The year is 2020. The global population stands at some 7.7 billion people, a number that may double by the end of the century. Humanity has now spread to cover almost every continent, has mapped every corner of the world, and has even made its first tentative steps beyond our planet. More than half the world’s people now live in cities or similar urban environments, marked by complicated social hierarchies, and that rely on agriculture and vast bureaucracies to survive. Yet in the grand scheme of history, these complex societies came into existence only recently. -artic wind noise begins- At the peak of the last ice age, just some 20,000 years ago, the global population was perhaps as low as just 2 million people, less than 0.1% of what it is now. Human societies consisted of widely dispersed bands of hunter-gathers, who followed a lifestyle that had not changed greatly since the appearance of recognizably modern humans some 300,000...
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