Et si vous viviez toutes les vies humaines de l’histoire ?

0:06 Imagine that your life began roughly 300,000 years

0:10 ago as one of the planet’s first humans.

0:13 At this time, you live in Africa near modern-day Morocco,

0:16 and your life isn’t too different from that of your hominid parents.

0:20 You make crude tools, hunt,

0:22 and gather food and materials, until, eventually, you perish.

0:28 But this is only the beginning.

0:30 Because after dying,

0:31 you travel back in time to be reincarnated as the second human ever to live.

0:37 While you don't remember your former life,

0:40 your previous actions affect you nonetheless.

0:45 And after dying once more,

0:47 you return as the third person, then the fourth, the fifth,

0:50 and so on— living the lives of every single human that’s ever walked the Earth.

0:56 Strung end to end, these lives last almost 4 trillion years.

1:01 Since you only recall the life you’re currently living,

1:04 your psyche doesn’t carry the entire weight of human history.

1:08 However, each of your lifetimes still has

1:11 a profound impact on your future selves.

1:14 Sometimes your influence on the world is obvious,

1:16 but these major historical figures only account

1:19 for a tiny fraction of your experience.

1:22 Instead, your existence consists mostly of ordinary lives,

1:26 filled with everyday tasks like eating, laughing, working, and worrying.

1:31 For approximately one tenth of your 4 trillion years, you’re a hunter-gatherer.

1:36 For 60%, you’re an agriculturalist,

1:39 developing tools and techniques which you employ over

1:42 roughly 800 billion years of working on farms.

1:46 Across your lifetimes, you spend 1.5 billion years having sex

1:51 and another 250 million years giving birth.

1:55 In total, 20% of your existence is spent raising children,

1:59 to whom you impart a variety of cultural

2:01 values that influence the trajectory of generations.

2:04 In some lives, you shatter those cultures through invasion and imperialism.

2:09 In others, you suffer as your lands and loved ones are taken away.

2:13 In over 1% of lives, you’re afflicted with malaria or smallpox,

2:18 while, in others, you treat

2:20 these conditions— saving countless versions of yourself.

2:24 In humanity’s early days, the average lifespan is fairly short.

2:28 There are fewer lives to live,

2:30 and your influence is usually limited to people physically near you.

2:34 But as humans survive longer on average and Earth's population grows,

2:38 you start to spend more time reliving the same action-packed years.

2:43 A full third of your existence comes after 1200 CE,

2:47 and a quarter of it takes place after 1750.

2:51 At this point, technology and society start changing faster than ever.

2:55 You invent steam engines, configure factories, and generate electricity,

3:00 which power the daily machinery of all of your later lives.

3:04 You live through revolutions in science,

3:06 the deadliest wars in history, and dramatic environmental destruction.

3:11 On average, each new life lasts longer,

3:14 but the pace of your existence keeps accelerating.

3:17 Conversations that previously took months to unfold now happen in minutes.

3:22 Business ventures that you built over generations transform overnight.

3:27 You enjoy luxuries you never could have sampled before,

3:30 even in your past lives as kings and queens.

3:34 After living over 100 billion lives,

3:38 you're finally reborn as the youngest person alive today.

3:41 But despite living through 300,000 years of human history,

3:45 your actions have more impact today than 99% of your past lives.

3:51 High-speed air travel allows you to carry

3:54 contagions and cures across an ocean in hours.

3:57 And the internet makes your personal sphere of influence global,

4:01 allowing you to collaborate with anyone,

4:03 anywhere, without even leaving your home.

4:06 In recent lives, you’ve invented tools to rewrite the genes of living organisms,

4:11 permanently altering their future generations.

4:14 And in this life, you might create

4:16 even more technologies that make the world safer,

4:19 kinder, and more equitable for countless future lives.

4:22 However, one careless invention could just as easily be catastrophic.

4:28 Between nuclear weapons, lab leaks,

4:30 climate change, and other existential threats,

4:32 humanity's risk of inducing our own extinction has never been higher.

4:37 In this fast-paced, interconnected world,

4:39 it’s frighteningly easy to undo all of humanity’s progress,

4:43 or potentially, cut short all your possible futures.

4:47 There's no way to know what will happen next.

4:49 But what’s clear is that your potential is limitless.

4:53 So, how will you spend this life?

4:56 And what can you do to work towards a better future for all your lives to come?