Do you ever think about death tolls, Brynn?
What, like from wars? I try not to.
Let me put it to you like this. Why do you think we count the dead?
To remind ourselves of how horrible it was, maybe? So we don't forget.
That's one reason, sure. Probably the most naive one.
Thanks for not underrating my worldliness.
Don't get all upset about it, now. What I'm getting at is that the dead are counted for a variety of reasons, and I would say that the practical purpose is nothing so innocent as memorializing the dead to avoid repeating past mistakes. Rather, it's almost always to grind an ax. When there is significant dispute over a body count, you can be sure there is a political motive.
Sure, I'll buy that. Do you have an example?
I can give you a couple. The one with the widest range of estimates is exactly how many indigenous people died in the Americas after Europeans arrived. It's partly a consequence of nobody being sure how many people were here to begin with. Estimates for the indigenous population of the Americans in 1492 are 8 million at the low end and 112 million at the high end. Of course, this isn't a death toll--but you need these numbers to determine exactly how many people died because of contact with Europeans.
"Contact" is kind of a nasty euphemism, don't you think?
I'm not trying to sugarcoat it. It's more that the deaths came from a combination of disease and violence. It used to be thought that the mass death of indigenous people in this hemisphere was primarily attributable to unintentional exposure to European diseases that they had no defense against. That definitely killed a lot of people--it's pretty hard to argue that it didn't--but it also becomes an easy "out" for Europeans to say that it wasn't really their fault, because it was an accident.
Right. I see the political angle.
Yeah, so there ends up being multiple dimensions to it. How many people were here to begin with? How many died? And when they died, how did they die? Depending on the numbers, you can tell very different stories.
Even the idea that the spread of disease is a neutral phenomenon is dishonest. Think about it. South of the Rio Grande, lots of indigenous people lived in cities. Those were probably very vulnerable to disease outbreaks because of population density. But north of it, settlements tended to be small, often temporary or seasonal in nature. Infectious diseases don't really thrive in that kind of environment. So, if we're to believe disease was the main driver of deaths, that explanation isn't compatible with what we know of population patterns from that era.
I take it you're about to drop the bomb.
Remember how I said population density is a major factor in virulence? Well, what do you think European conquerors did when they found bands of indigenous people? They sure didn't leave them alone in peace, not always. The Spanish in particular would enslave them, push them out of their land, deprive them of access to resources--essentially, break down their resilience, community, and way of life. That will definitely make you vulnerable to disease! So, even if we can ultimately blame most of the deaths on disease, we can't pretend that the way that occurred was accidental or that it leaves European conquerors and settlers blameless.
Right. So, it's not just how the bodies are counted, but why, and by whom.
Exactly. And in this case, obviously, we don't have literal bodies to count, which makes it that much harder to come up with firm numbers. Although we have lots of other evidence, like written accounts and surviving artifacts, it's still easy to just make up numbers to fit your intended theory.
Now, I'll talk about the instance I really wanted to talk about: the War.
Ah, the big one.
In 2066, there were 10.2 billion people on Earth. Give or take. In 2067, there were about 7.1 billion.
Jesus Christ.
What's fucked up is we didn't actually know the world population with any confidence until 2070. The 7.1 billion number is an educated guess based on how many people are believed to have died in the War, how many were alive in 2070, and some simple math around birth and death rates.
So, I want to talk about how exactly we got the 3.1 billion number for the death toll.
As I've mentioned, the world was a much more fragmented place leading up to the War. Failed states were commonplace. Color revolutions were frequent. Government bureaucracies were often ineffective or corrupt. Just counting living people was tricky.
I don't imagine it will surprise you to learn that China took the brunt of the death toll. They had about 1.1 billion people before the War and consensus estimate is that the immediate outbreak of violence killed about 200 million with another 100 million perishing due to, basically, civilizational collapse. The largest cities in the country were all wiped off the map in an instant.
120 million in India. 40 million in the former United States. 35 million in Brazil. 30 million in Nigeria. 30 million in Pakistan. 20 million in Indonesia. I'm only a little past half a billion here. I'm not going to list every country, but I think you get the picture. The most powerful countries on Earth--or their fragmented descendants--all had extremely destructive nuclear weapons pointed at each other's biggest cities. When they went flying, the outcome was as predictable as it was horrific. Virtually every city on Earth with over a million people was wiped out.
Once things got rolling, it was hard to stop. You'd think after the first volley, somebody would stop and think that what they were doing was too terrible to continue. That did happen, eventually. But it took several hours until somebody decided enough was enough and all parties agreed to stop with the nukes. That didn't stop the war, however. It dragged on for several months, as what was left of the Alliance and Confederation militaries fought over what was left of everything else. It's thought that post-nuclear phase of the war killed half a billion people on its own, but ultimately nobody is sure.
So, you can break down the death toll of the War into three general phases:
Truthfully, the estimated range for the death toll is more like 2.8 billion to 3.4 billion, but the consensus figure is 3.1. The lack of total accuracy is down to a few different things.
I mentioned before that a lot of states just kind of institutionally failed. Some of them hadn't taken recent censuses, or if they had, they weren't reliable. A ton of records were destroyed in the War itself, so you couldn't just count birth records and try to figure up who was unaccounted for. It should go without saying that entire families were vaporized, so it's not like anyone was going to report them missing, either. And, naturally, you can't count bodies that don't exist.
What a clusterfuck.
If there's a silver lining in all this--and I admit I'm reaching to find one--it's that the initial estimates were worse. At one point, it was thought that 4 billion people had perished. Hearing that billions of people died shouldn't be a relief, but when the number was nudged down toward 3, it had a strange effect on people. You started to have a little more optimism, people got more cooperative in general. Things didn't look great, but knowing they weren't as bad as everyone thought had a positive psychological impact.
What about reparations or trials? Like, these countries directly killed tons of people. Was no one held responsible?
The easy part was rounding up the people who let this happen or let it continue. A lot of those folks either died in the War itself or were killed by their colleagues or staff. But the ones who managed to survive? Let's just say there were a couple thousand very speedy trials and even speedier executions. Prime ministers, presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals, assorted politicians and bureaucrats. I'm not going to say everyone disposed of in this way was actually guilty, but for the collective psyche of the remaining population, there was just no way to question it, and nobody was particularly interested in reflecting on it later. I'm sure a fair number of the executions were just score settling over local political matters, but in the face of 3 billion other deaths, it's like, who gives a shit? It was those in power that let things deteriorate, and anyone with political power was considered suspect.
As for reparations: there was an attempt. Rather, a committee was formed with representatives from every surviving government. Their objective was to evaluate the feasibility of reparations, knowing that virtually every country on Earth was touched in some way. They spent about six months trying to figure out how you'd even allocate responsibility. Nobody could agree on anything and in the end, they just gave up. The world was coalescing around a single government--the ultimate bulwark against another war of this scale. There were smaller scale attempts at restitution, but for the most part, rebuilding was a global effort everyone felt responsible for in some way. Political hubris had brought humanity to the edge of annihilation and nobody had any stomach to fight anymore, and it was really one of those "now or never" opportunities.
I'm not going to say the Terran Alliance is perfect, of course. In many ways, it's a sluggish, lumbering monstrosity, overfunded and top-heavy, with blurry mandates, to say the least. But the entire world takes part in running, and unlike the United Nations that preceded it, it's not a toothless debate club. Terrestrial wars are simply not tolerated anymore, for one thing. Full military control is under the Alliance leadership, and the military may only be used against outside threats and to put down violent uprisings on Earth that can't be stopped through peaceful means.
That latter one sounds prone to abuse.
Oh, it absolutely is. But any time you see the army busting up a protest, images of it fly around the world in seconds, and people get pissed. Remember, in my time, mass executing corrupt politicians is still within living memory, so there aren't that many people in power willing to test whether the public still has the appetite for something like that. That limits how far anyone is willing to go in terms of excessive crackdowns.
The whole issue with the Colonies is another matter, and I don't really want to get into that now, and especially not into the Vorchon Incident. But anyway, I hope you liked the history lesson.
I'm just depressed now.
Don't be! Shit tons of bad people died! A better world rose from the ashes. I wish billions of people hadn't had to die to create it, but if the choice is between "lots of people die and everything is bad forever" and "lots of people die and everyone learns to build a future together," I'll take the latter every time.