The book is over half a century old now, so the numbers may be a bit off, but this sort of conversation always reminds me of this quote
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.”
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
The book is over half a century old now, so the numbers may be a bit off, but this sort of conversation always reminds me of this quote
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.”
-Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Kinda reminds me of this
Whole generations lived and died just to find out which mushrooms can be eaten.