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Thruout a person's life, their body traces a continuous path over the surface of Earth. By considering only their east-west motion (and ignoring north-south motion completely) we can graph this path in two dimensions, assigning the vertical dimension to time.
A lifetime's sequence of home addresses then becomes a more-or-less jagged vertical line (a 'home-line'):
The width here is 360 pixels, with each pixel representing one degree of longitude, 180 west to 180 east. (My own home-line never strays far from the American midwest, 93W to 79W.) The height can be arbitrarily chosen, here eight pixels per year starting at my own birth. (By convention, time will advance downwards.)
Side-trips will appear as spikes to the left or right of the home-line. (The approximate pattern of increasing distances as one ages is not surprising.)
If the lifeline of every human who's lived in the last 100,000 years were combined into one map it must look something like this:
At the top, the first humans expand thruout Africa, and then gradually east, reaching China by 60,000 BC. (The simultaneous expansion into Europe is unfortunately masked by the overlapping African longitudes.)
Between 15,000 and 10,000 BC humans probably crossed a temporary landbridge into the Western Hemisphere and quickly reached the eastern tip of Brazil.
The height here is arbitrarily chosen as 400 pixels, or 250 years per pixel... approximately ten generations (4000 generations total).
We can use shades of grey to represent population densities, with the basic levels corresponding to hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and literate (urban, industrial) economies:
For comparison's sake, we can look at the less-interesting graph using latitudes (90 south to 90 north) instead of longitudes:
The African expansion might have started around the Equator, but physically couldn't go south beyond the latitude of Cape Town (much later Tierra del Fuego). The northern expansion continued to Siberia, but agriculture made negligible impact that far north. Literacy traveled north more quickly than south.
And my own lifeline for latitudes is even narrower (from 24N to 55N) with the homeline mostly between 39 and 42N:
So to contemplate human history as a unity, this simple image makes an elegant startingpoint:
We can then (theoretically) zoom in on any real individual's lifepath, out of the 20-billion-or-so humans who've ever lived, and imagine coloring the graph in various ways. (Skin color would be interesting!)
We should also consider that each person has their own limited version of this map of human history, that evolves thruout their life. For their local neighborhood, the map may be quite detailed and accurate, but very little of this gets passed on to future generations.
If we had a written record of any single person's thoughts, they'd fill at most eight gigabytes [calc] so all human thought might fit into 10^20 bytes.
While every life is unique, the basic challenges humans face have remained fairly constant (food, love, competition, etc). And the range of thoughts one can have about these challenges is fairly predictable-- a reasonably complete survey might fit into an encyclopedia. [more]
Value systems
If you examine a human life according to a value-system, some of their acts will seem 'good' and some 'bad'. We might imagine coloring the lifeline green for good moments, and red for bad ones.
In theory, a well-defined value system with perfect knowledge of human history could color the basic graph red or green at every point. Some cultures might have more green, some more red, but every life will include both.
Most religions imagine God to have a well-defined value-system (unfortunately only imperfectly known to the religion's priests) along with perfect knowledge of all history. (Santa's Xmas list is a classic variant.)
Spelling out a full value-system shouldn't take much more space than the 'encyclopedia' of all human thoughts-- perhaps much less. (The effort of doing this should reveal many inconsistencies and failures of empathy.)
Humans are born with zero knowledge of history, and with a solipsistic value-system based on pleasure and pain. As they mature, their value system becomes more universal, and their knowledge of history slightly greater (though inevitably filled with serious errors).
Events that had been judged 'bad' because they caused pain will sometimes be re-envisioned as 'good' because the pain was deserved and educational. Great religious teachers and philosophers may teach a whole culture to value events differently.
Cultural conditioning can to some extent replace one's natural value-system with an externally-defined one, leading to internal conflict and inauthentic behavior. Most often, this will involve verbal intimidation being used to suppress the expression of natural values-- ie, people being told that their natural values are 'bad'.
The world at any given moment is full of competing value-systems. The ideal of democracy is that the government should enforce the majority opinion... but this works very poorly if the mass media don't honestly reflect what the majority believes or how it differs from what the government actually does. (Public education in general needs to be held to the highest standards of truth and objectivity.)
The mass media normally depict only small segments of human history, with greater or lesser accuracy, and with a more-or-less subtle 'spin' to convey the publisher's own value-system.
(For an especially unsubtle example, following the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 the US media launched a relentless campaign to marginalize as 'bad' all critics of US policies.)
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