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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 878 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
The State of the World, Life Span - Ask Gramps

Thank you for joining us for our five days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. This is Day 878 of our trek, and it is time for our Philosophy Friday series. Each Friday we will ponder some of the basic truths and mysteries of life, and how they can impact us in creating our living legacy.

As we continue on this trek called life, sometimes we have questions about life, so our Friday trek is a time where we can Ask Gramps. Gramps will answer questions that you would like to ask your dad or granddad, but for whatever reason, are unable to do so.

No matter how old we are, I know that all of us would like the opportunity to ask dad or gramps questions about life in many areas. We will address areas such as finances, relationships, health/fitness, business/work, home repairs/renovations, seasons of life, spiritual/Biblical questions, and any others areas that come our way.

As your fellow sojourner and mentor on this trek that we call life, it is Gramps’s goal to provide you with practical wisdom and advice about any area of life. It is crucial that I receive a constant flow of questions, so please submit your questions to guthrie@wisdom-trek.com. And Gramps will answer your questions on our Friday podcast.

We are broadcasting from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. Since this is a week of travel for Granny & Gramps, today’s episode will be shorter and serve as the 1st part of my answer to today’s question.

Hey Gramps, “Listening to most news sources and even many preachers, it seems like the world is getting worse each year, but is that really the case?”
The State of the World, Life Span


While there are concerns about the moral and ethical direction of many cultures throughout the world today, there have been many times in ages past where it was much worse. One example is the Roman Empire, where immorality was widespread, slavery and servitude were rampant, people were massacred for sport, and there were wars and rumors of war all over the world. In comparison, the world today is pretty mild.

The area that we will focus on today is the contextualizing improvements in human progress. This includes the worldwide level of poverty, lifespan, and the related death rates. Here are a few facts to consider.

With the exception of lifespans before the flood of Noah, from that point forward lifespans have become shorter with each age until recent history.

It's hard to remember how extraordinary the world is today when we're bombarded 24/7 by news about problems and disasters. History provides valuable context, however.

Some 700 years ago, the Plague killed 200 million people in a single year – 40 percent of England.
About 500 years ago, famine claimed 3 million lives in France.
100 years ago (in 1918) World War I claimed 16 million lives while the flu pandemic caused 50 million deaths, all in a single year.

If these were our current headlines, we would be in shock.

We forget how much the world has progressed in the past century alone.

The per-capita income for every nation on the planet has tripled. The human lifespan has doubled. The cost of food has dropped thirty-fold. The cost of transportation decreased hundreds of fold. The cost of communications reduced millions of fold.

The human lifespan is another way to contextualize progress:

During the days after the flood, the average lifespan continued to decline. Food in many areas of the world was scarce, and infant mortality was high. While many people lived to be older,