177–400 million people were sacrificed by 19 G20 countries between 1901 and 2025 to build the modern world.
Death tolls are AI-compiled 95% confidence intervals from Wikipedia, weighed against the population alive at the time. Read the ledger, then consider whether the modern Omelas was worth the cost.
Filters
Filters apply to everything below. Hover a country to isolate it on the chart.
Centuries
Kind of sacrifice
Internal — the polity kills people it rules. External — war with others. Exogenous — plague, famine, disaster. These colors are the chart legend.
Every mass-casualty event, 1901–2025
Hover an event to inspect it.
Each bubble is one event; area is people (deaths at the midpoint of the 95% interval). Color is the kind of sacrifice.
Comparison — deaths and share of the living
For the selected countries, centuries, and kinds. Percent uses each country’s largest contemporaneous population in the window as the denominator. Sorted by people sacrificed — click Sacrificed or % of population to re-sort.
Biggest sacrifices, by century
Top four events per century in each kind, ranked by the measure above. If two 95% intervals overlap the events share a rank and are marked “≈ tie”. Exogenous (plague, famine, disaster) is ranked separately so a pandemic is not scored as murder.
Sources and footnotes
English Wikipedia locators for the current filter. Closed by default.