Hey what the fuck I wasn’t ready
As an American, this is American math. “Thats 4 school buses” “those are 9 football fields!” “Thats the weight of 35 fully grown hippos!”
Like, its not THAT unbelievable. A lot can happen in a human lifetime.
But it’s not a human lifetime, it’s a generation…or 25 years in this case.
My parents are/were 90. I started telling them they’ve been alive for more than a third of the history of the United States. They loved hearing that shit.
Even crazier if you think in human lifetimes. Taking the global life expectancy of 72 years, the beginning of our era was 28 lifetimes ago.
Middle Ages ended 8 lifetimes ago.
Idk, they had kids a lot earlier than 25 for the vast, vast majority of world history.
Maybe their first kid, but a lot of families (i come from catholics) had a lot of kids
Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
It may be that throughout history not having kids is common. Gay people who never had children may have been common. Ugly, poor or unpleasant people who never managed to find a partner may have been common. Asexual people may have been common.
Straight people who had sex but never had kids were probably not common, just because good contraception wasn’t available.
Still, if you’re a person who, for whatever reason, is not going to have kids, none of your direct ancestors can understand that life.
My bloodline ends with me, and everything ive ever done has culminated in this exact moment (at time of writing)
A bloodline ending is also probably incredibly common. But, not once in our direct ancestors has a bloodline ever ended.
That’s actually one of the things that got me thinking about this. My family has a tradition that the first born son always gets a certain first name. My dad’s the third-born male, so he didn’t get the name, and didn’t pass it down to me. But, his oldest brother did, so it’s my cousin’s name.
My cousin’s probably not going to have kids. Or, if he does, they’d be happy little accidents who aren’t part of the family and don’t get the first-born-son name. So that name and that tradition dies with him. It’s a bit unfortunate because over time that first name has become less common and I like the name. So, for the first time in centuries(?) there won’t be someone with that name.
I thought about it a bit, and realized, it’s probably actually fairly common. When you’re the end of a chain like that, you might feel pressured because everybody before you had carried on the tradition and passed on the name. However, that has to be the case, because if your father or grandfather had failed to pass on the name, you wouldn’t be around to see it.
There are probably “bloodlines” ending all the time. But if you’re part of a “bloodline”, it probably feels like a big deal because everybody until you has ensured it survived.
(Having said that, “bloodlines” are a dumb concept, since each parent provides about 50% of the DNA. So, even if you’re a “Trey” and share the same name with your dad and grandfather, you only share half your DNA with your dad and a quarter with your grandfather. In a sense, you could say that the strength of every bloodline is cut in half with every generation. That is, unless you’re breeding with blood relatives, and then the bloodline may be strong, but the genetic disorders are even stronger.)
First law of socio-genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary
From some book of Murphy’s laws I found at home as a kid and fell in love with
Not necessarily accurate, though.
See selfish genes (ideally from someone other than Dawkins), and gay uncle hypothesis.
Also the unfortunate truth of rape. Rapists aren’t exactly picky
Idk, I’m very whelmed by this, warnings weren’t needed, sounds just about right.
Our entire economic system is built upon this, too. The idea that people other than the ultra wealthy can just retire and… not work when they get old for example (retirement funds are biggest shareholders of publicly traded corporations btw).
Developed countries are seeing the damage of growth stopping and we haven’t done much to mitigate it. Productivity per worker is, of course, way up luckily - but so are people’s lifestyle expectations. If we all wanted to live like they did in ancient Greek times (minus the pillaging of neighboring countries I guess), we wouldn’t even need many workers. But people want so many things that didn’t exist 100 years ago, let alone 2+ millennia ago.
For now, we could just solve this by importing more workers from 3rd world countries still experiencing growth. Slow down their economic growth and our decline. But people are racist and don’t want to.
The good news is, once those 3rd world countries have strong enough economies, they’ll also stop producing babies as retirement plans as has been the case historically (you’d have like 8 or 9 kids so you can live on the family farm while they do all the work - when the economy gets better, you stop doing that).
Yeah, basically a brand new species behaving like an infestation in an abundance of (mostly finite) resources, not building sustainable socioeconomic systems that would allow for social & scientific advancements in absence of “infinite™” growth of imaginary numbers (eg gdp).
Far away from Star Trek even when we have those ideals theoretically available to us. (That’s why transporting knowledge back in time wouldn’t necessary be of use.)
That’s not to say that some of these cities weren’t huge though. Rome had ~750K at it’s peak. Some places in China had 1 million. We just have a lot more huge cities now.
https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/the-largest-ancient-cities-ever-built.html
Huge for that time, sure… But we’ve had concerts with more people than in those huge cities.
True, but a lot of cities that we think of as big are around those numbers. They couldn’t get much bigger because of infrastructure.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states
Seattle is about 800k https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/washington/seattle
Yeah but you’re comparing the 18th largest city in the US to what we’re at the time the largest cities in the world. Apples to oranges. Why not compare Rome’s 700k to say… Shanghai? There’s 25 million people in the city proper. Just one city. The population of the Han Empire, recorded in the tax census of 156 AD, was 50.6 million people in 12,366,470 households. The entire empire could now fit in 2 cities.
Seattle could have a lot higher population if it wasn’t obsessed with single family homes and actually rezoned for high occupancy lower income housing. Not even “low income” just lower considering a 1-2 bedroom house can run into the millions in Seattle
If of one person today every previous generation had a unique pair of ancestral parents then go back 80 generations that’s 280 of people had to exist during that 80th generation back. That’s more than 1.2 septillion so a one with 24 zeros. So that’s impossible that’s more people than have existed in history. Meaning that inbreeding has happened in everyone’s family tree. So lots of distant cousin marriages. But unfortunately also some fucked up shit like some of your ancestor’s parents are brother and sister or father and daughter. So if you follow your paternal line back the number of dads is less than the number of mothers.
You’ve made the assumption that everyone has a unique pair of parents. You’ve not taken into account that parents can have multiple children.
One of the reasons behind the population boom (but not the only reason by any means) is that infant mortality is so low nowadays. Not that long ago, you could have entire families wiped out by diseases that are now functionally eradicated or easily treatable.
If you assume two children per group of parents survive until adulthood, the population line stays stable. It’s because of the massive rise in the number of children reaching adulthood that the population spikes so suddenly.
No that’s not the assumption I made. I said if one living person today had unique parents all the way back. Why would I have to take into account siblings if I’m only looking at the direct lineage.
I also said it’s impossible and inbreeding and pedigree collapse occurred.
Pre-modern first-birth ages were more in the range 15 to 20. So rather 5 to 6 mothers per century.
You’re assuming that your matrilineal line is entirely composed of firstborns.
I’m not who you were responding to, but first borns certainly aren’t necessary. High fertility, low marriage age places like West Africa meet the 15-20 range pretty spot on. A woman can easily have a child every year or so from 15 to 20, then they sort of coast to a stop by their late 20s. The majority of births are early because their so close together.
I have personally met 30-year old grandmothers who didn’t think anything of it. They’re 75% of the way to average life expectancy anyways.
I would say an average of 5 mothers per century up to 1850 or 1900 sounds about right, and is still a fairly conservative figure.
And the meme is being conservative
This is actually a great perspective to point out against anti-intellectual arguments like evolution being fake, when people ask why humans are not evolving. What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations? That’s nothing in the timeline of the earth. Plus 450 mothers is already more than what some religious fanatics claim is the age of the earth.
What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations?
Actually quite a lot. The pace of evolutionary change is a function of the amount of variation present in a population and the intensity of selection (i.e. the death rate). There was one study done of the variation of bone dimensions present in modern populations of chimpanzees that suggests that the transition from chimpanzee-style locomotion to full bipedality (at least the variant of bipedality observed in Ardipithecus (~5 million years ago) could have happened on the scale of a few thousand years.
This is not to say that it did happen that fast, just that it could have given a strong enough intensity of selection. There is a weird tendency in paleoanthropology for researchers to propose something that might have happened and it becomes accepted by the general public as something that did happen.
Actually, this math is almost exactly how the young earth creationist cult came to their number for the age of the earth. The counted out all the begats in the Bible from Adam to Jesus and multiplied by an average amount of time between births.
Exactly. The fact that our kids can look different from us at all is fucking wild
That’s mostly gene mixing though.
If you had your child alone (a clone), they would look quite exactly like you. It would take several generations to see a change.
The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn’t intelligence. It’s the knowledge we’ve inherited. Education is humanity’s greatest achievement.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I’m grateful to those who lifted us up, and I’ll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.
It’s society & available materials.
If you took all your knowledge 10k years ago the daily life would still fairly resemble the lives they had.
10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation
My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as “weak” and “sickly” and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.
The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn’t get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.
How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?
(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn’t do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?
Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?
Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
I absolutely agree with that.
Between what the people 12k years ago knew and what just about any person today knows, you could start agriculture, building houses, at least the idea of digging wells, hygiene, the wheel, writing, and probably some others. A decently educated person in history, technology, or science (and I don’t mean university-level) could add metalworking, astronomy, and animal domestication. The biggest limits to what you could do up to the industrial age would be megafauna and dieing before you accomplished it. If you passed on education, scientific theory, and the knowledge you had, there’s a fair chance those things could be continued after you died.
As far as society goes, there is good evidence chimps have society, as well as early homonids. I’m pretty sure we had that 12k years ago, too.
12k years ago is the stone age and before agriculture. The ice age would just be ending. You don’t have the calories to do much beyond exist.
I don’t think you would have much impact. Even if we assume you are extremely good at learning new (i.e. old) languages, extremely popular (everything you suggest is done), and you have a rich benefactor who houses and feeds you, you are still lacking the giant supply chain stack that is absolutely required to get anything done in the modern world.
The only thing I could maybe get done is making some extremely bad and extremely expensive soap. Concrete or metals would be so far out of reach, I might as well work on a perpetual motion machine or try to transform lead to gold. Just go into the woods and try to mine some iron and you see what I mean.
The average modern person knows probably less about agriculture and building houses than the average person 12k years ago, and those are pretty intuitive.
The wheel isn’t some complex contraption that needs to be improved over generations. It’s probably the most simple tool imaginable, but it’s also useless unless you have roads.
I’m always amazed how modern people have no idea how useless they would be just a few hundred years ago.
The guy on the primitive technology channel smelled iron from orange bacteria. He used 3 different methods with his most complex tools being stone and clay. Copper and tin are generally easier, and are exposed on the surface in many areas. The only thing stopping people from figuring out bronze earlier was location and luck. I think the bronze age starting 7000 years earlier would have had an impact.
I know how to make black powder, and generally know how to source it. Between that and bronze, you could have guns over 11000 years earlier than we did.
I’ve built houses.
I know the basics of making paper. Even if I didn’t, clay tablets are easy. Writing 4000 years earlier would necessarily advance knowledge if nothing else happened. Throw in some math and the concept of zero and you could advance knowledge in those areas by thousands of years. Math isn’t relevant? Some of the oldest structures we have around use math and astronomy. Imagine if we had those 5000 years earlier.
One of the bigger reasons people don’t learn more languages is because they don’t have the time or interest. One of the best ways to learn is immersion. Being in a situation where you have to learn a new language if you want to communicate with anyone else would certainly be a motivator to put in the effort.
The iron from Primitive Technology is maybe enough for a small piece of jewelry like a ring, and that’s from many runs of very time consuming and labor intensive smelting. I’m not a metallurgist, but it also looks pretty bad. Even if it was modern tool steel with no impurities, 20g of iron pellets is pretty useless if you don’t have a forge.
Your knowledge and skills are impressive, but I very much doubt that’s common, and you most likely use modern tools to build houses. I’d be surprised if you could build better houses with sticks and stones than the stone age people who have been doing it for generations.
I’ve seen videos of people who make paper traditionally, and I remember that knowing the basics of it is about as useful as knowing the basics of making a rocket. Unless you have actually made paper and gun powder from scratch without any modern tools, I will not believe that you could do it.
I have to agree with you regarding writing and math. Also social sciences like philosophy, ethics, psychology, education, etc. Any tool you can use with only your brain would be be very helpful.
But I think the biggest issue would be convincing people to try new things. For all I know, photovoltaik could be a gift from a time traveller, but there was (and is) much opposition to it because many people are so conservative. If you started explaining electricity to people in the stone age, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d be banned or worse.
That’s why I said tin and copper are easier. There were locations with native copper deposits, much like finding gold in streams. Copper is easier to work, tin is pretty easy relatively speaking, and the two give you bronze, which allows proper tools. That’s part of why it took about 2000 years after bronze before we had iron. The guy from Primitive Technology is working from a very poor ore source (and is actually doing trial and error). That said, I doubt you could get much more than the idea of iron accepted by a Neolithic culture in a lifetime.
Sure, I’ve built houses using modern tools, but I’m also aware of the techniques used in older wood buildings. I could be an adequate apprentice for the first house I built, and could build a second on my own.
I didn’t say gun powder, I said black powder. It’s far simpler and safer. I made some before I was a teenager. The hardest part is finding saltwater and the only tool you need is a mortar and pestle. If they didn’t exist by 10000 BC, then I could “invent” that, too.
How easy is it to find a copper deposit? What do they look like? How much should one expect to find? What would you do if you found a significant amount?
I’m sure they had adequate house building apprentices back then. We’re talking about uplifting stone age people, not fitting in.
Wikipedia says gunpower and black powder are the same thing, wut whatever. How do you make it? I knew you need saltpeter, but I wouldn’t have a clue how to find that, and even if I found some by chance, I wouldn’t even know what it looks like. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I know almost nothing about black powder, but I feel like I know more the average person.
I absolutely agree (I didn’t say it wouldn’t change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn’t be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
For everything you need a willing society bcs one individual can’t do it all - it’s either you dig/build one well & others feed you or you do the efforts communally. Same with metalwork, that’s a whole specialisation in the most basic sense (you need a workforce & resources for them to gather ore, work it, and forge anything of useful size - metalwork to produce a few grammes of metal per year isn’t worth it, so you need a city-sized community at your disposal, and you need to get to that point … unless maybe as an expensive way to just pass the knowledge for later gens to put it to good use, which might be successful, unless forgotten or the community doesn’t survive).
Animal domestication can take generations too in some cases (bovids), you need to first focus on docile females, and once they stay in a designated area (either like a valley or even fenced fields), you need the resources (food) to keep them alive there. So you need to build up agriculture at scale first. That why we found the first real domestication evidence around ancient cities, not random villages.
Yeah, if I was going to jump start domestication, I’d start with chickens or sheep/goats. Chicken and goats can eat just about anything, so can be fed scraps and quickly become a net positive. They’re also smaller and easier to manage than cows. Goats can be troublesome, but their risk is limited by their size.
Domestication on both those species started about 10000 years ago, so it would only speed things up by 2000 years.
If you went back 10000 years you definitively would have become an inventor or philosopher of sorts (assuming you could speak their language)
Well, I guess it depends on your education, but we get taught things in elementary school that wouldn’t have been invented or discovered for thousands of years back then. And some technologies you likely could make without many pre-requisite technologies themselves
If the average person went back 10k years they would be regarded as insane or heretical. Even assuming communication wasn’t an issue, way too much of your knowledge is built upon things you don’t understand and don’t exist. You can’t do anything with electricity until you can refine metals and make copper wire. No average person knows the precursor plants for medicine. Brick making is beyond the average person and you wouldn’t have a kiln anyway. Working without metal tools makes most processes the average person would know impossible.
You just start with math, there’s plenty of math the average person learns in an average school curriculum that you could re-“invent”. After that people would start taking you more seriously
Now they might consider you heretical or blasphemous still. If you played your cards right you could try to present yourself as a messenger from god although I personally really wouldn’t want to go that route
Math is probably the least useful at that age, maybe later in the bronze age it gets more useful as society can support some knowledge work. 10k years ago people don’t have time for math, the majority of people are focused solely on survival. That’s stone age and the very beginning of agriculture.
Have you ever read “Lest Darkness Fall”? It’s a great exploration of these concepts. Dude gets isekai’d back to the Roman Empire. All of his ideas fall on deaf ears because “obviously the Roman Empire is the peak of all cultures” and there’s no room for improvement. Except for his idea for an optical telegraph system, they really fuck with that. Honestly an amazingly realistic book haha.
I absolutely agree (I didn’t say it wouldn’t change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn’t be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
I’m trying to make the distinction between the ability to just ‘make’ as a proof of concept & actually apply that knowledge at scale that makes any difference in that accident context. Like metalwork - without (smol-)city-sized communities (labour, and accumulated resources like winter food & shelters) it doesn’t make sense bcs you don’t end up with enough use-cases.
(Ofc immediate location is a great factor in what knowledge is more applicable and what not - surviving in the Arctic circle would be much different to the some savannah).
I do agree with that!
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it!
Haha reminds me of that other stat how you only need to strip/peel a some graphite on a piece of tape like 20 times to reach a single atom thickness (graphene).
According to this scale, Aboriginal Australian cultures are 2,600 mothers old.
Anything but metrics…
The advent of agriculture (11.5 kya) was 4.5 hectomothers ago
I came here to say “obviously American, anything but metrics…”, but you bet me to it.
I may be an ignorant American, but can you explain metric time to me? What is the SI unit of time? Days? I’ll meet you in 4 decidays, 3 centidays, and 20 millidays.
USians are so insulated that they don’t know the rest of the world has 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes each.
Half a cup of seconds
Ehm … Metric … Time?
I looked up the average age of mothers at the time of their first child birth in 1863 because I really badly wanted to make a joke about a “score” being 20 for that reason.
Sadly the average age was 22-26 so my day is ruined.
