re: Everyone alive today has had a living ancestor at every point in history

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Going back to the very beginning of time.

Every person alive has one biological mother and one biological father. Four biological grandparents. Eight biological great-grandparents. Sixteen biological great-great grandparents, and so on all the way back.

So the number of living ancestors you had living on Earth at a given time can be expressed as 2 to the power of g where g equals the number of generations back you want to go.

But wait. If you conservatively estimate that there are 5 generations per century, going back 600 years or 2^30, you'd have had 1,073,741,824 living ancestors on Earth in 1418.

But the entire population of Earth then was only about half that. How can this possibly be?

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I’m saving this for tonight so I can show it to my kids as another example of why drugs are bad for you.

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Every person alive has one biological mother

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Pics?

I always figured that, if one was faced with the prospect of immortality and one had the ability to travel to any time period in history (either through a religious version of heaven or whatever other science fiction-y means), and one were looking for ways to pass the time, that one could travel back say 50 thousand years and check in on each of their ancestors lives, one line at a time. That should eat up a bit of time.

There is a theory that When mt toba volcano erupted 74,000 years ago in a series of 4 super eruptions that it caused "nuclear winter".
Only 3,000 couples survived.
It's a theory based on DNA and fact of toba caldera.

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and have sex with them

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Getting into Futurama territory there (though on a much longer time scale).

You're looking at it like an upside down pyramid, when its actually the opposite... you are just a line from the top of the pyramid.

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Every person alive has one biological mother

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Pics?

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Believers


Non-Believers

So if it's a diamond that means that at the diamond's widest point, a huge number of people were all the descendents of one couple. And that huge number of people, all related to each other, fricked each other and eventually created you.

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Every person alive has one biological mother and one biological father. Four biological grandparents. Eight biological great-grandparents. Sixteen biological great-great grandparents, and so on all the way back.

So the number of living ancestors you had living on Earth at a given time can be expressed as 2 to the power of g where g equals the number of generations back you want to go.

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Both of these premises are false.