Kinda a thought that pops into my head from time to time about if people that lived well before writing wanted to leave an eternal legacy and at best we see their remains dressed in ornaments.
It’s interesting to think that someone that lived 50k years ago paved a path for me in the sense that they probably exploded lands weren’t known to their tribe or human at the, found new edible plants, or maybe created a new tool.
Crazy to think that there’s billions of humans that I contributed to the life I have know and their names have long since been lost to time and that what I do today can still affect someone well into the future
I bet at least one person was named UUUUUUURRRRR and he had two buddies named AAAAARRRRR and AAAACCCHK
Bob. There has been and will always be a Bob around.
I suspect it was probably “Phil.”
Ben. I’m sure he was Ben. The caretaker.
Of course, how could I have forgotten!
It’s theoretically impossible to create a system to remember every human that doesn’t rely on external storage.
I’ll explain: let’s say that for every human that dies, they will be remembered and live on in the heart of another, living human. Each living human can remember n dead humans.
we can set up an equation
pn >= r
where p is the current population of live humans, r is the amount of dead humans that must be remembered.
We can express the rate of deaths as a proportion of the current living population:
d/dt[r] = pb
Where t is time and b is the instantaneous death rate per captia with respect to time (generally a constant).
Combined with the previous, we get the separable differential equation:
d/dt[r] = pb >= (r/n)b
dr/dt >= rb/n
[1/r] rt >= [b/n] dt
Integrated:
ln|r| >= tb/n+C
r >= e^(tb/n+C)
pn >= r >= e^(tb/n+C)
p >= e^(tb/n+C)/n
So in order for this system to work, the living population must always be growing exponentially, which is not feasible for modern humanity.
You could say that n would also have to increase with time. I’m thinking you have a tribe of 10 then 1 dies then 9 people to remember that person. We can say as time goes on the tribe stays at 10 but the original 10 die off then n = 1. So you could turn n into a function of it then solve the equations to see if it prevents a divergence
The best guesses are either Mohammad or McLovin. 🤷♂️
Many years ago I heard a comedian tell a joke, “I come from a long line of people who had kids.”
He was a funny guy, with a funny set, but that line always stuck with me.
I just remembered telling a bunch of men than at one point that DNA evidence showed that 1 guy had kids with 18 women to get black pilled responses, but one guy said “that’s my ancestors” and I thought that was funny
I’ve heard it as a witticism amongst new parents - no idea what im doing but all of my ancestors seem to have figured it out.
Then you learn that no one has figured anything out.
Yeah that was the wrong phrase wasn’t it. “all of my ancestors managed to do it” or something.
And will share the lack of knowledge with their children.
The only honest parenting advice I got from my mother was “don’t have a child like you”
In should have listened
Anyone who doesn’t have children is breaking a million year old family tradition. I regard it as willfully dying out.
Populations of animals tend to either naturally maintain an equillibrium with their surrounding environment…
… or grow their population beyond the carrying capacity of their environment, and then rather suddenly collapse, sometimes even going extinct.
I’m nonbinary, like if a man and a woman had a baby
I just like to imagine there was a real person called Unga Bunga though. It seems statistically likely. Or some guy named, like, Andrew or something, but with absolutely no linguistic ties to any of the modern name’s roots, like it arose independently more than once.
Considering we’ve been around for about 300,000 years, it’s within the realm of possibility.
Lol like Andrew meant star puncher in ancient language that no tale or legend can recall.
It used to mean “land exploder” in the before-times.
If the name “Naomi” can occur independently in Hebrew and Japanese, it’s probably been popping up regularly since the beginning of language.
Naomi is the crab of names
“Long” is interesting. It’s an English surname, but there’s also Chinese people called “Long” as it means “Dragon”
FYI: 龙 is not pronounced “long” lmao
you do not pronunce the pinyin as if it were an English word
It’s got different tones, I know that
None of the 4 tones of the pinyin “long” even sound like “long” in English. I mean the “o” does not represent the same sound.
Sorry if I sound like I’m trying to start a debate for no reason, but as a native Mandarin speaker, it kinda triggers my OCD xD
Lóng… Long… It sounds very similar
On the other hand, the number of humans from 50,000 years ago whose names you don’t know is vastly smaller than the number of humans alive right now whose names you don’t know.
To give a reference, it’s estimated that there were about 2 million humans roughly 50k years ago.
Although that’s a really rough estimate since the start of the ‘how many humans have ever lived’ begins around that time.
I mean nothing is eternal but I do get that feeling. The immensity of all the people who lived and died and how your life on the scale is so short and will end soon. Im not sure I want to have any type of written immortality and not sure anyone does. Do you really know the person who wrote or made things? Even people that meet and know you just have a kind of personal concept of you influenced by their own being. Ones entity is really something to unique to them and can’t really be after it is. Heck do I know myself yesterday like I do today or last week or from last month or last year or last decade. My 5 year old self is dead. I can remember a bit from the time but can’t really wrap my head around how I thought and who I was.
I think cave art is also quite intimate. Like the hand prints and stencils are very human.
As far as I’m aware, archaeology (specifically Assyriology and Egyptology) point to independent origins of writing systems (the writing as we know it): Sumerians and their cuneiforms, ancient Egyptians and their hieroglyphs. Even though, as far as I’m aware, Sumerians seem to have been the first ones to ever write, before Egyptians independently did it too, therefore Sumerians seem to be the pioneers of writing.
Having said this, how tragically ironic it is, as if the uncaring Cosmos got a sadistic sense of humour, the fact that the pioneer of writing is unknown even through the means of their own creation. It’s as if the WWW lacked any hypertext files containing the substring “Tim Berners-Lee”, or if every radio communication ever propagated across the EM field lacked any modulated signal, analog or digital, that would demodulate to “Guglielmo Marconi”.
We don’t know the name or history of the person who first wrote, nor we know to whom they were writing to (must’ve been a solitary endeavour, scratching some arrows on a clay when nobody else will understand it), nor we know what they wrote first (everybody knows the infamous “We the people” USian trope, and some nerds like me know how the first text transmitted between computers was “LO” as in truncated “HELLO”, but the first Cuneiform text ever was lost to entropy and decay).
We don’t even need to go that far, though. Do we know the names and life stories for ALL people who died from COVID-19? Surely we can find online and offline registers for several of them, but even the World Health Organization can’t tell precisely how many people died from COVID-19, let alone who exactly they were. And it’s been mere 6 years ago, when The Internet as we know it was already so ubiquitous! Now imagine The Plague? Or the dinosaurs, who simply got transmuted into fuel we use for our noisy metallic apparata with no regard for their own individual life stories from a time when they were gigantic living beings?
Thing is: we, living beings, humans and whatnot, we’re infinitesimally nothing before the mercilessness of the infinite cosmic entropy, decay and Death, for She can and She will erase us just as She’s already slowly erasing our biological existences as we speak (we know this as “apoptosis”, “aging”, etc, to which, sorry to remind the techno-gnostics who crave for “immortality”, that nothing can excel Her, not even the universe which, despite being so big in such a manner we have no idea how mind-bogglingly big it is, is also going to cease someday, too).
But, hey, humans must leave a legacy, conquer the cosmos and avoid Death Herself (whether we, as flesh-and-bones entities, would get past the insurmountable Cosmic Great Filter, before another Great Reset happens in this cosmic vicinity, something that not even “powerful” hominids with red buttons at their disposal could even prevent or stop from happening, is a whole other story)! To infinite and beyond we must! :)
We can get some stories from even before writing because oral traditions can carry stories till the invention of writing. That why I picked 50k years ago since I doubt stories could consistently last more than a few hundred years. I would consider writing that has been lost to time and destruction, and writing that need context outside of the story to be understood.
they probably exploded lands
Khaal explores. Khaal not explodes. Khaal not dumb.
Khaal took Armageddon out of his commander deck.
Kha’ra al explodes new lands kha’ra al found volcano
Have a read of how much history is embedded in Australian aboriginal oral stories. Their stories go a long long way back
I think it might be possible to… over-state that.
Im sure that in some regions many of these oral histories are preserved, but in others they’ve sadly been lost to time. In my region there aren’t any youth spending their days learning these histories, and I doubt there have been for the last 5 or 6 decades really.
Even Aboroginal place names are very unreliable.
I have a Geneology book that have the names of my ancestors that were alive circa 1200 CE… (like 20something generations ago)
But like… does that even matter?
Idk what they even did except like they village wrote a short summary of what that time was like but idk what their jobs were or their behavoirs, thoughts, philosophical beliefs, political beliefs, or maybe if they were just as toxic as my parents… I literally have no info on them other than their name… so does knowing the name of your ancestors even matter?
(Also its male ancestors only thats recorded in the geneology book… thanks, patriarchy 🤦♂️)
You don’t understand how much this hurts me
forgetting names is truly a sad thing, ComradeSharkfucker
I like to think that historical humans prefer it that way, if it helps.
I want my name known to people who loved me and whose life I directly impacted. I like the concept of getting to know the larger human community, but I don’t think I’ll have failed if nobody remembers my name a hundred years after my death. If the choice is between my diary being found and read by people or my name forgotten, I’d prefer the latter.
