Mathematically you can not exist!

reply to post by Totalstranger


Ok, So it goes to say, If each couple continues to have the increased 3-4 children, instead of two, that the population of the planet will litterally double every 15-20 years. in 20 years 14 billion. In fourty years 28 billion, and in 60 years 56 billion. Let's hope 2012 is halfway right!

The math is wrong for the following reason:

Once you get up into the "64" level or so, the people there will have multiple rolls in the equasion. Some of those people will related to each other in other ways, interconnecting the lines on the "family tree" in criss crosses and diagnals.

This may answer your question, maybe partially?

We all are blessed with two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on. If the average generation is twenty-five years, in 1200 years (back to 800 AD, the time of Charlemagne) each person has 281.5 trillion grandparents. That's the way geometric progressions work. The number of grandparents doubles every 25 years and in 12OO years or 48 generations, 281.5 trillion names would be on your pedigree.

But hold on, you say! In 800 AD there were not that many people on the whole planet. How could I - or any person - have that many grandparents? The answer is that while you must have this number of grandparents, given the imperatives of human procreation, they are not all different people. Some names on your pedigree appear twice, three times or even hundreds of times in the 1200 years. Cousins have married and, if they were first cousins, their offspring will have only six great grandparents rather than the normal eight. Those offspring will have pedigrees which have "collapsed" from 8 to 6 or 25% in the 4th generation back. That 25 % collapse will be present in each and every one of the 44 generations back to 800 AD. The same phenomenom occurs when 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins marry although the percentage ‘collapse’ is not as dramatic. A dramatic collapse occurs when siblings marry as was the norm for Egyptian pharaohs and Inca kings. In those cases there is a 50% collapse (from 4 to 2) at the 3rd generation, the grandparents.

Genealogy Pedigree Collapse

I think, therefore I am. What else can one say?

reply to post by dreamwalker74


I can see how this can be confusing. We have a brand of bleach that states how often a certain bacterium divides. If you follow what they say very quickly you end up with a mass of bacteria heavier than the earth.

Originally posted by Jenna
Seems to me that all of that fails to take into account all the people who had multiple children. One plus one doesn't always equal two when it comes to procreation. Sometimes it equals two and sometimes it equals 12, vastly cutting down the number of ancestors required for all 6 billion of us on the planet.

You are in the right track, but the number of children alone doesn't do the trick, in fact the magic number is as low as 2 children. What's missing is the relationship between man and wife.

Suppose 50 generations up my great great ... great grandparents had two children, a girl and a boy, this two married and had two children of their own, who also married and had children of their own, and so on until my generation came up. Then the number of relatives I've had since 50 generations up is 2*50=100

Of course this is something that doesn't happen, but it would be extremelly difficult to know if the next person you are marrying is a 4th generation cousin, but simply having a common ancestor chops down everything the very same way.


[edit on 24-7-2010 by daniel_g]

Originally posted by dreamwalker74
I'm sorry Jenna, honestly I have not checked my U2U period, I get on here when I can. I will check it now.

Wasn't me, it was truthquest.

Still do you believe in the "Origin country" theory that we came out of a base homo sapien in africa, either during the time of Pangea, or a time when land bridges were prevalent?

Honestly I'm not really sure what exactly I believe when it comes to the origins of modern humanity. In some ways it makes sense that we all came from a common ancestor way back in the family tree in Africa, in other ways it doesn't. I guess I just haven't really put much thought into it.

I honestly believe that if thier wasn't a mass extinction event every 18,000 years or so, that this is the only way the current way of life could be possible, I believe we would have litterally run out of space tens of thousands of years ago.

Not necessarily. Famine, deaths before procreating, plagues, natural disasters and a hundred other things have kept the population from exploding beyond what the planet can sustain. They didn't have antibiotics (in their current form), mass production of food, medical capabilities, or any of the other things that we have today thousands of years ago. What once would have killed off an entire village will now kill only a few out of hundreds or thousands. Nature isn't very kind and she's killed off plenty of people over the millennia.

reply to post by dreamwalker74


good, its about time someone proves I don't exist.

I was starting to go crazy thinking I was real and that this was a world I was liviing in.

what a relief.

reply to post by Myendica


Don't worry, none of us exist. It's not just you. Though maybe this is actually your dream. Though I'm still pretty sure it's mine.