• @[email protected]
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    285 months ago

    Depending on the religion, yes. Otherwise it‘s 12 years per mother, 14 if you’re late.

    • @[email protected]
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      155 months ago

      That’s also assuming you’re the first born of the first born of the first born, and so on. And the further back you go, the more individual kids the average mother is likely to have. After all, you had to have like 12 kids just so 3 of them would make it past 9.

      So your greatx12 grandmother might’ve started having kids at 15, but she still might not have had your ancestor till years later.

  • slazer2au
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    895 months ago

    The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          I’d like mothers represented metric tbh, I’m in a meeting and not able to do the math rn but if anyone else can oblige …

          • @[email protected]
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            25 months ago

            You can probably propose a new SI-base unit of “a mother”, but what does it measure?

            “Metric” just essentially comes from “metering”. People confuse “metric” with “decimal”, which is sort of the point of the person I replied to. While metric time technically exists insofar as you just use seconds as the base unit, omit minutes and hours and just do SI-prefixes, the French did also try decimal time, but it was just horrible.

            So if “mother” was the base unit and it measured something, in this instance time, the advent of agriculture was roughly four hectomothers ago. Or 0.4 kilomothers, if you will.

            • @[email protected]
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              5 months ago

              Mother as a unit of time.

              Ty

              Edit the mother epoch presumably is the same epoch as all time, just … related to the mothers as above.

              Ty

              • @[email protected]
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                35 months ago

                But see we already got the base unit of a second for time. But for generations, perhaps?

                One kilomother would’ve been the early modern human, roughly. Ten kilomothers ago homo sapiens was just coming into being. A hundred kilomothers ago homo erectus would’ve just been coming into existence. A megamother ago we would’ve been diverging into great apes.

        • @[email protected]
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          35 months ago

          It’s also about the speed of light in millifortnights (2.9e8), within a 4% error margin.

        • @[email protected]
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          35 months ago

          It didn’t suck exactly, time is just so much more prevalent than other units that switching to a new system was even more contentious. Current time is just as arbitrary (although maximizing for maximum number of prime factors is pretty nice, even if it doesn’t mesh nicely with other metric units)

      • @[email protected]
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        95 months ago

        The French tried to impose “metric” time way back in the day. Even they learned that was a bad idea and quietly dropped it. The solar system seems to prefer it’s base12 time.

        I think it maybe helped give rise the the saying: “The French follow no one. And no one follows the French.”

    • @[email protected]
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      105 months ago

      They were discussing converting the AU to 1 ‘your mom’ as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn’t sign on

  • @[email protected]
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    5 months ago

    Yes also this diagram:

    Gives you a clear sense of how quickly things are turning.

    In a geological sense, all of humanity isn’t even a heartbeat.

    • @[email protected]
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      45 months ago

      Yeah, I might not remember it exactly, but I’ve heard that about 9 out of 10 people of all our history haven’t died yet. Which can be neatly misinterpreted as a surprisingly optimistic chance of not dying.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          Probably the same as I do with finite time - stress myself about things I cannot influence. Or perhaps I’d finally have time to learn not to do that - it’s a task for several lifetimes, I’m afraid :)

  • @[email protected]
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    125 months ago

    Let’s push it one step further and frame history since agriculture, 9500 years ago, against the upper limit of a human lifetime now, about 100 years. This would mean recorded times started only less than 100 human lifespans ago. Bleh

  • Deebster
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    205 months ago

    I was thinking that it’s now 81 mothers ago, but then I got distracted by the fact that there was no year 0AD and now I’m thinking that roughly 80 is good enough.

  • @[email protected]
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    235 months ago

    I knew my great-grandmother, few people do. My great-great-grandmother is an ancient picture on the wall of my dead grandmother’s house, from a time when photography was new, a scant few years past daguerreotypes.

    4 mothers back is all I can summon, only remember 3.

    • stinerman
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      75 months ago

      I knew two of my great grandmothers (yay for really young parents!). I know I met two others but didn’t really know them.

      I was told that I met my great great grandmother once when I was a toddler but I don’t remember it. She died at age 99.

  • @[email protected]
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    1055 months ago

    Yeah only 2 generations ago, LGBT people were considered mentally ill. 4 generations ago women were considered unfit to vote. 8 generations ago about half the US though it was OK to own slaves. It takes a while for ideas to die out. That’s why US elections turn out the way they do.

    • @[email protected]
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      385 months ago

      Humanity isn’t progressing uniformly forward like this. Lgbtqia+ people were considered normal part of society by various cultures. Also Magnus Hirschfeld was an advocate for lgbtqia+ people a hundred years ago. Slavery has been transformed into modern slavery because the western world has found other, more concealed ways to force people into labor. Ideas may die out, but they will pop into people’s head again and again.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        And yet discussing progress in this manner can be a confort. All that you said was true… But what the person you replied said was also true. Two generations since fertilizer or two generations since we locked in Malthusian anarchy[please note I do not espouse Malthusianism]. Three generations since the worst war known to man and three generations that did not experience that kind of war. Glass half full, glass half empty. It’s correct to question the myth of unstoppable progress thru which you can just kick your feet up and relax. But equally is it important to keep perspective remember that, yeah, eight generations ago chattel slavery was a bonafide institution and four generations women were unfranchised. Things get better and they get worse. We make progress and it is wiped away. We still keep trying.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        Wonder how long it’ll take before we get to step forward again. As far as I’m seeing, we’re in for a long ride back. Not just for 4 years.

        • DUMBASS
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          55 months ago

          It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump made it President for life.

          • Elise
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            45 months ago

            No way that would last long, it’s just not how Americans tick

        • @[email protected]
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          5 months ago

          The American people are pretty fickle. It won’t take long for them to become unhappy with the Republican party. Of course once that happens and you and I are celebrating “Yay! We got rid of the fascists!” they’ll be going “Hmm… These other guys are pretty uninspiring. Maybe we should try fascism again.”

          * There’s a big asterisk here that this is all predicted on elections continuing unabated. Which is not a given.

        • @[email protected]
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          105 months ago

          This has happened before. Even after Abu Ghraib Bush Jr won re-election. Even after Iran-Contra the Republicans won re-election.

          But the fact is that they do not have the answers. They can only take things for themselves, and hope that people give up.

  • @[email protected]
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    145 months ago

    And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 280 = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet

    • Illecors
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      15 months ago

      This assumes a single child per set of parents, doesn’t it?

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        No I’m talking about the amount of ancestors in the 80th generation back not the total amount of ancestors. It doesn’t matter how many children each set of parents had for that number.

  • @[email protected]
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    65 months ago

    Some of my ancestors came to the United States on the Mayflower and that was only like 8 or 9 mothers ago.

      • @[email protected]
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        135 months ago

        So from your article, it seems to say the opposite

        The female average age of conception is 23.2, AND this includes a recent rise, so it would be even lower than that when considering older times

        Also, it’s unclear if the average also accounts for the fact that there is are significantly more child being given birth to in the very recent past, which would skew the number way up

        • @[email protected]
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          I don’t think 23 is wildly off from 25, and honestly this is just the first one I found that mentions it, I’ve seen various different sources for different reasons in the past. But the average is based on genetic mutations, and obviously in any given human it’s irrelevant how large a generation is as to how much genetic mutation is contributed by the generation. Like even if there are 8 billion people today, that doesn’t imply that you somehow got more generic inheritance from your parents than they did from theirs back when there were 6 billion people or whatever. Judging average to be the average per generation (a reasonable inference given the methodology) the last few years won’t make much of a difference in a timescale of 250k years

          I can’t find the article I vaguely remember from a while ago, here’s another random one that has mothers in the bronze age ranging from 16-40ish https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314262257_Bronze_Age_Beginnings_The_Conceptualization_of_Motherhood_in_Prehistoric_Europe although you can’t really infer much about averages from that.

          Anyway yeah there have been periods in time when average age of mothers was younger, but generally if you look back on a long timescale it’s been older than people seem to assume. Seems to be quite common to have the notion that women all had children at 16 or whatever back in the day but not much to really bear that out that I can find.

        • @[email protected]
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          105 months ago

          Every time I see people argue this I always wanna ask, are you considering that people don’t stop having kids after 1 or 2? I’d wager that most women had the majority of their kids around that 23ish mark when you include that lady who had 10 kids from 15 to 35