this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 52 minutes ago

When numbers divide

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago

Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

This is framed like 80 generations is a small number, but that's huge. Culture and civilization moves so quickly that even 3 generations ago life is barely recognisable. I can't even imagine what life was like 40 generations ago.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 hours ago

Many people don't realize that the amount of change our culture goes through in a lifetime is unfathomable historically. Before the 1800s it took a good decade for news to truly travel around to everyone in a region, and that was considered timely if it happened at all. Farming, hunting, homemaking, war, stayed exactly the same for dozens of years at a time and changes were usually made abruptly due to conflict before stagnating again.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

I am interested in learning about this metric time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours 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] 12 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Oh?

"450 mothers ago" is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.

To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

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] 3 points 2 hours 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] 3 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 2^80^ = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Village bicycle*

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours 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] 85 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

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] 27 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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] 10 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours 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] 18 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Two steps forward. One step back

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

two steps forward, random.randint(1,4) steps back.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

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] 2 points 5 hours ago

And when the Democrats put up the same fascist policies in continuation of the status quo and refuse to defend those who find themselves targeted by Republicans, you will "hold your nose" to vote for them and cry at anyone who refuses to fall in line and do the same; in fact you will actively work against their efforts to build up power in resistance of both parties just because it won't immediately pay off and you're too brainwashed to believe in any power but the two-party system's power. And then your party will lose anyways and take another step rightward in response. I know you people, we've done this whole song and dance before.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 hours 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago

You would have a lot more death during pregnancy / childbirth though.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 18 hours ago (5 children)

That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

As the other commentator says, medieval Europe was mostly early twenties. Studies of stone age remains suggest a first birth age average of 19.5 and contemporary hunter gather societies have a comparable average. Sexual activity generally begins earlier, during adolescence, but the most "reproductively successful" age for beginning childbearing has been shown to be around 18-19. Also, this age at first birth isnt "Average age of a child's mother" as many women would have multiple kids over their life, so the average sibling would have a much older mother at birth than the firstborn.

Its important to remember that puberty has shifted massively since industrialisation, "menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years in western societies". So the post-puberty fecundity peak, that use to happen 17-19, when women are fully grown enough to minimise birth complications, now happens at a disressingly young 13-15. Not only is this a big social yuck for most western societies, but it's reproductively unideal, because of the complications linked to childbirth at that age.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Huh, that’s interesting. Do we know why the menarche age has receded?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

if you click that second study link it's exactly about that

[–] [email protected] 50 points 18 hours ago (11 children)

In Western Europe at least back to the early medieval period it was common for anyone who wasn’t nobility to have their first child around 22. The younger you are the more likely you’re going to have serious (fatal, back then) complications. It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 18 hours ago

It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

Same as it ever was.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

First births yes, but what about average age? Our ancestors may have been second born, third born, eighth born etc

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 19 hours 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.

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