It’s so tragic that we have no records of Washington, Tesla, da Vinci, Newton, Faraday, or Kant. If only they’d thought to have kids they might have left a mark on the world.
This lmao.
“Being forgotten and replaced” is racist propaganda
And people will fall for it constantly.
Pro tip: if a right wing think tank can fear you into making a human life then maybe you are too stupid to responsibly raise children
Nah, I reckon we’re better off for Kant not procreating. That guy gets worse the more you look into him.
Bloodline doesn’t have to end for that to happen. Even if you have kids, in three generations no one will remember your name or your life. Do you know the names and history of your great great grandparents? No one will remember us and it will not be important whether they do or don’t.
This is very true, and also, the reverse is true as well: your bloodline can end yet you can still be remembered if you did something remarkable enough. I’m sure there are tons of well known figures in history whose bloodlines are no more today
One of the things I learned as a scientist is that for any major accomplishment, there are thousands of people who did difficult, necessary, and not-widely-recognized work to make that accomplishment possible.
My favorite example of this was just a few years ago, when the media all reported that a woman had found a black hole. The coverage was all about her and how surprising it was… she was on a team of 6. We all just decided, fuck the 5 other people on her team who all worked together on the project. She wasn’t even a team lead or anything.
I like to think that things are even more complicated, as we depend on a lot of people, even if we are not aware of it: random taxi/bus drivers, restaurant/grocery staff, your ISP workers, random factory workers, etc.
We depend on far mote people than we realize, and not just us but also people working in advancing the limits of human knowledge. We wouldn’t have Einstein without some of his totally unexpected yet unkownly related contemporanies. Following this logic, we wouldn’t have Einstein without his grandparents, and even those grandparent’s contemporanies, and this just keeps going.
As Lain says, we are all connected.
Do you know the names and history of your great great grandparents?
Yes. I guess permanently moving halfway around the world is notable. Although that also means the next generation will know what their great great great grandparents did.
yeah and its like whats a bloodline. There is the whole mitochondrial eve thing. I saw a youtube video on genetics and variation and generations and it did not take long for less than 1% of enetics to be in common with an ancestor and they used the british royal family as an examples so pretty inbred to.
I do, we even have a wedding ring
Agree, and I love that.
Even Steve jobs will be forgotten soon enough. My kids don’t even know who he is.
Not having to build some bullshit legacy is so freeing.
I can focus on my version of a good life, and ensure my time with my direct family is fulfilling.
Everything else is just pointless drama.
It happens anyway. It’s possible, but very very unlikely, that within two generations none of your grandkids shares any DNA with you.
nah, technically were all from the same bloodline or something so whatever
On the biological level, true enough.
I find it kinda fascinating that every single ancestor of mine lived long enough to procreate. My life can be directly linked to some unknown single celled organisms billions of years ago and every evolutionary step between those and a human, that’s really weird to think about.
It’s not his best work, but Mike Skinner made a song about it a decade or two ago. Like. Almost verbatim what you typed which is why I remembered it.
For billions of years since the outset of time
Every single one of your ancestors survived
Every single person on your Mum and Dad’s side
Successfully looked after and passed onto new life
What are the chances of that like?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc9gIzRhrvY
Not like it’s a bad song, it’s just Mike fucking Skinner, so he’s got a pretty high standard for one of his best songs.
Yep, the only thing that’s lost is any mutations unique to that “bloodline”.
That rarely happens, and when it does it’s almost always something that wasn’t beneficial to begin with.
We’re all just different combinations of the same DNA. Some of our ancestors were just isolated enough for already old mutations to become concentrated enough to get expressed in the majority of the population.
Like, going off memory but there’s like 17 different mutations for eye color?
None of them cease to exist when they’re not expressed, and they still have the same chance of showing up later.
The Blue Fugette’s from Kentucky is a great example. The original heads of that family was a French man and an Irish woman who’s bloodlines hadn’t crossed in probably thousands of years.
But they both had the same rare recessive trait for their blood to be less oxygenated than normal. So their kids had a blue hue. Because they moved to an isolated location with a small amount of other families, their kids with double recessive genes lead to a bunch of blue people in a couple generations after it had spread in the population.
Even if they had all died out for some reason, it wouldn’t stop another random couple with the resseive genes from meeting and moving to another isolated population.
My bloodline ends with me, but I have step kids. So kinda yes, but kinda no more than a typical person whose genes do continue but their story is forgotten eventually.
This really hit me recently when sorting my mom’s belongings and finding a ton of photographs of people I don’t recognize, and having nobody left to ask about who they were, how/if they were related to me, and what their life was like.
no dad, I am not gonna have kids. I am probably infertile from hrt anyway
Tell that to Newtown
Shortsighted take. The concept of legacy is bullshit. The long term effects you have on the world have more to do with reinforcing or negating societal patterns of behavior. Do you encourage or discourage kindness? Do you encouraged or discourage violence? That’s really all that matters.
Those who receive kindness, violence, etc. are likely to perpetuate it, but could fight that societal reinforcement and potentially change the course of their lives and the way they influence others around them.
All the different flavors of culture and traditions are simply wrappers over these patterns and are destined to die or change so dramatically that they would be unrecognizable to the practitioners of said culture from the past.
Your true legacy, the one that is likely to span many generations, isn’t the traditions or artifices of a culture and people long dead, it is the positive and negative behaviors you reinforced through you demonstrating these behaviors during your life.
Did you build and help community? Did you uplift and protect the most vulnerable amongst you? Did you work towards a world better for the next generation and not just for your children? Ultimately this is the closest people have to an actual legacy.
One day you and everyone you ever know will die, and the best you can hope for is that you perpetuated kindness amongst those that will take the mantle of humanity forward.
Legacy is still bullshit though. The reasons for doing right by another person is the goal, not the way towards the goal.
