We surely are not alone?

[Leothebear]

The reason i was being dismissive was a reaction to this part of UE's post:

But we are the most complex objects in the universe and odds are that we are totally unique and alone. Whether that makes us precious within eternity is another argument. ...

Not that it really matters but those are Stonge’s words:

viewtopic.php?p=257107#p257107

Oops - apologies to UE

[ursaminortaur]

The probability of a particular human such as yourself coming into existence has been calculated as infinitesimally small, something of the order of 1 in 10^44 against.

Not small enough though it would seem.

For any of us to have been born, every single one of our ancestors going back millions and millions of years had to survive all the hazards of the time in which they lived (at least long enough to breed). How lucky is that?

Not really true.

Firstly most of the human genome is common to us all only a small fraction differs between people. Secondly most of your ancestors from more than a thousand years ago will have had their genetic contribution to you weeded out in the intervening time so that today there is no trace of them in your individual genome. If you are european then statistically you are a descendent of Charlemagne and every other person alive in europe at the same time as Charlemagne who has living descendents but that doesn't mean that you have any genes which directly came from Charlemagne.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford

This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbour more than a billion ancestors – more people than were alive then. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more web-like. In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people. Basically, everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, Drogo, Pippin and Hugh. Quel dommage.
.
.
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Each subsequent generation, the contribution from an individual from your lineage becomes less. Professor Mark Thomas from University College London describes this dilution as “homeopathic”. After a few rounds of preparation, homeopathic dilutions contain no molecules of whatever the active ingredient is imagined to be. Genetic inheritance works in a similar way. Half of your genome comes from your mother and half from your father, a quarter from each of your grandparents. But because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.

If you were able to go back in time a 100,000 years and killed one of your ancestors before they had children then unless that particular individual had a particularly useful unique mutation then their genetic contribution to you today would probably have been zero anyway and easily replaced by some other person living at that time. The old time travel grandfather paradox really is a paradox with grandfathers but not with great great great ..... great great grandfathers from a 100,000 years ago.

[XFool]

...Or, to put it another way: 'Fings aren't wot they used to be.'

Or, to put it yet another way: 'Things are rarely quite how you think they are (using 'common sense'), rather they are the way they are. Whatever you may think.'

That may not quite be a case of: ' That's entropy, man' *, but I like to think it is a case of 'That's science, man'.

* Courtesy of Flanders & Swann
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnbiVw_1FNs

[Stonge]

The probability of a particular human such as yourself coming into existence has been calculated as infinitesimally small, something of the order of 1 in 10^44 against.

Not small enough though it would seem.

For any of us to have been born, every single one of our ancestors going back millions and millions of years had to survive all the hazards of the time in which they lived (at least long enough to breed). How lucky is that?

Not really true.

Firstly most of the human genome is common to us all only a small fraction differs between people. Secondly most of your ancestors from more than a thousand years ago will have had their genetic contribution to you weeded out in the intervening time so that today there is no trace of them in your individual genome. If you are european then statistically you are a descendent of Charlemagne and every other person alive in europe at the same time as Charlemagne who has living descendents but that doesn't mean that you have any genes which directly came from Charlemagne.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford

This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbour more than a billion ancestors – more people than were alive then. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more web-like. In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people. Basically, everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, Drogo, Pippin and Hugh. Quel dommage.
.
.
.
Each subsequent generation, the contribution from an individual from your lineage becomes less. Professor Mark Thomas from University College London describes this dilution as “homeopathic”. After a few rounds of preparation, homeopathic dilutions contain no molecules of whatever the active ingredient is imagined to be. Genetic inheritance works in a similar way. Half of your genome comes from your mother and half from your father, a quarter from each of your grandparents. But because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.

If you were able to go back in time a 100,000 years and killed one of your ancestors before they had children then unless that particular individual had a particularly useful unique mutation then their genetic contribution to you today would probably have been zero anyway and easily replaced by some other person living at that time. The old time travel grandfather paradox really is a paradox with grandfathers but not with great great great ..... great great grandfathers from a 100,000 years ago.

that's an extremely interesting and elaborate example of how to completely miss the point about a particular individual being born, i.e. you with your mind, your thoughts your self awareness

e,g. there are 3600 seconds in an hour and 1000 millisecs in a second, and if your dad had made his contribution a milllisec or two sooner or later you wouldn't have been born, instead your brother or sister would have been

trace that back over a few millennia

but its worse than that, identical twins have the same genes (not epigenetics but lets leave that out for now) but don't have the same mind so you may be right in some mysterious way

some people ask "why am I me and not you?" and others say "thank God I'm me and not you". we can all think of examples of the latter

but lets not bring religion into it

[XFool]

For any of us to have been born, every single one of our ancestors going back millions and millions of years had to survive all the hazards of the time in which they lived (at least long enough to breed). How lucky is that?

Not really true.

that's an extremely interesting and elaborate example of how to completely miss the point about a particular individual being born, i.e. you with your mind, your thoughts your self awareness

But surely the reply was in the context of:

For any of us to have been born, every single one of our ancestors going back millions and millions of years had to survive all the hazards of the time in which they lived (at least long enough to breed). How lucky is that?

some people ask "why am I me and not you?" and others say "thank God I'm me and not you". we can all think of examples of the latter

Yes. But isn't that something (almost) entirely different?

[ursaminortaur]

For any of us to have been born, every single one of our ancestors going back millions and millions of years had to survive all the hazards of the time in which they lived (at least long enough to breed). How lucky is that?

Not really true.

Firstly most of the human genome is common to us all only a small fraction differs between people. Secondly most of your ancestors from more than a thousand years ago will have had their genetic contribution to you weeded out in the intervening time so that today there is no trace of them in your individual genome. If you are european then statistically you are a descendent of Charlemagne and every other person alive in europe at the same time as Charlemagne who has living descendents but that doesn't mean that you have any genes which directly came from Charlemagne.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford

This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbour more than a billion ancestors – more people than were alive then. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more web-like. In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people. Basically, everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, Drogo, Pippin and Hugh. Quel dommage.
.
.
.
Each subsequent generation, the contribution from an individual from your lineage becomes less. Professor Mark Thomas from University College London describes this dilution as “homeopathic”. After a few rounds of preparation, homeopathic dilutions contain no molecules of whatever the active ingredient is imagined to be. Genetic inheritance works in a similar way. Half of your genome comes from your mother and half from your father, a quarter from each of your grandparents. But because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.

If you were able to go back in time a 100,000 years and killed one of your ancestors before they had children then unless that particular individual had a particularly useful unique mutation then their genetic contribution to you today would probably have been zero anyway and easily replaced by some other person living at that time. The old time travel grandfather paradox really is a paradox with grandfathers but not with great great great ..... great great grandfathers from a 100,000 years ago.

that's an extremely interesting and elaborate example of how to completely miss the point about a particular individual being born, i.e. you with your mind, your thoughts your self awareness

e,g. there are 3600 seconds in an hour and 1000 millisecs in a second, and if your dad had made his contribution a milllisec or two sooner or later you wouldn't have been born, instead your brother or sister would have been

trace that back over a few millennia

but its worse than that, identical twins have the same genes (not epigenetics but lets leave that out for now) but don't have the same mind so you may be right in some mysterious way

some people ask "why am I me and not you?" and others say "thank God I'm me and not you". we can all think of examples of the latter

but lets not bring religion into it

That is true but the genetic diversity is constrained and once you get back far enough most of your ancestors are fungible.

Note the statement I was commenting on was about our ancestors

For any of us to have been born, every single one of our ancestors going back millions and millions of years had to survive all the hazards of the time in which they lived (at least long enough to breed)

not about the particular sperm that your father ejaculated at a particular moment.

Genetics though isn't of course the only thing that makes you who you are. You are also the product of your environment and culture and technical developments of your birthplace. However again most of your distant ancestors were probably not great scientists , musicians, playwrights , kings , generals etc hence once again most of those distant ancestors are pretty fungible.

Your assumption with the sperm idea is that a change would make things diverge as it cascaded down the generations but the evidence is that generally that wouldn't happen. As an analogy you might consider your father's sperm which resulted in your birth to be akin to a quantum event pretty much inheritently unpredictable though given your father's genetic characteristics predictable to some extent probablistically. But the randomness of those meeting of sperms and eggs over the generations largely cancels out in a similar way to quantum effects cancelling out on the large scale to produce the much more predictable classical physics. (It's not a perfect analogy so please don't pick it apart too much).

[Howard]

Fabulous video of our Universe and just how utterly insignificant we really are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA

nimnarb

Thank you so much for pasting this video.

About six months ago I was asked to give a talk about astronomy to our local youth club tonight and your link provided a brilliant finishing video. I showed it an hour or so ago and it went down really well. The soundtrack was really impressive as well.

Much appreciated.

Howard

[nimnarb]

Fabulous video of our Universe and just how utterly insignificant we really are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA

nimnarb

Thank you so much for pasting this video.

About six months ago I was asked to give a talk about astronomy to our local youth club tonight and your link provided a brilliant finishing video. I showed it an hour or so ago and it went down really well. The soundtrack was really impressive as well.

Much appreciated.

Howard

Pleasure..............always been fascinated with this subject but some here imho try to take things apart too much when nobody will ever have the answer, well not in my lifetime anyway. Just enjoy what we have today. Had to look up what the meaning was when a recent poster said that perhaps my ancestors are fungible
good grief............

[SwissPaul]

Hah - you dont know insignifance until

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=troYor3xjMI

[EssDeeAitch]

Fabulous video of our Universe and just how utterly insignificant we really are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA

Great video!

This one shows firstly how huge we are as it takes on a journey to the super duper small and then how small we are by taking us up the ladder of size.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AAR7bNSM_s