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.
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.
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.
Do you know the names and history of your great great grandparents?
On my dad’s side, actually yes. They died either side of 100 when I was in my early 20s. I’m old enough to remember spending time with them and hearing about their lives. I didn’t meet the other sides, but my maternal grandfather compiled a book about his line which was quite interesting (and this was when one still had to go to the library and search through newspapers, etc. or have them call other libraries to get info).
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
I agree, but i can’t help but wonder if the internet changes this.
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.
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.
“Bloodline” is a pretty weird concept.
Nah its a fun concept.
Like imagine you just go back in time and randomly kill a person. Bam, a lot of people never get born, history changes dramatically.
Having a child is biggest butterfly effect you can have on the space time contiuum. Want more chaos, have more children. LET CHAOS REIGN!
But other people fill their roles, with the main difference being just genetics, so probably on average very similar behavior. And most people don’t do anything too exceptional or history changing. So would “ending a bloodline” really be more impactful than say causing a traffic jam, if all it’s really doing is applying a passive RNG shuffle to everything?
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.
Nah, I reckon we’re better off for Kant not procreating. That guy gets worse the more you look into him.
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 branch of the family tree dies with me. My family name is probably in the rarest few percent (I tried checking previously and got some fraction of a percent, but I don’t know how accurate that site was). Technically, though, as several of us uploaded DNA to various sites, it’s not completely lost in that sense. However, I just don’t care, really; I think it’s weirdly self-important to be concerned with a name or bloodline carrying on like humanity won’t survive without it somehow.
Oh yeah, my family name isn’t that rare, but it’s also probably going away locally when I do. I don’t mind though, it’s an ugly name anyway. My wife didn’t take it, her’s is much nicer.
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.
Everyone dies two deaths, once when they die and again the last time another person thinks of them.
I, too, cry at the end of Coco.
Oh man, Coco broke me in the best and most beautiful way.
My grandpa had Alzheimer’s, and near the end he couldn’t remember anything but if we started singing hymns or Christmas carols he knew he would sing along with us. I never really mourned him properly; by the time he died he’d been slowly disappearing for years, so the funeral was more of a “good, he’s done suffering” deal.
At the end of Coco I cried harder than I’ve ever cried at any movie. It was like I had all this stuff pent up and never dealt with and didn’t realize it. It all came out in one massive wave of catharsis. It felt incredible.
Now it’s my favorite Pixar movie.
Most underrated Pixar film, IMO.
Also the premise of a book I enjoyed many years ago! The book in question explores the premise fairly extensively.
no dad, I am not gonna have kids. I am probably infertile from hrt anyway
which would be completely irrelevant
Tell that to Newtown
It happens anyway. It’s possible, but very very unlikely, that within two generations none of your grandkids shares any DNA with you.
How is the history lost? You don’t need surviving relatives to keep historic records.
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.
