I just like to imagine there was a real person called Unga Bunga though. It seems statistically likely. Or some guy named, like, Andrew or something, but with absolutely no linguistic ties to any of the modern name's roots, like it arose independently more than once.

Many years ago I heard a comedian tell a joke, "I come from a long line of people who had kids."

He was a funny guy, with a funny set, but that line always stuck with me.

On the other hand, the number of humans from 50,000 years ago whose names you don’t know is vastly smaller than the number of humans alive right now whose names you don’t know.

they probably exploded lands

Khaal explores. Khaal not explodes. Khaal not dumb.

You don't understand how much this hurts me

You don't know John Sapien and Jennifer Sapien?

I have a Geneology book that have the names of my ancestors that were alive circa 1200 CE... (like 20something generations ago)

But like... does that even matter?

Idk what they even did except like they village wrote a short summary of what that time was like but idk what their jobs were or their behavoirs, thoughts, philosophical beliefs, political beliefs, or maybe if they were just as toxic as my parents... I literally have no info on them other than their name... so does knowing the name of your ancestors even matter?

(Also its male ancestors only thats recorded in the geneology book... thanks, patriarchy 🤦‍♂️)

Have a read of how much history is embedded in Australian aboriginal oral stories. Their stories go a long long way back

I suspect it was probably "Phil."

I think cave art is also quite intimate. Like the hand prints and stencils are very human.

It’s theoretically impossible to create a system to remember every human that doesn't rely on external storage.

I’ll explain: let’s say that for every human that dies, they will be remembered and live on in the heart of another, living human. Each living human can remember n dead humans.

we can set up an equation

pn >= r

where p is the current population of live humans, r is the amount of dead humans that must be remembered.

We can express the rate of deaths as a proportion of the current living population:

d/dt[r] = pb

Where t is time and b is the instantaneous death rate per captia with respect to time (generally a constant).

Combined with the previous, we get the separable differential equation:

d/dt[r] = pb >= (r/n)b

dr/dt >= rb/n

[1/r] rt >= [b/n] dt

Integrated:

ln|r| >= tb/n+C

r >= e^(tb/n+C)

pn >= r >= e^(tb/n+C)

p >= e^(tb/n+C)/n

So in order for this system to work, the living population must always be growing exponentially, which is not feasible for modern humanity.

The best guesses are either Mohammad or McLovin. 🤷‍♂️

I mean nothing is eternal but I do get that feeling. The immensity of all the people who lived and died and how your life on the scale is so short and will end soon. Im not sure I want to have any type of written immortality and not sure anyone does. Do you really know the person who wrote or made things? Even people that meet and know you just have a kind of personal concept of you influenced by their own being. Ones entity is really something to unique to them and can't really be after it is. Heck do I know myself yesterday like I do today or last week or from last month or last year or last decade. My 5 year old self is dead. I can remember a bit from the time but can't really wrap my head around how I thought and who I was.

Bob. There has been and will always be a Bob around.

We know a few. "Fire", for example. And "Axe". The inventions named after them are still in use to this day.

I bet at least one person was named UUUUUUURRRRR and he had two buddies named AAAAARRRRR and AAAACCCHK

@solidheron@sh.itjust.works

As far as I'm aware, archaeology (specifically Assyriology and Egyptology) point to independent origins of writing systems (the writing as we know it): Sumerians and their cuneiforms, ancient Egyptians and their hieroglyphs. Even though, as far as I'm aware, Sumerians seem to have been the first ones to ever write, before Egyptians independently did it too, therefore Sumerians seem to be the pioneers of writing.

Having said this, how tragically ironic it is, as if the uncaring Cosmos got a sadistic sense of humour, the fact that the pioneer of writing is unknown even through the means of their own creation. It's as if the WWW lacked any hypertext files containing the substring "Tim Berners-Lee", or if every radio communication ever propagated across the EM field lacked any modulated signal, analog or digital, that would demodulate to "Guglielmo Marconi".

We don't know the name or history of the person who first wrote, nor we know to whom they were writing to (must've been a solitary endeavour, scratching some arrows on a clay when nobody else will understand it), nor we know what they wrote first (everybody knows the infamous "We the people" USian trope, and some nerds like me know how the first text transmitted between computers was "LO" as in truncated "HELLO", but the first Cuneiform text ever was lost to entropy and decay).

We don't even need to go that far, though. Do we know the names and life stories for ALL people who died from COVID-19? Surely we can find online and offline registers for several of them, but even the World Health Organization can't tell precisely how many people died from COVID-19, let alone who exactly they were. And it's been mere 6 years ago, when The Internet as we know it was already so ubiquitous! Now imagine The Plague? Or the dinosaurs, who simply got transmuted into fuel we use for our noisy metallic apparata with no regard for their own individual life stories from a time when they were gigantic living beings?

Thing is: we, living beings, humans and whatnot, we're infinitesimally nothing before the mercilessness of the infinite cosmic entropy, decay and Death, for She can and She will erase us just as She's already slowly erasing our biological existences as we speak (we know this as "apoptosis", "aging", etc, to which, sorry to remind the techno-gnostics who crave for "immortality", that nothing can excel Her, not even the universe which, despite being so big in such a manner we have no idea how mind-bogglingly big it is, is also going to cease someday, too).

But, hey, humans must leave a legacy, conquer the cosmos and avoid Death Herself (whether we, as flesh-and-bones entities, would get past the insurmountable Cosmic Great Filter, before another Great Reset happens in this cosmic vicinity, something that not even "powerful" hominids with red buttons at their disposal could even prevent or stop from happening, is a whole other story)! To infinite and beyond we must! :)