I don’t believe this.
Given the size of William Shakespeare, in comparison to the size of the Earth & it’s atmosphere, there must be only a tiny, tiny percentage of atoms that were once part of his body. And an equally tiny chance that one of them is now part of your body. So I do not think that qualifies as ‘probable’. Quite improbable, actually.
Not quite twice as long. The main fighting was 1964-73, roughly equivalent to the action in Vietnam, although American military “technicians” were there as early as 1959 training the Royal Lao Army as well as Hmong hilltribe guerrillas. (There had been an American presence in Vietnam from 1950, when an advisory office was set up in Hanoi).
But the Lao experience gives the lie to the school of thought that says we lost Vietnam because there were too many restrictions on what we could bomb. In Vietnam, the “rules of engagement” (ROEs, or Romeos as they were called) prohibited bombing within 500 meters of a temple, while in Cambodia the limit was a full kilometer.
There were NO such restrictions in Laos. Any- and everything that came into the bombardiers site was fair game to be decimated, and we still lost.
Well, you have to remember three things.
First, we are talking about all of the atoms that were ever part of Shakespeare. This includes every molecule of CO2 exhaled, every skin cell sloughed off, every mililiter of urine (as well as all other precious and non-precious bodily fluids), and a good part of any fecal matter (as some fecal matter is unabsorbed material and doesn’t really count), not just his body when he died.
Second, it takes an unimaginably large amount of atoms to make anything large enough to be visible with the naked eye, let alone something as large as a human. One gram of carbon has about 5.018*10^22 atoms in it.
Third, atoms are actually recycled in our biosphere quite quickly.
With this in mind, it doesn’t seem so hard to imagine that every person alive today has a few atoms of Shakespeare in their body right now.
Correct. Assuming 4 generations per century, I have approximately 2^48 ancestors going back to the 8th century. That’s far more than the number of people who have ever lived. Of course, lots of the branches in my family tree will meet up with each other, but it’s still likely that I’m a direct descendant of Charlemagne.
Someone has done the the maths on this. Every atom in your body is replaced every 7 years or so, and there are a lot of atoms a body. They are rapidly reclycled around the biosphere. According to this estimate, I have more than 200 billion of Shakespeare’s atoms:
I’d have to look into this one, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Prostitution was, until recently, completely legal in Rhode Island as long as it was done indoors.
Makes sense on the surface, but it also raises a question. There’s quite a lot of people living now in the world who don’t have a smidgen of European ancestry in their body (I’m sure there’s hundreds of thousands of them in China and India alone, not to mention Africa). The math works out the same for them as it does for you and I. Would they be also “likely” descended from Charlemagne? Would I be “likely” to be a direct descendant of Kunta Kinte? (For the record I’m white, and can hit Europe if I go back about 4 or 5 generations)
I’m from the UK, so I’m probably decended from most people alive in 8th century Europe, whose line wasn’t quickly wiped out by disease. I’m also likely to have a large number or African and Asian ancestors, due to a relatively small number of inter-marriages. I can’t find a cite, but I think I’m right in saying that genetic profiling of Europeans tends to show significant evidence of Asian and African ancestry. I’m guessing that most Chinese and Indians living today are also desended from Charlemagne.
Kunta Kinte (I am wiki-ing the right one?) lived in the 18th century, so probably only has a few hundred to a few thousand descendants.
I’m not sure how “likely” someone from China/India/Africa/Australia is to be descended from Charlemagne, since he only lived 1,200 years ago.
However, some people think that the most recent common ancestor of all humans might have been within historical times - possibly 3rd millennium BC to 1st millennium AD.
Kunta Kinte was a character in a novel, right? Unless you mean that metaphorically. “Roots” was a novel, not a history book, and partially plagiarized at that.
Regardless, it was based significantly on the actual history of his ancestry. I shoudl know. I work in the library with Alex Haley’s private papers on file.
BTW, A bit of a note about the “size” rankings there. The USA is 3rd, not 4th. If you follow Wiki’s own link back, you will see the correct size. The listed size is actually cutting out a good chunk of U.S. territory.
Well, I couldn’t think of any famous 8th-ish century Africans, Kunta Kinte was the furthest back I could think of (and I was awre he may not be historical in the strict sense of the word).
I really hate to get back to the arguement our dear nutbar Egmond Codfried started, but wouldnt’ this mean dark-skinned Europeans?
And what about those remote tribes in the jungles of New Guinea/the Andaman Islands/the Amazon/Africa that have had barely any outside contact (and want to keep it that way), surely none of them can be descended from Charlemange!
As I said, on the surface your theory makes sense and I generally have no problem with it. But there are a few things that make you think there must be holes.
I thoguht the discrepancy was not about the US area but about China’s, ie what to count as “China”, if we count the aireas it claims as China (like Aksai Chin and Arunchal Pradesh (not counting Taiwan, every non-PRC source I’ve seen leaves that out)) it’s bigger than the US, if not it isn’t. These areas aren’t that large, smaller than several states, so the US and China are practically the same size.
Sure, that’s why I say ‘probably’ and ‘most’, there are some very isolated ethnic groups. But even somewhere like the Andaman islands, it only takes one sailor in the 18th century to get washed up there, and potentially most of the current population could be descended from Charlemagne by now (I’m not saying this actually happened).
A little over ten years ago, someone started a thread on the snopes message board where people could post odd “facts.” Most of them were pretty ridiculous, but a fair amount were almost sort of plausible enough that they might pass the sniff test for the less skeptical. One person decided to collect the best ones and send out a “Strange but true, pass this along to everyone you know” e-mail to everyone he knew. We wanted to see how long it took for it to show up in our own inboxes.
It never did.
The “facts” that I posted are the only ones I remember. The Tony Orlando/Angelica Huston one was mine. I’m very proud of it.
