Grandparents Experiment - World Population Dilemma

By Nelas | May 3, 2010 | 1 Comments | Rating: 1

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I was doing some thinking the other day and wondered if anyone has thought about this. I was adding up my grandparents from each generation and the number became extrememly large throughout the generations. I then did a population check of the world during certain years and it seems that I was related to everyone in the world. Actually, it seems that I was related to people who did not exist! Stay with me here, let me try to explain as we go through this.

We all know that we have two parents, a mother and a father. O.K., that was pretty simple. We also know that we have 4 grandparents, which of course is our mother and father's parents. Our grandparent's parents, are our great-grandparents, and since we have 4 grandparents, that will give us 8 great-grandparents. Our 8 great-grandparents all had parents of course, they all had a mother and father, and these people were our great-great grandparents, we had 16 of them. As we can see here, the numbers will just double for every generation of grandparents we have.

The world human population in the world as of 2010 is around 6,800,000,000, that is 6 billion and 800 million. Below is a figure of what the world population was during different years.

^{I did some thinking the other day and wanted to give others something interesting to think about. As I kept adding up how many grandparents I had from generation to generation, and figured out the world population by each year, it sort of baffled my mind. I am going to give an example below as to why it baffled my mind. Please keep in mind that with the example I'm giving below, it is estimated that each woman would give birth to her child at the age of 20. Of course some mothers would give birth in their 30's, and some would give birth as a teenager, but I thought that the age of 20 would be a good average age that the woman would give birth.}

^{Stay with me here.}

^{I was born in 1975}

^{My mother and father were born in 1955}

^{My 4 grandparents were all born in 1935}

^{My 8 great grandparents were born in 1915}

^{My 16 great-great grandparents were born in 1895}

^{My 32 great-great-great grandparents were born in 1875}

^{My 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents were born in 1855}

^{My 128 great (5X) grandparents were born in 1835}

^{My 256 great (6X) grandparents were born in 1815}

^{My 512 great (7X) grandparents were born in 1795}

^{My 1,024 great (8X) grandparents were born in 1775}

^{My 2,048 great (9X) grandparents were born in 1755}

^{My 4,096 great (10) grandparents were born in 1735}

^{My 8,192 great (11X) grandparents were born in 1715}

^{My 16,384 great (12X) grandparents were born in 1695}

^{My 32,768 great (13X) grandparents were born in 1675}

^{My 65,536 great (14X) grandparents were born in 1655}

^{My 131,072 great (15X) grandparents were born in 1635}

^{My 262,144 great (16X) grandparents were born in 1615}

^{My 524,288 great (17X) grandparents were born in 1595}

^{My 1,048,576 great (18X) grandparents were born in 1575}

^{My 2,097,152 great (19X) grandparents were born in 1555}

^{My 4,194,304 great (20X) grandparents were born in 1535}

^{My 8,388,608 great (21X) grandparents were born in 1515}

^{My 16,777,216 great (22X) grandparents were born in 1495}

^{My 33,554,432 great (23X) grandparents were born in 1475}

^{My 67,108,864 great (24X) grandparents were born in 1455}

^{My 134,217,728 great (25X) grandparents were born in 1435}

^{My 268,435,456 great (26X) grandparents were born in 1415}

^{My 536,870,912 great (27X) grandparents were born in 1395}

^{My 1,073,741,824 great (28X) grandparents were born in 1375}

^{My 2,147,483,648 great (29X) grandparents were born in 1355}

^{My 4,294,967,296 great (30X) grandparents were born in 1335}

^{My 8,589,934,592 great (31X) grandparents were born in 1315}

^{My 17,179,869,184 great (32X) grandparents were born in 1295}

^{My 34,359,738,368 great (33X) grandparents were born in 1275}

^{We are going to stop right here, my brain is starting to hurt with all of these numbers. The numbers of course will just grow larger and larger and we will eventually hit the trillions. As mentioned earlier, the population today is 6,800,000,000, but as we go through the grandparent experiment we were related to that many people sometime between 1315 and 1335. Of course this dosen't make sense since the world population was somewhere between 310,000,000 and 79,000,000 at that time. Can you explain this to me?}

^{I know that there were plagues that killed millions and millions of people through out history, cutting off a huge part of the population; not to mention all of the wars and natural disasters. It is still something to think about though. All of the people in the grandparents experiment indeed did survive until they created their baby, from which you eventually came from down the line. Just think about it, if only one of those people had died and broken the linage that led to you, you would not exist.}

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Comments

May 3, 2010 6:29pm

Kevin
Very interesting thought experiment! One of the reasons to why the populations don't add up is rebreeding between branches in your tree.

It is pretty likely that back in the day when people were confined to a village or tribe of people that there was a good deal of interbreeding. Maybe not from close generations, but from a couple down the line.

If you are interested in this stuff, you should check out Wikipedia for Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam.