[HN Gopher] Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
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Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
Author : Jimmc414
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-05-09 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| ljlolel wrote:
| They found a genetic bottleneck of a couple hundred individuals
| some hundreds of thousands of years ago so that was probably
| worse
| simpaticoder wrote:
| There have been several bottlenecks, the worst one was pre-
| homosapien (~1000 individuals for 100k years):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck.
|
| It is remarkable to imagine that every person alive now, or
| that's ever been alive, is descended from this same tiny group
| of beings. And all of this drama occurs in a remote spec of
| dust orbiting and average star of an average galaxy of 100B
| stars, among 100B visible galaxies. Even if we had Star Trek
| level tech, we'd still be approximately as insignificant.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Why would size determine significance?
|
| And what is significance anyway? What determines whether
| something is significant?
| voidspark wrote:
| Size determines significance by definition of a population
| bottleneck
| kbelder wrote:
| Statistically, size or quantity is a major part of
| significance. But that's not really the sense in which
| 'significant' is being used here... it's being used as a
| synonym of 'important' or 'meaningful'. In those terms, you
| have to ask the question, 'significant to whom?'
| Significance doesn't exist outside of somebody to attach
| meaning to it.
|
| Most often, the answer is 'to me, the guy making the
| observation.'
|
| In that sense, that tiny speck of dust in our corner of the
| galaxy is _very_ significant. At least to me.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| The self repair forces of the ego selecting the tale with
| the highest praise for me, the chosen one, living at the
| end of time, made in gods image.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The range is 100,000 to 1000 individuals. This is a factor of
| 100.. If you take the midpoint ,it's 50k, which is not as
| bad.
| cl3misch wrote:
| I think the multiplicative midpoint (i.e geometric mean) is
| more sensible for such a large range, which gives 10k.
| Still not as bad!
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| But what kept them hovering there for a thousand years?
| What besieged our ancestors until they developed something
| to break that siege ?
| Retric wrote:
| The people we descended from could be different from the
| entire population at that time.
|
| A beneficial mutation followed by rapidly outcompeting
| other populations might look similar.
| jowea wrote:
| I mean, all of non-viral life is descended from a single
| organism, right? I find that even more remarkable.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I think that's only true assuming no other life has
| appeared in any other place of the universe.
| tehlike wrote:
| Or multiples of organisms spawned in earth
| simultaneously.
| kadoban wrote:
| It seems quite likely that this isn't actually
| fundamentally true, because the real story was a mess.
|
| If you look at bacteria even, there's a lot of genetic
| transfer beyond just strict parent/child relationships
| either just directly or via viruses or other things I'm
| sure I've never heard of.
|
| The earliest life was probably more like some kind of soup
| of self-replicating things, closer to a chemical reaction
| than biological, and then it would have been kind of a
| sliding scale over a long period of time before we get to
| anything that really looks that much like "<this> organism
| begat <that> organism".
|
| The entire concept of organisms themselves are an
| abstraction over the truth, that kind of works for today's
| world, but probably less worked when things were new and
| interesting and messy.
| xwolfi wrote:
| "biological" and "chemical reaction" are the same things
| :p
|
| There's probably nothing special about life and it's
| everywhere where water is warm.
| ed wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| > a 2023 genetic analysis discerned such a human ancestor
| population bottleneck of a possible 100,000 to 1000 individuals
| "around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago [which] lasted for about
| 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction."
|
| And relatedly...
|
| > A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the
| pre-1492 native populations of the Americas are the descendants
| of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia
| and North America.
|
| > The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period
| around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome
| dropped precipitously, to a level equivalent to reproduction
| occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
| actuallyalys wrote:
| Limits on written records and the limits of what we can derive
| from genetic analysis means 536 and other years these analyses
| uncover are probably best understood as local minima rather
| than definitively the worst.
| bmitc wrote:
| What makes a genetic bottleneck worse than natural disasters
| and disease?
| terribleperson wrote:
| The genetic bottleneck isn't the terrible thing, it's a
| symptom of something terrible that must have happened.
| bmitc wrote:
| Thanks. I wasn't thinking about that.
| ilya_m wrote:
| Please change the title to "Why 536 was 'the worst year to be
| alive' (2018)".
| dang wrote:
| We've added the year (of the article) to the title. Thanks!
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand why that has improved anything.
| genter wrote:
| You're struggling to understand why someone is being
| pedantic on this site?
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34209313 - Jan 2023 (113
| comments)
|
| _What Was the Single Worst Year in Human History?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118341 - July 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 - March 2022 (39
| comments)
|
| _Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the 'worst year' ever to
| be alive_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 - April
| 2021 (117 comments)
|
| _Extreme weather events of 535-536_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598570 - March 2021 (86
| comments)
|
| _536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356
| comments)
|
| _Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4
| comments)
| clipsy wrote:
| The worst year to be alive _yet_.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| There's always hope that we can do better...
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| do we have any records of how society perceived that time. It
| would be interesting to compare it to how that fares compared to
| the perceived injustices that modern society complains about.
|
| While it's impossible to directly compare recent events, like the
| pandemic to the plague, it would be interesting to understand the
| claim of "the worst year to be alive" between a society that is
| hyper-distracted and always online today, with a society that
| walks among the ruins of a collapsing Roman empire ~1500 years
| ago.
|
| That said, both scenarios seem to ignore non Western history.
| macintux wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11e63o2/what...
|
| Update: This is a remarkable statement. "We marvel to see no
| shadows of our bodies at noon"
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| The ash cloud went from iceland to china? Where there chronicles
| about this in local culturesnearby ?
| zombiwoof wrote:
| I'd take 536 over 2025 at this rate
| senderista wrote:
| > What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly,
| wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern
| Roman Empire and hastening its collapse.
|
| Um what? The eastern Roman Empire survived for almost another
| millennium. Maybe the journalist confused it with the western
| Roman Empire (which had already collapsed)?
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