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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

It's an imagined mythology for rural England, so follows the same historical outline. For most of the last many thousands of years civilisation was all happening far away (Greece, Rome). Bits of those civilisations made their way here but our civilisation and high culture is based on the leavings from distant past glories. All the action long ago was far away from this green and pleasant land, but now is our time to step up and take responsibility for history.

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It’s also kind of an explanation for why England has no magic left. As you move forward in time the magical races and beasts all slowly die out. In the Hobbit the last dragon dies. In LOTR we see the elves leaving Middle Earth, the last march of the Ents, the end of the rings of power, the end of the wizards, the killing of a Balrog.. setting up the age of Men. And as you go further back in time it gets even more magical and outlandish.

Claiming a lineage back to impressive forbears is a pretty common thing - didn't the Roman's claim ancestry back to Troy, even the Scots claimed ancestry back to the Scythians...

Yep, and that includes Britain, which some mythologies claim was also founded by a Trojan, Brutus of Troy, descended from Aeneas himself.

Not to mention the whole British Israelite thing—where there is the claim that the Brits are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. Then there's the hymn Jerusalem which speculates that Jesus himself came to Britain.

The myths link Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, King Arthur, Holy Grail, Glastonbury and lots of other things:

https://theconversation.com/glastonbury-archaeology-is-revea...

Meanwhile here in Scotland we've just got a rock that someone used as a pillow - but we do have a cool footprint and a nice island with "its cargo of mouldering kings".

I guess everyone's descended from Aeneas nowadays.

Billions of years of conflict and selection lead to you. Anyone alive today is the product of a crazy amount of competition over time.

That is a pretty impressive lineage, no matter who you are. I know why people see a direct line to this or that ancient tyrant as special, but it is a ridiculously fine distinction, comparatively.

"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."

Cryptonomicon

Edit: I was going to say that the name of the book isn't referencing that kind of crypto, but then I remembered that it actually is!

Is your username a cryptonomicon reference too?

Well spotted :-)

My daughter once said she wasn't sure if she wanted to have kids. I told her she's the end result of an unbroken chain of 4 billion years of successful reproduction, with zero failures, and it would be a shame to break it now. No pressure.

Generally speaking, that chain depended on each generation producing more than one offspring to avoid the risk you’ve described.

It's also true of the ants you step on when you walk outside. It isn't actually worth celebrating.

It matters to them?

Most of those ants are workers, so already evolutionary dead-ends!

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