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Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

“Eventually, all our graves go unattended.”

— Conan O'Brien

A similar quote, paraphrased, is "Every one dies twice. The first time is when they stop breathing, and the second is when their name is spoken for the last time".

What if someone is born with the same name?

Different entity altogether.

What if you say the name of the entity 2000 years later, so they are remembered again? Would they have a 2nd revival? What is the second death timeout?

I think the gist of the "last time the name is spoken" idea refers to people who knew the deceased, their personal history, character, etc., so their existence ceases not just with the biological death, but also with the social, when the last person who remembers them dies.

If one discovers the name some millennia later, the character and its quirks are at best reconstructed rather than remembered, so you have the equivalent of a Frankenstein simulation of the original.

After researchers lose interest in them, that's the third death. At that point, the entity waits in inexistence without hope for some future PhD candidate with a good idea/proposal. The citation count is probably what's left until then, until Google shuts Scholar down.

This raises an interesting question: Who is the oldest person still alive to us that we know of by name?

If you mean "Who is the earliest known recorded individual in human history?" wikipedia says "The name "Kushim" is found on several Uruk period (c. 3400–3000 BC) clay tablets used to record transactions of barley." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_period)

That's pretty remarkable that Kushim holds the title, and not for anything other than dealing in barley.

In terms of actually _known_ in the meaning meant (people have some awareness of what they did) probably the Pharaohs Djoser (born 2686BCE) who built the stepped pyramid at Saqqara.

Maybe Gilgamesh, who may well have been a historical king of Uruk sometime between 2900 – 2350 BCE.

Enmebaragesi[1] probably existed around 2600 BCE but not much is known about him other than he was a King of Kish.

Figures in the old testament Bible are hard to track but the stories of Nimrod (grandson of Noah) seems to have been placed around 2000 BCE

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmebaragesi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iry-Hor

Still, everyone's causation cone forever will continue to extend across the universe.

The novel The Brief History of the Dead explores this idea as if it were real.

That was the strange thing about researching my family history, for me it felt a bit intense to go over the birth, marriage, and death of people in my family for hundreds of people in a week or so.

They're just dates, but each one made me pause for thought of the joy, and the despair of each of the family groups.

From this link Irvin Yalom, by way of Banksy:

https://www.bridgelawllp.com/they-say-we-die-twice/#:~:text=....

Eventually, all our graves disappear.

But for some reason most of NYC’s green spaces are still graveyards…

Many graveyards in NYC are forgotten or have been removed.

https://www.6sqft.com/what-lies-below-nycs-forgotten-and-hid...

Eventually, most graveyards will simply erode away. The average erosion rate is 0.2 mm/year, so 2 meters down will be exposed in about 10,000 years. YMMV

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