Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)

Size determines significance by definition of a population bottleneck

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.

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.

I think the multiplicative midpoint (i.e geometric mean) is more sensible for such a large range, which gives 10k. Still not as bad!

But what kept them hovering there for a thousand years? What besieged our ancestors until they developed something to break that siege ?

I think that's only true assuming no other life has appeared in any other place of the universe.

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.

yes but also no

convergent evolution is a thing, even pretty common (e.g. see crap like animals)

and while very rare and unlikely different species can "merge" especially if we speak about relatively simple live form through the more complex the more problematic and limited it gets

through that isn't the relevant point I want to make

The point I want to make is that the linear tree few of evolution often presented in documentations is wrong, species diverged but also reconverged all the time. E.g. neanderthal might have died out but to some degree also mixed into what later became homo sapiens sapiens.

This might seem irrelevant for anyone not studying this topics, but it isn't as the tree one survives the other dies out view is often one of the building blocks of white supremacist race theory (which theoretically also doesn't make sense even if evolution is a clean tree as they extend concepts from inter-species relation ships to ethnic groups which average difference in DNA is too small to call them different races, but it's not like such people care about since).

I don't see how it follows that there were many more humans. Math says that all people eventually become descendants of every single individual (kinda "diffusion"), or die off completely.

Say, there were not "many more", but just like 15% more. Like 1150 alive, and descendants of 1000 of them did not die off completely. Sounds plausible.

Thanks. I wasn't thinking about that.

You're struggling to understand why someone is being pedantic on this site?

It's just a convention on HN to put the year in parens at the end of the title when an article is more than a year old.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Right up until you hit your first major infectious disease or crippling injury, and have to depend on the medicine of 536 to treat it, and hope the result doesn't make you die before your year is up.

Not to mention: Very easily, accidentally running afoul of some regional religious or social taboo/law in a way that seems banal to you but at the time carries some grotesque variant of the death penalty plus torture, or if you're lucky just a bit of crippling, infection-prone torture-mutilation and a fine (that you may or may not be able to pay and thus risk very literal debt slavery).

The past wasn't just another country, it was another, vastly different world in so many ways.

If I had a time machine, I think i'd rather not even touch the world of 536 (or any such distant time) with a 10-meter cattle prod unless I could visit armed with an easily concealable and robust assortment of essential modern medications, and some powerful but compact concealed carry weapons.

Worth remembering too, the plague of Justinian was one of the earlier arrivals of Yersinia Pestis, and modern humans are at best only very marginally less susceptible to dying horribly from it than they were back then. You would absolutely need antibiotics with you at least. This is not to even mention something like the smallpox that widely circulated at the time. Who alive today who isn't in their 70s still gets vaccinated against the pox?

Oh come on, 'hack life' & just use bottles (or whatever containers available / practical), and open up windows. It isn't hard.

Bigger issue is time spent (daily average) on getting to a water source, and how clean/safe that water is for drinking. Boiling to kill parasites etc adds more time expense.