'Touch Generations' and 1,000 Years

I was recently listening to a lecture by Kevin Kelly where he introduces the concept of touch generations, the idea of a list of people based on when one person died and when the next was born: one person is in the next touch generation of someone else if they were born when the other person died. So Galileo and Newton, while unrelated, are in successive touch generations because Newton was born the year that Galileo died. Essentially, it's a way of connecting lifetimes across the years.

Kelly did this for 2,000 years and got back to that time period in only 30 generations. Using Wikipedia (which is how Kelly did this as well), it's actually quite straightforward, as different years each have their own Wikipedia article.

So here is a bit of one part of my ancestry, via Wikipedia, going back to the Middle Ages:

Me (b. 1981)
Harold C. Urey, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1893)
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, U.S. Supreme Court justice (b. 1825)
William Waldegrave, 1st Baron Radstock, Governor of Newfoundland (b. 1753)
George Berkeley, Irish philosopher (b. 1685)
King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland (b. 1630)
Johannes Kepler, German astronomer (b. 1571)
Shimazu Takahisa, Japanese samurai and warlord (b. 1514)
Donato Bramante, Italian architect (b. 1444)
Leonardo Bruni, Italian humanist (b. 1374)
Petrarch, Italian poet (b. 1304)
Emperor Go-Fukakusa of Japan (b. 1243)
Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent (b. circa 1160)
Eric Jedvardsson, king of Sweden since 1156 (b. c. 1120)
Gerard Thom (The Blessed Gerard), founder of the Knights Hospitaller (b. c. 1040)
King Duncan I of Scotland (b. 1001)

I go back 15 touch generations to get to the year 1001. And as you can see, I have quite an illustrious group of individuals. Though really, when you're picking and choosing Wikipedia articles, we all do. The more interesting thing is that it takes only 15 lifetimes to go back 1,000 years.

I have previously examined how large and small numbers—especially when it comes to time—are not always what they seem: for example, I'm about a billion seconds old. It's the same when it comes to the generations of humanity. Long stretches of time collapse more rapidly than we might expect.

Top image:Charles Jefferys. Library and Archives Canada/Flickr/CC