I was just thinking the other day about what incredible good fortune I have.
Some 800 years ago 17.2 million people started on a procreational journey that 35 generations later has resulted in ME, ME ..ME.. ME.
Not only did I arrive here relatively unscathed, but each one of my forebears managed to arrive unscathed as well...it was probably fortunate that for the first 700 years electrical sockets hadn't been invented, and for the first 150 years, neither had firearms.
Just as an example, in 1348 bubonic plague killed some 70% of the population of England. The population dropped from about 6 million people to 1.8 million. Not one, let me repeat that...NOT ONE of the of the 4.2 million people who died during that plague was one of my ancestors..and it only had to get ONE of them, just one, for me not to have been born.
Then in 1845 one million Irish people died from the potato famine. Not one of them was an ancestor of mine. Revolution, wars, famine, accident, disease, we escaped them all...as of course, if you are reading this, did you.
As you can, no doubt imagine, this is an unimaginable peice of good fortune.
Anyway, getting back to the story,...Then, every 22 years or so one of my ancestors not only had to find someone who would take pity, and have sex with them, but also had to have the incredibly poor judgement in achieving conception.
Then they had to survive childbirth, not succumb to disease, pestilence, famine, war, their own stupidy (it's amazing how many people this kills)
Just how fragile and tenuous this genetic string can be, was bought home to me, when in 1891 in a frontier town in New Zealand a midwife delivered of an unwed mother a son. The skill of this midwife lay in the fact that both mother and child survived the primitive conditions. 6 years later the mother, now wed to my great grandfather,had my paternal grandfather. In an ironic twist of good fortune,the midwife went on to become my great great grandmother on my mothers side...which of course wouldn't have happened if say she hadn't have washed her hands and had killed my other great grandmother.
I was thinking too that in the year 1206 (gee, that doesn't seem that long ago) when my 17.2 million ancestors started out making me, the average male orgasm was probably pretty much the same as it is today. That is some 17 seconds. Now 17 seconds multiplied by 8.6 million men is 144.5 million seconds.
Essentially what this means is that I started off as an orgasm that lasted some four and a half years.
It also means that I started out as enough semen to float the Titanic...eewww.
