The Abraham Effect: The Future of Humanity Depends on You
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
Just as the entire Jewish people are descended from Abraham, the people who inhabit Earth a thousand years from now may all be descended from you.
You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. The number of your ancestors doubles with every generation. Counting backwards 1000 years, about 36 generations ago, you had about 69 billion ancestors. That’s two to the power of thirty-six. But at that time, there were only about 50 million people alive in Europe. Everyone of European descent alive today is a cousin of everyone else, and all of us have the genes of a few people who were alive then.
Fast forward a thousand years, taking into account that people are far more mobile today than they were a thousand years ago. In the year 3000, if the human race survives that long, every human being alive on Earth and on other planets will be a descendant of a few people who are alive today. If you are a parent, there’s a chance that everyone alive a thousand years from now will have genes that passed through you.
That is an awesome responsibility. Be careful. Be proud. The future of the human race depends on you.
