If you have two parents and four grandparents, then your direct ancestors ten generations removed number exactly 1024, unless some of those ancestors are from the more mountainous regions of the east or mid-west.  Twenty generations ago this number expands to somewhat more than 1 million, and at thirty generations ago to 1 billion.

The population of the world circa 1900 was about 1 billion, so it is possible, theoretically, for you to be descended from everyone that lived in the 15th century, if not later. Are you a direct descendent of Julius Cesar?  Not likely, since his one known child did not make it to adulthood.  Johann Sebastian Bach is another matter entirely.

A generation these days involves a generous time span, since people don’t get married and have kids till they’re past thirty.  However, this idea doesn’t work so well when average life expectancy is forty years, which has been the norm up until the 20th century.  A generation, perhaps, is 20 years in most instances, which means that 30 generations represents a span of about 600 years.  Subtracting 600 from 2000 yields 1400, a period associated with plagues, Crusades, and interminable novels.

Genealogy fans will be pleased to know that areas where religious officials were literate kept birth records, so it might actually be possible to track ancestors all the way back to the Moorish occupation of Spain . . . if you can find the card catalog.  The inscriptions of the period, being Arabic, are read ‘backwards’.

Forward, March!
If you are a high school student graduating in 1962, is it obvious that one of the best occupations to be in is related to computers?  Growth prospects are unlimited, every major business in the country has to adopt this technology, and America is not going to make it to the moon and back without computers.

Same story in 1972?  Minicomputers are the rage.  Now, instead of big business, it’s the small businesses that are automating, and there are millions of them.

How about 1982?  The PC has been out for a year.  Your fortune is to be made in the next word processor, graphics program, spreadsheet, terminal emulator, or network operating system.

1992: the Internet is going to make us all rich, right?

2002? Don’t make me laugh.  The tech industry is still the leader, alright. . . in economic collapse.

This illustrates a sea change.  Larry Ellison, High Priest and Oracle, says that the future is in biotechnology.  If you are a talented high schooler just now ready to enter college, your choice is A: computer science, or B: biotech.  For career planning, where would you place your bet?

Many more fortunes will be made in computers, but the brightest young people in the country are thinking in a different direction, and us boomers are hoping they succeed, so that we’re still alive in 2070.  A computer that costs $600 now should cost $60 in 2007, but a drug that prevents bone loss isn’t going to get any less profitable in quite some time (it might be cheaper, but the profits will still be there).  A computer is nice and perhaps essential, however “Stayin’ Alive” now requires polyunsaturated rather than polyester.

Mass Quantities
When your father was born, did your grandfather have any reason to purchase something in a retail store measured in millions?  When you were born, did your father purchase anything in a retail store measured in billions?

Can you grasp any of the following numbers: the size of the national debt, the number of people living in the world, or even the number of people living in the US?  These numbers have been large for your entire lifetime.  However, at what point are you expected to divide the number of hours of video in MPEG format (2.5 gigabytes per hour) into a 120 GB drive. . . in your head while standing at the counter of a computer store?  Most calculators only go up to 9,999,999.99.

Maxtor is selling a 160 GB drive (this required a revision of the IDE interface specification, limited as it was to 130 GB).  There are now Pentium 4 motherboards available that support 4 IDE connectors.  Four connectors times two drives each times 160 GB is 1.2 terabytes.  Still a smaller number than that national debt, but not too big to fit on your desk.