Family

I’ve spent the summer pretty close to my family. This is pretty unusual for me because most of the time I’m 3000 miles away from my family on the other coast for work. One of the benefits of hanging with my family is sometimes my father talks me into going to Synagogue with him. It’s the oldest synagogue building in the use, Torro, and the entire service is in Hebrew. I don’t speak Hebrew and what little I learned as a kid has left me. So I read the English translations in the book and think about what they are talking about.

Somehow this past weekend, I got to thinking about the community in and all the intricacies of that group in the building with me. I started to think about my family and somehow to got to thinking about how which of my grandparents would be living in year (A.C.E., but going back to year zero of the Hebrew religion). Going through my current family, We’ve had four generations between 1900 to 2000. If we assume this math going backwards with generations, we have 20 *100 years = 2000 years. If we have 4 generations per 100 years, that means we have 20 * 4 = 80 generations since year zero.

The next step to this fun math is to realize that each generation adds another layer of parents.

Notice the trend? Powers of 2. As a software engineer, powers of two are my specialty. If you keep going back to 2 to the power of 80 you end up with a gigantic number: 1.2089 * 10^24. I feel like my math must be wrong, but if I’m doing this right, I’m related to more than the current population of the planet over the past 2000 years.

Someone please tell me where my math falls apart?