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A comment on New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published. Parent comment

Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by _jal on Thursday June 23, 2022 @08:27AM (#31848051)
Billions of years of conflict and selection lead to you. Anyone alive today is the product of a crazy amount of competition over time.

That is a pretty impressive lineage, no matter who you are. I know why people see a direct line to this or that ancient tyrant as special, but it is a ridiculously fine distinction, comparatively.

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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by arethuza on Thursday June 23, 2022 @08:31AM (#31848101)
"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."

Cryptonomicon

Edit: I was going to say that the name of the book isn't referencing that kind of crypto, but then I remembered that it actually is!

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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by satori99 on Thursday June 23, 2022 @10:09AM (#31849351)
Is your username a cryptonomicon reference too?
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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by arethuza on Thursday June 23, 2022 @10:17AM (#31849457)
Well spotted :-)
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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by simonh on Thursday June 23, 2022 @08:50AM (#31848315)
My daughter once said she wasn't sure if she wanted to have kids. I told her she's the end result of an unbroken chain of 4 billion years of successful reproduction, with zero failures, and it would be a shame to break it now. No pressure.
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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by havelhovel on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:48AM (#31849077)
Generally speaking, that chain depended on each generation producing more than one offspring to avoid the risk you’ve described.
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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by anotherman554 on Thursday June 23, 2022 @10:00AM (#31849233)
It's also true of the ants you step on when you walk outside. It isn't actually worth celebrating.
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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by jmmcd on Thursday June 23, 2022 @02:08PM (#31852972)
Most of those ants are workers, so already evolutionary dead-ends!
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Re:New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published by actionfromafar on Thursday June 23, 2022 @10:34AM (#31849661)
It matters to them?
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