Do the math (I'm a bit lazy and not that great at it) to think about how many ancestors you have from 500 years ago (I know enough about math to know it's an ex

Do the math (I'm a bit lazy and not that great at it) to think about how many ancestors you have from 500 years ago (I know enough about math to know it's an exponential function), and then think about how long it would take to read all of their memoirs and you begin to realize the problem. Of course, go far back enough (I'm not sure if 500 years is enough) and mathematically speaking, the number of your ancestors will exceed the population of the world, which shows some other issues that you run into.