The Man from Earth : I love this movie..but?

I love this movie but a few things bug me about it - The character, John Oldman, is insanely knowledgeable about history. However, what bugs me is he seemed to be in the right place at the right timehe Meets buddha, vincent van gogh and Columbus. This is to name a few influential historical characters he came across.

The odds of one man doing this is astronomical and to influence a worldwide religion even more so. What do you think? Why is love this move is simple - it makes you think.

You're looking at it the wrong way, kind of. A person living for thousands of years encountering Buddha, van Gogh, and Columbus is highly improbable, yes. That is not, however, the probability that should be considered. The probability that should be considered is how likely it is for a person living for thousands of years to encounter at least three people of equal or greater notability than those three.

That is to say, you'd probably react the same way if it was instead Mohammed, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marco Polo. Or Julius Caesar, Karl Marx, and Genghis Khan. Or Socrates, Thomas Edison, and Napoleon. You get the idea. The number of notable people throughout history one could reasonably come across is so large, running into a few is not that odd.

It's a very common (I dare say virtually ubiquitous) mistake to make; we tend to look at improbable events after the fact and proclaim them unbelievable, not considering that the number of events that could conceivably occur that are equally or more improbable (thus making us take note of them) is so unfathomably large, what would actually be unbelievable is if none of them happened.

(Technical note: this is related to what is in statistics known as the p-value: the probability of an outcome equally or more extreme than the observed one, assuming the null hypothesis is true which in this and similar cases can be thought of as "purely by chance" or "if there's nothing going on")

Make sense?

Don't listen to the negative ones; their arguments are irrational.

I agree he is looking at it the wrong way but differently wrong that what you point out. After having already lived several millenia it stands to reason that Oldman would be bored but would after that many lifetimes have learned how to navigate social circles and netweorks.

His having met Buddha, van Gogh, and Columbus was not random. He sought these people out during his various lifetimes. With the social skills acquired over thousands of years of experience in dealing with fellow Homo Sapiens, I do not find at all hard to accept.

If, in my 32 years of life, I've had several chance encounters with various celebrities, I can accept the idea of an immortal vagabond having met a handful of historical figures.

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by Wiserommer I love this movie but a few things bug me about it - The character, John Oldman, is insanely knowledgeable about history. However, what bugs me is he seemed to be in the right place at the right timehe Meets buddha, vincent van gogh and Columbus. This is to name a few influential historical characters he came across.

The odds of one man doing this is astronomical and to influence a worldwide religion even more so. What do you think? Why is love this move is simple - it makes you think.

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In the movie, those three "famous" people were the only ones mentioned that he met.

The part of your comment I've bolded though seems to have you implying that he ALSO met many more?

@WhoToTrust He did meet more


@OP - It was John that steered the conversation to some of the most known historical figures. If it were others he would've met, then he'd talk about those.

He was curious about exploring and learning (and was forced to be always on the move), naturally he would've met a lot of people. Budha was a coincidance, others - not so much I think.

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by klemen-kokot @WhoToTrust He did meet more

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At best that simply seems to be an assumption.

Id say the odds of NOT meeting at least some celebrities in such a long life would be much more implausible.

I think, Buddha, Van Gogh and Columbus and whoever he met (or not) were ordinary guys at that time, just like us. Anybody could met them. They became extraordinary after what they did. Again, just like us.

Buddha traveled and preached for 80 years. He wasn't obscure and abolished barriers of class, race and sex.

I'm sorry the Coen brothers don't direct the porn I watch. They're hard to get ahold of, okay?

I think the odds of one man meeting lots of influential figures in history and him being the most influential individual in human history was far fetched.

It was also improbable how the psychiatrist Will turned out to be his son.
wait.. boston, 60 years ago? john partee? DAD DAD is that you? you abandoned mom and me

I disagree.

As someone pointed out earlier as well, then

a) He must have been bored so he probably was looking around for answers and meeting new interesting people.

b) Since he had that much more life experience, the wise men (such as Buddha or Da Vinci) recognized him as an interesting figure and so would naturally want to spend time with him. As he pointed out as well then Buddha noticed something different about him. Not only he would have had good social and networking skills, but also recognizing talent and finding good sources to get information from. So he had all around experience about everything. This also leads it to be very likely that with his experience he could portray someone like Jesus easily, especially thanks to him being supernatural already so capable of performing a miracle (surviving what otherwise would be a certain death)

c) 14,000 years is definitely plenty of time enough to meet a few famous people,

The psychiatrist bit could easily be explained by the fact that perhaps he intended to move back to see his son, to see how he was doing and just because he didn't want to run away any longer and was tired of running away.

If you lived 14k years, you'd probably meet atleast 3 super famous people in your lifetime if you were actively striving for greatness.

Look at it this way: 14,000 years divided by 10 is 1,400. That's 1,400 personas for John to adopt. If you took a random sample of 1,400 people who existed around the world at various times (none overlapping with each other), chances are fairly good that they collectively would have collided with four notable historical figures or witnessed dramatic geological phenomena.

And don't forget John isn't just any person. He follows his curiosity wherever he goes. He's equally comfortable "smelling" whether the rain will come as he is discussing Voltaire and Goethe. He has accumulated immense knowledge and wisdom about the world, so he would have had no trouble integrating himself in the circles of royalty, artists, philosophers, and explorers. And as someone mentioned earlier, most famous historical figures were publicly known in their day (except maybe Van Gogh). They were not so inaccessible that John couldn't seek them out if he wanted to.

Oldman met Buddha, van Gogh and Columbus, yes.

But the question is not how probable this is, but if it was Oldmans influence that made those men great to begin with.

Think about it: you are talking to a man living for thousands of years, thus being extremely wise and having great knowledge.
Talking to him may change your views on many things - maybe he knew or even was Sokrates himself, asking questions as a philosophical ruse to reveal universal truths (like he tried in the present, but his friends were too ignorant this time)?

You know what's wrong with this movie? He's 14,000 years old but his vocal chords are developed to speak English ( or any modern human language for that matter)!

It's possible. I used to have a teacher who changed dialect in just 15 years. John says he graduated from Oxford in 1840. English is the language probably the longest he used a few years back. Moreover, English is the language most widely used a few years back.

He should've spoken a proto mother-tongue, and then there could've been a linguist to decipher it, so the movie could've been subtitled. It would've made more sense if he were a defrosted cave man.

I'm sorry the Coen brothers don't direct the porn I watch. They're hard to get ahold of, okay?

But then, how could he have previously communicated with modern people (e.g. the guy's mother whom he impregnated)? Unless you were being facetious

The vocal cords don't determine what human languages one is able to speak. Furthermore, human beings from 14 000 years ago are virtually identical to present-day humans anatomically.

He's had thousands of years to learn to speak new languages. That is plenty.

Don't listen to the negative ones; their arguments are irrational.

My absurdist comments were in response to rolfsmitherinesyou (above).


Irony is like goldy or bronzy, but it's made of iron.

Yes, that's who I was responding to as well.

Don't listen to the negative ones; their arguments are irrational.

Well, not really. He got the hang of moving to where sh** was happening at the time , it stands to reason that he'd seek out these places.


I'm in my late 20s, yet in 2004 I briefly met Steve Jobs who spoke at my school, about 3 years or so ago I ended up on a plane next to John Cusack and yet in 1998 I met Bret Hart at a restaurant in Canada.

It happens. I've chanced into three famous types in 28 years, and that's just me.

J.

it's more unlikely that in 14.000 years he managed to avoid any deadly accidents like a car crash or falling from a roof etc.

"Some people are immune to good advice."
-Saul Goodman

"I ignore pathetic trolls"

I think meeting Siddhartha Gautama was kind of necessary to the premise what with repackaging elements of his philosophy in Jerusalem, but Van Gogh would have been a very slim chance. I don't believe he was well-known or respected in his lifetime, so you'd have to have been a resident of Arles or Auvers-sur-Oise during very specific short periods (1888-1889 and 1890) to come by one of his distinctive paintings firsthand. It would have been better to have the painting be by someone who had a widespread reputation and perhaps a studio with apprentices/proteges while still alive, like Rembrandt or Michelangelo.

Did he say that he actually knew Christopher Columbus, or did he just comment about not being adventurous enough to sign on for the voyage? I'm thinking that might have been a big enough production for most educated people in Spain to know about at the time.

Well, there is one thing you have to consider. At the time of meeting them, these people weren't historically "famous". It was only the passage of time and how what they did affected the world that makes them significant to us in current times. During the particular eras he meets them in, they were just random, everyday people with some novel ideas that interested him.

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see

In fiction, of course, a certain amount of coincidence is necessary to form a coherent narrative. And sometimes real-life coincidences are such that, in a fictional work, they would be considered way too implausible (hence the phrase "stranger than fiction").

In the case of the film under discussion, these coincidences may seem highly unlikely, but then the basic premise happens to be highly unlikely as well. Also, if the "implausible" events such as meeting the Buddha, being mistaken for the Messiah, and so forth, were removed, we would then be presented with a rather different (and perhaps less interesting) story.

Mind you, this is just my perspective on a movie that I (like yourself) also enjoyed. I have no intention of coming across as a pedantic know-it-all, so by all means, take my comments with a grain of salt.