Year 3000

Any time I hear Busted's 2003 hit Year 3000, I can't get over the fact that they didn't consider the move from living on land, to living underwater, a significant change.

I've been to the year 3000, not much has changed but they lived underwater

The song revolves around the attractiveness of one of the singer's descendants. It's so important, they repeat it six times in under four minutes.

And your great-great-great-granddaughter is pretty fine

For the singer's great-great-great-granddaughter to be alive in the year 3000, he and his descendants would each need to live for an average of 169 years. That assumes almost no overlap from one generation to the next, and people don't tend to have children one day and drop dead the next, at least not with modern childbirth survival rates. It would also make that descendant almost 170 years old in the year 3000. No offence to any 170 year olds reading this, but I doubt the odds of a teenage pop singer describing you as "pretty fine".

According to a 2024 report from the UK's Office of National Statistics, the average age of becoming a father in the UK is 34 and life expectancy is around 85. Assuming all the descendants between the singer and his great-great-great-granddaughter were typically average men, either the girl in the song would have been 846 years old at the time they met her, or would have been dead for over 760 years.

But maybe he wasn't average? According to Guinness World Records, the oldest legal father was Les Colley, who in 1998 became a father at the exceedingly ripe age of 92. The Wikipedia list of oldest fathers includes Ramjit Raghav, who had his second child at the age of 96. Even with a family tree full of Ramjits, the target generation would be 536 years old in the year 3000.

In order to reach the year 3000 at a reasonable age, it's more likely it would be the singer's 27th-great-granddaughter, who would be 30 years old, but maybe that version just didn't work as well?