Historical Items Can be Simply Fascinating!!
My History page attempts to approach some of the many places & events that “once were” along with some fun facts as well as my Future Thoughts (which are shared below)… Choices amongst these many, many events are unavoidably restricted—my future ideas & “known” historical aspects (even of the last few years) would fill this page tens of thousands of times over!
History is one of the two subjects that I most detested in my senior-school years—the other was Geography!! These were held 3 times a week (vs. Math, which was daily) and were *always* boringly focused (as I remember) on “where” / “when” / “places” / “people” / etc… this was what actually caused me to get such poor grades at the resultant half-term and end-term exams!
As a rather interesting fact, both of these subjects (along with all those Countries, their Capitals, mountains & rivers, Kings & Queens etc) *absolutely* fascinate me today!! Perhaps the most significant fact is that they are each historically *completely unchangeable* no matter what some people might think; while time travel is certainly a concept, traveling back in time simply cannot happen…
Another fascinating thread is that we all live on a planet named Earth (where things can be “touched”) that is a part of our Solar System (details of which we can directly “see” with our eyes, even more with a small telescope) etc, where everything is surrounded by a force known as “gravity” which continues to remain a scientifically-defined mystery: all things are attracted to each other (like dropping something on the floor) yet it’s not known how this happens…
Everything here are parts of our Universe, many of which are still not fully understood: the Big Bang, the Evolution of our species, those Black Holes, etc… as one of today’s proposed oddities: we live in a “bubble” universe, likely (IMHO) to be just imaginary!
Here are some interesting threads around my History views, followed by some of my Future Thoughts
Note: small screens/iPhones distort this matrix
Where
When
Places
People
Many apparently interesting “places” like Stonehenge (which is to be found in my Culture Room), Atlantis, as documented by Plato (the Greek) was an ancient city that vanished without a trace and the city of Paris, where there was a revolution in 1789 along with many others
So many highly boring “people” to me at my time of learning, like Robert the Bruce of Bonnie Scotland and that horny old man called The Genghis Khan, who may well be another of my Great Grandfathers!
If you’ve ever wondered about the validity/sanity of those “ancient history” stories (that surely do usually seem to be idiotic!) I found it interesting to watch Mr. Graham Hancock’s summary of why those less-understood 15,000-year-old places & people may have been destroyed by a comet that hit the Earth around 13,000… discovery continues!
To continue from those headaches that plagued me so in school, here are some memorable historical events:
- As a place that’s sadly becoming historical as we watch it in 2018, the Barrier Reefs around Australia are dying due to today’s massive climate change; they may never recover…
- The rivers, coasts and island beaches all relate to the concept “of all the fishes in the sea…” (once incorrectly said to be an A-Z acronym similar to “The Quick Brown Fox” which yours truly used often in the British Army) which is where many ancient fish still live. Millions of their ancestors are understandably gone from history due to evolutionary developments, like the 1st land animals…
- While science continues today to analyze the unbelievably ancient threads of the start of our ancestors, real clues are in this Biosphere report. It may seem surprising that bacteria can leave fossils at all, yet one particular group, the cyanobacteria (“blue-green algae”) have left us a far-back fossil record in the Precambrian, demonstrating their existence ~3.5 billion years ago
- Coastlines have always changed constantly… a place known as Gondwana (with another view) was formed around 550 million years ago from the Continental Drift of Earth, and is a prime example of an historically significant geographical transient place
| My Future Thoughts |
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As you read my "visionary thoughts" in this summary, consider 1st the fact that unless each and every one of us finds a way to make changes to some of what we're doing on a daily basis,
climate change
or our
over-population
is going to destroy us all…
We're at ~8 billion people today with an estimated growth to 11.5 billion in just 2-3 generations… a sad but true fact!
Generally smarter than an average human, scientists unavoidably hold varying views about the future of both the Universe and of our planet, where life could actually disastrously end in just a few minutes… do go visit the Doomsday Clock and the related info? They'll continue to discover things ( see some Science News? ) until there's an end to everything that's us…
Objective evidence of the tenacity of life? Tundra moss, frozen for over 40,000 years, awakened and grew when brought into the light of day. Civilizations of humans from our past, such as the Mayans and the Romans each ran for hundreds of years but disappeared… where might we end up? Another of the global disasters is a "nearby" Supernova and/or a Gamma-ray Burst (as much as 100 light-years away) which would literally fry us alive, along with all living things near the direction of the radiation blast, which are 2 massive streams shooting out into space in all directions as the source spins around thousands of times a second. Those of us who rather lucky to be under-ground at the time of the event would sadly simply starve to death in a few months, as all plant-life would die off, not re-growing for centuries Other such off-world disastrously deadly threads do sadly abound…
Other thoughts, like the disaster of even a small nuclear exchange, being hit by biological weaponry from a terrorist attack, or by an inadvertent and unexpected global pandemic could each likely end life as we know it… Allowing our development of smart robots with connected AI may well take over in so many ways, being risky to us in the extreme! While the existence of Jesus Christ of Nazareth about 2,000 years ago has some active views (some that reject these loosely-related facts), a multitude of actual historical events caused by evil people (that represent the AntiChrist) abound endlessly… see a WiKi view and a list of some of the worst people in history; [ information about the author, Cliff Pickover, is here ]. A biblical view of the concept shares a different perspective, albeit still a very evil thing…
Death remains a fact today for all of us, yet our current research is *actively changing* how it will affect us in the upcoming years--genetic editing allows our lifespan to increase, and Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near" shares that medical advances are soon going to allow people to protect their bodies from the effects of aging at a zero cost, making our life expectancy immortal, a view that I support!!
Our planet, Earth, will be vaporized in 5-6 billion years as the Sun encounters a Massive Expansion at the end of its life. That will force all of us to leave our biological bodies that we have today, presumably becoming beings that are simply "AI"… Many scientific theories share additional views of the distant future—one is that in ~100 billion years the elements of dark matter in our universe (still not fully understood by science) are going to be so far apart that our skies will become completely blank, preventing any stars to be seen at night… Another is that after perhaps ~10 trillion years, new stars are no longer being born as no viable matter remains & the stars each start to die off… they will start to disintegrate and subsequently, total atomic disintegration will begin… proton decay occurs at around 1,032 trillion years -and- all the Black Holes will then start to explode at around 10googol years (yes, quite a long time ahead!) leaving *absolutely* nothing at all! A 3rd theory (in which I choose to believe) is that in ~100 billion years or so, the dark matter will have recombined (vs. disintegrated, shared above) causing a cyclical Big Crunch (or a Big Bounce), just like the one that caused our own Big Bang (the Lambda-CMB view vs. a WiKi view; also see a video?), our current Universe will be "reborn" from its end in many, many billions of years into the future… So, another one's coming! |
Updated October 4th, 2024; more may be added, so do return? Cheers!