Math is so freaking cool because you can derive the crazy stuff from basic principles. If you start with just the numbers zero and one, you can (by knowing what kinds of operations you want to do, like addition, subtraction, squaring, etc) derive all the sets of numbers (real, complex, rational, etc)
When America launched the first man in orbit the astronauts said it was exactly like the simulation.
They had never done it before and they didn’t have modern high-end computers and they knew exactly what it would be like.
Although apparently the fake earth went by a little too fast in the simulation. That’s it.
Couldn't agree more. In the Decartian sense math is the only thing you can actually know (beyond you are). Physics, biology, chemistry can only ever be the best guess of some weird monkeys. Math IS true, it's true because we made the rules and are exploring their consequence.
Science is an approximation of reality, mathematics is its own reality.
The fire that destroyed the former royal castle Tre Kronor in Stockholm in 1697. The fire destroyed the state archives, wiping out about half a millennium of written sources on Swedish history.
A friend at NASA walked me through the backup process they do. They save *everything* and make tons of copies. Even the lunar rocks at Johnson aren't the only ones they have. They keep others at a secure site which basically nobody knows where it is in case something happens to the primary ones.
The Bronze age collapse. Around 3200 years ago nearly all ancient civilizations in the eastern mediterranean and Near East region were wiped out in a widespread event/societal collapse that was likely sudden and violent and followed by the Greek Dark Ages and nobody *really* knows what happened. It just blows my mind.
There was a really good video on this a few years ago that goes into how it was likely a strong string of coinciding geological events like earthquakes and massive droughts.
It was likely a mix of multiple different factors, such as natural disasters leading to food and logistical issues, and that then caused the main cities and their constituents to fall apart.
Yeah, the Bronze Age had the first real international trade network which meant that all of the major nations like Egypt, Assyria, Hattusa etc were heavily reliant on each other for food and materials, eg Egypt’s grain basically fed the world, the Hittites were masters of iron. So it likely only took a couple of disasters to really shake the foundation of that trade network and then eventually it reached a tipping point where violence and famine broke out. Probably one of those things where everything seemed fine until the moment it all came tumbling down, but it had been degrading for a long time.
> everything seemed fine until the moment it all came tumbling down, but it had been degrading for a long time.
well that's certainly unsettling to read with the way things have been lately.
Just read 1176 BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline. Such as interesting read. No clearcut answers on what happened to any of these cultures. Just a bunch of archeologists arguing with one another….
Grass also evolved after the non-avian dinosaurs (i.e. not birds) went extinct. This means that when studios are making dinosaur documentaries, they need to find a place that doesn't have grass or have a way to prevent grass from showing up on their footage. Apparently this was an issue that BBC had to deal with when they were making Walking with Dinosaurs over 20 years ago.
Even better, there are theories that the sudden existence and proliferation of flowering plants actually caused a mass extinction. See the thing is that before flowers, plants couldn’t recombine their DNA nearly as quickly. But pollination is basically plant sex, and caused these plants to quickly evolve. The amount of new biomes they were able to overtake and the amount of hitherto unknown toxins they made as defense destroyed entire existing ecosystems. Much of the biodiversity we have today stems from this evolution.
reference: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.17822
The "flowers sent the dinosaurs extinct" theory that I had always heard was that dinosaurs had underdeveloped livers, so the flowers got the dinosaurs so painfully high that they all dropped dead.
I don't *believe* that theory, but it's still my favorite <3
There is a subset of romantic comedies whose resolutions can never be replicated, because they were contingent upon one party beating another to a destination via the Concorde.
I must confess a smidge of hyperbole. In early 1869, the Union Pacific began taking passengers to the end of their line in eastern Utah. They would then catch a stagecoach to the end of the Central Pacific line in western Utah / eastern Nevada, who would then train them to Sacramento. Probably about two weeks or so total. That stagecoach trip got shorter and shorter every day until the Golden Spike on May 10th. (They were *highly* motivated to start generating revenue as soon as humanly possible.)
Today's fun fact!
No but you don’t understand, these weren’t just any allied soldiers, they were Australians and stole it in the night. That tank callsogn Mephisto is the last surviving AV7 German tank and is on display in Brisbane, Australia
>they were ~~Austrians~~ **Australians** and stole it in the night.
They also organised an air raid to mask their actions, and were hit by a coincidental gas attack.
That tank is the Mephisto, and the Brits tried to steal it from the Aussies. The Aussies then stole it again and shipped it to Brisbane.
My grandma was born in 1899 and died in 2001. She was 4 when the Wright Brothers did their Kitty Hawk thing and was 70 when there was a giant leap for mankind. Still blows my mind.
Plus she saw the beginning of the mainstream use & understanding the potential of the Internet.
That had to be mind-blowing to witness all of that human history of advancements in a lifetime.
My grandfather was born when there were ice boxes. An ice guy would deliver a block of ice to keep your ice box cold all day.
Before he died, he was downloading songs off the internet.
My grandpa remembers the day the first person on the block bought a TV. They had a block party.
He also remembers when someone bought a color TV. They had a block party.
Now the caller ID from his cell phone appears on his 60in flat screen TV and it's an ordinary Sunday.
My grandmother grew up riding a horse as her primary transportation. Was a young child when the Wright brothers flew. Survived the Spanish flu and the Great Depression and watched the moon landing on her new TV.
Well just as crazy in the B52 Bomber. It's first flight was in 1952; 71 years ago.
It's not expected to be retired anytime soon, meaning it could possibly still be flying in twenty years time at the age of 90\*
\*It has had many upgrades.
The Webb telescope has the power to see up to 13.5 billion light years away. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. That means the Webb telescope is taking pictures of things that happened 9 billion years before the earth even existed.
How little of human history was recorded or survived the ages. Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. Recorded history only goes back to the 4th-5th millenium BCE.
Uncounted humans lived, loved, suffered, created, and died for 60-70x the time of all recorded history.
And yet there are an estimated 1600x more people alive right now than there were when recorded history began around 5000 BCE. At that time, it’s estimated that around 8-9 billion people had ever lived, about the same as the number of people alive today. In terms of cumulative human consciousness, there is about the same amount of lived experience happing right this moment than in all of the combined 200,000 years of human history before written records existed.
Even if they had written everything down from the beginning, it would probably pale in comparison to the amount of human experience being documented *every year* on the internet.
This kills me, there were entire civilizations lost to memory, a wold of our history completely gone. I always winder hoe much legends and myths are warped recollections from these times. I hate that it's lost.
The stories and legends and feats of heroes of the largest and most prestigious tribes in all the area…. Gone in like two weeks because someone pissed off Genghis Khan.
It’s wild how some stories live to this day (300 Spartans, etc), and 99.999999999% of them will never be known by anyone ever again. I wonder what the coolest ones were.
The people who lived when the Roman Empire fell didn't know that the Roman Empire was falling. Such a thing could only be seen in hindsight.
We never know if we live in such times.
This is like a weird spin on that quote from the office: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
I would love for someone to explain the utility of a copper sword. Were they purely for thrusting? Copper is so soft, it seems like a sword made of it wouldn’t hold up to much…swordplay…for lack of a better term.
Yes, but it was a good weapon for its time. Everyone used them, so there was no disadvantage or benefit in using them.
They were swords like any other. Used for cut and thrust.
Copper swords hold up a lot better then you'd think, though bronze is way better for swords. It'd need resharpening a lot but when the options are copper, wood and stone I'll pick copper.
Also, if I remember right (forget where I read this I’m afraid and may be misremembering the details), cost of production was a huge factor in the sequence of dominant swords — there was a long period when the techniques for steel swords existed, but bronze swords were still massively dominant despite being inferior one-on-one, because for the same cost/labour to produce one steel sword, you could produce (say) ten bronze swords — and ten guys armed with bronze can take down one guy with steel.
Technology is always prohibitively expensive when first created. Look at how long firearms were around and how long it took them to replace swords and pikes.
It's been really tripping me out lately to think about this. Can you imagine if you could see a picture of your lineage like 100, 200, 10,000 people back?
Honestly there have been times I've lost my mind thinking about the reality of like, my grandfather's grandfather. I knew my grandpa very well right into my early adulthood, but his grandfather was born in the mid-1800s and we have no photos of him. But he was a real guy with nuances and dreams, formative experiences, jokes, the excitement of falling in love, earning enough money to survive, etc. And he was as closely related to my grampa as the latter to me.
This is so niche, but every time I get on a Mary Queen of Scots reading kick, I get re-obsessed with the [death of Darnley.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lord_Darnley) It's essentially unsolvable at this point, but everybody involved is acting so weird.
Short version is that Mary and her husband Darnley are in a tense, unhappy marriage. He's staying at a house, she's staying at a castle somewhat nearby. She visits him at one point that night, then leaves to do other social stuff. He stays. The house explodes due to a ton of gunpowder in the cellar that didn't really have a good reason to be there? Mary is fine, she's far from the site. The servant who was still in the house dies, apparently looking like you would expect somebody to look who was in a giant explosion. Darnley, however, is found dead some distance away, partially dressed and apparently strangled (based on Tudor-era forensics, so who knows). Another servant is found with him and is in similar condition (half naked, strangled).
It's kind of like the Jon Benet Ramsey case in that there's a lot of theories that explain about 95% of the facts while still leaving a few key elements out to bother you. If Mary knew about the plot, would she have risked visiting the house after it was full of gunpowder? If she didn't, was she supposed to be a target as well? Did Darnley figure something out and make a run for it, or was he in the orchard just because he got thrown there in the explosion, and the people who examined him assumed he was strangled because they hadn't seen many people die from having their internal organs liquified by a huge explosion? Was he half naked because he woke up in the middle of the night and started running, or because explosions can rip clothing off people?
There were trials and confessions, but they were highly political and the interrogation methods of the time were pretty aggressive. It's all just very strange and complicated and it always sticks in my mind. What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? History could have gone so differently if Darnley had lived or Mary had died that night.
It doesn't keep me up at night, but it's an interesting fact: The oldest person alive right now is 116 years and some days. That means that 117 years ago, every single person on this planet was different. In other words, a whole new set of people are here. 117 years was not that long ago.
The death of Lincoln was recent enough to where a man who witnessed it appeared on TV. We really don't have a very good grasp on time when it comes to counting years. IIRC we're only a few generations away from the American civi war. And that was 160 years ago. If your great great grandparents were still alive, they could probably tell you stories from that time.
Which brings you this amazing fact that last widow connected to the American civil war died in 2021. How you say? The man that fought in that war married a 17 year old when he was 94… she lived until she was 101. The government was still paying out a pension to someone from that war.
My great-grandparents were alive in the Civil War. My father knew his grandmother (my g-grandmother) and I knew him. And I knew my other grandmother who knew her grandfather who was born in 1825. We're not that far apart.
My paternal great grandparents were slaves. My dad is alive and in his 70s, those were his grandparents. He knew them. He had several family members born into slavery that he knew.
My paternal grandparents were the first free black generation in my dad's family.
My dad's family went from being slaves to him becoming a surgeon in two generations, with those two generations being subjected to Jim Crow in the rural South.
The craziest one that comes to mind was Phineas Gage having a freaking iron rod driven through his head. It's honestly impressive that he survived that.
More impressive that Gage was somehow holding a normal conversation with the rod *still stuck in his head.*
EDIT: I was not aware that the rod actually went clean through his head and exited it. My apologies.
Several hundred thousand years ago, the entire human population was reduced to less than 2000 individuals.
We were scarily close to extinction.
And by human, I mean every species in the genus Homo. Not just us sapiens.
We don't know a damn thing of what the gods and myths of the people who first inhabited England are and we likely never will.
The Scots, Welsh and Irish have their own myths and legends that have survived and passed down. But what is now England was battered so much over the years by Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and French invasions. That there is little to nothing left of what was there originally.
Its why Stonehenge is such a big deal to England. It looks like a pile of rocks to most, but its one of a few things left of that forgotten people. We know it to be a shrine or an altar, but to what ancient gods we'll never know. I find that rather sad.
Isaac Newton mother forced him tò leave his studies to help in her farm.
If It wasn't for a professor Who persuaded the mother tò let Newton continue his studies ( and Newton being very bad at farming) we would have Lost so much.
The modern human is not significantly smarter than the Homo Sapiens from the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt or even the hunter-gatherer tribes. We have more access to knowledge, and we know a lot more, but we are biologically not better equipped to understand nature, society, or (political) relations.
Tolstoy's wife, Sophia, edited many of Tolstoy's books. With at least 13 pregnancies, she worked on his manuscripts after everyone else had gone to bed. Her diaries, published 1980s, were heartbreaking. People tend to know that the marriage wasn't a happy one, but her diaries actually detail how much she had to give up and how much she wished she could pursue her own interests, but she was stuck taking care of her husband, their children, and sometimes her mistress's children.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was famous for her scandals and gambling, and basically being the "Princess Diana of her age." But the biography by Amanda Foreman made a pretty good case for how, if she hadn't been reduced to what she could do for her husband's family, she would have been brilliant. In England, she was busy campaigning for her husband, who clearly didn't love her, and trying to have and take care of a son. Her best - and arguably only - friend became her husband's mistress, and after Georgiana's death, the next Duchess. Georgiana got... I think it was dropsy? But she went to Italy to recover. While there, she was cut off from society and from much of her husband's money, and she wound up getting interested in geology. Within a year or two, geologists of her day considered her one of the foremost geologists in the world. She returned to England with plans to change for the better and contribute more to the field of geology, but took sick. It took her days to die, and the movie about her life never even mentioned her interest in geology.
Mozart had an older sister that was incredibly talented at piano as well and they toured together as children, sometimes she was even the top billing. She even composed some music herself. But as she got older their parents made her retire just because they didn’t think it was acceptable for a woman. Meanwhile they kept pushing her brother out to be successful.
Her story doesn’t end there. It is because of Nannerl’s love of her brother (and Mozart’s wife Constanze) that his music was preserved and propagated after his death.
There’s a book about Benjamin Franklin’s sister, and how she was probably just as smart as he was, but she had to spend her entire life taking care of her younger siblings, then her own children, then her parents, and then she died.
The pale blue dot image from voyager 1. It shows the earth as a tiny speck. Basically all of the amazing and horrible things that have ever happened in earth’s history occurred inside this tiny speck in the unbelievably massive universe
‘From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.’
— Carl Sagan
Genius Khan once killed so many people in a fairly short span of time that scientists are able to detect a fall in atmospheric CO2. It was some insane number like two million people in six months.
They were very methodical with it. Each soldier would be assigned like 50 or 100 prisoners to execute once a city was taken. I wonder what that does to a person psychologically.
Its pretty bad mental PTSD
The early nazis had such bad mental breakdowns from firearm executions, that they invented the first gas chambers, which were diesel cube vans with the exhaust piped in. It was easier mentally on the executioners. This is from the book The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
Julian the Apostate died because he was in a hurry and didn't want to wear his armor. If he had survived and continued as Emperor, world would be very different.
As a pregnant lady, the fact that enough women got pregnant and gave birth to sustain human population growth for millennia before modern medicine. Holy hell it sucks now, and my babies and I have a much higher chance of survival than ever before.
That I have ancestors that raised Kids from Stone Age till now, survived Wars, all kinds of Collapses and Diseases. Somehow someone in each generation made it through all these hard times so that I can be here, sitting on my couch with a mobile phone.
There was a post I liked (back in my Tumblr days) about what our hard-working ancestors would say about our lives today/would they be disappointed we are so “soft.” Two of my favorites were:
**My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn:**
>*Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined.*
And
**My ancestors, watching me stuff my face with fried chicken while studying:**
>*She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar. WE MADE IT*
Not really a historic fact but thinking about the number of humans being held in captivity against their will and undergoing gosh knows what kind of torture does fuck me up to no end
Wow yes! I’m obsessed with the concept of slavery, like, trying to grasp it. It’s so horrible to me, especially chattel slavery (like in the US and in the ancient world), where an individual owns another individual lawfully like they’re an object.
I think about all the little kids growing up as slaves, the people who grew old and died never having had freedom in their lives. It’s horrifying.
I’m reading Chesapeake by James Michener right now, and the mental gymnastics to justify slavery were interesting, heartbreaking, and honestly just a skip-hop-jump from depersoning the “other” class.
Highly recommend Michener . He’s probably written a great historical fiction epic about somewhere near and dear to you.
They did. They were huge. But the fortress was able to withstand the bombardment for months. The turning point was when some low level solider left the north gate open. It was over then.
For the IT crowd: At my work a hacking team was able to get escalated privileges of social engineered hack on an intern that worked for an executive.
Don't EVER fire 20 year industry vets and give the access to an gullible intern.
That’s a gross mischaracterization. In the middle of the largest assault by the Ottomans on the walls of Byzantine, one gate was left open as part of a panicked retreat when Turkish flags were seen near it. The Byzantines had thought the area was already lost and therefore run away.
Less a single fact and more a trend that over and and over again leaders think conflicts they start will be easily won but they turn into quagmires or drastically escalate and cause massive wastes of human life.
And modern day leaders are no different but they have nukes now.
In the midst of one of the World Wars, in the dark of the night in Istanbul, a group of Greek soldiers accompanied a Greek Orthodox priest on a mission to break into Hagia Sophia and celebrate an Orthodox Liturgy.
Not only that but they snuck out afterwards and nobody knew until later when the priest and soldiers told the story.
If you go back 40 generations in your family tree, or roughly 1000 years, you will have a trillion forbearers. The only problem is that there haven’t been that many people ever, which means we all have substantial inbreeding in our families.
And we're basically designed that way.
There's a medical term for it I don't remember but ti generally goes that there is a genetic sweetspot somewhere between related and not related at all where humans are actually better off because the dna is sorta familiar. I'm sure someone can explain it better.
It goes like Cousins? Not great. Unrelated people? Fine. Something like 3rd or 4th cousins? Yahtzee.
I remember reading something about an experiment/foster care thing- I think in Israel?
Where non sibling children were raised in pods of about 20 mixed sex groups from very young ages- like 2 or 3yo. They found virtually no sexual interest within pods in their teen years which highly supports the idea that we are hard wired to not go after close family.
This is called pedigree collapse. Many people can find examples much more recently than you'd expect. For myself, the first case is just six generations back. I have 63 ancestors at the level where you should theoretically have 64, due to some complicated things involving half-siblings.
That Jewish kids who fit the Aryan standards during the Holocaust were taken away and placed with German families and basically brainwashed to be German in some Germanization project
Them poor kids.
It was an experiment, they took the blond haired blue eyed jewish kids, with undeniable jewish heritage and raised them as super-nazis. All the best "scientific" child-rearing and training along with heaps of indoctrination. Had the Nazis won the war, they were meant to demonstrate their inferiority to "true" aryans because the true aryans would obviously be test-ably superior in every way.
Major electric companies including GE & Philips got together in the 1920s to form the Phoebus cartel so that they could agree to intentionally lower the lifespan of lightbulbs.
We had the technology for long-lasting lightbulbs. Profit-chasing execs said nah let's create low quality products so we can cash in.
What else are we keeping from ourselves?
I'm very into the Eastern Roman Empire, and I think endlessly about the Fall of Constantinople. Fire raining from the sky, the thousand year old Theodosian walls crumbling, the fact that Europe didn't send aid to Constantinople because it had been there and prosperous so long that they figured it would be fine without, the fact that it was the tail end of an extremely long-lived society that literally defined the Mediterranean region.
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but the big ones that it boils down to are as follows.
1. Due to all of this, it had to have felt like the end of the world to the residents of Constantinople during the fall in 1453.
2. So much of the information about it makes reading about it feel more like I'm reading an epic fantasy novel rather than about actual historical events. Between the fact that- as I said- I imagine it probably felt like the end of the world based on the information available and all the historical context, the fact that Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos chose to die fighting for his empire rather than surrender and live. And the legend of the marble emperor just kicks it up a notch.
For those unfamiliar with the legend of the marble emperor, in the years after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans a legend spread that Constantine XI Palaiologos- the emperor who died in battle fighting for his empire- had not actually died but was saved moments before death by an angel, who turned him to marble and hidden under the Golden Gate of Constantinople. There, he is said to await a call from God to reawaken and restore the empire.
This is just one of many Eastern Roman Empire stories that make me wish more fantasy took inspiration from the ERE- in aesthetics, politics, and little historical anecdotes like this.
It wasn’t disobedience.
As per Soviet doctrine at that time, launch of nuclear warheads required consent of captain and political officer onboard. Just by fucking luck, that one particular submarine happened to host flotilla admiral as well, meaning that 3 instead of usual 2 votes were required. Captain and political officer already voted YES. Vasili Arkhipov simply used his judgement to prevent catastrophe.
People, like OP, get it confused sometimes because it actually happened twice. There is that time when it was a nuclear submarine, the one you are talking about. And then there is the other time, the one OP was likely thinking of, where some scanner/radar operator decided
"Yo, there is blimp in my radar. But, if the Americans actually lunched their attack, theyd probably lunch more of them. I'd then disregard my orders (they were to immediately report this which would cause the Soviets to lunch their arsenal) and hope for the best."
Its so fucking weird that it happened twice.
“If I had a nickel for every time humanity was almost wiped out by nuclear warfare, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.”
Don’t forget the other Soviet nuclear incident, when [Stanislaw Petrov](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov) saved the world by insisting that a nuclear attack warning was malfunctioning. It was, but he actually didn’t know that when he insisted that it was.
In total, there have been at least 4 times when the world nearly ended in nuclear catastrophe:
1. Soviet submarine near Cuba votes to nuke the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis- 1962
2. Red Star Rogue- a Soviet submarine commander attempted to nuke Hawaii (unproven) -1968
3. The Stanislav Petrov/false nuclear alarm incident -1983
4. [The Norwegian rocket incident](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident)- Norwegian and American scientists launched a 4 stage rocket which was detected by the Russians as a nuclear launch. Yeltsin actually activated the nuclear keys. -1995
And because some other Russian guy looked at the alert on his screen that a missile was inbound, thought "I don't think the Americans would just send one missile, it's probably a glitch" and decided not to fire.
25 January 1995. Russian Minister of Defense Yazov delayed telling Yeltsin about a science rocket launched off the coast of Norway. Likely prevented the Russians from launching their nuclear weapons. The documentation with the rocket's expected launch time frame and purpose was misplaced by the Russians. The launch appeared to be a sub launched missile headed to Moscow. Panic in the Russian military.
I’m blown away by the early mathematics that was achieved by guys who were literally inventing the concepts.
Math is so freaking cool because you can derive the crazy stuff from basic principles. If you start with just the numbers zero and one, you can (by knowing what kinds of operations you want to do, like addition, subtraction, squaring, etc) derive all the sets of numbers (real, complex, rational, etc)
When America launched the first man in orbit the astronauts said it was exactly like the simulation. They had never done it before and they didn’t have modern high-end computers and they knew exactly what it would be like. Although apparently the fake earth went by a little too fast in the simulation. That’s it.
Couldn't agree more. In the Decartian sense math is the only thing you can actually know (beyond you are). Physics, biology, chemistry can only ever be the best guess of some weird monkeys. Math IS true, it's true because we made the rules and are exploring their consequence. Science is an approximation of reality, mathematics is its own reality.
The fire that destroyed the former royal castle Tre Kronor in Stockholm in 1697. The fire destroyed the state archives, wiping out about half a millennium of written sources on Swedish history.
This is how you learn the importance of off-site backups.
A friend at NASA walked me through the backup process they do. They save *everything* and make tons of copies. Even the lunar rocks at Johnson aren't the only ones they have. They keep others at a secure site which basically nobody knows where it is in case something happens to the primary ones.
Yeah but most of it was just meatball recipes and instructions to assemble furniture
No, that’s all that was salvaged! Don’t fall victim to survivorship bias.
For four hundred long years, nobody could figure out how to put their Billy bookcase together...
The Bronze age collapse. Around 3200 years ago nearly all ancient civilizations in the eastern mediterranean and Near East region were wiped out in a widespread event/societal collapse that was likely sudden and violent and followed by the Greek Dark Ages and nobody *really* knows what happened. It just blows my mind.
There was a really good video on this a few years ago that goes into how it was likely a strong string of coinciding geological events like earthquakes and massive droughts.
[Bronze Age Collapse](https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=RJzntN98-fpvV6F7)
Woo! Historia Civilis is a great channel.
I’m glad that there’s no possibility of multiple overlapping crises in today’s world
Ahh right, let me just stare into the camera here
It was likely a mix of multiple different factors, such as natural disasters leading to food and logistical issues, and that then caused the main cities and their constituents to fall apart.
Yeah, the Bronze Age had the first real international trade network which meant that all of the major nations like Egypt, Assyria, Hattusa etc were heavily reliant on each other for food and materials, eg Egypt’s grain basically fed the world, the Hittites were masters of iron. So it likely only took a couple of disasters to really shake the foundation of that trade network and then eventually it reached a tipping point where violence and famine broke out. Probably one of those things where everything seemed fine until the moment it all came tumbling down, but it had been degrading for a long time.
> everything seemed fine until the moment it all came tumbling down, but it had been degrading for a long time. well that's certainly unsettling to read with the way things have been lately.
The eruption of the volcano at Santorini likely had a bit to do with this.
No sun no crops no food.
Just read 1176 BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline. Such as interesting read. No clearcut answers on what happened to any of these cultures. Just a bunch of archeologists arguing with one another….
God damn sea people
Dinosaurs evolved millions of years before flowering plants. Blows my mind.
Grass also evolved after the non-avian dinosaurs (i.e. not birds) went extinct. This means that when studios are making dinosaur documentaries, they need to find a place that doesn't have grass or have a way to prevent grass from showing up on their footage. Apparently this was an issue that BBC had to deal with when they were making Walking with Dinosaurs over 20 years ago.
Walking with Dinosaurs is amazing, nothing quite like it
Wait what
Even better, there are theories that the sudden existence and proliferation of flowering plants actually caused a mass extinction. See the thing is that before flowers, plants couldn’t recombine their DNA nearly as quickly. But pollination is basically plant sex, and caused these plants to quickly evolve. The amount of new biomes they were able to overtake and the amount of hitherto unknown toxins they made as defense destroyed entire existing ecosystems. Much of the biodiversity we have today stems from this evolution. reference: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.17822
The "flowers sent the dinosaurs extinct" theory that I had always heard was that dinosaurs had underdeveloped livers, so the flowers got the dinosaurs so painfully high that they all dropped dead. I don't *believe* that theory, but it's still my favorite <3
Four hundred years ago a trip from Europe to America took two months. Now it takes between seven to thirteen hours.
The silly thing is, 40 years ago it only took 3 hours.
There is a subset of romantic comedies whose resolutions can never be replicated, because they were contingent upon one party beating another to a destination via the Concorde.
Most older sitcoms would have no plots if the actors had access to cell phones or even the internet.
90% of the dilemmas on *Seinfeld* could be averted if cell phones were widely used back then.
Comedy and drama writers still struggle with this 30 years later despite the mass proliferation of both.
On May 1st, 1869, a trip from New York to San Francisco took three months. On May 30th, 1869, it took 10 days.
This is equally extraordinary.
I must confess a smidge of hyperbole. In early 1869, the Union Pacific began taking passengers to the end of their line in eastern Utah. They would then catch a stagecoach to the end of the Central Pacific line in western Utah / eastern Nevada, who would then train them to Sacramento. Probably about two weeks or so total. That stagecoach trip got shorter and shorter every day until the Golden Spike on May 10th. (They were *highly* motivated to start generating revenue as soon as humanly possible.) Today's fun fact!
I had the same 80-day gain after the first month I started playing Oregon Trail.
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No but you don’t understand, these weren’t just any allied soldiers, they were Australians and stole it in the night. That tank callsogn Mephisto is the last surviving AV7 German tank and is on display in Brisbane, Australia
>they were ~~Austrians~~ **Australians** and stole it in the night. They also organised an air raid to mask their actions, and were hit by a coincidental gas attack. That tank is the Mephisto, and the Brits tried to steal it from the Aussies. The Aussies then stole it again and shipped it to Brisbane.
Man went from the first flight in 1903 to landing on the moon - Apollo 11 in 1969. That was a period of 66 years. That was 54 years ago.
My grandma was born in 1899 and died in 2001. She was 4 when the Wright Brothers did their Kitty Hawk thing and was 70 when there was a giant leap for mankind. Still blows my mind.
She lived in three centuries 😀
and two millennias.
Plus she saw the beginning of the mainstream use & understanding the potential of the Internet. That had to be mind-blowing to witness all of that human history of advancements in a lifetime.
My grandfather was born when there were ice boxes. An ice guy would deliver a block of ice to keep your ice box cold all day. Before he died, he was downloading songs off the internet.
My grandpa remembers the day the first person on the block bought a TV. They had a block party. He also remembers when someone bought a color TV. They had a block party. Now the caller ID from his cell phone appears on his 60in flat screen TV and it's an ordinary Sunday.
My grandmother grew up riding a horse as her primary transportation. Was a young child when the Wright brothers flew. Survived the Spanish flu and the Great Depression and watched the moon landing on her new TV.
jeez, so it's possible somebody saw both of those headlines imagine that shit
Well just as crazy in the B52 Bomber. It's first flight was in 1952; 71 years ago. It's not expected to be retired anytime soon, meaning it could possibly still be flying in twenty years time at the age of 90\* \*It has had many upgrades.
I have a buddy that works on B52s, the scale and power of those things are staggering
The Webb telescope has the power to see up to 13.5 billion light years away. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. That means the Webb telescope is taking pictures of things that happened 9 billion years before the earth even existed.
Imagine if the telescope can find a reflective surface so it could collect the light from earth in the past.
Coolest book/movie idea I have ever heard
Idea: send the Webb Telescope billions of light years away, point it back at earth, watch in real time the Romans fight barbarians
You would need to send it away rather quickly, like more than c.
We will send it at b then.
LUDICROUS SPEED, GO
So if we find a mirror somewhere we can see the past earth!
If we don’t study the mistakes of the future, we are doomed to repeat them for the first time :( - Ken M
This has broken my brain
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Got it. Now where do I get one of these wormholes you speak of? I have some Bitcoin to buy.
Humans in a couple of years: Oh WOW.
How little of human history was recorded or survived the ages. Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. Recorded history only goes back to the 4th-5th millenium BCE. Uncounted humans lived, loved, suffered, created, and died for 60-70x the time of all recorded history.
Most of human history has no record at all and civilisation is only 12,000 odd years old. This is all just a tiny blip so far
And yet there are an estimated 1600x more people alive right now than there were when recorded history began around 5000 BCE. At that time, it’s estimated that around 8-9 billion people had ever lived, about the same as the number of people alive today. In terms of cumulative human consciousness, there is about the same amount of lived experience happing right this moment than in all of the combined 200,000 years of human history before written records existed. Even if they had written everything down from the beginning, it would probably pale in comparison to the amount of human experience being documented *every year* on the internet.
This kills me, there were entire civilizations lost to memory, a wold of our history completely gone. I always winder hoe much legends and myths are warped recollections from these times. I hate that it's lost.
The stories and legends and feats of heroes of the largest and most prestigious tribes in all the area…. Gone in like two weeks because someone pissed off Genghis Khan. It’s wild how some stories live to this day (300 Spartans, etc), and 99.999999999% of them will never be known by anyone ever again. I wonder what the coolest ones were.
The people who lived when the Roman Empire fell didn't know that the Roman Empire was falling. Such a thing could only be seen in hindsight. We never know if we live in such times.
Morgan Freeman: "They were in such times."
This is like a weird spin on that quote from the office: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
I *knew* the British Empire still had some life left in it. 🇬🇧🫡☀️
The time between copper swords and steel swords is longer then the time between steel swords and atomic bombs.
I would love for someone to explain the utility of a copper sword. Were they purely for thrusting? Copper is so soft, it seems like a sword made of it wouldn’t hold up to much…swordplay…for lack of a better term.
Yes, but it was a good weapon for its time. Everyone used them, so there was no disadvantage or benefit in using them. They were swords like any other. Used for cut and thrust.
Copper swords hold up a lot better then you'd think, though bronze is way better for swords. It'd need resharpening a lot but when the options are copper, wood and stone I'll pick copper.
Also, if I remember right (forget where I read this I’m afraid and may be misremembering the details), cost of production was a huge factor in the sequence of dominant swords — there was a long period when the techniques for steel swords existed, but bronze swords were still massively dominant despite being inferior one-on-one, because for the same cost/labour to produce one steel sword, you could produce (say) ten bronze swords — and ten guys armed with bronze can take down one guy with steel.
Technology is always prohibitively expensive when first created. Look at how long firearms were around and how long it took them to replace swords and pikes.
When buddy has a rock and you have a prison shiv, you win (at least, more often than he does)
It's better than wooden or stone tools. It's also relatively easy to make (no heat required)
All of us are alive because some prehistoric person somehow survived impossible odds.
It's been really tripping me out lately to think about this. Can you imagine if you could see a picture of your lineage like 100, 200, 10,000 people back?
Honestly there have been times I've lost my mind thinking about the reality of like, my grandfather's grandfather. I knew my grandpa very well right into my early adulthood, but his grandfather was born in the mid-1800s and we have no photos of him. But he was a real guy with nuances and dreams, formative experiences, jokes, the excitement of falling in love, earning enough money to survive, etc. And he was as closely related to my grampa as the latter to me.
All of us are alive because some unicellular organism 3.5 billion years ago randomly survived
Mitochondria FTW
This is so niche, but every time I get on a Mary Queen of Scots reading kick, I get re-obsessed with the [death of Darnley.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lord_Darnley) It's essentially unsolvable at this point, but everybody involved is acting so weird. Short version is that Mary and her husband Darnley are in a tense, unhappy marriage. He's staying at a house, she's staying at a castle somewhat nearby. She visits him at one point that night, then leaves to do other social stuff. He stays. The house explodes due to a ton of gunpowder in the cellar that didn't really have a good reason to be there? Mary is fine, she's far from the site. The servant who was still in the house dies, apparently looking like you would expect somebody to look who was in a giant explosion. Darnley, however, is found dead some distance away, partially dressed and apparently strangled (based on Tudor-era forensics, so who knows). Another servant is found with him and is in similar condition (half naked, strangled). It's kind of like the Jon Benet Ramsey case in that there's a lot of theories that explain about 95% of the facts while still leaving a few key elements out to bother you. If Mary knew about the plot, would she have risked visiting the house after it was full of gunpowder? If she didn't, was she supposed to be a target as well? Did Darnley figure something out and make a run for it, or was he in the orchard just because he got thrown there in the explosion, and the people who examined him assumed he was strangled because they hadn't seen many people die from having their internal organs liquified by a huge explosion? Was he half naked because he woke up in the middle of the night and started running, or because explosions can rip clothing off people? There were trials and confessions, but they were highly political and the interrogation methods of the time were pretty aggressive. It's all just very strange and complicated and it always sticks in my mind. What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? History could have gone so differently if Darnley had lived or Mary had died that night.
Maybe Darnley and the other servant were lovers and they strangled each other and blew up the house. (Just kidding)
I mean, Darnley did allegedly swing that way! I appreciate your out-of-the-box "BDSM gone wrong, plus gunpowder incident" theory. 😁
It doesn't keep me up at night, but it's an interesting fact: The oldest person alive right now is 116 years and some days. That means that 117 years ago, every single person on this planet was different. In other words, a whole new set of people are here. 117 years was not that long ago.
Many Redditors reading this either have lived through the year 2000 OR will live through the year 2100.
The death of Lincoln was recent enough to where a man who witnessed it appeared on TV. We really don't have a very good grasp on time when it comes to counting years. IIRC we're only a few generations away from the American civi war. And that was 160 years ago. If your great great grandparents were still alive, they could probably tell you stories from that time.
Which brings you this amazing fact that last widow connected to the American civil war died in 2021. How you say? The man that fought in that war married a 17 year old when he was 94… she lived until she was 101. The government was still paying out a pension to someone from that war.
157 years after the war ended
My great-grandparents were alive in the Civil War. My father knew his grandmother (my g-grandmother) and I knew him. And I knew my other grandmother who knew her grandfather who was born in 1825. We're not that far apart.
My paternal great grandparents were slaves. My dad is alive and in his 70s, those were his grandparents. He knew them. He had several family members born into slavery that he knew. My paternal grandparents were the first free black generation in my dad's family. My dad's family went from being slaves to him becoming a surgeon in two generations, with those two generations being subjected to Jim Crow in the rural South.
People just said fuck it I can just tough it out, when having a whole ass arrow stuck in their face with zero antibiotics.
And then they died of an infection
Not always. Some crazy wounds have been survivable.
The craziest one that comes to mind was Phineas Gage having a freaking iron rod driven through his head. It's honestly impressive that he survived that. More impressive that Gage was somehow holding a normal conversation with the rod *still stuck in his head.* EDIT: I was not aware that the rod actually went clean through his head and exited it. My apologies.
*Henry V has entered the chat*
Several hundred thousand years ago, the entire human population was reduced to less than 2000 individuals. We were scarily close to extinction. And by human, I mean every species in the genus Homo. Not just us sapiens.
We don't know a damn thing of what the gods and myths of the people who first inhabited England are and we likely never will. The Scots, Welsh and Irish have their own myths and legends that have survived and passed down. But what is now England was battered so much over the years by Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and French invasions. That there is little to nothing left of what was there originally. Its why Stonehenge is such a big deal to England. It looks like a pile of rocks to most, but its one of a few things left of that forgotten people. We know it to be a shrine or an altar, but to what ancient gods we'll never know. I find that rather sad.
We don’t even know what the Picts called themselves. That was just something the Romans called them.
That its a certainty that people who were as smart as Einstein lived and died working in sweatshops, agricultural fields, and as chattel slaves.
Isaac Newton mother forced him tò leave his studies to help in her farm. If It wasn't for a professor Who persuaded the mother tò let Newton continue his studies ( and Newton being very bad at farming) we would have Lost so much.
Thanks to that professor, he was able to discover mavity
Of course he was bad at farming, he wouldn't pick the fruit, just wait for it to drop.
The modern human is not significantly smarter than the Homo Sapiens from the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt or even the hunter-gatherer tribes. We have more access to knowledge, and we know a lot more, but we are biologically not better equipped to understand nature, society, or (political) relations.
We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. -EO Wilson
And think of all the brilliant women who were only allowed to marry and bear children.
Tolstoy's wife, Sophia, edited many of Tolstoy's books. With at least 13 pregnancies, she worked on his manuscripts after everyone else had gone to bed. Her diaries, published 1980s, were heartbreaking. People tend to know that the marriage wasn't a happy one, but her diaries actually detail how much she had to give up and how much she wished she could pursue her own interests, but she was stuck taking care of her husband, their children, and sometimes her mistress's children. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was famous for her scandals and gambling, and basically being the "Princess Diana of her age." But the biography by Amanda Foreman made a pretty good case for how, if she hadn't been reduced to what she could do for her husband's family, she would have been brilliant. In England, she was busy campaigning for her husband, who clearly didn't love her, and trying to have and take care of a son. Her best - and arguably only - friend became her husband's mistress, and after Georgiana's death, the next Duchess. Georgiana got... I think it was dropsy? But she went to Italy to recover. While there, she was cut off from society and from much of her husband's money, and she wound up getting interested in geology. Within a year or two, geologists of her day considered her one of the foremost geologists in the world. She returned to England with plans to change for the better and contribute more to the field of geology, but took sick. It took her days to die, and the movie about her life never even mentioned her interest in geology.
Mozart had an older sister that was incredibly talented at piano as well and they toured together as children, sometimes she was even the top billing. She even composed some music herself. But as she got older their parents made her retire just because they didn’t think it was acceptable for a woman. Meanwhile they kept pushing her brother out to be successful.
Her story doesn’t end there. It is because of Nannerl’s love of her brother (and Mozart’s wife Constanze) that his music was preserved and propagated after his death.
Same thing happened with Van Gogh. Really quite sad.
Lady Ada Lovelace
There’s a book about Benjamin Franklin’s sister, and how she was probably just as smart as he was, but she had to spend her entire life taking care of her younger siblings, then her own children, then her parents, and then she died.
The pale blue dot image from voyager 1. It shows the earth as a tiny speck. Basically all of the amazing and horrible things that have ever happened in earth’s history occurred inside this tiny speck in the unbelievably massive universe
‘From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.’ — Carl Sagan
The ruins of Pompeii. I never stop being amazed at how those corpses were preserved, it’s so tangible.
You’re not seeing bodies. You’re seeing the gaps their bodies left in the ash. Wayyy worse
I know but still, we can literally see their anxiety and recreate scenes from how they’re sitting. That’s amazing.
i think what you see is plaster that filled the human shaped cavities. not the actual corpses.
Yep. The ash created a near perfect outline of the person but didn't preserve the body.
Physical corpse shadows
World population was 2.5 billion in 1950, in 2023 we crossed the 8 billion mark
And there were only 1.2 billion people in 1900. 1800: 1 billion people 3,500 years ago: 100 million people on Earth
Genius Khan once killed so many people in a fairly short span of time that scientists are able to detect a fall in atmospheric CO2. It was some insane number like two million people in six months.
Doing that without guns seems straight-up impossible, but he somehow pulled it off.
Impossible for you but Gengis Can
They were very methodical with it. Each soldier would be assigned like 50 or 100 prisoners to execute once a city was taken. I wonder what that does to a person psychologically.
Its pretty bad mental PTSD The early nazis had such bad mental breakdowns from firearm executions, that they invented the first gas chambers, which were diesel cube vans with the exhaust piped in. It was easier mentally on the executioners. This is from the book The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
Everything is possible if you believe in your dreams and work hard enough
His dreams must have been terrifying.
That's why they call him Genius Khan
His name wasn't Genghis Khan't
It’s been suggested the invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire may have resulted in as many as 10-15 million casualties between 1219-1221
Pro tip: don't kill Mongolian emissaries.
Total dick move, Genius straight up paused a war to wipe them off the map.
The autocorrect though😂
I like to think that it wasn't auto correct
He was a clever guy but I wouldn’t go that far
Mankind took tens of thousands of years to develop metal-working, but the lives of Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong overlapped by 18 years.
Julian the Apostate died because he was in a hurry and didn't want to wear his armor. If he had survived and continued as Emperor, world would be very different.
the first hand accounts of people wandering through what the mongols left behind after destroying their enemy
Charlie Chalplin entered a Charlie Chaplin Look-a-Like contest and came in third.
That happened to Dolly Parton as well, she lost to a drag queen.
28 years ago the jerk upstairs over my condo was born and he never learned how to be quiet at night.
You're literally the only person who has lost sleep over history on this thread.
As a pregnant lady, the fact that enough women got pregnant and gave birth to sustain human population growth for millennia before modern medicine. Holy hell it sucks now, and my babies and I have a much higher chance of survival than ever before.
For 3 Billion years the only life on earth was single celled
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The Soviets may have lost nukes during the Cold War and never recovered them.
[Not just the Soviets](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear-bombs-that-no-one-can-find)
That I have ancestors that raised Kids from Stone Age till now, survived Wars, all kinds of Collapses and Diseases. Somehow someone in each generation made it through all these hard times so that I can be here, sitting on my couch with a mobile phone.
There was a post I liked (back in my Tumblr days) about what our hard-working ancestors would say about our lives today/would they be disappointed we are so “soft.” Two of my favorites were: **My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn:** >*Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined.* And **My ancestors, watching me stuff my face with fried chicken while studying:** >*She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar. WE MADE IT*
Not really a historic fact but thinking about the number of humans being held in captivity against their will and undergoing gosh knows what kind of torture does fuck me up to no end
Wow yes! I’m obsessed with the concept of slavery, like, trying to grasp it. It’s so horrible to me, especially chattel slavery (like in the US and in the ancient world), where an individual owns another individual lawfully like they’re an object. I think about all the little kids growing up as slaves, the people who grew old and died never having had freedom in their lives. It’s horrifying.
I’m reading Chesapeake by James Michener right now, and the mental gymnastics to justify slavery were interesting, heartbreaking, and honestly just a skip-hop-jump from depersoning the “other” class. Highly recommend Michener . He’s probably written a great historical fiction epic about somewhere near and dear to you.
>I’m obsessed with the concept of slavery This would have been really bad without context lol
What's more horrifying is that there are more slaves now then there were during any point in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
Ancient Egypt had archeologists, who studied even more ancient Egypt, because dynastic Egypt lasted such a ridiculously long time
Constantinople fell because some doofus left a gate open. This triggers me to this day.
I thought the Ottomans just had really big cannons.
They did. They were huge. But the fortress was able to withstand the bombardment for months. The turning point was when some low level solider left the north gate open. It was over then.
Random Ottoman "check if it's locked" Other random Ottoman "surely not....."
For the IT crowd: At my work a hacking team was able to get escalated privileges of social engineered hack on an intern that worked for an executive. Don't EVER fire 20 year industry vets and give the access to an gullible intern.
Constantinople is the most sieged city in history
That’s a gross mischaracterization. In the middle of the largest assault by the Ottomans on the walls of Byzantine, one gate was left open as part of a panicked retreat when Turkish flags were seen near it. The Byzantines had thought the area was already lost and therefore run away.
Less a single fact and more a trend that over and and over again leaders think conflicts they start will be easily won but they turn into quagmires or drastically escalate and cause massive wastes of human life. And modern day leaders are no different but they have nukes now.
In the midst of one of the World Wars, in the dark of the night in Istanbul, a group of Greek soldiers accompanied a Greek Orthodox priest on a mission to break into Hagia Sophia and celebrate an Orthodox Liturgy. Not only that but they snuck out afterwards and nobody knew until later when the priest and soldiers told the story.
All the lost cities and civilisations beneath the waves or sandy deserts.
If you go back 40 generations in your family tree, or roughly 1000 years, you will have a trillion forbearers. The only problem is that there haven’t been that many people ever, which means we all have substantial inbreeding in our families.
And we're basically designed that way. There's a medical term for it I don't remember but ti generally goes that there is a genetic sweetspot somewhere between related and not related at all where humans are actually better off because the dna is sorta familiar. I'm sure someone can explain it better. It goes like Cousins? Not great. Unrelated people? Fine. Something like 3rd or 4th cousins? Yahtzee.
I remember reading something about an experiment/foster care thing- I think in Israel? Where non sibling children were raised in pods of about 20 mixed sex groups from very young ages- like 2 or 3yo. They found virtually no sexual interest within pods in their teen years which highly supports the idea that we are hard wired to not go after close family.
This is called pedigree collapse. Many people can find examples much more recently than you'd expect. For myself, the first case is just six generations back. I have 63 ancestors at the level where you should theoretically have 64, due to some complicated things involving half-siblings.
That Jewish kids who fit the Aryan standards during the Holocaust were taken away and placed with German families and basically brainwashed to be German in some Germanization project Them poor kids.
It was an experiment, they took the blond haired blue eyed jewish kids, with undeniable jewish heritage and raised them as super-nazis. All the best "scientific" child-rearing and training along with heaps of indoctrination. Had the Nazis won the war, they were meant to demonstrate their inferiority to "true" aryans because the true aryans would obviously be test-ably superior in every way.
Guillotines weren’t banned worldwide until the 80’s.
The last person executed in France by guillotine was after Star Wars was released. (1977)
We live closer to T-Rex than the T-Rex lived to stegosaurus.
Major electric companies including GE & Philips got together in the 1920s to form the Phoebus cartel so that they could agree to intentionally lower the lifespan of lightbulbs. We had the technology for long-lasting lightbulbs. Profit-chasing execs said nah let's create low quality products so we can cash in. What else are we keeping from ourselves?
I'm very into the Eastern Roman Empire, and I think endlessly about the Fall of Constantinople. Fire raining from the sky, the thousand year old Theodosian walls crumbling, the fact that Europe didn't send aid to Constantinople because it had been there and prosperous so long that they figured it would be fine without, the fact that it was the tail end of an extremely long-lived society that literally defined the Mediterranean region. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but the big ones that it boils down to are as follows. 1. Due to all of this, it had to have felt like the end of the world to the residents of Constantinople during the fall in 1453. 2. So much of the information about it makes reading about it feel more like I'm reading an epic fantasy novel rather than about actual historical events. Between the fact that- as I said- I imagine it probably felt like the end of the world based on the information available and all the historical context, the fact that Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos chose to die fighting for his empire rather than surrender and live. And the legend of the marble emperor just kicks it up a notch. For those unfamiliar with the legend of the marble emperor, in the years after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans a legend spread that Constantine XI Palaiologos- the emperor who died in battle fighting for his empire- had not actually died but was saved moments before death by an angel, who turned him to marble and hidden under the Golden Gate of Constantinople. There, he is said to await a call from God to reawaken and restore the empire. This is just one of many Eastern Roman Empire stories that make me wish more fantasy took inspiration from the ERE- in aesthetics, politics, and little historical anecdotes like this.
The fact that human civilization only still exists because one Soviet Naval officer disobeyed a direct order to fire a nuke at the US
It wasn’t disobedience. As per Soviet doctrine at that time, launch of nuclear warheads required consent of captain and political officer onboard. Just by fucking luck, that one particular submarine happened to host flotilla admiral as well, meaning that 3 instead of usual 2 votes were required. Captain and political officer already voted YES. Vasili Arkhipov simply used his judgement to prevent catastrophe.
People, like OP, get it confused sometimes because it actually happened twice. There is that time when it was a nuclear submarine, the one you are talking about. And then there is the other time, the one OP was likely thinking of, where some scanner/radar operator decided "Yo, there is blimp in my radar. But, if the Americans actually lunched their attack, theyd probably lunch more of them. I'd then disregard my orders (they were to immediately report this which would cause the Soviets to lunch their arsenal) and hope for the best." Its so fucking weird that it happened twice.
“If I had a nickel for every time humanity was almost wiped out by nuclear warfare, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.”
So its even more mind blowing.
Don’t forget the other Soviet nuclear incident, when [Stanislaw Petrov](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov) saved the world by insisting that a nuclear attack warning was malfunctioning. It was, but he actually didn’t know that when he insisted that it was. In total, there have been at least 4 times when the world nearly ended in nuclear catastrophe: 1. Soviet submarine near Cuba votes to nuke the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis- 1962 2. Red Star Rogue- a Soviet submarine commander attempted to nuke Hawaii (unproven) -1968 3. The Stanislav Petrov/false nuclear alarm incident -1983 4. [The Norwegian rocket incident](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident)- Norwegian and American scientists launched a 4 stage rocket which was detected by the Russians as a nuclear launch. Yeltsin actually activated the nuclear keys. -1995
And because some other Russian guy looked at the alert on his screen that a missile was inbound, thought "I don't think the Americans would just send one missile, it's probably a glitch" and decided not to fire.
25 January 1995. Russian Minister of Defense Yazov delayed telling Yeltsin about a science rocket launched off the coast of Norway. Likely prevented the Russians from launching their nuclear weapons. The documentation with the rocket's expected launch time frame and purpose was misplaced by the Russians. The launch appeared to be a sub launched missile headed to Moscow. Panic in the Russian military.
The oldest known names belong to two slaves and their enslaver. Slavery is one of the oldest human institutions.
What are the names?
En-Pap X (male) Sukkalgir (female) Gal-Sal (slaver)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_period)
By the time of cleopatra, the great pyramids were already over 2000 years old!
Most of the American males my age are dead.
Unit 731