Sunday, July 21, 2019
More clickback
Heard some expert on the radio saying: "Apollo is the one event from the 20th century that will be remembered in the 30th century."
Since I'm in Century Clickback mode today, let's click back the thousands place on the odometer. Is there an event from 900-1000 that was still remembered in 1900-2000?
Only one event comes to mind, and it's a remarkably close parallel. In the 900s the Danes settled Greenland, which is really part of North America whether we count it or not. Around 985 a few of the Greenlanders wandered around and hit the solid mainland. They stayed briefly, returned a couple times, and then abandoned the place. Of course it wasn't really a discovery, since lots of non-Danes had been living on the continent for many thousands of years.
A brief visit to a place that didn't need to be "discovered" because it was already familiar. After the brief visit, nothing.
Good parallel.
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If we look for SCIENTIFIC parallels, the 900s were highly active. Persia was making major developments in math, but it's hard to single out one specific landmark in the 900s.
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Later addition, via the 1962 Hix book:
Uber Eats began in the 900s.
Hix got the details slightly wrong; this is more accurate... Caliph al-Aziz of Egypt had an aristocratic taste for cherries, so he invented a way to get fresh cherries from Baalbek in Syria, where the best cherries were grown. He trained a fleet of homing pigeons to return to his banquet hall, then shipped them out to the best orchard in Baalbek equipped with little cloth pouches tied to their legs. The orchard placed a cherry in each pouch and sent the pigeons back to Cairo. Same-day delivery, powered by autonomous GPS-directed AI! (Avian intelligence)
Labels: Grand Blueprint
¶ 12:10 PM
