We haven’t gone extinct. We’re still alive and well.

One billion seconds ago was the year 1976 CE. (There were still liberals in America!)

I’ve heard this before, but I don’t really believe it. I’ve never seen any transitional forms!

I had a biology teacher in high school who gave one of the best illustrations of the enormity of these numbers that I’ve ever seen. He passed around a huge, thick paperback book. Every single page, all one thousand of them, was printed top to bottom and side to side with tiny black dots, a thousand dots per page. He let us thumb through the book, contemplating all those dots, while he brought some large boxes into the room on a dolly. “There are one million dots in that book,” he said. “Imagine that each of those dots is one year.”

He pulled what looked like more of the million-dot books out of the boxes and stacked them up. “Ten books – ten million years”. It was a big stack. “Now, imagine six stacks like this, plus three extra books. That takes us back to the dinosaurs.” He let us think about that for a while, then asked us to imagine ten stacks of ten books, then ten times that. Finally, he had us envisioning four thousand books packed into the school, with five hundred more spilling out onto the lawn. “And that’s how old the earth is.”

Don’t forget about the racism of the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis. They never say the Roman aqueducts were laid out with laser beams from spaceships. Why not? The Romans were white people! But there’s no way those browner people could have done anything impressive. The Pantheon dome can be so close to perfectly round, but those stocky little Andean people couldn’t have traced the Nazca figures.

BTW, I won’t know whether the pyramid builders were slaves or not, but they treated very well. An analysis of their bodies reveals almost no sign of nutritional stress and that they got effective medical care for on the job injuries.

Managing a project on that scale with the huge workforce and supply problems they had would have been impossible if not for that other human invention: Bureaucracy.

I thought you were gonna say “slavery”.

You must be right! That page is now blank! The government is suppressing the truth!

For me, what we’ve done with software is much more impressive than hardware. Don’t get me wrong, all forms of physical engineering are very difficult, requiring leaps of creativity and insight along with Herculean patience for trial and error. But from a complexity standpoint, contemporary software is a mind-blowing accomplishment. It’s probably one of the reasons there are a lot of atheist programmers (trying to get back on topic…).

(Parrotlover, I’ll see your geek out and raise you!)

It really is amazing to consider just how advanced many ancient civilizations were. In addition to the Egyptians, there were the Minoans, who out-Romed the Romans in many ways. There were the Mayans and the Incans, whose cultures not only made tremendous strides in astronomy and agriculture, but also managed to thrive and flourish in delicate ecosystems for centuries without putting too much pressure on the environment around them. The Chinese (don’t ask me which dynasty or dynasties were responsible) built the largest wall on Earth, and they weren’t even worried about Mexicans sneaking in illegally!

Yet many people arrogantly, perhaps with even a touch of racism, assume that these cultures were far too “primitive” to know their asses from holes in the ground. These people existed, in their own unique ways, for far longer than what we think of as Western Civilization has been around, and they did it, incidentally, without knowing dick about Jesus or that stupid ark.

Whoa, I got to geek out on BoF. Sorry for straying so far. I guess back on topic, I’m more impressed with implementation than just specs. Indeed, if somebody figures that out without boiling oceans, we will have superceded magic, aliens, and all that.