MPJ

Part of Serbia below the Danube River is pretty mountainous, with complex geology, especially in the eastern parts where the Carpathian and Balkan mountains collided and over eons formed the Serbian Carpathians, with a total of 14 independent mountain ranges in existence today. These rocks date back to the Proterozoic Eon (2.5 billion–541 million years ago), with limestones and dolomites mainly formed from late Jurassic to early Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago. There are dozens of large caves within these mountains, and many have tourist paths built to visit and admire their beauty and history. Two of them we visited last week, and they both gave us extraordinary experiences and impressions. However, the first cave in this blog story belongs to the one formed in the foothills of an ancient volcano of the nowadays mountain of Bukulja in western Serbia, although the recent paper posted a theory that the mountain is much younger (15 million years ago) and instead formed i...

There is a period of time we are familiar with the acronym "BC". It stands, of course, for "Before Christ", the period before the famous tale about the origin of Christian religion. But this time goes far behind Jesus. Far beyond the origin of all monotheistic religions. It goes even before the eons when our ancestors knew gods in plural and to the ages when modern humans started their everlasting and ongoing endeavors. The time in prehistory occupied with endless wonders of surrounding nature without firm beliefs but surely filled with many invisible divine spirits and mysterious stars. Due to the illiteracy of the period, there's almost nothing tangible we could use to gain full knowledge of what early society really looked like, and even though we know a great deal about those times only by analyzing cave walls, fossil records, and DNA samples, in order to describe one early settlement we still must use lots of imagination and scientific guesses. Pers...

Have you ever thought about what you would be or do if you were born at different ages? Well, the future is uncertain, but even so, I would most likely do some technical and innovative things. For example, if society evolved into living in the void of space, I would definitely try to find a place aboard some research ship or orbital station. In the plausibility of some futuristic global society, my place would be not so different than today; only my programming skills would probably be diverted from preposterous business projects into something more substantial and useful in science or engineering. But in the spirit of today's post, lets travel to the past and check several old ages. Two centuries ago, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, I would most definitely have been involved in the machine invention process. A couple of centuries before that, in Leonardo's time, I would probably be hunted by the church for my free-thinking ideas that would, most likely, contradict ...

Let's assume you are in possession of a time travel device or some fringe wormhole portal with possibility to take you way backwards in time and back. If I had one, I would probably turn myself into some sort of time paparazzi and returned with tons of high quality digital photographs of history events, places and people. Well, never mind that, time travel always opens lots of questions, but in light of today's 'what-if' thought experiment, let me ask you one question. So, what would you do, if you, during your time travels, stumbled into some sort of natural disaster in the middle of some tribal settlement of late stone age, around, say 7000 years ago and realized there was just one survivor - a small boy, around 2 years old, endlessly crying in the bottom of his destroyed tent? After little hesitation, you realized you are his only hope so you took the boy and went through the portal with him back into our time. What do you think will happen with the boy? Would he l...