MPJ

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...

Last year, during our visit to the Cretan site of Knossos and their wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated in large part to one of the greatest peaceful periods in human history, I didn't hide admiration for the old Minoans and their way of life. I even said I would move to Crete without second thoughts if I had a time machine, mainly to avoid hostility of the world order we are currently living in today. At the time, considering only the European continent, I was under the impression that cultures like Minoan were rare and the Bronze Age society we glimpsed on Crete was maybe walking on the edge of being the only one in the history of mankind. To say the least, I couldn't be more wrong. Only a couple of millennia before the late Neolithic period, known as the Chalcolithic or simply the Copper Age, there was an old European society that lived for centuries and also flourished in peaceful harmony and perfect equilibrium with nature, themselves, and their immediate land, where t...

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...

There were lots of breakthroughs in human history until this date. Some were instant and recognisable events or technological inventions and some were slow evolutionary processes in history of our species. Whatever they were, the outcome was always reshaped course of mankind entirely. In our own time one of those is no doubt learning how to split the atom and very invention of nuclear bomb. We are still living in the post-turbulence time of that latest breakthrough that has potential to rise us from the Earth toward the stars. Some would say that it is still unknown whether this one is more of a civilization killer event or true entrance into another phase of humanity. We will wait and see. Either way, it is breakthrough, nevertheless. In early human history there was one similar invention that had the same uncertainty. It was called "Neolithic Revolution" and it happened in the middle of the Stone Age. And yes, even though we are still here, consequences of this invention ar...