I would have included the "C" programming language, Wordstar, and Visicalc. I am not sure that small desktop computers would have caught on in buisness without the early applications like Wordstar and Visicalc. If I have to explain the impact of the C language then there just isn't any use in debating with you.
You could also include integrated circuits. I used to work on discreet systems and LSI/VLSI changed the world. It was no fun working hardware any mosre so I became a programmer.
I think that is what Curriki is doing. http://www.curriki.org/ Except that the courses don't have to be on DVD. They are also concentrating on K-12 at this time. You still might want to take a look. They are specifically trying to replace text books with open source multimedia lessons. Please consider becoming a contributing member.
It turns out that cows produce many times more methane than humans do. We are keeping more cows now days than before but many less bison are in the wild. Cows produce large amounts of methane due to the way they digest their food with multiple stomachs.
One large volcanic eruption produces more CO2 than we would produce in a hundred years at our current rate of production. These large eruptions happen quite frequently.
This is really a little off topic but Al Gore uses 20 times more energy at his house than the average American home. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6401489.stm
You of course are probably skeptical about these observations. Look it up.
Would the Sun be heating up or cooling down?
If the Sun were becoming less energetic, cooling down, would it put out more energy in the infrared spectrum as opposed to the higher visible and ultraviolet bandwidths? There could be a difference not only in the heat it puts out but also the other types of radiation it produces. What would happen to plant life if there was more or less ultraviolet energy available for photosynthesis? No plants = no food. Maybe just looking at heat output is a bit short sighted. What is the change in power for the other parts of the radiation spectrum?
I wonder if you could send a relatively small package of micro-robots that would be a complete mining and manufacturing colony? This colony could then build larger robots who in turn would build larger robots for several generations until you had a mining and manufacturing colony capable of building structures for human habitation and of course new micro-robot colony packages to be sent to other planets and the asteroid belt. A kind of robotic evolution.
You would start by designing the end state and work your way backwards designing through successive generations until your design reached the initially deployed micro-robot colony.
The sun not only changes in intensity but in frequency of the radiated energy. There may also be more or less ultraviolet energy available for plant and plankton life to use. The decrease or increase in plant life do to frequency shifts could account for another cycle. There is also the evidence for magnetic and physical pole changes.
The north and south poles that form our current planetary axis have not always been in existence. The axis was located at various other locations in the past. The earth is not a perfect sphere and it bulges in the middle. The earth quakes induced by a change in axis have in the past, and will in the future, dwarf all other quakes that we humans have seen and documented.
Do not forget about asteroids and their impact when they strike the earth. There may also be a large cloud of them that are orbiting the sun on a much longer cycle as reflected in mass extinctions documented in the fossil records over the last several hundred million years. What if there is a large cloud that cycles through our earths orbit every 40 or 50 million years and wipes the planetary species out almost completely? Imagine a few million smaller and several larger rocks hitting us as that cloud passes.
There is much more to all this than we can imagine. Maybe our current global warmining is a pimple in the scope of our planets health cycle.
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I would have included the "C" programming language, Wordstar, and Visicalc. I am not sure that small desktop computers would have caught on in buisness without the early applications like Wordstar and Visicalc. If I have to explain the impact of the C language then there just isn't any use in debating with you.
You could also include integrated circuits. I used to work on discreet systems and LSI/VLSI changed the world. It was no fun working hardware any mosre so I became a programmer.
I think that is what Curriki is doing. http://www.curriki.org/ Except that the courses don't have to be on DVD. They are also concentrating on K-12 at this time. You still might want to take a look. They are specifically trying to replace text books with open source multimedia lessons. Please consider becoming a contributing member.
It turns out that cows produce many times more methane than humans do. We are keeping more cows now days than before but many less bison are in the wild. Cows produce large amounts of methane due to the way they digest their food with multiple stomachs. One large volcanic eruption produces more CO2 than we would produce in a hundred years at our current rate of production. These large eruptions happen quite frequently. This is really a little off topic but Al Gore uses 20 times more energy at his house than the average American home. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6401489.stm You of course are probably skeptical about these observations. Look it up.
Would the Sun be heating up or cooling down? If the Sun were becoming less energetic, cooling down, would it put out more energy in the infrared spectrum as opposed to the higher visible and ultraviolet bandwidths? There could be a difference not only in the heat it puts out but also the other types of radiation it produces. What would happen to plant life if there was more or less ultraviolet energy available for photosynthesis? No plants = no food. Maybe just looking at heat output is a bit short sighted. What is the change in power for the other parts of the radiation spectrum?
I wonder if you could send a relatively small package of micro-robots that would be a complete mining and manufacturing colony? This colony could then build larger robots who in turn would build larger robots for several generations until you had a mining and manufacturing colony capable of building structures for human habitation and of course new micro-robot colony packages to be sent to other planets and the asteroid belt. A kind of robotic evolution. You would start by designing the end state and work your way backwards designing through successive generations until your design reached the initially deployed micro-robot colony.
The sun not only changes in intensity but in frequency of the radiated energy. There may also be more or less ultraviolet energy available for plant and plankton life to use. The decrease or increase in plant life do to frequency shifts could account for another cycle. There is also the evidence for magnetic and physical pole changes.
The north and south poles that form our current planetary axis have not always been in existence. The axis was located at various other locations in the past. The earth is not a perfect sphere and it bulges in the middle. The earth quakes induced by a change in axis have in the past, and will in the future, dwarf all other quakes that we humans have seen and documented.
Do not forget about asteroids and their impact when they strike the earth. There may also be a large cloud of them that are orbiting the sun on a much longer cycle as reflected in mass extinctions documented in the fossil records over the last several hundred million years. What if there is a large cloud that cycles through our earths orbit every 40 or 50 million years and wipes the planetary species out almost completely? Imagine a few million smaller and several larger rocks hitting us as that cloud passes.
There is much more to all this than we can imagine. Maybe our current global warmining is a pimple in the scope of our planets health cycle.