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State of the Planet: 2019 Edition
6 years ago
Alright everyone, it's time once again for Helios' annual wrap up of the orbit we've just taken around the ol' Sun. This is the State of the Planet as we close out 2019.
Now before I begin I want to state that, unlike seemingly everyone else, I'll only be looking back at things that happened this year* as opposed to this decade. For those wondering why, it's because I want to save my decade wrap up for when the decade actually ends. And as anyone who was around for Y2K can tell you, because there was no Year 0, the next decade doesn't actually begin until 2021.
Which means my decade wrap-up will be a year from today (and thus quite lame) but at least I'll be consistent.
So, with that in mind, let's take a look back at what happened this year:
*Same-sex marriage became legal in Austria, Taiwan, Ecuador and Northern Ireland.
*Pope Francis became the first Pope to visit the Arabian peninsula.
*Avengers: Endgame became the highest grossing movie of all time.
*A 17 year old in Britain was the first person to receive a genetically modified phage therapy to treat a drug-resistant infection.
*Jane Goodall won the Luxembourg Prize for Outstanding Environmental Peace.
*Humpback whales recovered from near-extinction in the South Atlantic.
*71 new species were discovered this year.
*The Antarctic ozone hole was the smallest on record since its discovery.
*One third of the world's electricity is now powered by renewable energy sources.
*A record number of African American women (34) graduated from West Point.
*The Indian Navy welcomed its first-ever woman pilot.
*The European Commission elected its first female President.
*Chicago elected its first African-American woman mayor.
*Ali Stroker became the first wheelchair-bound actor to win a Tony award for her role in "Oklahoma!"
*Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came to an end with strong finales (2/3 anyway).
*The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, making it 6 rings for Tom Brady.
*The Washington Nationals won their first World Series.
*The US Women's National Team won the 2019 World Cup, their fourth title.
*A new form of messenger RNA Aerosol was developed, which could be helpful for treating diseases like Cystic Fibrosis.
*Malaria was eliminated from Algeria and Argentina.
*Two men may have been cured of HIV.
*Child mortality rates are at an all time low.
*Researchers at the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley developed new 3D Printing methods.
*Waymo has chosen Michigan to be the site of the world's first autonomous vehicle production factory.
*All 16 gigabytes of Wikipedia were encoded into synthetic DNA.
*The US Government authorized funds for Geoengineering.
*Video was taken by NOAA researches of a Giant Squid in the Gulf of Mexico.
*SpaceX's Dragon 2 and Boeing's Starliner capsules made their first flights.
*The first all-women Spacewalk was conducted on the International Space Station.
*India, Israel and China launched probes to the Moon, with China making the first soft landing on the far side.
*Water was detected on Mars and K2-18b, a Super-Earth 110 light years away.
*The New Horizons space probe made a fly by of the KBO Arrokoth (then known as Ultima Thule)
*For the first time ever, a Black Hole was imaged.
The above is a snapshot of where I'm at right now, the final hours of 2019. You, dear reader, are in the future. Let this list above serve as a reminder of what we've experienced in this past year.
Now the time has come for me to give a little speech to tie up everything that we've been through in 2019. Usually this is the part where I have trouble, but the truth is that I've known for a while what word I want to use to describe this past year.
The word of the year is "sacrifice."
This is a word that isn't supposed to be thrown around lightly, but I feel it's lost its meaning. When sons of certain politicians equate their lost business opportunities to what the soldiers buried in Arlington gave up...I get the feeling that the meaning has been cheapened.
As Captain America said to Tony Stark, it's about fighting for someone besides yourself. It's about laying down on the wire to let the others crawl over you.
It's about giving up your youth to bring attention to a coming environmental disaster, as we saw with Greta Thunburg.
It's about going into a disaster zone to save one life, as we saw with the first responders who ventured into areas ravaged by Hurricanes or Earthquakes, or battled raging wildfires in the United States and Australia.
It's about risking your own life in the name of standing up for your rights and liberties, as we saw with the protesters in Hong Kong.
It's about nearly destroying yourself to save an entire continent, if not a planet, as we saw re-enacted in HBO's Chernobyl.
As we here in America prepare to once again ask ourselves what course our nation should take, I feel that we've lost sight of the sacrifices the Founders made to get us to this point. We seem less concerned with the prosperity of our nation and more concerned with the prosperity of those that we happen to like, with the misfortune of those who disagree with us not only accepted, but desired. We've gone from E pluribus, unum to "my side needs to win no matter what, fuck the others."
This is not to say we are averse to the notion of sacrifice. We're perfectly willing to give up something for our friends and family as well as anyone who happens to share the same views. But I feel that we're not willing to go further than that. If we are to continue to proclaim ourselves, as we indeed are, the defenders of liberty and freedom wherever they may exist in the world, then we need to uphold ourselves to those values. We need to be willing to make sacrifices not just for ourselves and our "side", whatever that may be, but for all Americans.
And more importantly, all citizens of this Earth must be willing to make a sacrifice not just for their city or country or race or ideology, but for all of humanity. This is the only way for us to fulfill our destiny. The future of our species awaits us among the stars, and I know that the only way to get there is together.
So as we head into the true final year of this decade, consider what you are willing to give up and who you're willing to give it up for. And remember that the time will come when we all will have to decide whether or not to make a sacrifice in the name of something that's greater than all of us. What that sacrifice is and whether or not you choose to make it is for you to decide.
Just know that somewhere out there in a sea of 400 billion Suns is a world just like this one.
We owe it to ourselves and our children yet unborn to give our species the best possible chance to visit. Just in case it turns out to have Jedi or Ponies.
Have a great day, a great week, a great month and a great 2020.
See you next year.
Now before I begin I want to state that, unlike seemingly everyone else, I'll only be looking back at things that happened this year* as opposed to this decade. For those wondering why, it's because I want to save my decade wrap up for when the decade actually ends. And as anyone who was around for Y2K can tell you, because there was no Year 0, the next decade doesn't actually begin until 2021.
Which means my decade wrap-up will be a year from today (and thus quite lame) but at least I'll be consistent.
So, with that in mind, let's take a look back at what happened this year:
*Same-sex marriage became legal in Austria, Taiwan, Ecuador and Northern Ireland.
*Pope Francis became the first Pope to visit the Arabian peninsula.
*Avengers: Endgame became the highest grossing movie of all time.
*A 17 year old in Britain was the first person to receive a genetically modified phage therapy to treat a drug-resistant infection.
*Jane Goodall won the Luxembourg Prize for Outstanding Environmental Peace.
*Humpback whales recovered from near-extinction in the South Atlantic.
*71 new species were discovered this year.
*The Antarctic ozone hole was the smallest on record since its discovery.
*One third of the world's electricity is now powered by renewable energy sources.
*A record number of African American women (34) graduated from West Point.
*The Indian Navy welcomed its first-ever woman pilot.
*The European Commission elected its first female President.
*Chicago elected its first African-American woman mayor.
*Ali Stroker became the first wheelchair-bound actor to win a Tony award for her role in "Oklahoma!"
*Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came to an end with strong finales (2/3 anyway).
*The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, making it 6 rings for Tom Brady.
*The Washington Nationals won their first World Series.
*The US Women's National Team won the 2019 World Cup, their fourth title.
*A new form of messenger RNA Aerosol was developed, which could be helpful for treating diseases like Cystic Fibrosis.
*Malaria was eliminated from Algeria and Argentina.
*Two men may have been cured of HIV.
*Child mortality rates are at an all time low.
*Researchers at the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley developed new 3D Printing methods.
*Waymo has chosen Michigan to be the site of the world's first autonomous vehicle production factory.
*All 16 gigabytes of Wikipedia were encoded into synthetic DNA.
*The US Government authorized funds for Geoengineering.
*Video was taken by NOAA researches of a Giant Squid in the Gulf of Mexico.
*SpaceX's Dragon 2 and Boeing's Starliner capsules made their first flights.
*The first all-women Spacewalk was conducted on the International Space Station.
*India, Israel and China launched probes to the Moon, with China making the first soft landing on the far side.
*Water was detected on Mars and K2-18b, a Super-Earth 110 light years away.
*The New Horizons space probe made a fly by of the KBO Arrokoth (then known as Ultima Thule)
*For the first time ever, a Black Hole was imaged.
The above is a snapshot of where I'm at right now, the final hours of 2019. You, dear reader, are in the future. Let this list above serve as a reminder of what we've experienced in this past year.
Now the time has come for me to give a little speech to tie up everything that we've been through in 2019. Usually this is the part where I have trouble, but the truth is that I've known for a while what word I want to use to describe this past year.
The word of the year is "sacrifice."
This is a word that isn't supposed to be thrown around lightly, but I feel it's lost its meaning. When sons of certain politicians equate their lost business opportunities to what the soldiers buried in Arlington gave up...I get the feeling that the meaning has been cheapened.
As Captain America said to Tony Stark, it's about fighting for someone besides yourself. It's about laying down on the wire to let the others crawl over you.
It's about giving up your youth to bring attention to a coming environmental disaster, as we saw with Greta Thunburg.
It's about going into a disaster zone to save one life, as we saw with the first responders who ventured into areas ravaged by Hurricanes or Earthquakes, or battled raging wildfires in the United States and Australia.
It's about risking your own life in the name of standing up for your rights and liberties, as we saw with the protesters in Hong Kong.
It's about nearly destroying yourself to save an entire continent, if not a planet, as we saw re-enacted in HBO's Chernobyl.
As we here in America prepare to once again ask ourselves what course our nation should take, I feel that we've lost sight of the sacrifices the Founders made to get us to this point. We seem less concerned with the prosperity of our nation and more concerned with the prosperity of those that we happen to like, with the misfortune of those who disagree with us not only accepted, but desired. We've gone from E pluribus, unum to "my side needs to win no matter what, fuck the others."
This is not to say we are averse to the notion of sacrifice. We're perfectly willing to give up something for our friends and family as well as anyone who happens to share the same views. But I feel that we're not willing to go further than that. If we are to continue to proclaim ourselves, as we indeed are, the defenders of liberty and freedom wherever they may exist in the world, then we need to uphold ourselves to those values. We need to be willing to make sacrifices not just for ourselves and our "side", whatever that may be, but for all Americans.
And more importantly, all citizens of this Earth must be willing to make a sacrifice not just for their city or country or race or ideology, but for all of humanity. This is the only way for us to fulfill our destiny. The future of our species awaits us among the stars, and I know that the only way to get there is together.
So as we head into the true final year of this decade, consider what you are willing to give up and who you're willing to give it up for. And remember that the time will come when we all will have to decide whether or not to make a sacrifice in the name of something that's greater than all of us. What that sacrifice is and whether or not you choose to make it is for you to decide.
Just know that somewhere out there in a sea of 400 billion Suns is a world just like this one.
We owe it to ourselves and our children yet unborn to give our species the best possible chance to visit. Just in case it turns out to have Jedi or Ponies.
Have a great day, a great week, a great month and a great 2020.
See you next year.
What I do have time for apparently is to ramble about how I love the nerdy debate on whether or not the decade starts on 2020 or 2021. Personally, I lean toward the former, because "the 20's" is mostly used for talking colloquially; ie, almost everyone thinks that 1990 was in "the 90's," and not even a solid majority of historians disagree. But there's only a debate at all because the modern calendar started on a 1 instead of a 0, and when you're talking about scales like millennia or centuries that seems to matter more, and with decades it's most people talking about 10 year chunks of modern history that many living people lived through? How silly it all is. :D You could say that this whole debate... tickles my fancy~
Also, long time no speak to! I hope you're doing well over there! <3
Which would make today December 31 ,12019 which doesn't sound quite as neat.
And yeah, speaking of tickles, it's been ages! Hope you're also doing okay :>
Ah yes so many things happend , wasen't there a satelite that actually has now gone beyond the now know universe?? I think i remember something like that or the cava is eating those many needed braincells.
What theres a debate going on the date?? I say those who think it's 20 , celebrate it and those who have it on 21 let them have theirs at that time. Now go out and party hard wooooooo.
Have a good one and awesome new year.
Oh look Fa upgraded.
As for your list, I like how it's kept to mostly positives, achievements, and progressions, rather than negatives, failures, and setbacks. It's always easier to have a healthy outlook for the future with a glass half-full mentality!
I pray 2020 becomes a positive turning point for both our countries, because god knows how entertaining the past few years have been for both parties across the pond.