Vielleicht gibt es diese Seite ja auch auf DeutschThe history of the world so far
In the beginning there was nothing. And there was such an overwhelming lot of it that it filled all there was which, of course, was not particularly difficult as there was not very much for it to fill, nothing indeed.
Then there was a bang. It was that big a bang that some 15 billion years later scientists would call it the big bang and many would also believe that it had created itself which did at least sound more sensible than the idea that it had been created by nothing [1]. There were also a few who tended to say that -- considering the enormous extent of this bang -- He must have created Himself but they were the guys who drank their tea without milk but with sugar and therefore could not be taken seriously anyway.
After this remarkable event the whole of creation faced a long period of confusion. Fortunately it did not have the faintest notion of what was going on until eventually it gave birth to the first creatures to have enough brain cells to consider themselves intelligent, unaware of the fact that they actually were not. These people will however not play any further role in this story for several reasons, one of them being that they were called Borquerates in their own language and this name translates into something unspeakably obscene on the planet that will happen to be most important shortly. It is not yet the right time to introduce it though because we first have to come to the age of the formation of stars and planets. Nowadays everybody knows that several billion years ago uncountable grains of stardust gathered in certain areas of space and started to spin faster and faster thus sucking in ever more dust -- not unlike gigantic vortices -- until finally they collapsed into such things as stars and planets. What most people do not know is that they are wrong and those who do usually prefer to keep their mouths shut.
Let us for the time being just accept the seemingly undeniable reality that by some means our solar system and the likes of it came into existence. Everything that happened from then on is merely history [3]: some things got hot, others cooled down, water eventually started to obey what would soon be known as the law of gravity and change position from the skies to the oceans, got struck by lightning and thus became home to the first innocent monocellular lifeforms which soon evolved into ever more complicated but in turn less innocent beings until finally the first human beings frightendly fell out of the trees, being humiliated by the apes for the first time out of many. As we all know they would soon take revenge.
The human beings [4] soon discovered that there were several ways of connecting stones and sticks to other animals' heads and hearts and quickly became the most dangerous species on our planet. It was not long before they invented another kind of entertainment which basically involved killing your friends, neighbours or superiors. Within very short time the people became that good at this that they needed a name for their new occupation and for obvious reasons they called it war. It was war that drove them to develop the most advanced weapons and other products of civilization and by another ironic turn of history even to the temporary introduction of democracy [5]. By the middle of the twentieth century however, mankind had to accept that they had gone a few steps to far and that for their purposes of warfare the invention of atom bombs had been a bad move. Some people like Ronald Reagan and Michail Gorbatschow decided that if they simply turned back time and thereby restored a state without weapons of wholesale destruction they could go on fighting as cheerfully as before. Others like Deng Xiaoping or Mr Milosevicz found out that if they made war against their own citizens they needed nothing but a bunch of well trained policemen or soldiers and a determination not to tolerate anyone saying a word against them. So after all war was still an option and it seemed to be only a question of time as to when the human beings would at last perish from the earth.
On first view it may seem surprising that the invention that turned out to be most dangerous for mankind was not war but television. For several millennia the human culture had depended on scientific progress. Whenever people got too bored of the status quo some more or less reputable genius came up with a stunning new idea and everyone was happy again for some years. The bad thing about tv was that people did not feel bored any more and therefore there was obviously no need to improve the situation any further. As we all know, stagnation leads to decay and it was not long before a large percentage of the earth's population [6] was pointlessly spending day after day in front of their tellies, completely unable to fulfill any task more complicated than operating the remote control. The automobile industry collapsed first. Not because of a lack of qualified workers but simply because there were too few people left who were capable of driving and who therefore would buy cars. Computers were next. The governments helplessly tried to take steps against this horrifying turn by introducing new jobs like "remote control engineers" who could be called to change the batteries of one's remote control but soon there was noone left manufacturing tv sets and so this turned out to be a dead end, too. The social and economical crisis caused by virtually everyone losing their jobs led to civil war-like conditions and within no more than ten years the western world was falling into chaos. Beneficiaries of this development were those people who had never really participated in what we used to call civilization but managed to live a mostly undisturbed life in some backwater niche of the globe. Greenpeace would have been delighted to hear that by the year 2077 the northern American upper class was red indian and that Africa was at once the richest of all continents. Sadly Greenpeace did not even exist long enough to see the end of General Motors or the final shut down of Tchernobyl several years earlier.
Footnotes
[1] Or the nothing although not all people
were sure it really was neccessary to specifically point out its being this
particular nothing as by this time nobody knew how to distinguish between two
different nothings [2].
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[2] If these existed at all.
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[3] At least that's what
historians say. They do of course not care about the fact that there are
billions of billions of other suns and billions of billions of planets orbiting
them and they do not have the least interest in admitting that the past of many
of these worlds is far more exciting than that of the earth. Luckily we are no
historians.
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[4] Or people as I will often call them for convinience.
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[5] In the first place democracy only implied equal rights for
all male non-slaves of certain towns but it nevertheless became a paragon for
many societies in the second half of the second millennium.
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[6] ie the earth's humanoid population.
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(C)1999 Richard Brauer
