Monday, January 6, 2014

Human Achievement…..

As a child of the 60's I have seen some amazing things so far in my brief stay on this planet.

Color TV, push button phones, cell phones, computers, satellite TV, the list goes on and on. My grandmother used to tell me how excited they were when they saw airplanes flying overhead. They remembered when TV was first available in black & white. In college we used to listen to old time radio shows late at night with the lights off. Lamont Cranston used to scare me silly.

This got me to thinking…..What has been the greatest human achievement of all time?

I first started by thinking that this would be a generational question. Some dipshit kid born in the 90s might say the Playstation 4 is the answer. My generation may say putting a man on the Moon. Organized religion has been mentioned as man's finest invention. I guess the fact that probably half the wars and a good deal of all the untimely human deaths since humanity has began could be blamed on religion. So that can't be it.

A good candidate might be the controversial ability of our species to genetically modify food crops to alleviate starvation. Regardless of a few uninformed idiotic activists, this might be the one I would rank highest. The development of fertilizer and maybe insecticides could be a close second. The discovery of yeast fermentation to brew beer would be a good candidate as well. The Bikini? That's gotta rank up there also.

I suppose we will never know as long as we are stuck in our current frame of reference. We can look backwards in time and see events and inventions that have changed mankind's future for those who were alive then. This requires us to move forward in time to extrapolate what we do now, or have done, that will be the defining moment in our collective human history.

According to Pierre Boulle, in 700,000 (seven hundred thousand) years, when the dominant species on Earth will be the Ape and humans will be hunted as crop destroying pests, we may be able to get an idea.

Buried deep inside a cave, high on a cliff face over looking the ocean lies the answer. It will be as shocking to you as the end of the iconic movie I am stealing this idea from.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, fearless readers of all ages. The greatest achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens is…..

Reynolds Crock Pot Liners.

And here you assumed Deep Thought was the only one who could answer the really big questions.

Your Welcome.