PROJECT - The 10 most important events of the human kind referat

unteanu Alexandru

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The 10 most important events of the human kind

The Tragic Story of the Titanic

Before the fate of the Titanic, Morgan Robertson wrote a book called The Wreck of the Titan in 1898. The ship predicted 'unsinkable' sank. Many lives were lost due to too few lifeboats. This story predicted the fate of the Titanic.

In 1907, J. B. Ismay, president of White Star Lines, and Lord Pirrie, chairman of Harland & Wolff shipbuilders, discussed to plan three ocean liners, one of which was the Titanic. The Titanic would become the biggest ship of her day.                      

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, commanded by Captain Edward J. Smith, set sail. On April 11, 1912, there were seven warning messages about icebergs on the Titanic's course. These messages were noted but were not taken into account. At around 11:40 p.m. Sunday, April 14, the Titanic hit an iceberg. (The picture shows distress flares after the Titanic hit the iceberg). By 2:18 a.m., April 15, 1912, the Titanic submerged into the murky water and sank to her final resting place.

The Discovery

The Titanic was discovered by Robert Ballard (left) in August 1985. With the help of Sonar and Agro, Ballard and his research team found the wreck. Argo was a small submarine (more like a sled) with lights and cameras. It was operated by the research team above her in her mother ship, Knorr. With the help of Argo's cameras, the Titanic was found. Without the use of Argo, the Titanic may not have been found.
After the discovery, one year later Ballard and his research team travelled back to take a closer look. They used a small submarine, Alvin, to get a first hand look at the wreck. To explore the Titanic closer, a crew member inside Alvin manipulated Jason, a robotic mini sub. Jason was the first to explore and see the Titanic since 1912!
Below is how the Titanic looks at her final resting place. On the left is the stern (rear of boat) and on the right is the bow (front of the boat).

WHY: I think that the sinking of the Titanic is one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because it marked the people and the history.

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden is both one of the CIA's most wanted men and a hero to many young people in the Arab world.

He and his associates were already being sought by the US on charges of international terrorism, including in connection with the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Africa and last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

In May this year a US jury convicted four men believed to be linked with bin Laden of plotting the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Bin Laden, an immensely wealthy and private man, has been granted a safe haven by Afghanistan's ruling Taleban movement.

During his time in hiding, he has called for a holy war against the US, and for the killing of Americans and Jews. He is reported to be able to rally around him up to 3,000 fighters.

He is also suspected of helping to set up Islamic training centres to prepare soldiers to fight in Chechnya and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Sponsored by US and Pakistan

His power is founded on a personal fortune earned by his family's construction business in Saudi Arabia.

Born in Saudi Arabia to a Yemeni family, Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in 1979 to fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Afghan jihad was backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

He received security training from the CIA itself, according to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian.

While in Afghanistan, he founded the Maktab al-Khidimat (MAK), which recruited fighters from around the world and imported equipment to aid the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army.

Egyptians, Lebanese, Turks and others - numbering thousands in bin Laden's estimate - joined their Afghan Muslim brothers in the struggle against an ideology that spurned religion.

Turned against the US

After the Soviet withdrawal, the 'Arab Afghans', as bin Laden's faction came to be called, turned their fire against the US and its allies in the Middle East.

Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work in the family construction business, but was expelled in 1991 because of his anti-government activities there.

He spent the next five years in Sudan until US pressure prompted the Sudanese Government to expel him, whereupon bin Laden returned to Afghanistan.

Terrorism experts say bin Laden has been using his millions to fund attacks against the US.

The US State Department calls him 'one of the most significant sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today'.

According to the US, bin Laden was involved in at least three major attacks - the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1996 killing of 19 US soldiers in Saudi Arabia, and the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Islamic front

BBC correspondent James Robbins says bin Laden had 'all but admitted involvement' in the Saudi Arabia killings.

Some experts say he is part of an international Islamic front, bringing together Saudi, Egyptian and other groups.

Their rallying cry is the liberation of Islam's three holiest places - Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

Analysts say bin Laden's organisation is very different from the groups that carried out bombings and hijackings in the past in that it is not a tightly knit group with a clear command structure but a loose coalition of groups operating across continents.

American officials believe bin Laden's associates may operate in over forty countries - in Europe and North America, as well as in the Middle East and Asia.

The few outsiders who have met bin Laden describe him as modest, almost shy. He rarely gives interviews.

He is believed to be in his 40s, and to have at least three wives.

WHY: I think his birth was one of the most important 10 events of the human kind because if there wasn't any Osama bin Laden, USA would not know how it is to fight to defend their territory.

The World Trade Center

Height: 1,368 and 1,362 feet (417 and 415 meters)
Owners: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Architect: Minoru Yamasaki, Emery Roth and Sons consulting
Engineer: John Skilling and Leslie Robertson of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson
Ground Breaking: August 5, 1966
Opened: 1970-73; April 4, 1973 ribbon cutting

The World Trade Center is more than its signature twin towers: it is a complex of seven buildings on 16-acres, constructed and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). The towers, One and Two World Trade Center, rise at the heart of the complex, each climbing more than 100 feet higher than the silver mast of the Empire State Building.

Construction of a world trade facility had been under consideration since the end of WWII. In the late 1950s the Port Authority took interest in the project and in 1962 fixed its site on the west side of Lower Manhattan on a superblock bounded by Vesey, Liberty, Church and West Streets. Architect Minoru Yamasaki was selected to design the project; architects Emery Roth & Sons handled production work, and, at the request of Yamasaki, the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson served as engineers.

The Port Authority envisioned a project with a total of 10 million square feet of office space. To achieve this, Yamasaki considered more than a hundred different building configurations before settling on the concept of twin towers and three lower-rise structures. Designed to be very tall to maximize the area of the plaza, the towers were initially to rise to only 80-90 stories. Only later was it decided to construct them as the world's tallest buildings, following a suggestion said to have originated with the Port Authority's public relations staff.

Yamasaki and engineers John Skilling and Les Robertson worked closely, and the relationship between the towersí design and structure is clear. Faced with the difficulties of building to unprecedented heights, the engineers employed an innovative structural model: a rigid 'hollow tube' of closely spaced steel columns with floor trusses extending across to a central core. The columns, finished with a silver-colored aluminum alloy, were 18 3/4' wide and set only 22' apart, making the towers appear from afar to have no windows at all.

Also unique to the engineering design were its core and elevator system. The twin towers were the first supertall buildings designed without any masonry. Worried that the intense air pressure created by the buildingsí high speed elevators might buckle conventional shafts, engineers designed a solution using a drywall system fixed to the reinforced steel core. For the elevators, to serve 110 stories with a traditional configuration would have required half the area of the lower stories be used for shaftways. Otis Elevators developed an express and local system, whereby passengers would change at 'sky lobbies' on the 44th and 78th floors, halving the number of shaftways.

Construction began in 1966 and cost an estimated $1.5 billion. One World Trade Center was ready for its first tenants in late 1970, though the upper stories were not completed until 1972; Two World Trade Center was finished in 1973. Excavation to bedrock 70 feet below produced the material for the Battery Park City landfill project in the Hudson River. When complete, the Center met with mixed reviews, but at 1,368 and 1,362 feet and 110 stories each, the twin towers were the world's tallest, and largest, buildings until the Sears Tower surpassed them both in 1974.

On the 11th of September 2001 The World Trade Center collapsed becaused it was struck by two civillian airplanes.

WHY: I think that this is one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because since then the interstate relations considerately changed.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

Charles Darwin, M.A.,

Fellow of the Royal, Geological, Linnæan, etc. societies; Author of Journal of researches during H. M. S. Beagle's Voyage round the world. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859

Slow process of change from one form to another, as in the evolution of the universe from its formation in the Big Bang to its present state, or in the evolution of life on Earth. Some Christians and Muslims deny the theory of evolution as conflicting with the belief that God created all things. English naturalist Charles Darwin assigned the main role in evolutionary change to natural selection acting on randomly occurring variations (now known to be produced by spontaneous changes or mutations in the genetic material of organisms).

Organic evolution traces the development of simple unicellular forms to more complex forms, ultimately to the flowering plants and vertebrate animals, including man. The Earth contains an immense diversity of living organisms: about a million different species of animals and half a million species of plants have so far been described. There is overwhelming evidence that this vast array arose by a gradual process of evolutionary divergence and not by individual acts of divine creation as described in the Book of Genesis. There are several lines of evidence: the fossil record, the existence of similarities or homologies between different groups of organisms, embryology, and geographical distribution.

The idea of continuous evolution in the living world can be traced as far back as Lucretius in the 1st century BC, but it did not gain wide acceptance until the 19th century, following the work of Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, English naturalist Charles Darwin, and English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. Darwin assigned the major role in evolutionary change to natural selection acting on randomly occurring variations. Natural selection occurs because those individuals better adapted to their particular environments reproduce more effectively, thus contributing their characteristics to future generations. The current theory of evolution, called neo-Darwinism , combines Darwin's theory with Austrian biologist Gregor Mendel's theories on genetics and Hugo de Vries's discovery of genetic mutation. Although neither the general concept of evolution nor the importance of natural selection is doubted by the vast majority of biologists, there remains dispute over other possible processes involved in evolutionary change. Besides natural selection and sexual selection , chance may play a large part in deciding which genes become characteristic of a population, a phenomenon called `genetic drift'. It is now also clear that evolutionary change does not always occur at a constant rate, but that the process can have long periods of relative stability interspersed with periods of rapid change. This has led to new theories, such as punctuated equilibrium model . See also adaptive radiation .

Although the broad outlines of the evolutionary sequence are known, much research is still necessary to fill in the details and to discover the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Evolution depends on the presence of heritable variations in a population which confer a selective advantage on the individuals displaying them. The phrase `survival of the fittest' is misleading since it implies the death of the `unfit' individuals. From an evolutionary point of view, fertility is much more important than survival since if one type regularly leaves more offspring than another, the frequency of the more fertile type in the population is bound to increase. Fertility depends on many things including general vigor, the length of the reproductive period and the ability to mate successfully. Heritable changes arise from genetic mutations which occur spontaneously in all organisms. Many investigations, which are currently being made into the genetic structures of living plant and animal populations, show the relative importance of mutations and isolation in the origin of new species. It is believed that the processes now occurring on a very small scale are the same as those which have caused the evolution of the major groups over a vast period of geological time. These studies will therefore throw light on the mechanism of evolution.

Evolution is a diagram by Charles Darwin of Galapagos finches, drawn during the voyage of the Beagle. On the Galapagos Islands, Darwin found a colony of finches that contained at least 14 distinct species, none of which existed on the continental mainland. He proposed that, in the isolated environment of the islands, the finches had evolved over many generations and were embroiled in a `survival of the fittest'.

WHY: I think the appearance of the book "Origin of Species" is one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because it lets us know from where begin.

The discovery of the telephone

Telephone Instrument for communicating by voice over long distances were invented by US inventor Alexander Graham Bell 1876. The transmitter (mouthpiece) consists of a carbon micro-phone, with a diaphragm that vibrates when a person speaks into it. The diaphragm vibrations compress grains of carbon to a greater or lesser extent, altering their resistance to an electric current passing through them. This sets up variable electrical signals, which travel along the telephone lines to the receiver of the person being called. There they cause the magnetism of an electromagnet to vary, making a diaphragm above the electromagnet vibrate and give out sound waves, which mirror those that entered the mouthpiece originally.

The Microphone Primary is a component in a sound-reproducing system, whereby the mechanical energy of sound waves is converted into electrical signals by means of a transducer. One of the simplest is the telephone receiver mouthpiece, invented by Scottish-US inventor Alexander Graham Bell in 1876; other types of microphone are used with broadcasting and sound-film apparatus.

Telephones have a carbon microphone, which reproduces only a narrow range of frequencies. For live music, a moving-coil microphone is often used. In it, a diaphragm that vibrates with sound waves moves a coil through a magnetic field, thus generating an electric current. The ribbon microphone combines the diaphragm and coil. The condenser microphone is most commonly used in recording and works by a capacitor.

Telecommunications and Communications over a distance is generally made by electronic means.

Long-distance voice communication was pioneered 1876 by Scottish scientist Alexander Graham Bell when he invented the telephone. Today it is possible to communicate with most countries by telephone cable, or by satellite or microwave link, with over 100,000 simultaneous conversations and several television channels being carried by the latest satellites. Integrated-Services Digital Network (ISDN) makes videophones and high-quality fax possible; the world's first large-scale center of ISDN began operating in Japan 1988. ISDN is a system that transmits voice and image data on a single transmission line by changing them into digital signals. The chief method of relaying long-distance calls on land is microwave radio transmission.

The first mechanical telecomunications systems were the semaphore and heliograph (using flashes of sunlight), invented in the mid-19th century, but the forerunner of the present telecommunications age was the electric telegraph. The earliest practicable telegraph instrument was invented by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain 1837 and used by railroad companies. In the US, Samuel Morse invented a signaling code, Morse code , which is still used, and a recording telegraph, first used commercially between England and France 1851. Following German physicist Heinrich Hertz's discoveries using electromagnetic waves, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi pioneered a `wireless' telegraph, ancestor of the radio. He established wireless communication between England and France 1899 and across the Atlantic 1901. The modern telegraph uses teleprinters to send coded messages along telecommunications lines. Telegraphs are keyboard-operated machines that transmit a five-unit Baudot code. The receiving teleprinter automatically prints the received message.

The drawback to long-distance voice communication via microwave radio transmission is that the transmissions follow a straight line from tower to tower, so that over the sea the system becomes impracticable. A solution was put forward 1945 by the science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, when he proposed a system of communications satellites in an orbit 35,900 km/22,300 mi above the equator, where they would circle the Earth in exactly 24 hours, and thus appear fixed in the sky. Such a system is now in operation internationally, by Intelsat . The satellites are called geostationary satellites (syncoms). The first to be successfully launched, by Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, was Syncom 2 in July 1963. Many such satellites are now in use, concentrated over heavy traffic areas such as the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. Telegraphy, telephony, and television transmissions are carried simultaneously by high-frequency radio waves. They are beamed to the satellites from large dish antennae or Earth stations, which connect with international networks. Recent advances include the use of fiber-optic cables consisting of fine fiberglass for telephone lines instead of the usual copper cables. The telecommunications signals are transmitted along the fibers on pulses of laser light.

telecommunications Satellite dish. Geostationary communications satellites over the Earth's equator which orbit in 24 hours permit connections between all points on the Earth's surface to be made using such dishes. Satellite dishes are commonly used by European households to receive television channels broadcast by satellite.

WHY: I think that the invention of the telephone was one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because now the telephone is an indispensable thing and it is part of our lives for some of us.

The Apollo program

The Apollo program is the US program to land human beings on the moon. Inaugurated May, 1961, by President J. Kennedy, the program suffered a serious setback in the preparatory phase when a fire broke out in the Apollo 1 space capsule (Jan. 27, 1967) during testing at Cape Kennedy. Three astronauts in the capsule were killed, the first deaths of US astronauts. Preparations for the moon landing included a number of preliminary missions and several moon landings were eventually made. Apollo 8 was the first manned moon orbit (Dec. 1968), and Apollo 11 was the first moon landing (July 20, 1969). In the latter, astronaut N. Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Apollo 17 (Dec., 1972) was the last flight of the program. Apollo project US space project to land a person on the Moon, achieved 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong was the first to set foot there. He was accompanied on the Moon's surface by Col Edwin E Aldrin, Jr; Michael Collins remained in the orbiting command module.

The program was announced 1961 by President Kennedy. The world's most powerful rocket, Saturn V, was built to launch the Apollo spacecraft, which carried three astronauts. When the spacecraft was in orbit around the Moon, two astronauts would descend to the surface in a lunar module to take samples of rock and set up experiments that would send data back to Earth. The first Apollo mission carrying a crew, Apollo 7, Oct 1968, was a test flight in orbit around the Earth. After three other preparatory flights, Apollo 11 made the first lunar landing. Five more crewed landings followed the last 1972. The total cost of the program was over $24 billion.

Apollo project The crew of Apollo 11 , who made the first lunar landing in July 1969 (from left to right): Neil Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, command module pilot; and Edwin `Buzz' Aldrin Jr, lunar module pilot. While Armstrong and Aldrin actually set foot on the Moon's surface, Collins remained in orbit in the command module.

Apollo-Soyuz test project Joint US-Soviet space mission in which an Apollo and a Soyuz craft docked while in orbit around the Earth on 17 July 1975. The craft remained attached for two days and crew members were able to move from one craft to the other through an air lock attached to the nose of the Apollo. The mission was designed to test rescue procedures as well as having political significance.

In the Apollo craft were Thomas Patten Stafford (commander), Vance DeVoe Brand, and Donald Kent Slayton; the Soyuz vehicle carried Alexei Archipovich Leonov (commander) and Valeri Nikolayevich Kubasov. The project began with the signing of an agreement May 1972 by US president Nixon and Soviet premier Kosygin.

WHY: I think that going in space is one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because it opened new doors to the technology development.

Christopher Columbus

Genoese navigator in the service of Spain, credited with the discovery (1492) of America. Though the Vikings are believed to have previously landed (c1000) in North America, it was Columbus  voyage that opened the great epoch of European exploration and colonization in the New World. Columbus became an experienced navigator while serving the Genoese and Portuguese, and his idea of sailing west to Asia was not new. It was not until 1492, however, that the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to support his venture. He left Spain (Aug. 3, 1492) with three ships, (the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta ) and landed on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas Oct. 12, just over two months later. Believing he had reached islands east of Japan, he briefly explored the Caribbean and then returned to Spain later in October. Three other voyages followed (1493, 1498, 1502), on which he discovered other Caribbean islands and reached the South American coast. Unable to adequately administer the Spanish colony in the New World he was removed as governor (1500), and died shortly after his disastrous fourth voyage (1502 04).

Leif Ericson Ericsson, Erikson, Eriksson) fl. 1000 was a norse explorer, son of Eric the Red. Raised among the Norse colonists in Greenland, he was converted to Christianity while visiting Norway. Sent back to Greenland to convert the colonists, he apparently went off course and landed somewhere in North America, which he called Vinland. He wintered there and then went on to Greenland. By another account, he first went to Greenland and then sailed westward on a voyage of discovery.

WHY: I think that the discovery of America is one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because if there was no America we would not have all the advanced technology and who knows what the world would be like.

World War Two

Appearing before the Nazi Reichstag (Parliament) on the sixth anniversary of his coming to power, Adolf Hitler made a speech commemorating that event and also made a public threat against the Jews

'In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!' Adolf Hitler - January 30, 1939

Nazi Euthanasia

In October of 1939 amid the turmoil of the outbreak of war Hitler ordered widespread 'mercy killing' of the sick and disabled.                       Code named 'Aktion T 4,' the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate 'life unworthy of life' at first focused on newborns and very young children. Midwives and doctors were required to register children up to age three who showed symptoms of mental retardation, physical deformity, or other symptoms included on a questionnaire from the Reich Health Ministry. A decision on whether to allow the child to live was then made by three medical experts solely on the basis of the questionnaire, without any examination and without reading any medical records. Each expert placed a + mark in red pencil or - mark in blue pencil under the term 'treatment' on a special form. A red plus mark meant a decision to kill the child. A blue minus sign meant meant a decision against killing. Three plus symbols resulted in a euthanasia warrant being issued and the transfer of the child to a 'Children's Specialty Department' for death by injection or gradual starvation. The decision had to be unanimous. In cases where the decision was not unanimous the child was kept under observation and another attempt would be made to get a unanimous decision. The Nazi euthanasia program quickly expanded to include older disabled children and adults. Hitler's decree of October, 1939, typed on his personal stationery and back dated to Sept. 1, enlarged 'the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.' Questionnaires were then distributed to mental institutions, hospitals and other institutions caring for the chronically ill. Patients had to be reported if they suffered from schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile disorders, therapy resistant paralysis and syphilitic diseases, retardation, encephalitis, Huntington's chorea and other neurological conditions, also those who had been continuously in institutions for at least 5 years, or were criminally insane, or did not posses German citizenship or were not of German or related blood, including Jews, Negroes, and Gypsies. A total of six killing centers were established including the well known psychiatric clinic at Hadamar. The euthanasia program was eventually headed by an SS man named Christian Wirth, a notorious brute with the nickname 'the savage Christian.' At Brandenburg, a former prison was converted into a killing center where the first Nazi experimental gassings took place. The gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms, but were actually hermetically sealed chambers connected by pipes to cylinders of carbon monoxide. Patients were generally drugged before being led naked into the gas chamber. Each killing center included a crematorium where the bodies were taken for disposal. Families were then falsely told the cause of death was medical such as heart failure or pneumonia. But the huge increase in the death rate for the disabled combined with the very obvious plumes of odorous smoke over the killing centers aroused suspicion and fear. At Hadamar, for example, local children even taunted arriving busloads of patients by saying 'here comes some more to be gassed.' On August 3, 1941, a Catholic Bishop, Clemens von Galen, delivered a sermon in Münster Cathedral attacking the Nazi euthanasia program calling it 'plain murder.' The sermon sent a shockwave through the Nazi leadership by publicly condemning the program and urged German Catholics to 'withdraw ourselves and our faithful from their (Nazi) influence so that we may not be contaminated by their thinking and their ungodly behavior.' As a result, on August 23, Hitler suspended Aktion T4, which had accounted for nearly a hundred thousand deaths by this time. The Nazis retaliated against the Bishop by beheading three parish priests who had distributed his sermon, but left the Bishop unharmed to avoid making him into a martyr. However, the Nazi euthanasia program quietly continued, but without the widespread gassings. Drugs and starvation were used instead and doctors were encouraged to decide in favor of death whenever euthanasia was being considered. The use of gas chambers at the euthanasia killing centers ultimately served as training centers for the SS. They used the technical knowledge and experience gained during the euthanasia program to construct huge killing centers at Auschwitz, Treblinka and other concentration camps in an attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. SS personnel from the euthanasia killing centers, notably Wirth, Franz Reichleitner and Franz Stangl later commanded extermination camps.

Statistics of World War II Including the European and Pacific Theaters

WHY: I think that the WW2 was one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because it changed the entire course of the history.

The first TV

The first opto-mechanical system that functioned was breveted in 1884 by a student named P. Nipkow.

The first demonstration with the television system, made by Nipkow, was made in 1925 by the Scottish inventor that is known as the inventor of the television, John Logie Baird, and the first demonstration with a color television was made in 1928 by the same Scottish inventor. Baird also invented the video disk in 1928, but it was commercially available only from 1978. The video disk is a disk with pictures and sounds recorded on it , played by laser. It is a type of compact disk. The video disk is chiefly used to provide commercial films for private viewing. Most systems use a 30 cm/12 in rotating vinyl disk coated with a reflective material. Laser scanning recovers picture and sound signals from the surface where they are recorded as a spiral of microscopic pits.

WHY: I think that the invention of the first television and the first video disk is one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because they are some of the most used things from our days.

The discovery of fire

Human species, origins of Evolution of humans from ancestral primates . The African apes (gorilla and chimpanzee) are shown by anatomical and molecular comparisons to be the closest living relatives of humans. Humans are distinguished from apes by the size of their brain and jaw, their bipedalism, and their elaborate culture. Molecular studies put the date of the split between the human and African ape lines at 5-10 million years ago. There are only fragmentary remains of ape and hominid (of the human group) fossils from this period. Bones of the earliest known human ancestor, a hominid named Australopithecus ramidus 1994, were found in Ethiopia and dated as 4.4 million years old.

Australopithecus afarensis , hominids found in Ethiopia and Tanzania, date from 3.5 to 4 million years ago. These creatures walked upright and they were either direct ancestors or an offshoot of the line that led to modern humans. They may have been the ancestors of Homo habilis (considered by some to be a species of Australopithecus ), who appeared about a million years later, had slightly larger bodies and brains, and were probably the first to use stone tools. A. robustus and A. africanus also lived in Africa at the same time, but these are not generally considered to be our ancestors.

Over 1.5 million years ago, H. erectus , believed by some to be descended from H. habilis , appeared in Africa. The erectus people had much larger brains, and were probably the first to use fire and the first to move out of Africa. Their remains are found as far afield as China, Java, western Asia, Spain, Germany, and England. Modern humans, H. sapiens sapiens , and the Neanderthals, H. sapiens neanderthalensis , are probably descended from H. erectus . Analysis of DNA in recent human populations shows that H. sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago in Africa. The oldest known fossils of H. sapiens also come from Africa, between 150,000 and 100,000 years ago. Separation of human populations occurred later, with separation of Asian, European, and Australian populations between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. Neanderthals were large-brained and heavily built, probably adapted to the cold conditions of the ice ages. They lived in Europe and the Middle East, and died out about 40,000 years ago, leaving H. sapiens sapiens as the only remaining species of the hominid group. The most recent fossil discovery is that of a lower jaw of a fossil ape found in the Otavi Mountains, Namibia. It comes from deposits dated between 10 and 15 million years ago, and it is similar to earlier finds from E Africa and Turkey. This is the first record of a fossil ape from S Africa and it extends the known range of fossil apes by at least 3,200 km/2,000 mi. It is thought to be close to the initial divergence of the great apes and humans, although genetic studies indicate that the last common ancestor between chimpanzees and humans lived 6 to 8 million years ago.

Human species, origins of A reconstruction of Java Man. This fossil dates back to between 750,000 and 300,000 years ago. Since its discovery in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Java Man has been shown by anthropologists to be a human predecessor and it provides a valuable chronological marker for human evolution.

WHY: I think that the discovery of fire is one of the 10 most important events of the human kind because it is indispensable.