What would you say you might not have learned about History ...
if we did not have the internet now ...

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Is the world an illusion?

What exists beyond the human senses?

What happens after death?

Does divine or supernatural agency exist?

Is the future already decided?

What is the meaning of life?

What is right and wrong?

What beings should have what rights?

What should one do?

What is truth? consciousness? intelligence?

What are the limits of intelligence? Of logic?

Could a machine think?

Does free will exist?

How did the universe begin? How will it end?
What laws govern it? Why are those laws as they are?

How old is the universe? How big is it? What happened before the Big Bang?

Does the universe have a center? An edge? What is the universe expanding into?

What is life? How did life arise? What explains its complexity?

How did mind and language arise?

How does the brain work?

Is there life and intelligence beyond earth?

How do politics and economics work? What system is best?

How and why do men and women behave differently?

How and why have human civilizations developed differently?

Will humanity suffer cultural decline? economic crash? tyranny? resource depletion? overpopulation? runaway pollution? pandemic? interplanetary impact? nuclear catastrophe? nanotech plague?

Will humanity experience divine salvation? loss of faith? paranormal abilities? alien contact? time travel? warp travel? machine or human superintelligence? immortality?

What will happen in the next: hundred years? thousand years? million years? billion years? trillion years?

4,608,000,000 (Years ago.)
4,607,000,000 (Years ago.)
4,606,000,000 Inside the Milky Way, hundreds of new stars were about to shine.
4,605,000,000 Our sun was one of them. Nearby, a star went supernova.
4,604,000,000 The heavy metals and other elements, uranium included,
4,603,000,000 were created at the moment of the supernova's explosion.
4,602,000,000 This material was dispersed into the surrounding space.
4,601,000,000 Some impacted the sun, while other material found its way
4,600,000,000 into orbit around the sun and eventually added to or began
4,599,000,000 the formation of some of the planets. All the stars in the
4,598,000,000 cluster received material from this supernova. When the
4,597,000,000 supernova exploded, the planets that circled it were blown
4,596,000,000 apart. Life is common in the universe and life could be found
4,595,000,000 on these planets. Microbes attached to particles were
4,594,000,000 dispersed into space by the explosion.
4,593,000,000 The theory that simple forms of life travel in ejecta from
4,592,000,000 other worlds is called: lithopanspermia.
4,591,000,000 Panspermia is the theory that
4,590,000,000 radiation pressure from the stars blow microbes about like
4,589,000,000 tiny solar sails. These microbes have the ability to survive in a
4,588,000,000 cold vacuum by going into stasis. They reduce there chemical
4,587,000,000 interactions to zero while maintaining there biological
4,586,000,000 structure well enough to later thaw and multiply when
4,585,000,000 they find themselves in a sustaining environment.
4,584,000,000
4,583,000,000 Two planetoids, less than a thousand mile in diameter, orbit the
4,582,000,000 sun at about the same distance from the sun as the earth does
4,581,000,000 today. Comets, meteorites (some left over from the supernova),
4,580,000,000 and planetoids crash into other planets and planetoids adding
4,579,000,000 mass. At this time there are dozens of planets and planetoids
4,578,000,000 circling the sun. Many cross the orbits of others. They crash into
4,577,000,000 each other, adding mass, and become larger.

4,000,000 Humans and chimps diverged (Ardipithecus)
3,000,000 Lucy: bipedal, small brain, long arms, short legs.
2,000,000 Early man (stone tools)
1,000,000
0 All of human's written history has occurred
in the most recent 10,000 years, or 1% of
the time in this last million year increment.

The following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:


Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no "authorities").
Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.
Quantify, wherever possible.
If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
"Occam's razor" - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.
Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, is it testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?


Additional issues are

Conduct control experiments - especially "double blind" experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects.
Check for confounding factors - separate the variables.

Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
Argument from "authority".
Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavourable" decision).
Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).
Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)
Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").
Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.
Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
Confusion of correlation and causation.
Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack..
Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

I still believe that the Internet has become an extension of the mind.
As your brain /mind would search your knowledge we can just search the internet.
Only difference being that you didn't have to learn to gain the knowledge, you just need to know how to search.

We were always told it was originally a project management exercise in 'cellular network communication', if one unit was ever knocked out, it didn't affect the rest of the network and was originally thought up and created by the military. It later got took over primarily by university professors and academia, then it grew socially among the masses, and the rest as you know is history. In a lot of ways the world wide web has caused a kind of information revolution across the globe.

Would be interesting just how much knowledge most of us would have retained if the internet ever went down completely?

This is the website of the Principia Cybernetica Project (PCP), an international organization. The Project aims to develop a complete philosophy or "world-view", based on the principles of evolutionary cybernetics, and supported by collaborative computer technologies. To get started, there is an introduction with background and motivation, and an overview, summarizing the project as a whole.

I remember way back in the day when Microsoft asked me
"Where Do You Want To Go Today?"
everytime I turned my computer on.

So I tuned to different 'channels' to see what is out there...

Welcome to Principia Cybernetica Web
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/

Principia Cybernetica tries to tackle age-old philosophical questions with the help of the most recent cybernetic theories and technologies.



Main subjects

Theory
our theoretical results, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, concepts, principles, memetics, and the history and future of evolution.

Organization
details the people, conferences, publications, ways of participating, newsletter and the mailing lists part of PCP.

R&D
our algorithms, experiments and applications to develop distributed, self-organizing, knowledge networks, inspired by the "Global Brain" metaphor

Reference
background material collected by us, including an electronic library with free books, a web dictionary, related websites, and info about cybernetics and systems theory, such as bibliographies, associations, and journals.

Navigation
tools to help you to quickly find your way around our over two thousand pages, such as the Recent Changes, Search, Table of Contents, and Index, plus general information about this website and how to use it.

Other Info
this server also hosts some pages that are not part of PCP: the Association for the Foundations of Science, Language and Cognition (AFOS), and Belgium: Overview

The map of the Internet

Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

Categories
Books (722)
Movies (574)
Odds and Sods (422)
post (2)
Space and Science (275)
status (5)
Television (335)

Well, since I majored in History, and continue to read more of it, I'm not clear about what I learned where.
I guess what I would go with, are the things I am now able to determine are FALSE, as the best thing about having this resource.

Especially all the "persuasive quotes" by great people of the past...

.... which turn out to be pure propaganda or fantasies, made up by later people.

Our planet's timeline written in one million year increments.
Includes notes from the author

http://earthdevelopslife.blogspot.com/



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I liked history in school ... did not learn a lot tho lol come to find out the falsehoods of some ... so then you know the history of America ... way back ... ? I heard the other day what saved Washington yrs ago at war ...was a storm took out the British... thats why we won ... go figure ...