Kilometres Quotes

The ruins stretch from the river to the base of that mountain over there, about half a kilometre.’ ‘How far is that in regular measurements?’ Percy asked. Frank rolled his eyes. ‘That is a regular measurement in Canada and the rest of the world. Only you Americans –’ ‘About five or six football fields,’ Hazel interceded, feeding Arion a big chunk of gold. Percy spread his hands. ‘That’s all you needed to say.

Strange? I don't think that word comes anywhere near it. My troops are on an overnight camp three hundred kilometres away from here. I had to sleep at the Santangelo penitentiary for pre-pubescent girls.

There was silence on the other end. The static crackle from one hundred kilometres of telephone lines. Crows sitting on them, shivering, while people's conversations darted past under their feet.

He left the unspoken question hanging in the air. How did one annoy a two- kilometre-long black rectangular slab? And just what form would its disapproval take

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

Definition: 'Love' is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometres away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope. Statement: This definition, I am told, is subject to interpretation. Obviously, 'love' is a matter of odds. Not many meatbags could make such a shot, and strangely enough, not many meatbags would derive love from it. Yet for me, love is knowing your target, putting them in your targeting reticle, and together, achieving a singular purpose... against statistically long odds...

On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.

Over time, Jews were banned from state hospitals and not allowed to travel further than thirty kilometres from their homes. Public parks, playgrounds, rivers, swimming pools, beaches and libraries were placed out of bounds. The names of all Jewish soldiers were scratched off First World War memorials,

​ 'Daha çok anlat.' dedim. 'Çok. Elimden gelse seninle sekiz yüz elli iki bin kilometre hiç durmadan konuşurdum.' 'Bu kadar yola nasıl benzin yetiştiririz?' 'Gider gibi yaparız.

To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.)

I have maybe a half-hour before the next surgery. Want to go and get a cup of coffee?” What I want is to meander eight kilometres down the canals with you from Kirov to your Fifth Soviet door. I want to get on the tram with you, the bus with you, sit in the Italian Gardens with you. That is what I want. I will take the cup of coffee in your hospital cafeteria.

Just say after Wednesday we never see each-" "Don't" he says, angry. "Jonah, you live six hundred kilometres away from me," I argue. "Between now and when we graduate next year there are at least ten weeks' holiday and five random public holidays. There's email and if you manage to get down to the town, there's text messaging and mobile phone calls. If not, the five minutes you get to speak to me on your communal phone is better than nothing. There are the chess nerds who want to invite you to our school for the chess comp next March and there's this town in the middle, planned by Walter Burley Griffin, where we can meet up and protest against our government's refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty.

Daha anlatsana," dedim. "Hoşuna mı gitti?" "Hem de çok. Seninle sekiz yüz elli iki bin kilometre boyunca hiç durmadan laflamak isterdim." "Benzinimiz yeter mi ki?" "Yalancıktan doldurursak yeter.

It's only now, when a few thousand kilometres will insulate us against deceit, lies and underhandedness and we very probably won't see each other for a long time, that I feel really close to you once more. Only far away from you am I really at home with myself, only far away from you can I dare to open my heart without losing myself.

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

Belki de ben gerçekten gelmemeye gittim. O kadar çok gittim ki artık hiçbir yerdeyim. Ama şunu bil ki bu dünyada olmayı seçebileceğim tek bir yer olsaydı senin yanını seçerdim.

Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.

The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A

It were as though the building’s kilometres of clanky old ductwork connected up to an asthmatic giant with poor oral hygiene, hidden away somewhere in the basement.

Some car accidents are caused by the ignorance or disbelief of the fact that a driver’s eyes and mind can be thousands of kilometres apart.

60,000 kilometres per second may be the practical (!) speed limit for space travel

Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean.

Oh Pia, I feel GOOD! Fully recovered!’ he always says in a dazzling tone that tells everyone within a ten-kilometre radius that he’s not.

Earth travels in the space at the speed of 108,000 kilometres per hour. When you walk calmly in a forest, you must know that you are in fact flying in the space at that crazy speed!

The eighteenth-century chapel is on the grounds of the estate, only about a half a kilometre away—its spire pierces the English Sky™ (grey, sunless, speckled with the occasional crow).

The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.

Coming back, he took the tracker out of Morley’s hand, slid back into the car and flipped a switch. An internal Mannheim, a force shield, flared into life, dividing the front of the car from the rear. Once he was satisfied the Mannheim would prevent the sound of their voices being picked up by any undiscovered bugs he spoke. “I have a plan, a way to turn the tables on them.” “How?” Instead of explaining, Lieges waved his hand at the stray dog. Thinking it was going to be fed, the mutt came over. Lieges grabbed it, removed some of the gum he was chewing, fixed the bug to it and stuck the gum under the dog’s collar. Picking the dog up, he placed it in the front of the air-car. Morley hissed. “What the hell are you doing?” “Thinking laterally,” Lieges replied. “We’ll fly a few kilometres from here and push the dog out. The BlackClads will then lock onto the dog and not us. No doubt they’ll realise something is wrong after they’ve been tracking it for a while, but it will probably buy us some time.

In one second, almost two and a half million emails are sent, the universe expands fifteen kilometres and thirty stars explode, a honey bee can flap its wings two hundred times, the fastest snail travels 1.3 centimetres, objects can fall sixteen feet, and ‘Will you marry me?’ can change a life.

At first you are awed by the splendour, by the beauty, of the planet and then you look down and you realize that this one planet is the only thing we have. Every time the sun comes up and goes down… and for us that’s sixteen times a day… you see a thin, thin, thin layer just above the surface, maybe 10 or 12 kilometres thick. That is the atmosphere of the Earth. That is it. Below that is life. Above it is nothing. JULIE PAYETTE, Canadian astronaut

Dnes ráno jsem vyrazil na procházku. Na vyvýšený okraj kráteru jsem to měl zhruba kilometr. S takovou vzdáleností si lidé na Zemi vůbec nelámou hlavou, ale ve skafandru je to utrpení. Nemůžu se dočkat, až budu mít vnoučata. „Když jsem byl mladší, šel jsem na kraj kráteru. Do kopce! Ve skafandru! Na Marsu, vy smradi! Slyšíte? Na Marsu!

I ran to eat cake. I ran to be free. I ran to freely eat cake. I ran to remind myself what it was like to be a kid – exhilarated and entirely immersed in the moment.

I know we’re not the first to discover this,’ Gene Cernan radioed back from about 29,000 kilometres, ‘but we’d like to confirm, from the crew of America, that the world is round.

Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

Dünya, saatte 108.000 kilometre bir hızla uzayda seyahat eder. Bir ormanda sakince yürürken bilmelisin ki aslında o çılgın hızda uzayda uçuyorsundur!

-Elimden gelse seninle sekiz yüz elli iki bin kilometre hiç durmadan konuşurdum. -Bu kadar yola nasıl benzin yetiştiririz? -Gider gibi yaparız.

the average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour.

A wolf's sense of hearing is remarkably acute. A wolf can detect another's howl from as far as nineteen kilometres away.

the first century AD, Roman coins were an accepted medium of exchange in the markets of India, even though the closest Roman legion was thousands of kilometres away.

It is best to love some people at least a kilometre away from them.

In ten days and 3000 kilometres we never even scratched the surface.

Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself.

Bitkilerle insanların birbirinin soluğunu alıp vermesiyle gezegen çapında karşılıklı bir hayat öpücüğü döngüsü, 150 milyon kilometre uzaklıktaki bir yıldızın enerjisiyle sürüp gitmekte...

I go on the same walk once or twice each week. There is one part of the walk, around one kilometre, which is my favourite part. And when I walk down that short part, I get the most remarkable ideas, especially related to my writing, often quotes. At some point, I recognized this as a pattern, and so now it always occurs, like magic. I have always felt that certain geographical areas vary in energy, some good for me, and some less good, even bad energy. Countries, areas, and cities vary in this way. So, when you find that special energy place, you can collect good energy, and other benefits, from simply walking through it.

Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That's the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body.

I mean, my home in London would always be a home, but really I felt I could live anywhere, so long as I was surrounded by love and filled with a sense of purpose. I hoped that one day I’d be anchored somewhere too.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards

Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with that relation. We express the difficulty that we have in getting to a place in a system of miles or kilometres which becomes false as soon as that difficulty decreases.

But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven’t called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.

The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres, which isn’t so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the centre and dropped a brick down it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom

The [ military ] lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting. They were cold, professionally polished and well on their way up a career ladder which would ensure that despite the uniforms they wore, they would never have to come within a thousand kilometres of a genuine firefight. The only problem they had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit). I sat in that courtroom for three weeks listening to them dress it like a variety of salads, and with every passing hour the distinctions, which at one point I'd been pretty clear on, grew increasingly vague. I suppose that proves how good they were.

Behzat Ç‘nin hayatında çoğu insan bir başkasının yerini tutabilirdi. Harun‘la Cevdet yer değiştirebilirdi mesela. Ya da Ağbisi Şevket‘le Tahsin yer değiştirse, hemen hemen hiçbir şey değişmemiş olurdu. Ama Şule giderse, biri sahiden gitmiş olurdu. Maçın ilk dakikalarında on kişi kalmak gibi bir şey, akşam Tekel bayisinde 216 bulamamak gibi bir şey. Ya da hiç beklemediği bir anda, O‘nun bir apartman tepesine çıkıp kendini boşluğa bırakması gibi bir şey. Betonda kan izi, çevrede meraklı kalabalık. Ve hala nefes almak, ay sonunu düşünmek, rakıyı bırakıp biraya yüklenmek, elin arada bir 14’lüye gitmesi, eski bir aşkın izini sürmek, konuşma isteksizliği, sağır olma isteği, damarlarda dolaşan yedi kilo kan, iki kilometre sinir, yaşamak aşağı yukarı böyle bir şeydi herhalde…

When I meet some of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames they occasionally enquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: ‘I moved Africa 600 kilometres to the south.’ They usually turn quickly to the soccer page. One

Summertime on Icarus First published in Vogue, June 1960, as ‘The Hottest Piece of Real Estate in the Solar System’ Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds When I wrote this story, I certainly never dreamed that one day I would have an asteroid named after me: in 1996 the International Astronomical Union rescued 4923 from anonymity. As a result, I am now the proud absentee landlord of about 100 square kilometres of real estate out around Mars. It doesn’t come anywhere near the Earth, so I’m not worried about Deep Impact type lawsuits.

Whales can hear one another from hundreds of kilometres away, and each whale has a repertoire of characteristic ‘songs’ that may last for hours and follow very intricate patterns. Every now and then a whale composes a new hit, which other whales throughout the ocean adopt.

I was drawing near to the curve of the track; already the twelve hooves of those dead horses were visible in the distance, jutting towards the sky like the columns in the cathedral crypt at Stará Boleslav. I thought of Masha, and of how we met for the first time, when I was still with the track superintendent. He gave us two buckets of red paint and told us to paint the fence round the entire state workshops. Masha began by the railway track, just as I did. We stood facing each other with the tall wire fence between us, at our feet we each had a bucket of cinnabar paint, we each had a brush, and we stippled away with our brushes opposite each other and painted that fence, she from her side and I from mine. There were four kilometres altogether of this fence; for five months we stood facing each other like this, and there wasn't anything we didn't say to each other, Masha and I, but always there was this fence between us. After we'd painted two kilometres of it, one day I'd done just as high as Masha's mouth with this red colour, and I told her that I loved her, and she, from her side, had painted just up to there, too, and she said that she loved me, too ... and she looked into my eyes, and, as this was in a ditch and among tall goosefoot plants, I put out my lips, and we kissed through the newly painted fence, and when we opened our eyes she had a sort of tiny red fence-pale striped across her mouth, and so had I, and we burst out laughing, and from that moment on we were happy.

What I’m trying to get at,’ he says, ‘is whether Dr Ketterley persuaded you to go anywhere. Whether he kept you anywhere against your will. Whether you were free to come and go.’ ‘Yes. I was free. I came and went. I did not remain in one place. I walked for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kilometres.

We are at home with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres (the view from a mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre (the point of a pin). Outside this range even our imagination is handicapped, and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics—which, fortunately, we can learn to deploy.

The second thing that tore at my heart was the sight of educated yet jobless Baluch youngsters addicted to drugs. The landscape changed non-stop, but the story of deprivation and misery remained the same throughout the belt. NA-260 (Quetta-cum-Chagai-cum-Mastung) was considered the largest electoral constituency of Pakistan, spread over 700 kilometres and bordering Iran and Afghanistan. It was not only an administrative impossibility to govern, but had the additional challenges of stretching from a Pashtun stronghold in Quetta into a mainly Baluch belt. Cross-border smuggling and infiltration was a huge additional complication.

The Russian empire, it is estimated, grew by fifty-five square miles (142 square kilometres) per day after the Romanovs came to the throne in 1613, or 20,000 square miles a year. By the late nineteenth century, they ruled one sixth of the earth’s surface—and they were still expanding. Empire-building was in a Romanov’s blood.

Marvin, her şey yolunda mı?" Hayır, hiçbir şey yolunda değil. Bir sonraki güneş sistemine yaklaşık 40.850.000.000.000 kilometre uzaktayız. Samanyolu'nun çapı 100.000 ışık yılı. Bir ışık yolu 9,46 milyar kilometre. Bu kavranamaz uzaklıkların yanında, yaşadığım gezegen tamamıyla bir hiç. Bu durumda nasıl olmalıyım? Hiçbir şekilde iyi olamayacağım kesin.

What?’ I said, and increased the speed of his treadmill to four kilometres per hour. ‘Slower, bhai.’ ‘It’s fine. Your heart rate should go up. You weighed yourself? How much was it?’ ‘Ninety-five point five.’ ‘That’s too much, Saurabh.’ ‘I am working on it. One day I will have a six-pack like you. Actually, I do have one. It’s just hidden under some tissue.

shocking life lesson was beginning to dawn on me – if you work hard for something, you don’t always get what you want. And that’s okay, but it stings like a bitch.

Once the Funk Island birds had been salted, plucked, and deep-fried into oblivion, there was only one sizable colony of great auks left in the world, on an island called the Geirfuglasker, or great auk skerry, which lay about fifty kilometres off southwestern Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. Much to the auk’s misfortune, a volcanic eruption destroyed the Geirfuglasker in 1830. This left the birds one solitary refuge, a speck of an island known as Eldey. By this point, the great auk was facing a new threat: its own rarity. Skins and eggs were avidly sought by gentlemen, like Count Raben, who wanted to fill out their collections. It was in the service of such enthusiasts that the very last known pair of auks was killed on Eldey in 1844.

Oto nadchodzi koniec świata. Oto nadciąga, zbliża się czy raczej przypełza mój własny koniec świata. Koniec mego osobistego świata. Ale zanim mój wszechświat rozpadnie się w gruzy, rozsypie na atomy, eksploduje w próżnię, czeka mnie jeszcze ostatni kilometr mojej Golgoty, ostatnie okrążenie w tym maratonie, ostatnie kilka szczebli w dół albo w górę po drabinie bezsensu.

As late as AD 1400, the vast majority of farmers, along with their plants and animals, clustered together in an area of just 11 million square kilometres – 2 per cent of the planet’s surface.2 Everywhere else was too cold, too hot, too dry, too wet, or otherwise unsuited for cultivation. This minuscule 2 per cent of the earth’s surface constituted the stage on which history unfolded.

One thing protects us from change: exile. In unreality or at the other end of the world, in melancholy or the South, exile is a marvellous and comfortable structure. Only the exiled have a land. I know some people who are only close to their country when they are 10,000 kilometres away, driven out by their own brothers. The others are nomads chasing their shadows in the deserts of culture.

The human mind is grown inside a 0.0013 cubic meters crystalline calcium phosphate box on the 149 million km2 rocky surface of a 510 million km2 planet that is falling in a straight line over curved space at 108,000 kilometres per hour inside the gravity well of a 6 trillion km2 star on a 250 million year sojourn around the centre of a galaxy containing some 400 billion stars and trillions of planets and moons. The immediate solar system appears to end at the Kuiper Belt, its outer edge a mind-stunning 7 billion kilometres away, yet the outermost reach of the Heliosphere is still another 5 billion kilometres further out. The furthest object, however, within the Sun’s gravity well, Sedna, marks the solar system’s diameter to in fact be a sense-jarring 287 billion kilometres in length.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away. So

Go out into a big field with a football and plonk it down to represent the sun. Then walk 25 metres away and drop a peppercorn to represent the Earth’s size and its distance from the sun. The moon, to the same scale, would be a pinhead, and it would be only 5 centimetres away from the peppercorn. But the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri, to the same scale, would be another (slightly smaller) football located about … wait for it … six and a half thousand kilometres away!

Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). (page 109)

Doing a one eighty is when you turn yourself a full one hundred and eighty degrees and take another look at the situation. You realise there must be another way to see things. Normally, a better way. As soon as you “do the one eighty” life becomes a lot more fun.

Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy).4 It was the bargain of the millennium.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.

Dr. Tom Lawson, so Chief Engineer Lawrence had decided, was an exception to the old saying, “To know all is to forgive all.” The knowledge that the astronomer has passed a loveless, institutionalised childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities helped one to understand him—but not to like him. It was singular bad luck, thought Lawrence, that he was the only scientist within three hundred thousand kilometres who happened to have an infra-red detector, and knew how to use it.

Maybe our life is an affair of coastlines, of touching on contours, of sand shifting underfoot, of footprints straying a shoreline. No epitaph in granite, no marble eminence, no limestone subtlety. Tracking my prints back is recovering tides’ clean sweep, the cleansing services of storms’ and winds’ abrasive erasures. The only line that matters in the end is forward since home is what we find when we find what it is, they say. Still, standing on the edge of stone seven thousand kilometres wide, my back to a whole past vivid to my eyes, I wonder why, here, it should suddenly begin.

The world’s first commercial railroad opened for business in 1830, in Britain. By 1850, Western nations were criss-crossed by almost 40,000 kilometres of railroads – but in the whole of Asia, Africa and Latin America there were only 4,000 kilometres of tracks. In 1880, the West boasted more than 350,000 kilometres of railroads, whereas in the rest of the world there were but 35,000 kilometres of train lines (and most of these were laid by the British in India).6 The first railroad in China opened only in 1876. It was twenty-five kilometres long and built by Europeans – the Chinese government destroyed it the following year.

The crucial turning point came in 1492, when Christopher Columbus sailed westward from Spain, seeking a new route to East Asia. Columbus still believed in the old ‘complete’ world maps. Using them, Columbus calculated that Japan should have been located about 7,000 kilometres west of Spain. In fact, more than 20,000 kilometres and an entire unknown continent separate East Asia from Spain. On 12 October 1492, at about 2:00 a.m., Columbus’ expedition collided with the unknown continent. Juan Rodriguez Bermejo, watching from the mast of the ship Pinta, spotted an island in what we now call the Bahamas, and shouted ‘Land! Land!

Un début dans la vie was serialised in the review La Législature in 1842 under the title Le Danger des mystifications. In 1845 it appeared under its present title in the second Furne edition of La Comédie humaine. Balzac wrote the novel during one of his many visits to the commune of L’Isle-Adam in Val-d’Oise, a few kilometres north of Paris. Un début dans la vie is based on a short-story by Balzac’s sister Laure Surville, which was later published in 1854 under the title Le Voyage en coucou (The Journey in a Rickety Carriage). Balzac retold the story, transforming it into a profound study of human vanity and its consequences.

At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a sin­gle great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rum­pled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge of fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous within it, coated all but the smoothest of vertical surfaces with tumescent hanging forests of lime-green, royal blue and pale, rusty orange; only the heights of scarred wall closest to the more actively venting fissures and fumaroles remained untouched by the tenacious vegetation.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 – went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less22, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet.

We warily sipped ‘fresh’ buffalo milk in a Krishna temple. We travelled into the Himalayas until, at a height of two kilometres above sea level where we found ourselves surrounded by men as hard and tough as the mountains that bred them. We negotiated a price of 100 rupees for one of these men to carry our two heaviest bags the 15-minute walk to the hotel with nothing more than rope and a forehead strap. I paid him 300 rupees and his face lit up! We watched the morning mist clear to reveal views of the green Doon Valley and the distant white-capped Himalayan peaks. We rode an elephant up to the Amber Fort of Jaipur, and the next day we painted, washed and fed unpeeled bananas to another elephant, marvelling at her gentle nature as we placed the bananas on her huge bubble-gum coloured tongue.

From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.

Şu tepenin üstünde, kendimi onlardan ne kadar uzak hissediyorum. Sanki başka türdenim ben. Bütün gün çalıştıktan sonra bürolardan çıkıyor, evlere ve meydanlara neşeyle bakıp, bu kentin, kendi kentleri olduğunu, bir 'güzel burjuva kenti' niteliği taşıdığını düşünüyorlar. Korkmuyorlar; kendi yurtlarında olduklarını duyuyorlar. Musluklardan akan evcil kent suyundan, düğme çevrilince ampullerden yayılan ışıktan, dayanaklarla desteklenmiş melez ağaçlardan başka şey bilmezler. Her şeyin bir mekanizmaya uyarak ortaya çıktığını, dünyanın belli ve değişmez yasalara göre işlediğini günde yüz kere görürler: Boşlukta, bütün nesneler aynı hızla düşer; park yazın her gün saat altıda, kışın da dörtte kapanır; kurşun 335 derecede erir; son tramvay Hotel de Ville'den on biri beş geçe kalkar. Durgun, biraz asık suratlı kimselerdir. Yarın'ı, yani bugünün bir tekrarını düşünürler; kentlerde her sabah yeniden orataya çıkan tek bir gün vardır. Pazarları, bu tek günü az buçuk süslerler. Avanaklar! Güven dolu, kalın suratlarını göreceğimi düşündükçe tiksinti kaplıyor içimi. Yasalar yaparlar, bayağı romanlar yazarlar, çocuk yapma budalalığına düşmekten kurtulamazlar. Ama o koskoca, ne idüğü belirsiz doğa, kentlerine girmiş, her tarafa, evlerine, bürolarına, kendilerine bile sızmıştır. Doğa kıpırdamaz, olduğu gibi durur; onlar, içleri dolduğu, doğayı soludukları halde farkında değillerdir. Kentin dışında, yirmi kilometre uzakta olduğunu sanırlar doğanın. Onu görüyorum ben,bu doğayı görüyorum. Baş eğişinin tembellikten geldiğini biliyorum; yasaları olmadığını da biliyorum, onun düzenliliği sandıkları şey...Doğanın alışkanlıkları var yalnız, yarın değiştirebilir onları.

Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see any of them in our territory, and we don’t care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human. In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people. The Dinka’s bitter enemies are the Nuer. What does the word Nuer mean in Nuer language? It means ‘original people’. Thousands of kilometres from the Sudan deserts, in the frozen ice-lands of Alaska and north-eastern Siberia, live the Yupiks. What does Yupik mean in Yupik language? It means ‘real people’.3

What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’ Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection: ‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?

To this day, I can see the bright, raspberry red glow. The reactor seemed lit up from inside. It was an incredible colour. Not an ordinary fire, but a kind of shining. Very pretty. If you forget all the rest, it was very pretty. I’d never seen anything like it in the movies, there was just nothing comparable. In the evening, everyone came out on to their balconies; if they didn’t have one, they went to their friends and neighbours. We were on the eighth floor and had a great view. About three kilometres as the crow flies. People brought out their children and lifted them up. ‘Look! Don’t forget this!’ And these were people who worked at the reactor: engineers, workmen. There were even physics teachers, standing in that black dust, chatting away. Breathing it in. Admiring the sight. Some people drove dozens of kilometres or cycled to see it. We had no idea death could look so pretty.

But she would not have slept for anything. Tilting her head she could see the red moon and the stars rising and lowering over the uneven road. The car rushed between rows of sloping pines whose trunks were barred with white paint, and past an army of advertisements for gasoline, Chianti, and men’s hats. Once in a while they passed through a village whose main and single street shone like a fair with a confusion of neon lights, and in whose unadorned cafés children, too late out of bed, slept on their mothers’ laps. As clearly as if it were day she could picture the symmetrical Tuscan landscape that extended on either side. She had made this journey from Florence a dozen times before without ever finding it too short, but tonight the numbered notices of decreasing kilometres seemed to be posted at every turn. She wanted to go on for ever - but wanted it intensely, as if it were a possibility - and wondered whether she had ever been as happy as this.

A few days later, from a wall along the river, Martha Gellhorn watched the Soviet troops move on. ‘The army came in like a flood; it had no special form, there were no orders given. It came and rolled over the stone quays and out onto the roads like water rising, like ants, like locusts. What was moving along there was not so much an army, but a whole world.’ Many of the soldiers were wearing medals from the Battle of Stalingrad, and the entire group had fought its way at least 4,000 kilometres to the west in the last few years, most of it on foot. The trucks were kept rolling with impromptu repairs, the countless female soldiers looked like professional boxers, the sway-backed horses were driven along as though by Ben Hur himself, there seemed to be neither order nor plan, but according to Gellhorn it was impossible ‘to describe the sense of power radiating from this chaos of soldiers and broken-down equipment’. And she thought how sorry the Germans must be that they had ever started a war with the Russians.

In 2004 the British government’s official advisers, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, proposed that 30 per cent of the United Kingdom’s waters should become reserves in which no fishing or any other kind of extraction happened.58 In 2009 an environmental coalition launched a petition for the same measure – strict protection for 30 per cent of UK seas – which gathered 500,000 signatures.59 Yet, while some nations, including several that are much poorer than the United Kingdom, have started shutting fishing boats out of large parts of their seas, at the time of writing we have managed to protect a spectacular 0.01 per cent of our territorial waters: five of our 48,000 square kilometres. This takes the form of three pocket handkerchiefs: around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran and Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. There are plenty of other nominally protected areas but they are no better defended from industrial fishing than our national parks are defended from farming.

To summarise, an outbreak of mysterious pneumonia in a copper mine, more than 1,800 kilometres by road from Wuhan, led to patient samples being sent to Wuhan for analysis. A 2013 medical thesis concluded, after incorporating results shared by the WIV, that these miners had likely been infected by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats in the mine. An expedition by Wuhan virologists to seek the viral cause brought back hundreds of samples from bats. Their repeated visits to the mine turned up a bat-borne coronavirus in 2013, which was recognised to be a novel SARS-like coronavirus. The WIV team partly sequenced this new virus in 2017 and then fully sequenced it in 2018. When its sequence was found to closely match the sequence of the virus causing Covid-19, the Wuhan scientists published it under a new name and failed to cite their own paper detailing its discovery or to reveal that they had been studying the virus over the past few years or to mention that it had come from a mine where there had been a fatal outbreak of pneumonia.

Allan realised it was only a matter of time before he and Herbert were stopped along the road and checked out properly. Not even a marshal would be allowed just to roll into the capital of a country at war without somebody at least asking a question or two. So Allan spent a couple of hours instructing Herbert as to what he should say – just one sentence in Russian, but a very important one: ‘I am Marshal Meretskov from the Soviet Union – take me to your leader!’ Pyongyang was protected at this time by an outer and an inner military ring. The outer one, twenty kilometres from the city, consisted of anti-aircraft guns and double checkpoints on roads, while the inner ring was virtually a barricade, a front line for defence against land attack. Allan and Herbert got caught in one of the outer checkpoints first and were met by a very drunk North Korean soldier, with a cocked machine gun across his chest. Marshal Herbert had rehearsed his single sentence endlessly, and now he said: ‘I am your leader, take me to… the Soviet Union.

Köster had bought the car, a top-heavy old bus, at an auction for next to nothing. Connoisseurs who saw it at the time pronounced it without hesitation an interesting specimen for a transport museum. Bollwies, wholesale manufacturer of ladies’ ready-made dresses and incidentally a speedway enthusiast, advised Otto to convert it into a sewing machine. But Köster was not to be discouraged. He took down the car as if it had been a watch, and worked on it night after night for months. Then one evening he turned up in it outside the bar which we usually frequented. Bollwies nearly fell over with laughing when he saw it, it still looked so funny. For a bit of fun he challenged Otto to a race. He offered two hundred marks to twenty if Köster would take him on in his new sports car—course ten kilometres, Otto to have a kilometre start. Otto took up the bet. But Otto went one better. He refused the handicap and raised the odds to even money, a thousand marks each way. Bollwies, delighted, offered to drive him to a mental home immediately.

Benetton markasının düzenli yayınladığı Colors dergisinin 2000 yılının ilk sayısı, kültürlerin devamlılığı önündeki en büyük tehlikelerden biri olarak ‘tektipleşme’yi sayıyor ve bu savını destekleyecek çeşitli örnekler veriyordu: Bugün dünyada yaklaşık 300 milyon evde Amerikan müzik kanalı MTV izleniyor. Yaklaşık 200 ülkede gençler, artık Sevgililer Günü'nü kendi bayramlarından çok önemsiyor ve sevgililer gününde sevgililerine Hallmark'ın hazırladığı kartlarla aşklarını ilan ediyorlar. Tüm dünyada çocuklar, Disney'in Mickey Mouse'unu, kendi devlet büyüklerinden daha iyi tanıyor. 1998'de dünyada en çok gişe yapan 20 filmin 19'u Amerikan filmlerinden oluşuyordu. Güneydoğu Asya'da gençler saçlarının Jennifer Lopez veya Meg Ryan gibi olmasını istiyorlar. Bunun yanında, Dünyada her 5 saatte bir McDonald's restoranı açıldığı belirtiliyor. Aralarında binlerce kilometre fark olan ülkelerde aynı hastalık (AIDS), aynı ilaç (Viagra), aynı içecek (cola), aynı haber kanalı (CNN), aynı haber (Clinton'ın aşk maceraları), aynı maç (Avrupa futbol şampiyonası finali), saat farkıyla popüler oluyor.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 – went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less22, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet. Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core23, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot. The theory, incidentally, is almost always presented as a recent one, but in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard24. The only recent thing about it is people paying any attention to it. When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing, because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently25, and life might never have got a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment, and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later, people began to wonder how it had all happened. And it is there that our story next takes us.

Can a reasonable man ever truly question the nobility of the heat engine he calls his body? What option does he have but to heap praise on his form, to self-adore, to admire, and to hold it up as the greatest statement of beauty in a beautiful garden? What, though, is to be admired in such a frighteningly fragile machine; a perilously needy contraption laced with kilometres of liquid and electrical conduits prone to leaks, rot, clogs, and short-circuits? What is there to be proud of in a machine that has an eight hour battery life and is predetermined to spend half its existence in a defenceless, catatonic coma? What is to be revered in a mechanism let loose in a sealed off room where almost everything—including its single source of light and warmth—makes it sick, but whose immune system functions by late entry crisis-response imitation? Where is the awe in a contrivance that freezes and dies if placed a little over here, or overheats and dies if placed a little over there? Where is the wonder in an instrument that is crushed to a pulp if dropped a little down there, or boiled away to nothing if lifted a little up there? Where is the marvel in an appliance where three-quarters of the planet’s surface will drown it, and three-quarters of the atmosphere will asphyxiate it? What is there to be cherished in a machine born innately greedy and so utterly useless that it has to wait three years for its neural networks to hook-up and come online before it even begins to get a hint of who or even what it is, and only then can it start to relearn absolutely everything its forebears had already bothered to learn? Where is the artistry in a thinking engine whose sweetest fuel can only be embezzled from other thinking engines?

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The

Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told In the far corner of the Virgo supercluster, a small galaxy called the Milky Way exists, and in one of the further spirals of that galaxy there is said to be a tiny planet called Earth. At a cursory glance, there is nothing seemingly unique about this planet, even though it is simply beautiful, cloaked in calypso blue with an oscillating belt of green. It is, in fact, one of millions like it that live in just this universe.   The extraordinary thing about this planet though, are the beings that exist on it. They have been through war after war. Empires that promised to burn brighter than their resident star, the sun, and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Savage rulers, dictators have destroyed entire portions of it, and yet … they simply refuse to stop existing, it is like they have this treasured thing within them to keep them surviving, and to keep knowing.   Look closer now, oh passer-by, look closer at these beings. They are survivors with a sense of awe and curiosity at everything around them. Sometimes they have lost their way, but this is a thing they never seem to lose, because they are so full of potential.   Promise. This planet may be called Earth, but it should have been called Promise.   If you do not believe this little story, and dismiss it as a silly old wives’ tale, a thing which cannot possibly exist, then I hope you come upon their legendary message. You see, 40 years ago, these beings sent out a message on a space probe that has travelled 20.5 billion kilometres, hoping to meet one of us in space. In it lies a message, the definition of this entire species, and it reads simply:   ‘This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.’   The Voyager is still out there, waiting for someone to come upon it. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe you will remind that species of the greatness that lies in their potential, their promise. Maybe you will be the being that turns that fairytale planet of promise into an intergalactic legend of green and blue.

Then, on a left-hand curve 2.8 kilometres from the finish line, Marco delivers another cutting acceleration. Tonkov is immediately out of the saddle. The gap reaches two lengths. Tonkov fights his way back and is on Marco’s wheel when Marco, who is still standing on the pedals, accelerates again. Suddenly Tonkov is no longer there. Afterwards Tonkov would say he could no longer feel his hands and feet. ‘I had to stop. I lost his slipstream. I couldn’t go on.’ Marco told Romano Cenni he could taste blood. His performance on Montecampione was close to self-mutilation. Seven hundred metres from the finish line, the TV camera on the inside of the final right-hand bend, looking down the hill, picks Marco up over two hundred metres from the line and follows him for fifty metres, a fifteen-second close-up, grainy, pallid in the late-afternoon light. A car and motorbike, diffused and ghostlike, pass between the camera and Marco, emerging out of the gloom. The image cuts to another camera, tight on him as he swings round into the finishing straight, a five-second flash before the live, wide shot of the stage finish: Marco, framed between ecstatic fans on either side, and the finish-line scaffolding adorned with race sponsors‘ logos; largest, and centrally, the Gazzetta dello Sport, surrounded by branding for iced tea, shower gel, telephone services. Then we see it again in the super-slow-motion replay; the five seconds between the moment Marco appeared in the closing straight and the moment he crossed the finish line are extruded to fifteen strung-out seconds. The image frames his head and little else, revealing details invisible in real time and at standard resolution: a drop of sweat that falls from his chin as he makes the bend, the gaping jaw and crumpled forehead and lines beneath the eyes that deepen as Marco wrings still more speed from the mountain. As he rides towards victory in the Giro d‘Italia, Marco pushes himself so deeply into the pain of physical exertion that the gaucheness he has always shown before the camera dissolves, and — this must be the instant he crosses the line — he begins to rise out of his agony. The torso lifts to vertical, the arms spread out into a crucifix position, the eyelids descend, and Marco‘s face, altered by the darkness he has seen in his apnoea, lifts towards the light.

I will not delay the reader with lengthy quotations from the very many Taiwanese flood myths that were collected from amongst the indigenous population, primarily by Japanese scholars, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typically they tell a story of a warning from the gods, the sound of thunder in the sky, terrifying earthquakes, the pouring down of a wall of water which engulfs mankind, and the survival of a remnant who had either fled to mountain tops or who floated to safety on some sort of improvised vessel. To provide just one example (from the Ami tribe of central Taiwan), we hear how the four gods of the sea conspired with two gods of the land, Kabitt and Aka, to destroy mankind. The gods of the sea warned Kabitt and Aka: 'In five days when the round moon appears, the sea will make a booming sound: then escape to a mountain where there are stars.' Kabitt and Aka heeded the warning immediately and fled to the mountain and 'when they reached the summit, the sea suddenly began to make the sound and rose higher and higher'. All the lowland settlements were inundated but two children, Sura and Nakao, were not drowned: 'For when the flood overtook them, they embarked in a wooden mortar, which chanced to be lying in the yard of their house, and in that frail vessel they floated safely to the Ragasan mountain.' So here, handed down since time immemorial by Taiwanese headhunters, we have the essence of the story of Noah's Ark, which is also the story of Manu and the story of Zisudra and (with astonishingly minor variations) the story of all the deluge escapees and survivors in all the world. At some point a real investigation should be mounted into why it is that furious tribes of archaeologists, ethnologists and anthropologists continue to describe the similarities amongst these myths of earth-destroying floods as coincidental, rooted in exaggeration, etc., and thus irrelevant as historical testimony. This is contrary to reason when we know that over a period of roughly 10,000 years between 17,000 and 7000 years ago more than 25 million square kilometres of the earth's surface were inundated. The flood epoch was a reality and in my opinion, since our ancestors went through it, it is not surprising that they told stories and bequeathed to us their shared memories of it. As well as continuing to unveil it through sciences like inundation mapping and palaeo-climatology, therefore, I suggest that if we want to learn what the world was really like during the meltdown we should LISTEN TO THE MYTHS.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.