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Alan Guth, Albert Einstein, Cesar Millan, Craig Venter, Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Jimmy Wales, Peter Higgs, The Probaway Person of the Year, Xi Jinping
It is nearing time to declare the Probaway Person of the Year and I haven’t been looking in the right places because nothing has popped up yet of five-hundred-year memorability. A couple of previous years included four important astronomical discoveries, but the visualizing of a black hole will vanish in the historical imagination in a short time as it doesn’t affect us personally. Before those choices, there was a group of five memorable events in biology. Xi Jinping will probably be remembered for creating a new Dynasty in China. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia will be memorable as the creator of the best collection of human knowledge. The first day of creating The Probaway Person of the Year, Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, seemed to be memorable because he videoed relationships of humans to difficult dogs in a new way that would last.
The complete up-to-present date list of Probaway Person of the Year:
- 2019 – Elon Musk for creating a reusable rocket system that will give much cheaper access to space which opens new frontiers.
- 2018 – Astronomers for discovering the signatures of the heavy elements like gold in the collision of neutron stars.
- 2017 – Albert Einstein for predicting black holes, their collisions creating gravity waves, and the laser for observing the gravity waves.
- 2016 – Xi Jinping for taking China from a backward economy to the most powerful one on Earth.
- 2015 – Peter Higgs and Alan Guth created theories that led to proofs this year of mass and gravity sources.
- 2014 – Jennifer Doudna created a method for insertion of designed DNA precisely into existing DNA.
- 2013 – Plague Inc. is a computer game that explores the problems of creating a disease that will kill every last human being on Earth.
- 2012 – Zebrafish research-technique advances made it possible to observe drug interactions within living animals.
- 2011 – Craig Venter laid the groundwork for creating entirely new forms of life (greater than species) out of computer-generated DNA sequences.
- 2010 – Nadya Suleman (Octomom) and the society that created this travesty of good sense will be remembered in the distant future by many hungry people.
- 2009 – Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia, which will be still be used after our current computer operating systems are surpassed and forgotten.
- 2008 – Cesar Millan (the dog whisperer) because he shows people how to relate to dogs and people much better than anyone else. His videos and techniques will be remembered and used as long as there are people and dogs.
These may seem like strange choices, but they are people involved in potentially long-term memorable events that had a major tipping point the year before their selection as Probaway Person of the Year.
If the Earth Ark Project ever actually accomplished the saving of a small part of the biosphere of anyplace in the world, it would be a five-hundred-year memorable event. In that distant time, there will be a need to discover what needs to be planted in a variety of given locations, and that complete biosphere might be contained in a single envelope sent by an ordinary person to the South Pole storage location today. So far nothing has been sent because the Antarctic is a protected life zone. The South Pole station is hundreds of miles from any natural living things not supported by humans, but if the seed bank was created there it might eventually help the entire biosphere of Earth survive.
Visualizing a black hole isn’t as important as saving the biology of the whole Earth!