1.
Brownsville, Texas
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Brownsville is the county seat of Cameron County, Texas. It is the sixteenth most populous city in the state of Texas, with a population at the 2010 census of 175,023 and an estimated population in 2014 of 183,046. It is located at the southernmost tip of Texas, on the bank of the Rio Grande, directly north and across the border from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. The 2014 U. S. Census Bureau estimate placed the Brownsville-Harlingen metropolitan area population at 420,392, in addition, the international Matamoros–Brownsville Metropolitan Area was estimated to have a population of 1,136,995. Brownsville has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, the Brownsville urban area is one of the fastest growing in the United States. The citys population increased after it experienced a boom in the steel industry during the first decade of the 1900s. In recent times, the Port of Brownsville has become an economic hub for South Texas, where shipments arrive from other parts of the United States, from Mexico. In April 1846, construction of a fort on the Mexican border by was begun by American forces due to increased instability in the region on the eve of the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848. Before the completion of the construction, the Mexican Army began the Siege of Fort Texas, during the first active campaign in the Mexican–American War, the first battle of the war occurred on May 8, when General Zachary Taylor received word of the siege of the fort. Taylors forces rushed to help, but Mexican troops intercepted them, resulting in the Battle of Palo Alto, approximately 5 miles north of present-day Brownsville. The next morning the Mexican forces had retreated, and Taylors troops caught up with them, resulting in the Battle of Resaca de la Palma, which took place within the present city limits. When Taylor finally arrived at the besieged Fort Texas, it was found that two soldiers had died, one of them the commander, Major Jacob Brown. In his honor, General Taylor renamed the fort Fort Brown, an old cannon at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College marks the spot where Major Brown received his fatal wound. The city of Brownsville was originally established late in 1848 by Charles Stillman, the state originally incorporated the city on January 24,1850. This was repealed on April 1,1852, due to a dispute between Stillman and the former owners. The state reincorporated the city on February 7,1853, which remains in effect, the issue of ownership was not decided until 1879, when the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Stillman. On July 13,1859, the First Cortina War started, juan Nepomuceno Cortina became one of the most important historical figures of the area, and continued to exert a decisive influence in the local events until his arrest in 1875. The First Cortina War ended on December 27,1859, in May 1861, the brief Second Cortina War took place
2.
University of Texas at Austin
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Founded in 1881 as The University of Texas, its campus is in Austin, Texas—approximately 1 mile from the Texas State Capitol. The institution has the nations seventh-largest single-campus enrollment, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty, UT Austin was inducted into the American Association of Universities in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. It is a center for academic research, with research expenditures exceeding $550 million for the 2014–2015 school year. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory, among university faculty are recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Emmy Award, the Turing Award, and the National Medal of Science, as well as many other awards. UT Austin student athletes compete as the Texas Longhorns and are members of the Big 12 Conference and its Longhorn Network is the only sports network featuring the college sports of a single university. The first mention of a university in Texas can be traced to the 1827 constitution for the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Although Title 6, Article 217 of the Constitution promised to establish education in the arts and sciences. On April 18,1838, An Act to Establish the University of Texas was referred to a committee of the Texas Congress. On January 26,1839, the Texas Congress agreed to set aside fifty leagues of land towards the establishment of a publicly funded university, in addition,40 acres in the new capital of Austin were reserved and designated College Hill. In 1845, Texas was annexed into the United States, interestingly, the states Constitution of 1845 failed to mention higher education. On February 11,1858, the Seventh Texas Legislature approved O. B,102, an act to establish the University of Texas, which set aside $100,000 in United States bonds toward construction of the states first publicly funded university. The legislature also designated land reserved for the encouragement of railroad construction toward the universitys endowment, Texas secession from the Union and the American Civil War delayed repayment of the borrowed monies. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, The University of Texas endowment was just over $16,000 in warrants, the more valuable lands reverted to the fund to support general education in the state. The legislature additionally appropriated $256,272.57 to repay the funds taken from the university in 1860 to pay for frontier defense, the 1883 grant of land increased the land in the Permanent University Fund to almost 2.2 million acres. Under the Act of 1858, the university was entitled to just over 1,000 acres of land for every mile of railroad built in the state. On March 30,1881, the legislature set forth the structure and organization. By popular election on September 6,1881, Austin was chosen as the site, galveston, having come in second in the election was designated the location of the medical department. On November 17,1882, on the original College Hill, smite the earth, smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth
3.
Science fiction
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Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a literature of ideas. Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying science fiction is what we point to when we say it, a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography, you do not know what it is, in 1970 or 1971William Atheling Jr. According to science fiction writer Robert A, rod Serlings definition is fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. Science fiction elements include, A time setting in the future, in alternative timelines, a spatial setting or scenes in outer space, on other worlds, or on subterranean earth. Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids, or humanoid robots, futuristic or plausible technology such as ray guns, teleportation machines, and humanoid computers. Scientific principles that are new or that contradict accepted physical laws, for time travel, wormholes. New and different political or social systems, e. g. utopian, dystopian, post-scarcity, paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, telekinesis Other universes or dimensions and travel between them. A product of the budding Age of Reason and the development of science itself. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Keplers work the first science fiction story and it depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earths motion is seen from there. Later, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a flight to the moon, more examples appeared throughout the 19th century. Wells The War of the Worlds describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry and it is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. In the late 19th century, the scientific romance was used in Britain to describe much of this fiction. This produced additional offshoots, such as the 1884 novella Flatland, the term would continue to be used into the early 20th century for writers such as Olaf Stapledon. In the early 20th century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of mainly American SF writers, influenced by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine. In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his series of Barsoom novels, situated on Mars
4.
William Gibson
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William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Gibson notably coined the term cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome and these early works have been credited with renovating science fiction literature after it had fallen largely into insignificance in the 1970s. In the 1990s, Gibson composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which explored the sociological developments of urban environments, postindustrial society. These works saw his name reach mainstream bestseller lists for the first time and his more recent novel, The Peripheral, returned to a more overt engagement with technology and recognizable science fiction concerns. In 1999, The Guardian described Gibson as probably the most important novelist of the past two decades, while the Sydney Morning Herald called him the prophet of cyberpunk. His work has been cited as an influence across a variety of disciplines spanning academia, design, film, literature, music, cyberculture and his family moved frequently during Gibsons youth owing to his fathers position as manager of a large construction company. In Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where the lack of encouragement for him to read was a cause of dismay for his parents. While Gibson was still a child, a little over a year into his stay at Pines Elementary. His mother, unable to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death, tom Maddox has commented that Gibson grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J. G. Ballard ever dreamed. A few days after the death, Gibsons mother returned them from their home in Norfolk to Wytheville, at the age of 12, Gibson wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer. He spent a few years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School. Becoming frustrated with his academic performance, Gibsons mother threatened to send him to a boarding school, to her surprise. He resented the structure of the boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially. On the SAT exams, he scored 148 out of 150 in the section but 5 out of 150 in mathematics. In 1967, he elected to move to Canada in order to avoid the Vietnam war draft, at his draft hearing, he honestly informed interviewers that his intention in life was to sample every mind-altering substance in existence. Gibson has observed that he did not literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me, after the hearing he went home and purchased a bus ticket to Toronto, and left a week or two later. He elaborated on the topic in a 2008 interview, After weeks of nominal homelessness, Gibson was hired as the manager of Torontos first head shop, a retailer of drug paraphernalia. He found the citys community of American draft dodgers unbearable owing to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide
5.
Impact crater
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An impact crater is an approximately circular depression in the surface of a planet, moon, or other solid body in the Solar System or elsewhere, formed by the hypervelocity impact of a smaller body. In contrast to volcanic craters, which result from explosion or internal collapse, impact craters typically have raised rims, Impact craters are the dominant geographic features on many solid Solar System objects including the Moon, Mercury, Callisto, Ganymede and most small moons and asteroids. Where such processes have destroyed most of the original crater topography and this indicates that there should be far more relatively young craters on the planet than have been discovered so far. Note that the rate of impact cratering in the outer Solar System could be different from the inner Solar System, although Earths active surface processes quickly destroy the impact record, about 190 terrestrial impact craters have been identified. They are also found in the stable interior regions of continents. Impact craters are not to be confused with landforms that may appear similar, including calderas, sinkholes, glacial cirques, ring dikes, salt domes, and others. Daniel Barringer was one of the first to identify an impact crater, Meteor Crater in Arizona, in the 1920s, the American geologist Walter H. Bucher studied a number of sites now recognized as impact craters in the United States. He concluded they had created by some great explosive event. However, in 1936, the geologists John D, albritton Jr. revisited Buchers studies and concluded that the craters that he studied were probably formed by impacts. The concept of impact cratering remained more or less speculative until the 1960s, armed with the knowledge of shock-metamorphic features, Carlyle S. By 1970, they had identified more than 50. Although their work was controversial, the American Apollo Moon landings, because the processes of erosion on the Moon are minimal, craters persist almost indefinitely. Since the Earth could be expected to have roughly the same cratering rate as the Moon, Impact cratering involves high velocity collisions between solid objects, typically much greater than the velocity of sound in those objects. Such hyper-velocity impacts produce physical effects such as melting and vaporization that do not occur in familiar sub-sonic collisions. On Earth, ignoring the effects of travel through the atmosphere. The fastest impacts occur at about 72 km/s in the worst case scenario in which an object in a retrograde near-parabolic orbit hits Earth, the median impact velocity on Earth is about 20 km/s. The larger the meteoroid the more of its initial cosmic velocity it preserves, while an object of 9,000 kg maintains about 6% of its original velocity, one of 900,000 kg already preserves about 70%. Extremely large bodies are not slowed by the atmosphere at all, impacts at these high speeds produce shock waves in solid materials, and both impactor and the material impacted are rapidly compressed to high density
6.
Ocean
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An ocean is a body of saline water that composes much of a planets hydrosphere. On Earth, an ocean is one of the major divisions of the World Ocean. These are, in descending order by area, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, the word sea is often used interchangeably with ocean in American English but, strictly speaking, a sea is a body of saline water partly or fully enclosed by land. The ocean contains 97% of Earths water, and oceanographers have stated that less than 5% of the World Ocean has been explored, the total volume is approximately 1.35 billion cubic kilometers with an average depth of nearly 3,700 meters. As the world ocean is the component of Earths hydrosphere, it is integral to all known life, forms part of the carbon cycle. The world ocean is the habitat of 230,000 known species, but because much of it is unexplored, the origin of Earths oceans remains unknown, oceans are thought to have formed in the Hadean period and may have been the impetus for the emergence of life. Extraterrestrial oceans may be composed of water or other elements and compounds, the only confirmed large stable bodies of extraterrestrial surface liquids are the lakes of Titan, although there is evidence for the existence of oceans elsewhere in the Solar System. Early in their histories, Mars and Venus are theorized to have had large water oceans. The Mars ocean hypothesis suggests that nearly a third of the surface of Mars was once covered by water, compounds such as salts and ammonia dissolved in water lower its freezing point so that water might exist in large quantities in extraterrestrial environments as brine or convecting ice. Unconfirmed oceans are speculated beneath the surface of many planets and natural satellites, notably. The Solar Systems giant planets are thought to have liquid atmospheric layers of yet to be confirmed compositions. Oceans may also exist on exoplanets and exomoons, including surface oceans of water within a circumstellar habitable zone. Ocean planets are a type of planet with a surface completely covered with liquid. The concept of Ōkeanós has an Indo-European connection, Greek Ōkeanós has been compared to the Vedic epithet ā-śáyāna-, predicated of the dragon Vṛtra-, who captured the cows/rivers. Related to this notion, the Okeanos is represented with a dragon-tail on some early Greek vases, though generally described as several separate oceans, these waters comprise one global, interconnected body of salt water sometimes referred to as the World Ocean or global ocean. This concept of a body of water with relatively free interchange among its parts is of fundamental importance to oceanography. The major oceanic divisions – listed below in descending order of area and volume – are defined in part by the continents, various archipelagos, Oceans are fringed by smaller, adjoining bodies of water such as seas, gulfs, bays, bights, and straits. The Mid-Oceanic Ridge of the World are connected and form the Ocean Ridge, the continuous mountain range is 65,000 km long, and the total length of the oceanic ridge system is 80,000 km long
7.
Moby-Dick
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Moby-Dick, or, The Whale is a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. The novel was a failure and out of print at the time of the authors death in 1891. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, call me Ishmael is among world literatures most famous opening sentences. The product of a year and a half of writing, the draws on Melvilles experience at sea, on his reading in whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare. The white whale is modeled on the hard to catch actual albino whale Mocha Dick. In addition to prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies. Hundreds of differences, mostly slight and some important, are seen between the two editions, the London publisher censored or changed sensitive passages and Melville made revisions, as well, including the last-minute change in the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in both editions as Moby Dick, with no hyphen, because the British edition lacked the Epilogue, which accounts for Ishmaels survival, it seemed that the story was told by someone who was supposed to have perished. Many reviewers in British magazines recognized a violation of the rules of fiction, other reviewers, however, found the book too fascinating to dismiss it for these reasons. Some of the scornful British reviews were either reprinted or quoted in American periodicals, about 3,200 copies were sold during the authors life. Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage, the inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the tattooed Polynesian Queequeg, a harpooneer whose father was king of the island of Rokovoko. The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg attend Father Mapples sermon on Jonah, Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod. Peleg describes Captain Ahab, Hes a grand, ungodly, god-like man who nevertheless has his humanities and they hire Queequeg the following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab, while provisions are loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas Day, the Pequod leaves the harbor, Ishmael discusses cetology, and describes the crew members. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon, a gold coin, Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit. Ahabs purpose exercises a mysterious spell on Ishmael, Ahabs quenchless feud seemed mine, instead of rounding Cape Horn, Ahab heads for the equatorial Pacific Ocean via southern Africa. One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat — its warp seemed necessity, his free will
8.
Herman Melville
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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee, an account of his experiences in Polynesian life. His work was almost forgotten during his last thirty years and his writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. Born in New York City as the child of a merchant in French dry goods, Melvilles formal education ended abruptly after his father died in 1832. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839 as a sailor on a merchant ship. In 1840 he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet for his first whaling voyage, after further adventures, he returned to Boston in 1844. His first book, Typee, a romanticized account of his life among Polynesians, became such a best-seller that he worked up a sequel. These successes encouraged him to marry Elizabeth Shaw, of a prominent Boston family and his first novel not based on his own experiences, Mardi, is a sea narrative that develops into a philosophical allegory, but was not well received. Redburn, a story of life on a merchant ship, and his 1850 expose of harsh life aboard a Man-of-War, White-Jacket yielded warmer reviews, Moby-Dick was another commercial failure, published to mixed reviews. Melvilles career as a popular author effectively ended with the reception of Pierre. His Revolutionary War novel Israel Potter appeared in 1855, from 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, most notably Bartleby, the Scrivener, The Encantadas, and Benito Cereno. These and three stories were collected in 1856 as The Piazza Tales. In 1857, he voyaged to England, where he reunited with Hawthorne for the first time since 1852, the Confidence-Man, was the last prose work he published during his lifetime. He moved to New York to take a position as Customs Inspector, battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the Civil War. In 1867 his oldest child, Malcolm, died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot, Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, a metaphysical epic, appeared in 1876. In 1886, his son, Stanwix, died and Melville retired. Melvilles death from disease in 1891 subdued a reviving interest in his work. The 1919 centennial of his became the starting point of the Melville Revival
9.
Solar System
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The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets, with the remainder being significantly smaller objects, such as dwarf planets, of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly, the moons, two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury. The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the mass is in the Sun. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being composed of rock. The four outer planets are giant planets, being more massive than the terrestrials. All planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a flat disc called the ecliptic. The Solar System also contains smaller objects, the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptunes orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed mostly of ices, within these populations are several dozen to possibly tens of thousands of objects large enough that they have been rounded by their own gravity. Such objects are categorized as dwarf planets, identified dwarf planets include the asteroid Ceres and the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris. In addition to two regions, various other small-body populations, including comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds. Six of the planets, at least four of the dwarf planets, each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other small objects. The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, the heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium, it extends out to the edge of the scattered disc. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-period comets, the Solar System is located in the Orion Arm,26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. For most of history, humanity did not recognize or understand the concept of the Solar System, the invention of the telescope led to the discovery of further planets and moons. The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99. 86% of the known mass. The Suns four largest orbiting bodies, the giant planets, account for 99% of the mass, with Jupiter. The remaining objects of the Solar System together comprise less than 0. 002% of the Solar Systems total mass, most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earths orbit, known as the ecliptic
10.
Genetic engineering
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Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct manipulation of an organisms genome using biotechnology. It is a set of used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including the transfer of genes within. Genes may be removed, or knocked out, using a nuclease, gene targeting is a different technique that uses homologous recombination to change an endogenous gene, and can be used to delete a gene, remove exons, add a gene, or introduce point mutations. An organism that is generated through genetic engineering is considered to be a modified organism. The first GMOs were bacteria generated in 1973 and GM mice in 1974, insulin-producing bacteria were commercialized in 1982 and genetically modified food has been sold since 1994. GloFish, the first GMO designed as a pet, was first sold in the United States in December 2003, Genetic engineering techniques have been applied in numerous fields including research, agriculture, industrial biotechnology, and medicine. However the European Commission has also defined genetic engineering broadly as including selective breeding, cloning and stem cell research, although not considered genetic engineering, are closely related and genetic engineering can be used within them. Synthetic biology is a discipline that takes genetic engineering a step further by introducing artificially synthesized material from raw materials into an organism. If genetic material from another species is added to the host, if genetic material from the same species or a species that can naturally breed with the host is used the resulting organism is called cisgenic. Genetic engineering can also be used to remove material from the target organism. In Europe genetic modification is synonymous with genetic engineering while within the United States of America it can refer to conventional breeding methods. The Canadian regulatory system is based on whether a product has novel features regardless of method of origin, within the scientific community, the term genetic engineering is not commonly used, more specific terms such as transgenic are preferred. Plants, animals or micro organisms that have changed through genetic engineering are termed genetically modified organisms or GMOs, bacteria were the first organisms to be genetically modified. Plasmid DNA containing new genes can be inserted into the bacterial cell and these genes can code for medicines or enzymes that process food and other substrates. Plants have been modified for insect protection, herbicide resistance, virus resistance, enhanced nutrition, tolerance to environmental pressures, most commercialised GMOs are insect resistant and/or herbicide tolerant crop plants. Genetically modified animals have used for research, model animals. The genetically modified animals include animals with genes knocked out, increased susceptibility to disease, hormones for extra growth, humans have altered the genomes of species for thousands of years through selective breeding, or artificial selection as contrasted with natural selection, and more recently through mutagenesis. Genetic engineering as the manipulation of DNA by humans outside breeding
11.
Extraterrestrial life
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Extraterrestrial life, also called alien life, is life that does not originate from Earth. These hypothetical life forms may range from simple single-celled organisms to beings with civilizations far more advanced than humanity, although many scientists expect extraterrestrial life to exist in some form, there is no evidence for its existence to date. The Drake equation speculates about the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the science of extraterrestrial life in all its forms is known as exobiology. The science of astrobiology considers life on Earth as well, in 2015, remains of biotic life were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia, when the young Earth was about 400 million years old. According to one of the researchers, If life arose relatively quickly on Earth and it has also played a major role in works of science fiction. Over the years, science fiction works have increased the publics interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, some encourage aggressive methods to try for contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, whereas others argue that it might be dangerous to actively call attention to Earth. Alien life, such as microorganisms, has been hypothesized to exist in the Solar System and this hypothesis relies on the vast size and consistent physical laws of the observable universe. The chemistry of life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang,13.8 billion years ago, Life may have emerged independently at many places throughout the universe. Alternatively, life may have formed less frequently, then spread—by meteoroids, in any case, complex organic molecules may have formed in the protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the Sun before the formation of Earth. According to these studies, this process may occur outside Earth on several planets and moons of the Solar System, since the 1950s, scientists have argued the idea that habitable zones around stars are the most likely places to find life. The nearest such planet may be 12 light-years away, according to the scientists, astrobiologists have also considered a follow the energy view of potential habitats. Life on Earth requires water as its solvent in which biochemical reactions take place, More generally, life based on ammonia has been suggested, though this solvent appears less suitable than water. It is also conceivable that there are forms of life whose solvent is a liquid hydrocarbon, about 29 chemical elements play an active positive role in living organisms on Earth. About 95% of this matter is built upon only six elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus. These six elements form the building blocks of virtually all life on Earth. The unique characteristics of carbon make it unlikely that it could be replaced, even on another planet, the carbon atom has the unique ability to make four strong chemical bonds with other atoms, including other carbon atoms. These covalent bonds have a direction in space, so that carbon atoms can form the skeletons of complex 3-dimensional structures with definite architectures such as nucleic acids, carbon forms more compounds than all other elements combined. The great versatility of the atom makes it the element most likely to provide the bases—even exotic ones—for the chemical composition of life on other planets
12.
Civilization
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Historically, a civilization was a so-called advanced culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. As an uncountable noun, civilization also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure, Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings. The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle East, and later in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China, similar pre-civilized neolithic revolutions also began independently from 7,000 BCE in such places as northwestern South America and Mesoamerica. These were among the six civilizations worldwide that arose independently, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500 years ago. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations began to rise in various cradles from around 3300 BCE. Chalcolithic civilizations, as defined above, also developed in Pre-Columbian Americas and, despite an early start in Egypt, Axum and Kush, the English word civilization comes from the 16th-century French civilisé, from Latin civilis, related to civis and civitas. The fundamental treatise is Norbert Eliass The Civilizing Process, which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the Early Modern period, in The Philosophy of Civilization, Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions, one purely material and the other material and ethical. Adjectives like civility developed in the mid-16th century, the abstract noun civilization, meaning civilized condition, came in the 1760s, again from French. The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the French revolution, civilization was used in the singular, never in the plural and this is still the case in French. The use of civilizations as a noun was in occasional use in the 19th century. Only in this sense does it become possible to speak of a medieval civilization. Already in the 18th century, civilization was not always seen as an improvement, one historically important distinction between culture and civilization is from the writings of Rousseau, particularly his work about education, Emile. From this, a new approach was developed, especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder and this sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined by conscious, rational, deliberative acts, but a kind of pre-rational folk spirit. Civilization, in contrast, though more rational and more successful in material progress, is unnatural and leads to vices of social life such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice. In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism, Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Andrew Nikiforuk argues that civilizations relied on shackled human muscle and it took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities and considers slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern civilizations. All civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence, grain farms can result in accumulated storage and a surplus of food, particularly when people use intensive agricultural techniques such as artificial fertilization, irrigation and crop rotation
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