Years

As part of an assignment due on Monday, my class is required as individuals to find images representative of a given element of humanity in a particular year.
My group was given 1996. It was then further divided up, and I was delegated technology/science.

We need to come up with 3-5 distinctive images that will be used to form a collective overview of humanity's existence at that year in time.

Wikipedia was immensely helpful, it provides an overview of the significant events in each year in a number of different categories - Science, Arts, Politics, and so forth.

The images I've ended up settling on are below.



I find it really interesting, this process of profiling humanity. It's going to be really good on Monday, where we're going to pin all our finished posters up around the four walls of our studio to form a progression since 1994 to the current day.

It's humbling how many noteworthy things scientists alone achieved in 1996, which didn't make it to my "best" most noteworthy events.

-We as a species completely genetically profiled the common yeast - the first eukaryote to be done.
-We determined that a meteorite ALH84001 possibly contained extraterrestrial life.
-We launched the spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker to observe the asteroid 433 Eros.
-We launched the Mars Global Surveyor.
-We discovered the Comet Hyakutake.
-We opened the second Keck 9.8 metre telescope in Hawaii.
-We discovered the existence of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, basically the human Mad Cow.
-We succesfully demonstrated magnetic refrigeration, making things colder by introducing them to a magnetic field.
-And for fun, a Swede, Göran Kropp, climbed Everest completely unassisted and with no oxygen, having ridden a bicycle there from his home in Sweden.

That's just science, and that's just the most major things. Humanity is awe-inspiring. I actually want to do more years, more profiles. What we've done in 10 years must be breathtaking. I've just recently had this sort of appreciation for how powerful we are as a group, for all the things we come up with. It's sort of a shame I think, that we have no-one to show it to, collectively, no outsiders to come in and be completely blown away. It's hard to see everything when you're inside this space, this time we've created for ourselves. Stepping outside it and knowing nothing of us, then being introduced back - that would be the closest experience I could get to a religion, a belief in a power.