2nd week of class

To start off the class, Prof Gurinder showed us this video on the rise and fall of empires through recorded history of man, and the fact that the continent of Africa had a significant percentage of ancient empires left a huge impression on me. Right now, when people mention about Africa, they only think about poverty, hunger, AIDS, corruption and poor governance. Yet Mali used to have the world's richest and greatest empire centred around Timbuktu, where it was said that even the roads were paved with gold. So it was a huge shock to me that great empires could fall so deep in such a short period of time. Another example was the Roman Empire, which once ruled the whole of Europe till Turkey, having the world's first parliament, which was the inspiration behind the current U.S. system of governance. It was trade and an openness to new ideas from all over the world that preserved and grew the wealth of the Empire, yet the bubonic plague reversed years of progress and prosperity, when the people decided to turn to religion and superstition because the top scientists of the time did not have answers to why as many as 12,000 people were dying every day. People started to isolate themselves in closed groups and denied access to strangers from foreign lands, who were the sources of new ideas from outside the Empire. And yet the start of the Renaissance Age was also sparked off from the same bubonic plague, when the religious bodies did not have answers to stop the deaths, and scientific methods to quarantine infected people worked. The credibility of science was regained, and important figures such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton came from this era who challenged the set of beliefs of that era and proved that their own theories were correct.

Then we watched a video on how a professor used a new method of teaching, using videos and vivid graphs to show clearly the correlation between wealth and life expectancy. I knew beforehand that the world was pretty balanced in terms of wealth and life expectancy before the 1700s, before the Industrial Revolution brought about an explosion in technological advancements that led to vaccines, pasteurisation and ultimately wealth for the Western world. Over the next 300 years, the world shifted from the poor and unhealthy quarter to the rich and long life expectancy quadrant. So what Hans Rossler predicted was that the world will continue to see a shift diagonally upwards towards a wealthier and healthier lifestyle. I think that it is entirely possible that technology advances will lead to better vaccines, broader access to healthcare facilities and better medicines that will cure disease such as cancer, yet like all things mortal, there will be a limit to how far we can actually go. It is unimaginable that humans can live forever, that because the oxygen we breathe to live will also oxidise and age our bodies, we cannot exist in this world indefinitely.

To conclude this post, I would like to rate the class a 9/10, because the video made by Hans Rossler really opened my eyes and made me realise that teaching could be fun and innovative, and also because of the lively discussions in class which allowed me to hear about different views from people on the multiple issues which we touched on during the class.