Aditya Das | Week 13: Why We Need to Keep Remembering
Have you ever been told that history repeats itself, or asked the question of why we place an emphasis on learning about the past? I certainly have.
When I was 6, I thought it was a complete waste of time, believing that we were spending too much time dwelling on the past and diverting our attention from the future. Now looking back, I wonder if I could have been any more wrong with that notion. But it took me time to come to this realization; as I began to learn about how the world worked and operated I developed the belief that our memories and thoughts might actually be the single most important thing propelling us forward.
Logic behind this is simple: our memories help us preserve what we have learned and build off of what has already been discovered. It stops us from having to “reinvent the wheel again” everytime we build a car.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” penned by Sir Issac Newton in 1675 to Robert Hooke, another one of the most brilliant minds to have ever lived.
This most beautiful quote demonstrates the power of remembering and learning from the things innovated by those who have spent their lives trying to pave the way for future generations.
The science that I believed when I was 6, to be the greatest most important field would not have been able to push the bounds of mankind as it has if history, knowledge, and remembrance of what had been done before hadn’t been preserved as it has.
Furthermore, we can see in civilizations that have had their records erased, but left their marks on earth still preserved still baffle us today through their ingenuity for their time that sometimes cannot be explained with modern technology. For instance the truth about the Great Pyramids of Giza whose latitudinal coordinates are the exact same as the speed of light which was not discovered until over 5000 years later.
This demonstrates the need for keeping the memory of the past alive.
Hi Aditya! I think, especially nowadays, people are all too ready to forget the past, or even rewrite it. One of the US senators, I forgot which one it was, recently declared that the US should have airplane companies conduct their own screening. Given that the TSA was established due to 9/11, I've seen jokes that the senator forgot about 9/11, despite the countless claims that the US "would never forget." Although I do not know how valuable this instance is, the TSA has never been particularly effective, I believe that this represents an unfortunate trend of our current politicians disregarding the past. As for your statement about the pyramids, that's likely just a coincidence. There's no reason to build the pyramids on those exact coordinates and it's awfully convenient that those coordinates are located in Egypt. I don't see them moving thousands of miles if the Egyptians lived anywhere else. Cheese consumption has increased at the same rate as people dying from getting tangled in their bed sheets. Correlation, not causation. The coordinates are a really interesting fact though!
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