{"id":855,"date":"2012-03-26T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T05:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jackofharts.com\/?p=855"},"modified":"2012-06-12T00:10:55","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T05:10:55","slug":"the-book-of-civilizations-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/?p=855","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Civilizations – Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello, my name is Charles Edward Hurst.\u00a0 Many have asked me to write a history of our world.\u00a0 Considering what I study, I chose to answer the calls.\u00a0 This is the forward to the book, with much more depth to be found in its pages.\u00a0 I know that beginning a book of our civilization well before any<\/em> civilization we know existed may seem odd, but considering the claims of the Shang, I think it best we start as early as possible.\u00a0 The more we know, the harder it will be for others to exploit us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Book of Civilizations<\/h1>\n

Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Where did we come from?\u00a0 Why are we here now?\u00a0 Some people say we evolved out of random chance and there is no reason we\u2019re here beyond random chance.\u00a0 Some people say we were created by a higher power to follow some higher purpose.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 All I know is that we are here and I plan to do something with that fact.<\/p>\n

We know that we were nomadic in the beginning, but some studies suggest that we also settled down in villages from the very beginning as well.\u00a0 Unfortunately, we don\u2019t have much hard evidence of anything that long ago.\u00a0 There was an ice age that makes finding out what happened difficult.\u00a0 Did we have great civilizations with great cities on the coasts as some claim?\u00a0 Or were we cavemen huddling against the cold and scrawling on walls as others say?\u00a0 We don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t even really know when the ice age ended.\u00a0 Some say it ended 15,000 years ago, while others say 10,000 years ago.\u00a0 What we do<\/em> know is that when it happened, the sea levels rose at least twenty meters in as little as two centuries, and any coastal civilization we had literally fell beneath the waves.\u00a0 This is probably where the stories of Atlantis falling beneath the waves and the Great Flood come from.\u00a0 Perhaps one day a true scientific study of the outer shelf can be made to see what truth those stories are based on.<\/p>\n

We know that humanity after the ice age was nomadic, rarely settling in one place at a time for long.\u00a0 We ran from the rising waters on the coasts and many of us settled far away from the oceans.\u00a0 Civilizations rose up in the Andes Mountains of America, the northern mountains of India, and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia east of the Mediterranean Sea.\u00a0 Other great powers of the ancient world rose up as well, Egypt and China being examples.\u00a0 There are others of course, but this is a basic idea of where human civilization rose after the ice age.<\/p>\n

As the ancient world faded, new civilizations arose in Carthage, Greece, and Arabia, and many others disappeared.\u00a0 Greece took the first steps towards founding what we consider Western Civilization, and created enmities that still exist to this day, when they conquered Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and even parts of India.\u00a0 Then Rome stepped up and conquered the known world around the Mediterranean Sea.\u00a0 Only the Persians were able to stand against the Roman juggernaut.<\/p>\n

Rome itself bowed to the rising Christendom after centuries of suppressing it.\u00a0 And then Islam rose to capture Rome\u2019s eastern and southern provinces, and conquered Persia with a lightning campaign.\u00a0 Europe became the bastion of Christendom, while Islam took over everything from the west coast of Africa to India.\u00a0 They suppressed any local culture they found in favor of the glory of Islam and became one of the world\u2019s greatest empires.\u00a0 After centuries of reeling from the fall of Rome and Islamic invasions, the nations of Europe rose up again and colonized America, destroying the last of America\u2019s ancient cultures.\u00a0 It is regrettable that the actions of both Christendom and Islam in those centuries of war made studying our early days as a race much harder.<\/p>\n

Russia and America rose up as new civilizations and gained enough power to influence the rest of the world.\u00a0 Then the World Wars of the twentieth century destroyed the Ottoman Empire, and forced the Islamic world to live under Christian governors who often did not respect their beliefs for decades.\u00a0 By the time they were granted independence, they had a host of new reasons to hate the world at large, and the Western World in particular.\u00a0 At the same time, the last of a long line of Chinese Emperors fell, and shortly thereafter China rose again as the Communistic empire it is now.<\/p>\n

We went to space, landed on the Moon, and sent probes to Mars, Venus, and everywhere else in the system.\u00a0 It was an amazing time to be human in those days, a hopeful time, a time when all we saw was us getting better and going higher.\u00a0 It was a time of unbridled worldwide optimism.<\/p>\n

The Islamic Jihad brought everything to an end.\u00a0 Suicide attacks, religious riots, drive-by shootings, and piracy on the open seas became their standard tactics.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t actually responsible for the Second Great Depression, even if they did<\/em> trigger it.\u00a0 The massive international debt and loan systems that caused it were already in place, and would have resulted in a depression of some kind no matter what.\u00a0 The Jihad simply stressed an already fragile system of international trade.<\/p>\n

With the Second Great Depression, America and the European nations couldn\u2019t afford their foreign bases and brought their troops home.\u00a0 Foreign aid programs ended and over a hundred small nations who depended on them to survive collapsed.\u00a0 Into that chaos, the Islamic movements began full-scale military campaigns against non-Islamics from Africa to India and killed tens of millions of people.\u00a0 Africa, Israel, and India struck back.\u00a0 Everybody did actually, in their own corners of territory, but those campaigns against the Islamics were the bloodiest and most visible, and resulted in the general destruction of Islamic power in the world.<\/p>\n

Russia and China began to flex their muscles as well, annexing their neighbors and using those resources to strengthen their positions.\u00a0 America and Europe responded by forming the Western Alliance and those three powers clawed themselves out of the Second Great Depression.\u00a0 Trade between the three great powers became non-existent as patriotic fervor required that people buy from their friends, not their enemies, and the Big Three rebuilt abandoned factories and began to stand tall again.\u00a0 In time we even returned to space.\u00a0 We colonized the Moon and Mars, and placed outposts on many other planets and moons in the system.<\/p>\n

The year 2105 was when everything changed.\u00a0 The Chinese made their first jump into hyperspace and proved that we could go to the stars<\/em>, not just the other planets.\u00a0 We setup a crash program and followed them three years later, and the Great Space Race began.\u00a0 The Big Three went first, followed by Africa and numerous smaller nations and larger corporations.\u00a0 We colonized Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Indi, and then continued out into the other systems surrounding us.\u00a0 We studied The Wall of interstellar dust completely surrounding Earth approximately 150 lightyears away and found out we couldn\u2019t break through.\u00a0 We spent the next half-century trying to find our way through and finally did in 2205.<\/p>\n

And in 2205, everything changed again.\u00a0 The Peloran made Contact with the British.\u00a0 It was the first time we knew that humanity was not alone in the universe.\u00a0 The larger surprise was that they were just as human as we were.\u00a0 Whenever we asked why, they just told us to keep looking for the answers to that.\u00a0 While they didn\u2019t bring answers, they did<\/em> bring medical Treatments that cured almost every disease, allowed us to live hundreds of years in good health, and in some very rare circumstances (approximately one in a million) actually froze our aging altogether.\u00a0 I am one of those Ageless.\u00a0 They also helped us build hyperdrives that could pass through The Wall in safety and the galaxy was ours.<\/p>\n

The Roderan and Shang made Contact soon after the Peloran, and we found them to be just as human as the rest of us.\u00a0 The Shang claimed it was because they were our gods and created us in their image and had returned to rule over us with their great wisdom now that we were worthy of their presence.\u00a0 The Peloran just smiled and told us that the Shang were not entirely trustworthy, though the Chinese seemed to fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.\u00a0 The Roderan don\u2019t talk much, at least not to us in the Western Alliance.\u00a0 Even with the Russians though, they work with closed lips most of the time.<\/p>\n

Shortly after Contact, a Russian ship fired on an American ship over a disputed colony.\u00a0 That started a far more aggressive and dangerous space race between the Big Three, with fighting over colony worlds becoming far more common.\u00a0 We signed several treaties promising not to engage in combat over most of our major worlds, including Earth, as we didn\u2019t want to wipe out our major industrial bases.\u00a0 That kept full war from developing, but relations in the colony regions never got better than tense.<\/p>\n

By 2304, we had at least some<\/em> form of base or colony on most of the habitable worlds inside what we now call the Terran Bubble, the clear space inside The Wall.\u00a0 We also had numerous colonies outside The Wall, and had explored most star systems within 300 lightyears of Earth.\u00a0 By any definition of the other races, who traveled thousands of lightyears to Contact us, we were still just a regional power at best, and the fact that we were actively fighting each other over most of that region didn\u2019t help us.\u00a0 We looked weak as a power.<\/p>\n

That was when the Shang hit Yosemite Yards in low geosynchronous orbit over California.\u00a0 The massive space station broke apart and pieces of it came down to crash all over the America West, from the Pacific to the Mississippi River.\u00a0 They also targeted Washington D.C. during the State of the Union and wiped out the vast majority of the American government.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know why the Shang attacked us.\u00a0 Lucky for us, the Peloran stand with us, as they promised they would.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Chinese have made it clear that they stand with the Shang.\u00a0 At this time, the Russians and the Roderan have remained neutral, seemingly happy to watch us fight each other. \u00a0I don\u2019t know if I should hope they remain that way, or pick a side.\u00a0 They could<\/em> after all pick the wrong<\/em> side.\u00a0 Whatever the future holds there, we are at War now, and we can only pray that we prove victorious, while making plans to ensure that result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello, my name is Charles Edward Hurst.\u00a0 Many have asked me to write a history of our world.\u00a0 Considering what I study, I chose to answer the calls.\u00a0 This is the forward to the book, with much more depth to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-of-civilizations","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-charles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":858,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions\/858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}