Years ago I was doing a TAFE course and part of it required a certain level of typing speed. We used a program, I think it was called Type Quick or something, and this was one of the texts we typed. I took a copy of the text.
IF WE UNDERSTAND THIS CAN WE CHANGE?
Planet earth is 4,600 million years old.
If we condense this inconceivable time span
into an understandable concept, we can liken
Earth to a person of 46 years of age.
Nothing is known about the first 7 years of
the life of this person, and whilst only
scattered information exists about the middle
span, we know that only at the age 42 did the
Earth begin to flower.
Dinosaurs and the great reptiles did not
appear until one year ago, when the planet
was 45. Mammals arrived only 8 months
ago; in the middle of last week man like apes
evolved into ape like men, and at the
weekend the last ice age enveloped the Earth.
Modern man has been around for 4 hours.
During the last hour, Man discovered
agriculture. The industrial revolution began
a minute ago.
During those sixty seconds of biological
time, Modern Man has made a rubbish tip of
Paradise.
He has multiplied his numbers to plague
proportions, caused the extinction of 538
species of animals, ransacked the planet for
fuels and now stands like a brutish infant,
gloating over this meteoric rise to
ascendancy, on the brink of a war to end all
wars and of effectively destroying this oasis
of life in the solar system.
Zaijian and cheers.
I always found this text fascinating and kind of sad. It's taken me months to crawl through my files to find this. I've never seen it anywhere else and honestly it's sadder now than it was, because I was learning to type using this program in 2004. Little has changed since.
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