5 People You May Not Know that Probably Saved Your Life and Changed the World

History has no shortage of people who have greatly contributed to making the world a better place. People like Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Rosa Parks, and Alan Turing are but a few of those remarkable human beings that we owe our lives to today.

However, history is not only made by giants. In most cases, the greatest events that have shaped the world involved hundreds of nameless faces that are as heroic as their iconic contemporaries.

So, in today’s list, we are honoring some of those people whom the world has overlooked as we count down to 5 people you may not know that probably saved your life and changed the world!

#5 — Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov

The Cuban Missile Crisis put the world at the precipice of total Nuclear War. When Cuba opened its borders to Soviet ships carrying nuclear armaments, the United States and the rest of the international community held their breath, fearing if we would still be alive the next day.
Many people attribute the abating of the missile crisis to John F Kennedy himself, but the real story behind it was far from what the rest of the world has come to believe. 

In 1962, JFK and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev stood toe to toe regarding the transit of nuclear weapons to the Caribbean which is why the United States government placed a heavy embargo on Cuba to prevent weapons to come into its shores.

At the center of the conflict area, the USSR sent a B-59 Soviet Foxtrot Class Submarine that was armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. To prevent the submarine from advancing beyond the embargo line, the US sent 11 destroyers and an aircraft carrier, the USS Randolph.

War should have broken out because the US began to barrage the submarine with depth charges but to fire back in retaliation, the Soviet submarine needed a unanimous launch approval from three on-board officials: Captain Valentin Grogorievitch Savitsky, Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and another officer named Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov.

Savitsky and Semonovich gave the nod to launch the missile and essentially press the button for the Third World War, but Arkhipov convinced the two that it was a bad idea to fire back. Instead, despite protests from Savitsky and Maslennikov, the submarine resurfaced in plain view: a decision that decisively averted the annihilation of the human race.

#4 — Nils Bohlin

You may not know him but Swedish inventor, Nils Bohlin, has saved millions of lives in the past fifty years and continues to do so with a simple solution to the problem of comfort and laziness.
When the automobile was first introduced to the public the idea of seatbelts was non-existent if not completely optional. Though the seatbelt was introduced for mass consumption in 1959, these safety devices were basic lap-belts that did nothing to prevent any internal injury to the driver and passengers.

Back then, seatbelts were mostly employed by professional race car drivers and their design was more on the bulkier, less comfortable side being a four-point harness. While they were much safer than lap-belts, convincing the average Joe to go the extra mile of securing all attachments of the belt was another story. In fact, where they were offered, regular people just flat out refused to use them.

This was a problem, and Bohlin was able to identify it and find a solution to make life-preservation as simple and effective as possible. He ended up with the three-point seatbelt, a safety device that we use to this day and has saved many lives of motorists and their passengers.
To Bohlin, though the problem of overcoming laziness and comfort was a little bit of a hurdle, the solution was so simple that motorists need to only use one hand to fasten their belts and still have a generous amount of comfort while on the road.

Bohlin initially invented the belt for car manufacturer Volvo, but his idea was incredibly ground-breaking and innovative that the company made the patent available to all car manufacturers as a sign of goodwill and interest in public safety.

#3 — Viktor Zhdanov and Donald Henderson

Sometimes the biggest wars ever waged were on a microscopic level. The disease has been the bane of humanity since the beginning of time, and since the inception of the medical sciences, humanity has been waging a relentless battle against pathogens and potentially lethal diseases to this very day.

However, there have been victories where humanity has rid the world of illnesses like polio and dysentery. One of these victories came from an unlikely alliance.

In 1958, USSR Deputy Minister of Health Dr Viktor Zhdanov approached the World Health Assembly with a proposal to create a global effort to finally eradicate smallpox. Since the disease caused by the Variola virus has claimed millions of lives over the decades preceding the 1950s, Zhdanov found it necessary to step up to save lives.

The proposal and initiative, after being presented to the Assembly and the members of the international community, were accepted by the United States and was represented by a physician named Donald Henderson, MD.

The amazing team-up yielded to amazing results and Dr Zhdanov, and Dr Henderson’s efforts paid off when smallpox was essentially rendered extinct through the distribution of information globally and by making the vaccine immediately available to the public.

#2 — Gertrude Elion

The first half of the 20th Century was not a great time for women everywhere. With misogynism still a staple even in civilized society, women have found it difficult to break ground without being side-lined by their male counterparts.

Gertrude Elion was one of the many women who were consistently ignored and doubted by a male-driven society. Despite graduating with honours, she was turned down for scholarships because of her gender. Even after obtaining her Master's Degree in Chemistry, she was constantly turned down any opportunity to work in laboratories and had to accept a less than prestigious job checking frozen fruit for rot and mould.

Her break came when World War II broke out, and the scientific world needed more people in labs and facilities. Landing a job with Dr George Hitchings, she was able to collaborate with him and publish over 200 papers and research.

Even more, Elion and Dr Hitchings were able to pioneer a new and revolutionary way of developing drugs called “rational drug design” that eliminated the risk of putting a person’s life on the line to find out if a drug works properly. By studying the behaviour of pathogens through biochemistry, the pair was able to use the information to create drugs to specifically target a certain kind of disease.

Also employing this technique, Elion was able to invent a variety of drugs that included the first treatment for Leukemia, anti-malarial vaccines, and immune-suppressive agents that are used for delicate organ transplants. Adding to her inventions were antibiotics used to treat meningitis, septicemia, and treatments for urinary and respiratory tract infections.

To top it all off, Elion was first to develop a treatment for viral Herpes that we know as Zovirax.
The world, quite possibly, would still be battling diseases if it weren’t for her scientific research and countless contributions. 

#1 — Rudolf Roessler

During the Second World War, Britain was scrambling to find a way to decode German messages before the next Nazi bombardment over London. When Alan Turing invented the Enigma machine, the tide of the war turned in favour of the British, and they were able to prevent a full-scale Nazi invasion of the already crumbled city.

While that was all well and good for the world, most historical accounts have discounted the Soviet efforts to prevent Nazi incursion spreading eastward. While they may not have their own Enigma device to crack encrypted messages from the enemy, the USSR had a man named Rudolf “Lucy” Roessler working on their side who proved to be much more effective and efficient than England’s Enigma machine.

Roessler was an anti-Fascist German publisher who kept in constant contact with the high ranking rebellious members of the German General Staff while living in Lucerne.

While working on his code-breaking machine, Roessler also communicated with the members a covert radio espionage group called the “Red Orchestra” from the USSR. Through a round-the-clock and tireless work, Roessler was successful in transmitting decoded communique from the Germans to the Kremlin within six hours of interception.

One of Roessler’s greatest victories was his discovery of an offensive against the Kursk Salient called Operation Zitadelle.  After delivering the decoded messages to the Kremlin, Roessler was able to bring victory to the Soviet Union that made the German offensive in the east crashing hard into a brick wall.

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Sources:
http://whatculture.com/science/8-people-you-didnt-know-saved-your-life
http://www.cracked.com/article_18519_6-people-youve-never-heard-who-probably-saved-your-life.html
http://www.craveonline.com/mandatory/1041404-10-people-youve-never-heard-of-who-changed-history#/slide/1

Was There an Ancient Nuclear War?

Is mankind currently at the peak of a modern age of advancement in technology and weaponry, or are we merely trapped in a never-ending cyclical process of innovation, prosperity and eventual self-destruction? There are those among us who believe that humanity’s complicated fascination with nuclear warfare is only a recent repeat in a series of achievements and blunders that have come, gone and returned with the passing of time and the rise and fall of different civilizations. This means that there are currently a variety of theories and hypotheses entertaining the idea and the strong likelihood of an atomic war taking place thousands of years ago, during a time when the most ancient human civilizations on the planet had flourished and had subsequently been erased from existence.

While talk of an ancient nuclear war may sound like something that can only be read on science fiction novels, there are theorists and believers who claim to have found indirect references in ancient literature about a large-scale war in the past that used complex tools of destruction. There are also allegedly best available evidences which can be found in ancient ruins supporting the possibility that our ancient ancestors possessed highly advanced technology which may have included powerful weapons intended for atomic warfare.

Ancient Nuclear War as Detailed in the Mahabharata

source: loving2you

Modern mankind had never heard or experienced horrific descriptions about the aftermath of a nuclear explosion until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during the Second World War. However, an accurate description of such a catastrophic event had allegedly already been written in ancient texts thousands of years ago – more particularly, in the great Sanskrit epic of ancient India titled the “Mahabharata.”

The Mahabharata, which spoke of doom and destruction and allegedly contained verses that seemingly spoke of a nuclear warfare, is believed by some to be an indirect proof that an ancient nuclear war took place on Earth way before the nuclear bomb attacks in World War II. The ancient Hindu epic are claimed by some to have originated thousands of years earlier, and they say it described massive “fireball” weapons falling from the sky during a war between the Rama Empire and an enemy race considered as the archetype of the mythical empire of Atlantis.

One reference in the Mahabharata purportedly speaks of explosions which were described to be brighter than “a thousand suns.” And when these blasts occurred, the suns were supposedly twirling in the air; the trees went up in flames; and the overall destruction was so massive that corpses were burned to the point that they were completely unrecognizable. Those who managed to survive the blasts, however, started to lose their hair and nails, while their food supplies got contaminated. All these are allegedly a concise reference to radiation poisoning and nuclear fallout, which were written on texts that are thousands of years old.  

The Ancient City in Mohenjo Daro

source: scoopwhoop

These gritty details referencing an atomic war is said to have occurred in a bygone era, when knowledge and technology required to make such weapons should not have existed yet. And so, in light of this, some believe that the Hindu epic of Mahabharata may not be as mythological as most scholars and experts think. And among the best evidences usually raised to support the theory of an ancient nuclear war is the ancient city discovered at Mohenjo Daro. Now an archeological site located in Sindh, Pakistan, Mohenjo Daro was built around 2500 BCE, and was one of the largest settlements of the ancient Indus Valley civilization until its abandonment in the 19th century BCE.

This archeological site was not rediscovered until the 1920s, and since then, significant excavation has been conducted at the site of the city. When excavations of Mohenjo Daro reached the street level, they discovered 44 skeletons which were scattered all over the city. Many of them were holding hands and were lying face down in the street, while their faces and body positioning suggested that they suffered a sudden, violent death. In certain areas of the site, they have found increased levels of radiation, and it was also a wonder how the bodies, which are thousands of years old by archeological standards, did not decay or get eaten by wild animals along the way.   

British Indian researcher David Davenport, in particular, claimed to have found a 50-yard-wide epicenter at Mohenjo Daro where everything appeared to have been fused and glassified by a heat as high as 1500°C through a transformative process known as vitrification. Vitrification is a process in which regular-type stone gets molten into magma state before hardening once again. However, once the stone is hardened, it feels like glass. At the site, there is evidence of vitrification, a phenomenon which could have only been achieved if the site was exposed to extreme heat by some type of blast.

Moreover, A. Gorbovsky in his book titled “Riddles of Ancient History” reported the discovery of at least one human skeleton in the area with a level of radioactivity approximately 50 times greater than it should have been because of natural radiation. Davenport, on the other hand, claimed that what was found at Mohenjo Daro corresponded exactly to what was seen after the nuclear bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Debunking of the Ancient City in Mohenjo Daro as Evidence of an Ancient Atomic War

Source: National Geographic

But did an ancient nuclear war actually take place in the ancient city discovered at Mohenjo Daro? Skeptics and many experts in the field of archeology and the sciences would respond in the negative. One of the first problems with this theory is that the excavations in Mohenjo Daro - through which the bodies were discovered - have been criticized by scholars for the poor approach used during the dig period. The poor methodology applied by the excavators has consequently made interpretation of the ancient site difficult.

Even though some of the original excavators of the site have initially interpreted the evidence in a way that suggested that the skeletons found there were linked by a single catastrophic event, they took the view that the catastrophe was brought about by war and not a nuclear explosion. Moreover, it was also determined by some scholars that although some of the bodies were found in the same parts of the city, their distribution suggested that many of them actually came for different time periods. Some of the bodies were clearly from the Early period of Indus Valley civilization while some are believed to be from the Late period. It is worth nothing that the two periods are more than a thousand years apart.

Also, the idea that the bodies were laying around in the streets has been disproven. The bulk of the bones found at the ancient city were actually found in contexts suggesting burials of the sloppiest and most irreverent nature. The most infamous group of bodies that were found laying in the middle of the street was actually caused by the fact that these bodies were buried during the later period of the Indus Valley civilization, at a time when the existing buildings had been built over the establishments erected in earlier periods. Hence, the bodies found, as it turns out, were buried above a road which was built from a period hundreds of years earlier.

As for the remarkably well-preserved bones, this can be chalked up to Mohenjo Daro being literally one of the hottest places on Earth, with temperatures reaching up to 128 degrees. And because the location is also really dry, it is a perfect climate for preservation. This is also probably the reason why the mud-brick buildings are still standing until now.

As for the claims about there being radiation at Mohenjo Daro, the problem with these allegations is that no one is completely certain where this claim originated from. Since the source of the claim was not any of the scientists directly involved with the Mohenjo Daro digs, and since theorists that believe in the occurrence of a nuclear explosion in the area do not cite a specific and accurate reference with which to verify this claim, there is no reason to address it sp urgently as it is a non-factor in assessing the validity of the theory regarding ancient nuclear warfare.

What about the claim that the ancient settlement in Mohenjo Daro is the epicenter of vitrification? Well, according to archeologists, the site is actually not the epicenter of anything. What was found during the excavation was just a small amount of broken pottery. And because pottery is put in a fire to harden it, the broken pottery found in the area contains a specific type of vitrification called Frit. Aside from that there is no epicenter of anything at the site. If there was, traces of Trinitite - which is vitrified sand caused by a nuclear explosion – should have been found.

Another major problem with the theory that the Mohenjo Daro settlement was destroyed because of a nuclear explosion is the city itself. For an ancient city that was supposed to have been obliterated by an atomic bomb, it is unusual and inconsistent that the buildings in the area are still intact, and some of them are still standing erect at 15 feet high. Since they are made out of mud, some of them should have been toppled if a nuclear weapon did hit the ancient city as the force of its blast wave had more than sufficient destructive power to do so.

And so, to summarize, from the standpoint of skeptics and scientific experts, the bodies at Mohenjo Daro were not killed in a sudden disaster. In fact, they died a thousand years apart in some cases, and were also clearly buried. The cases of radiation are also a non-factor, while the overexaggerated vitrification at the site was actually caused by pottery.  Lastly, if a nuclear explosion obliterated the citizens of that settlement, it should have knocked down the mud-brick houses which are still standing at the site. But, it didn’t.

With speculations and evidences which allegedly prove that an ancient nuclear war took place on Earth, and with skeptics, scholars and other experts working diligently to disprove them, the theory of a highly-advanced ancient civilization capable of atomic warfare remains essentially a controversial case rather than a clean-cut one.

Was there really an ancient nuclear war thousands of years ago? And if so, did an advanced human civilization exist on planet Earth around that time, or were their supposed high technology alien in nature? For now, the truth remains uncertain. While all the evidences presented referring to an ancient atomic warfare have somehow been debunked one way or another, it is also difficult to definitively dismiss that a highly-advanced ancient civilization didn’t exist on this planet at all without presenting tangible proof as well.

Nevertheless, mankind in general must keep in mind that the important thing is for us to not pass judgment on this subject matter so rashly, and to keep an open and objective mind as new evidence gets discovered in the years to come. Maybe by then, the validity of the facts and evidence presented will be compelling and sufficient enough to either affirm the theory that an ancient nuclear war did happen, or definitively conclude that such an event had never happened at all.

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Sources:

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_07.htm
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