Douglas Edward Blish1946 through 2026
1936-1952 Reign of King George VI (Windsor)
1945-1952 Harry S Truman president of US
1946 The Bikini
1946-1989 The Cold War
1947 Transistor
1947 India and Pakistan emerge from ex-British India
1947 UN partitions Palestine to Jewish and Arab sections
1948 33 1/3 rpm musical recordings
1948 NATO formed
1948 Israel inaugurated as state
1948 Arabs attack Israel on the day it is inaugurated
1948-1955 Multiple polio epidemics in the USA
1949 Apartheid policy in South Africa
1949 Soviets detonate first nuclear bomb
1949 45 rpm musical recordings
1950-1954 McCarthyism
1950-1953 Korean War
1950 World pop. est. at 2.4 billion
1950 Bunche 1st black to win Nobel Peace Prize
1951 Electricity from Atomic Power
1952 1st Thermonuclear Device Detonated
1952-2022 Reign of Queen Elizabeth II of England
1953-1960 Dwight D Eisenhower president of US
1954 Racial segregation in schools ruled unconstitutional
1954 Womans right to vote (UN Suffrage)
1955 Introduction of Salk Polio Vaccine
1955 Warsaw pact formed
1955 Invention of Velcro
1955 Fiber Optics (by Kapany)
1956 Ocean liner Andrea Doria collides with the Stockholm, sinks
1957 Sputnik Launched - 1st (artificial) satellite
1958 Stereo LP recordings come into usage
1958 FM Stereo Broadcasts
1958 Integrated Circuit
1958 US space agency (NASA) established
1958 Neural Network invented
1959 1st nuclear powered merchant vessel, Savannah
1959 Alaska enters the union - 49th
1959 Hawaii enters the union - 50th
1960 1st weather satellite (Tiros I)
1960 Laser
1960 World subsurface circumnavigation by US sub Triton
1960 Pantyhose
1961 1st US manned spaceflight - Alan Shephard
1961 First human in space - Yuri Gagarin
1961-1963 John F Kennedy president of US
1961-1989 Berlin Wall
1961-1991 7th Cholera Pandemic
1962-1965 Vatican II
1962 Cuban missile crisis
1963 Compact Cassette Recordings
1963 Pres. Kennedy Assassinated
1963 1st artificial heart
1963-1968 Lyndon B Johnson president of US
1963 Valentina Tereshkova is 1st woman in space
1964-1975 Vietnam War
1964 US civil rights bill
1965 Blacks riot in Watts neighborhood, Los Angeles
1965 1st spacewalks (US, USSR)
1966 1st soft landings on moon (US, USSR)
1966 8-track tape players
1967-1970 Nigerian civil war
1967 Six day war: Israel-Arabs
1967 Physicist John Wheeler coins the term Black Hole
1967 Marshall 1st black supreme court justice
1967 1st human heart transplant
1968 Martin Luther King assassinated
1968 Robert Kennedy assassinated
1969 Moon Landing - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
1969-1974 Richard M. Nixon president of US
1969 Woodstock Music Festival
1969 ARPANET begins (Internet's precursor)
1970 Nat. Guard murders 4 students at Kent State
1971 Pakistani civil war
1971 Intel ships 1st uProcessor: the 4004
1972 North Atlantic trash patch discovered
1972 8008 Microprocessor ships (Intel)
1973 The Internet begins
1973 October war (Israel-Arabic nations)
1973 Invention of the cellphone
1974 Pres. Nixon resigns in disgrace
1974-1976 Gerald Ford president of US
1974 8080 Microprocessor ships (Intel)
1974 6800 Microprocessor ships (Motorola)
1974 CP/M operating system released
1975 Byte Magazine, issue #1 - September
1975 Altair 8800a - the 1st home computer
1975 SWTPC 6800 computer
1975 IMSAI 8080 computer
1975 Ebola virus appears - 90% lethal
1975 6502 Microprocessor ships (MOS Technology)
1976 US Bicentennial
1976 Whites accept principle of black majority rule in S. Africa
1976 VHS Video Recordings
1976 Television begins satellite delivery
1976 Z80 Microprocessor ships (Zilog)
1976 Apple releases first computer
1976 FLEX operating system released
1977-1980 James Earl Carter Jr president of US
1977 Neutron bomb
1977 Kilobaud Magazine, issue #1 - January
1978 Jonestown religious group mass suicide - 913 people die
1978 1st test-tube baby
1978 Laserdisc video recordings
1978 6809 Microprocessor ships (Motorola)
1979 Three Mile Island nuclear event
1979 Margaret Thatcher 1st Woman Prime Minister in UK
1979 OS-9 operating system released
1980 Mount St. Helens Erupts
1981 1st space shuttle flight - Columbia
1981 1st female supreme court justice
1981-1988 Ronald Reagan president of US
1981 IBM PC ships
1981 Anwar Sadat, Pres. of Egypt, assasinated
1982 1st genetically engineered product - insulin
1983 Compact Disks
1983 Bluford 1st black in space
1983 Pioneer 10 leaves the solar system
1983-1985 Famine in Ethiopia, 1.2m dead
1983 Cellphones come into use
1984 Apple Macintosh Ships
1984 HIV determined to be cause of AIDs
1985 Amiga Computer Ships
1985-2050 Era of effective Machine Learning
1985 Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupts in Columbia, 23,000+ die
1986 Mir space station deployed
1986 Shuttle Challenger explodes
1986 Chernobyl power plant melts down
1986 Halleys Comet
1987 2000th satellite launched: USSRs Cosmos
1988 Turin shroud precisely carbon dated to 1330 AD - shroud is a hoax
1988 Pacific trash patch discovered
1989 Pons and Fleischmann claim cold fusion
1989 Breakup of the Soviet Union
1989-1992 George Bush president of US
1989 Powell is 1st black chairmain joint US chiefs of staff
1989 Fall of Berlin Wall
1989 US Invades Panama, topples Noriega
1990 World Wide Web
1990 Hubble space telescope deployed
1991 Iraq attacks Kuwait, US Attacks Iraq
1991-2003 8th Cholera pandemic
1992 Blacks riot in South Central neighborhood, LA, US
1992 Invention of the smartphone
1993 Muslim terrorists bomb World Trade Center
1993-2000 William Clinton president of US
1993 Catholic Church apologizes for abusing Galileo
1994 South Africa moves to 1 person, 1 vote system
1994 Smartphones come into use
1995 American Terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City
1996 DVD video recordings
1997 Mars pathfinder lands
1997 Cloning living beings
1997 Comet Hale-Bopp reaches magnitude -1 or so
1997 Heaven's Gate mass suicide
1998 Pres. Clinton Impeached December 19th.
1998 US attacks Iraq, again
1998 1st 1 GHz microprocessor ships - The DEC Alpha CPU
1999 US attacks Bosnia
2000 North Pole ice melts - 1.5 km of open water in August
2000 Playstation II ships
2000 Working draft of human genome completed
2000 2nd Coming, 2nd time; unfulfilled prophesy
2001 Earthquaqe at Gujarat, India - 20,000+ deaths
2001 Muslim terrorists destroy World Trade Center Sep 11th
2001-2009 George W. Bush president of US
2001 X-Box console released
2001 Wikipedia goes online
2001 Probe NEAR-Shoemaker makes 1st touchdown on asteroid
2001 Satellite Radio broadcasts to consumers begin
2001 Netherlands first country to legalize same-sex marriage
2001-2020 US war in Afghanistan, October 7th
2002 Euro currency introduced
2002 10th solar planet(oid) discovered: Quaoar
2002 Terrorist bomb kills 170, injures 250 in Bali
2003 28,000 die in Iran earthquake
2003 Shuttle Columbia destroyed during re-entry (feb 1st)
2003-2020 US war in Iraq
2003-2026 Cholera has become endemic
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami kills 290,000+ - dec 26
2004 Huge trans-Neptunian object, Sedna, discovered
2004 Water verified present on Mars by Odyssey lander
2004 10 terrorist bombs kill 200, injure 1240 in Spain
2004 Non-government Spaceship One achieves spaceflight
2005 Muslim terrorists bomb London transit system July 7th
2005 Huge trans-Plutonian object discovered
2005 Hurricanes Katrina, Rita devastate New Orleans - Aug, Sep
2005 Microsoft ships Xbox 360
2005 Space Shuttle returns to flight July 26th-Aug 10th
2005 NASAs Deep Impact spacecraft craters comet Temple 1
2005 Kashmir earthquake kills more than 74,000
2006 Israel attacks Lebanon
2006 Americans lose habeas corpus
2006 Twitter launched
2006 Wii ships from Nintendo
2006 PS3 ships from Sony
2006 Blu-Ray recordings
2007 Amazon launches the Kindle reader
2007 Comet McNaught swings by the sun - extremely bright
2008-2010 Global Recession
2008 Tesla begins delivering electric vehicles to the public
2008 Cyclone Nargis kills more than 138,000
2008 Sichuan Earthquake kills more than 69,000
2009 Population of Africa reaches one billion
2009 Comet Lulin, a green comet, swings past earth
2009-2016 Barack Obama president of USA
2010 Haiti earthquake - 220k dead, 300k injured
2010-2025 US improves heathcare for millions with ACA
2011 Craig Venter creates first artificial lifeform: Mycoplasma laboratorium
2011 Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico
2011 Macular degeneration curable
2011 Space shuttle fleet retired
2011 Japan 9.1 earthquake and Tsunami - 10K dead
2011 Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, rad release
2012 Mayan calendar cycle ends
2012 Voyager I crosses the heliopause
2013 Meteor explodes over Chelyabinsk
2013 Embryonic stems cells created via cloning
2013 First nation to legalize cannabis -- Uraguay
2013 XBox One launched
2013 PS4 launched
2014 Gay marriage in England, Wales
2014 NATO ends combat ops in Afghanistan
2014 Amazon launches the Echo voice-command server
2014 Laser weapons deployed on naval platforms
2015 Dawn probe reaches Ceres
2015 New Horizons probe reaches Pluto
2015 Cuba and USA reestablish diplomatic relations
2015 Mecca Hajj stampede kills 2200+, injures 900+, 600+ missing
2015 Liquid water found on Mars
2015 Hurricane Patricia record winds 200 MPH+, 879mb pressure
2015 Ireland legalizes same-sex marriage
2015 First controlled landing of spacecraft booster
2016 North Korea tests nuclear weapon
2016 Chinese 500m radio telescope begins ops
2016 4k Blu-Ray recordings
2017 New phase of matter: "Time Crystal"
2017 Machine learning (ML) system beats human Go champion
2017-2020 Donald Trump president of the US
2018 Women allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia
2018 OpenAI releases GPT-1 LLM Machine Learning system
2019-2020 Over one billion animals perish in Australian bush fires
2019 US President Trump impeached December 18th
2019 Facebook fined $5B dollars by FTC
2019-2026 COVID-19
2019-2026 Measles cases surge in the US
2019-2026 ACA crippled by non-enforcement of individual mandate
2020 COVID-19 reaches pandemic levels
2020 Cultured meat goes on sale (Singapore)
2021 Assault on US Capital
2021 COVID vaccines developed
2021 Malaria vaccine approved by WHO
2021 Direct injection CRISPR Cas-9 gene editing
2021 James Webb IR telescope launches
2021 US President Trump impeached for 2nd time
2021 Diffusion-based generative imaging ML systems
2021-2024 Joseph Biden President of the United States
2022 Webb IR telescope goes live
2022 Polio re-emerges, beginning in NYC, USA
2022 Monkeypox spreading internationally
2022-2026 Reign of King Charles III of England
2022-2026 Russia invades Ukraine, commits multiple war crimes
2022 SCOTUS regresses women's healthcare 50 years
2023 CRISPR gene editing therapies approved (US, UK)
2023 Ex-President Trump convicted of Sexual Abuse
2023-2025 Palestinian/Hamas terrorist atrocity; Israel responds
2023 Cultured meat legal to sell in US
2024 Ex-president Trump convicted of 34 felonies
2024 Warmest year (on records kept since 1880)
2025-2026 Donald Trump president of US
2025 Robotaxis deployed in some US cities
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