We’ve been talking about life beyond earth for decades…and one of the best places to look (for starters) are the moons of Jupiter and Saturn…wouldn’t it be cool if we could land a probe on one of them to have a little look around? ...but that won’t happen for decades, right?

Wrong…it already happened…in 2005, the Huygens probe descended to the surface of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn…it was a monumental achievement in space exploration.

Oh…forgot that that one, huh? ...okay, let’s try another.

Anyone remember when an entire country went bankrupt? ...you would if you were from Iceland…in 2008, the entire Icelandic banking system collapsed forcing the nation to declare bankruptcy…but Iceland recovered by actually holding bankers accountable and initiating a series of financial reforms that are worth studying by other countries.

Don’t remember, huh?... One more.

What about the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010…it was the largest marine oil spill in history and cause an incredible amount of environmental and economic damage…they even made a movie about it along with a bunch of documentaries.

My point is that news and world events come at us so fast and from so many angles, they occupy all our attention for a hot minute…but then we either become overwhelmed, bored, or distracted by something else…we move on and forget—or bury the information deep.

I sometimes think we’re approaching the human limit of being able to process all the information that comes at us every second…and if we can’t do that, we can’t learn any lessons from the past, we can’t understand why we are where we are now, and we can’t even predict where we might go in the future.

That’s why it’s important for us to stop, look back and to see what happened…this is chapter 9 of “the 100 greatest rock moments of the 21st century—so far” .

Songs in this episode:

Moby - Porcelain

Chris Cornell - Nothing Compares To You

Linkin Park - In The End

The White Stripes - Blue Orchid

Thea Gilmore - Mainstream

U2 - Until The End Of The World (live)

Jack White - Lazaretto

Eagles of Death Metal - I Love You All The Time

Man With No Name - Teleport

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