Introduction: We Travelers of Unknown Destination
It was 5 o’clock in the evening of June 21 in 2019 when I was weaving words in my ASUS machine for the first paragraph of this book in the basement of my Burlington home in Ontario, Canada. This was the longest day of the year in northern hemisphere, and coincidently, the eve of my 50th birthday, not to mention the birthday had already begun in my native country Nepal where 22nd of June was already up, the day I was born. It took me about an hour to draft this paragraph. By the time I finished the paragraph, I was thinking I had been nowhere but sitting on a chair in my basement, which wasn’t in fact true when looking into my relative position in the cosmos in perspective. When assuming it as my absolute position, true I was in the same chair in my same basement, but I was in a high-speed motion within the cosmos sticking on our beloved planet earth in a far corner of our Milky Way Galaxy changing my position in the cosmos every moment. To see my movement within the solar system and beyond, in one hour of writing this paragraph I had already revolved around earth’s axis by a rotating distance of 1,667 kilometers and had travelled about 107,000 kilometers around the sun in the planet’s orbit, more than 8 times full circle of the earth by comparison. After having dinner prepared by my wife with her culinary dexterity that evening, I went to bed to take a nap for the night. When I woke up at 5 in the morning next day as my alarm rang, I was lying on the same bed where I was yesterday evening but again my relative position in the cosmos had brought me in next 12 hours in the same sun’s orbit another 1.3 million kilometers away, while at the same time being dragged in about 9.5 million kilometers towards the center of the Milky Way galaxy in its Orion Arm, the distance based on what scientists say the sun’s speed around our home galaxy is 800 thousand kilometers per hour. On top of that, there is an estimation that our Milky Way galaxy is gravitating towards Leo and Virgo constellations due to their intense gravity with an estimated speed of 2.1 million kilometer per hour, now this force taking me further away by 21.2 million kilometers in another direction of the cosmos along with my home Milky Way galaxy, in an astronomical blink of an eye of only 12 hours of my napping time here on earth that day. In the aggregate, I was billions of kilometers away in the cosmos from where I began to put bits in my computer for this book four years ago.
With no hint of it at all where we all on the planet are heading to at that colossal speed, our life on the planet earth continues though. As far as the vast and unknown cosmos that is out there, there is yet another vast world within our own planet still to be explored much of it. As cosmos passengers in remote corner of mysterious deep sky, all together on same spaceship earth, what 8 billion of us attached to this sphere are busy with? Are we doing the best we can? What forces guides our while living on the planet? Are there any ways we can improve our conditions going forward? The imperative of writing this book is to answer these big questions, big enough that the answer by this insignificant creature living in one corner of earth spaceship within such a vast cosmos will certainly be far from complete. But believing that all in all it will add one more brick in the Great Wall in understanding us and what we are up to, I spent countless hours in my basement in last few years to come up with this small addition to our existing understanding of the world.
To give a punch line, I begin with this note – this book intends to unite the world and spread positivity around it by focusing more into its optimistic side, with the sole intention of creating the environment where we can find ways to live happily together. After all, we have got only one planet to live and share, and we can live as one big family in this planet ensuring good living for all no matter where we belong to within our planet home.
Under the sun so many things are happening. When we go about our daily life, we don’t realize where the cosmos is bringing us, but we have got many agendas to get busy with within our planet. In doing that, we often tend to see and experience the world in parts but less aware about wholeness of it. To illustrate this with an example, we are like ants walking on the surface of slowly spinning toy globe sitting on a table. Like ants are on their own with no sense at all that the globe is spinning and that we are watching them, we are in the same situation on the real globe that is spinning in one corner of vast cosmos, but we all are busy in our own business like ants. Unlike ants though, we intelligent beings have capacity to understand the wholeness of the globe and even beyond it, and this book intends to take you in understanding that very wholeness and set up the better path forward for all of us living in this planet home.
One way to see the wholeness is to see the planet from sky and know the facts what is happening on the ground. Many satellites are doing that for us now. A total of 6,718 operating satellites are on top of our head as of January 1, 2023, besides thousands from private companies now to provide us internet services. Surveillance satellites are keeping eyes on events happening on earth around the clock. Some of them even look beyond earth in outer space for us. Ever since the first images from space that we began to receive through the sub-orbital V-2 rocket flight launched by the U.S. on October 24, 1946, we have made a great leap forward in mapping the planet and many satellite imaging companies, tech giants, and governments are involved in this big endeavor[1]. These satellites from distance see us in whole and provide more of an integrated view of the planet and about us. I refer this view as Satellite Window View, hereafter SatWin View for brevity[2].
My interest in varied fields along with lived experiences in many situations throughout my half a century life have fed many arguments in this book. SatWin view is probably the manifestation of the fact that I was drawn to the area of sky, planes, and astronomy since my childhood. I remember a moment during my childhood when my father had just passed away and a few days later I was busy making a toy plane in my home’s backyard out of wood attaching two fans made of paper sheets in its wing. My two married sisters had been to my home for my father’s ritual then, but I had no care of their coming and I was just busy making the plane and flying holding it high in one hand and running forward to make fans spinning. I spent most of the time that day doing it. Geography, on the other hand, is another fascinating area where I am just drowned into as I spend in a regular basis countless hours in Google Earth and National Geographic to experience the world including watching in television the accounts of world travellers who share their experiences to the world, unlike me who loves watching these in screens but not willing to travel much, probably being a bit of introvert by nature. Other areas of my interest include history, science, philosophy, technology, and economics is as such what I am trained as academician. Thus, the book brings all these areas together, both in longitudinal and cross-sectional dimensions, to see the world in a comprehensive way from varied lens. Besides, I find myself lucky in the sense that in this short life span I had a privilege to see and experience both Eastern and Western worlds, early part being spent in the East in Nepal whereas later part in the West in North America, which has shaped many views in the book representing these contrasting settings.
On these imperatives, I decided to put the ink to my think when I turned 50. By this age I had no time to embark on any academic discourse as writing this book but just to struggle with life and career moving from place to place. As such, it wasn’t an easy road for me to embrace the new world when I moved to advanced North America from deprived South Asia. But by the time I reached this age, I felt I was obligated to share my experiences to the world hoping to make a little contribution to the humanity before I leave the planet. The analysis here should be taken as less prescriptive but rather more illustrative. In other words, the book is an account of the world mostly by an observer but less so by an advocate. The book is the blend of reality and the opinions while more dominant with facts. I don’t delve much into offering recommendations at least at this point, let alone the solutions, but would want to provide readers a colorful account of what is happening on the surface of our planet in more like a canvas setting, and then just trigger the alarm based on the observation and introduce briefly the course of action to be taken moving forward that is needed to advance the humanity in the next level. Offering illustrative account of the world based on facts is one motivation of doing this book but another motivation that follows this is also that the sequels of this book have been planned with more prescriptive nature and for it, I felt it necessary to laid the foundation for new books with more accurate observation of the world in a holistic frame in the first place so right courses of action can be forwarded in more detail.
Going back to SatWin View, astronomers in International Space Station (ISS) are well trained in photography, and not surprisingly, looking planet from space for them must be breathtaking experience and they have taken staggeringly beautiful pictures of topographies such as of volcano, glacier, and so forth, but one thing unexposed or of relatively limited coverage on those photographs is direct human activities on the ground, not to mention the uglier the planet has become due to these very human activities which photographs have also captured. Their photographs hardly capture how humans came into being, what they are busy with on the planet’s surface, and how they are interacting each other. The objective of this book is to connect those gorgeous views of the planet in images with the animated human element embedded into them, to see the wholeness of the world where nature and human are in constant play within the planet. Besides, the astrophysicists are often seen to be organizing pompous press communique to boast in front of the world for their accomplishments – things like they found a new earth-like planet, they observed gravitational wave, and the like – and again one thing missing in those big announcements is human side of our living on the planet. This book is about connecting those big accomplishments the science has made in which we are very proud of with our very own existence and evolution on the planet itself. Make no mistake in assuming that astrophysicists don’t care about us at all; they put days and night together to offer us better understanding of our surroundings in the sky we have little knowledge of[3]. On top of that, the astronomers must have a very different view about our world than we all have on the ground because they see the planet in its entirety and in quick span of time, as they go all around earth 16 times a day, for example in ISS, traveling 8 kilometers per second. At least in their view, we can guess they take the entire world as one integrated organization, unlike we on the ground perceive the world fragmented with borders and other divisions. The intent of this book is also to take readers to astronomer’s view of the planet as one world which is believed to mitigate the effects of man-made divisions embedded into it on the ground. Just to feel this astronomer’s world view imagining that you are in Cupola and watching earth down below, the Cupola, meaning dome in Italian, being the cabin in ISS that is used to view the planet and take photographs[4], don’t you see the world below you as one family? Wouldn’t this take you to experience the wholeness of our living on the planet? This book brings you to these feelings throughout.
In observing the wholeness of the world and having a good feel about our life on the planet, we must see the world in perspective, something to believe what Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu say in The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World[5]. Narrow view, in and of itself, is an ultimate enemy of progress and our happiness whereas broader view gives us strength to cope with the situation we face as we understand the wholeness of the system and how things are connected in it. To create the feeling of seeing the world in perspective, I am trying to connect the pieces of puzzles together, to the best of my capacity, to create a larger purview, in the belief that people’s enhanced living experience on the planet evolves when we can avoid getting over localized and limited understanding of our living but instead get passed it to come out and see the world out of the box. In that case, we can see wonderful realities unfolding in front of our eyes that equip us with the ability to evaluate the situation in more realistic way, be able to live up with the challenges, and seek best courses of action for collective good. As a matter of fact, this is gradually happening now and we are currently in the state of transitioning from narrow view of the world to a broader view, and this is so because we are already so much connected globally in terms of technological advancement we have achieved and even venturing out to the sky to expand the understanding of our world beyond it. This book is a precursor to align with this transition.
We humans are pattern-recognizing machines. We are constantly looking up through telescopes and looking down through microscopes while trying to understand from gigantic to miniscule, but what awaits ahead for us to do is to connect the dots within the continuum across these two spectrums and visualize the patterns that can help us understand interconnectedness of the world we live in. In finding patterns, we, however, need to maintain the balance without going too far in either spectrum as constrained by our ability and resources because going to deep in space can ignore to see what is happening in our backyard while focusing too much inward may curb our boundaries of knowledge about the outer world. When putting a lot of efforts to find, for example, whether there are earth-like planets and any living things residing in them within this vast universe, we must not ignore to understand what we are doing as being already here as living things in one corner of the universe and must also not disregard to understand our own beautiful machine the planet earth and beautiful creatures living in it. What are the patterns that are emerging within the boundary of our knowledge so far? Upon going through many literatures and penetrating the facts about us, our planet, and its surroundings, many patterns have become discernably visible and here are a few examples. Spacization, on top of globalization, is happening in a great speed; prosperity over time on the planet appears to be travelling from Europe to North America to East Asia, leaving the rest behind in race, former group can be termed as Earlyrunners and the latter as Laterunners; and middle-age powerhouse, as opposed to middle-income powerhouse, which spreads uniformly across the world and carries huge potential to mitigate the gap between Earlyrunners and Laterunners, to name a few.
Nature, on the other hand, creates many patterns, and we humans evolve within these patterns with our own trajectories. The earth is rotating its boss – the sun – for four and half billion years now and in this journey, nature created geography on earth, and we created communities in it, by ‘we’ it means all our ancestral living creatures through the evolution. Most of the landmasses were in southern hemisphere 500 million years ago which now you see mostly in northern hemisphere and on this geographical transformation, one piece of land, for example, spit from today’s Antarctica about 300 million years ago that drifted north rapidly to get attached in Eurasia landmass to become Indian sub-continent now. There was no earth’s tallest mountain Mt. Everest 60 million years ago, but it rose to become the tallest mountain in the world today after Himalaya began to form during that time. On building communities within these transformations, on the other side, mammals, for example, came into existence about 215 million years ago and from within mammals, a diversion of great apes from gibbons happened around 17 million years ago that laid the foundation for the emergence of human species, one of them being the most astute Home sapiens lately, whom the planet is hosting now in billions in number to give wonders to the world, not to mention many dents they have also caused in our planet home’s very surface lately[6]. A total of 117 billion humans came into being on the planet’s surface since Homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago and they continued developing their sophisticated communities all over the planet which goes until now[7]. In the name of developing communities and achieving prosperity, the recent generations of humans, however, have inflicted a big damage on the planet’s health, and the readers are taken back and forth in this notion throughout the book.
Within this interplay between nature and human and resulting geographies and communities, how is human’s business on the planet going? Each day on the planet is full of surprises. We 8 billion of us get up as sun rises in the east, we spend the day either working or idling around or taking care of others, and we all take a nap as night falls. We do the same thing to get the ball rolling another day, and by next day over 150,000 leave the planet as they die whereas twice as many open their eyes first time to discover the world ahead, with net gain of over 150,000 human beings on earth under the sun every single day. With this rapid expansion of us, within only 50 years of my lifetime, at the time I had begun to write this book, the people on planet earth more than doubled. Among this crowd, nobody that we see today were there on this planet just one hundred and fifty years ago, and after one hundred fifty years from now, nobody, even a newborn child today, will be there, never mind it could be that we can make a big invention of keeping people live for hundreds of years, if not forever. I know very little about my great grandfather and my great grandchild would know little about me, but life on the planet continues. Young generations are pushing us away and they are being pushed away by the generation coming after them. When you can see all these dynamisms on planet’s surface from sky, it must look like we are in a constant motion in operating our life here on earth as a running machine in a factory that produces things constantly like we do produce offsprings or like an escalator in a shopping mall that takes us up incessantly, the similar way we humans come and leave turn by turn all the time on the planet. To see this dynamism, at one point in the book you will be taken to the moment when you are flying in a polar orbit satellite, and you see down below a constant ripple of human activities as the sun moves west with the earth spinning east underneath and as people get ready for the day with the sunrise. In another point, you are taken to the moment on June 21 around noon Greenwich time to see the whole planet from geostationary satellite, the moment when the show on the planet is so vivid that almost the whole population in the world is awake at that precise moment and people are seen busy in numerous tasks all through the planet. These shows on earth must be fascinating to view from sky to understand how we all are up to on the planet in a daily basis.
Within this dynamism on the planet, is our performance in it running optimally? Speaking on behalf of the current population of 8 billion people, my view is that we are running less than optimal, and it looks like we are busy all the time but with seemingly no obvious collective goal. No doubt we have achieved a significant amount of prosperity and lots of good things coming out of it, but the question is whether the prosperity is going hand-in-hand with our enhanced living experience on the planet. Are we all living happily in this solo home family? Before answering these questions, we must admit that we have horrendously failed when it comes to distribute what we have achieved so far among members of this big family. Capitalists believe the prosperity will trickle down but that’s their interpretation and the fact is that we don’t see it from sky or from data. The pressing point also, to me, is that we have created so much out of the planet, but we have been so much careless about protecting this very planet itself where we are residing and, most importantly, we have no place to go beyond our planet home if any severe damage happens in it. A considerable eight times increase in population in barely past 200 years, for example, needs a lot of resources and put pressure in it as such to be able to continue our life in this home, and the fact is that we have nothing to bring or borrow from elsewhere other than from within this planet. This is equivalence of expanding two-member family household with only husband and wife to 16-member family living in the same home, and we can imagine how this family experience an extraordinarily difficult situation to manage this household with limited resources, never mind what could be the situation if all 16 members demand so much more than what the family can offer to them. This family must invent ways to manage it effectively and efficiently, and when same applies to a larger planet home family, we have no choice than to seek ways to manage it the same way as effective and efficient as possible because the fact is that humanity has failed to perform to its fullest at moment. This mandates to take departure in our actions from what we are currently doing.
To cover all these accounts described so far, the book is organized in three parts: first part offers an observational description of our living on the planet earth, second part discusses the forces behind what is happening in it; and the third part outlines future directions. Within these three themes of the book, in the first part I begin by walking readers briefly in all geographical continents, including polar extremes, to give a headline level description of the world and people living in it. Then, the readers are taken to an account of the roles 8 billion of us are playing in the earthly drama. By understanding these roles, it looks like our living on the planet is guided by an alliance of leaders and professionals where leaders are driving the earth show, professionals are writing the story, and all else are the workforce running the worldwide system of production and distribution. Next chapter discusses what we have created so far while fulfilling different roles on the planet. Interestingly, the value of knowledge that we have created so far is more than the value of physical goods. In the following chapter, people’s movement around the planet is discussed. The world is very dynamic where there is a constant flux of people, be it as domestic and international migrants, business travellers, tourists, and those on study. This constant movement of people around the world is contributing to the fusion of values, customs, cultures, and beliefs. Planet’s richness from diverse flora and fauna is discussed in the following chapter. Notwithstanding different parts of the world have different flavors, the fact is that we all belong to the same family on earth and the family in its entirety looks astonishingly beautiful. This beauty, however, has been tarnished by unfair and unjust world we have created, which is the coverage of the last chapter in the book’s first part.
In the second part in describing the forces behind what is happening on the planet, income-expenditure annihilation force is discussed first which is the most powerful force today to drive the world in motion. This force is discussed as an analogy to Einstein’s mass and energy equivalence where it is claimed that both income and expenditure, as mass and energy in Einstein’s theory, are different manifestations of the same thing and when these two annihilate, the force comes into action which engages billions of people on the planet. Next force comes from fulfilling our needs. While many human needs are discussed in this chapter, food remains on the center because food is common denominator to all on the planet and without food, no other activities we are engaged in are possible. Another most powerful force on the planet is ownership which is both universal and dynamic. The ownership force, more strengthened through good record system lately in human history, even gives an explanation as to why communism failed. The reason is that communism did not embrace the notion of ownership which goes against the rule of nature that prevails from atomic level to cosmic level. Geopolitical force is another major force on the planet which leaves no one spared when it comes to endure its influence. This leads to the question of whether leaders should be trained to achieve maximum global welfare because over-nationalistic approach of some leaders results in geopolitical confrontation that destroys harmony of the world order in any moment because such leaders are overly indulged on their own interest. Beyond all these forces, there are many other major forces in play, including force of nature, force of money, and force of religion which are also shaping our life significantly on the planet, and they are discussed in the final chapter in this part of the book.
Third part of the book covers the future directions that lie ahead for us. In the first chapter in this part, an urgent need of protecting the planet from environmental degradation is discussed. Arguments are forwarded to make the case that unless we can preserve our planet home, there is no point of achieving the progress we have realized now and aspiring for it in the future. All it boils down to the idea that we must return our planet to our future generations intact and healthy to ensure prosperity all along the way going forward. In the following chapter, a case is made to think the world as one to be able to address some challenges which are mostly global in nature as the world is heavily integrated today. The chapter explains what roles international organizations have played to unite the world and highlight the importance of their increasing role in the coming days. In the next chapter, two immediate future discourses are proposed in which the first discourse envisions an alternative economic paradigm where it is suggested to take the notion of wealth of the world going beyond wealth of nations propounded by Adam Smith. The wealth of the world founds on the idea of two-tier pyramid theory where those on top of the pyramid will continue to utilize capitalism’s ability to create more wealth and this wealth to be used for more research, development, and innovations, and on the bottom of the pyramid, billions of people will participate in decentralized value creation mechanism to enhance their living conditions through market dynamism and social mobility. The next immediate discourse, standing on the idea of wealth of the world, is the development of theory of everyone which is applied to all human beings on the planet irrespective of time they live in with an ultimate goal of creating the environment where all will live happily.
All these descriptions in the book are based on positively proven evidences and research-driven analyses, while a little figurative component coming from the description of the planet through SatWin View which is only to use them as illustrations or give readers a fantasy when reading the book. Data are extensively used to describe the situation but sometimes data don’t capture subjective things like compassion, love, and joy, and thus both factual and literatures relating to art disciplines are also taken into its embrace to describe the world. In that line, major contributions made so far in major disciplines, mostly economics discourses, have been taken to make the arguments in the book. On top of that, news articles also largely serve as the basis for description of events in the book. News articles are often blamed as being news only but not containing views and sometimes taken as back-of-the-envelope description of events without any in-depth analysis, but I take news as though they fill the gaps as feeders within ongoing long-term trend of events of the contemporary world, sometimes as such requiring scrutiny of their validity[8]. Beyond the description coming from news, data, literatures, and the analytical research works, my opinions have also taken a significance space in the book wherever I thought they were appropriate.
To sum it all up, it is expected that you will have full joy from the interesting journey this book will take you on. The aim of the book is to provide a colorful, factful, and holistic description of our living on the planet, and until the time the live view of the planet from sky will be in place to watch it, which appears to be coming soon, this book is precursor to that realistic view and it is expected that by going through the flow of the texts in the book will give you the same feeling as though you are watching a play on planet’s surface from a distant high in sky.
[1] UCS Satellite Database. Union of Concerned Scientists, https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/satellite-database, accessed August 8, 2023; “This Day in Aviation: Important Dates in Aviation History,” thisdayinaviation.com, https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/24-october-1946/, accessed December 8, 2023.
[2] Unlike bird’s eye view or thirty-thousand-feet view which are popular terms today, which covers only small area on earth’s surface, SatWin View is a more holistic and comprehensive view covering large area from greater distance, and as such bird’s eye view or thirty-thousand-feet view already are embedded into SatWin view as satellites can also see the parts of the planet more closely in high resolution images, seemingly as though looking through a powerful binocular or telescope attached to the window of the satellite for an observer.
[3] Astrophysicists’ contribution is no doubt crucially important to enhance our living on the planet, and at the same time it could be that in layman’s view, they may seem to be living onto their own world and appear distinct from rest of others as one may feel seeing those announcements of their discoveries about outside world. They appear like they are excessively focused on matters away from us as opposed to the rest of others who are going about their daily life here on the planet. Thinking that revealing the mystery of outside world is supreme thing that matters most, chances is that astrophysicists could possibly become ignorant, or unknown of at least, the human side of the world and their living on the planet itself. This book offers human side account of the world to address any gaps that possibly exist in astrophysicists’ outward-focused understanding of the world.
[4] Cupola has six trapezoidal side windows and one bigger 31.5-inch diameter top window, largest window ever flown in space that gives a panoramic view of the earth to astronomers. The dome is 1.5 meters tall and maximum diameter of 2.96 meters which houses up to two crew members. Ever since it was first launched in February 2010, it has helped astronomers to take millions of photographs of earth, not only for hobby but as part of scientific research as well (see The European Space Agency, “Cupola”, https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Node-3_Cupola/Cupola, accessed July 13, 2023)
[5] Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Carlton Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (New York: Avery, 2016).
[6] “Watch How Today’s Continents were Formed over one Billion Years – in Just 40 Seconds,” World Economic Forum and Visual Capitalist, June 16, 2021, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/1-billion-years-tectonic-plate-movement-pangaea-geology/; Roger Bilham, “Birth of the Himalaya,” PBS Online, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/everest/earth/birth.html#:~:text=What%20ultimately%20formed%20Mt.,map%20of%20the%20Indian%20subcontinent, accessed December 9, 2023; For mammals rise, see Michael Novacek, “Rise of Mammals,” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/1/l_031_01.html, accessed July 18, 2023. For split from gibbon, see University of Tubinjen, “Last Ape and Human Ancestor was about the Size of a Gibbon, ScienceDaily, October 12, 2017, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171012091129.htm#:~:text=The%20hominoids%2C%20including%20all%20apes,about%2017%20million%20years%20ago.
[7] Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub, “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?,” Population Reference Bureau (PRB), November 15, 2022, https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/. Others have estimated the number of human beings who have ever lived on earth to be anywhere from 45 billion to 125 billion, with most estimates falling into the range of 90 to 110 billion humans (see Sade Agard, “Human Population: What the Number Reveals about Life on Earth,” Interesting Engineering, Jan 19, 2023, https://interestingengineering.com/science/human-population-life-earth). For past studies, see Samuel Goldberg, “How Many People Have Ever Lived?,” in Probability in Social Science, Mathematical Modeling, 1a, (Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, 1983), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5616-8_2; Edward S. Deevey, “The Human Population,” Scientific American 203, no. 3 (1960): 194-205, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24940623.
[8] To see how important news are to understand the world, one can look at Gene Weingarten’s text One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America which describes the events that happened on a particular one day in America, Sunday, December 28, 1986, such as things like story of serial killer, a tragic fire, political blunder, unusual romance, and so forth (see Gene Weingarten, One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2019). It should be case that these events must have happened in particular contexts that may link to the events prior to these and those coming afterwards. The flow of news like these truly reflects what happens on the planet each day, which falls under the scope of this book so news couldn’t be avoided.