Well… maybe not exactly, but the events of 1918 were, perhaps, some of the most significant game-changers in human history, even up there with The Black Death.  Just as one disaster ended, so another one began.

Accurate estimates for the death toll of the disaster that ended in 1918, the First World War, are difficult to come by.  Various sources give the figure as between 11 and 50 million people – the deadliest conflict in human history.  And, as the soldiers came home in November of that year, they brought with them an infection that became known as the Spanish Flu which, through a kind of perfect storm that only epidemiologists understand, turned into the kind of pandemic that spread to every corner on the globe.  Even people on paradise islands of the South Pacific became infected.  The pandemic killed (again an estimate) anywhere between 50 to 100 million people worldwide.  That’s almost one in five of the infections.  And the germ infected one in three of the world’s population at that time.

Therefore, just to be dramatic like the BBC or Sly News or any of them, the events of that five-year period – 1914-1919 – killed anywhere between 60-150 million people, or between 5 and 10% of the population of the world.  That would equate to about 700 million of today’s population.  That’s a prime example of the power that Mother Nature has to use the human race against itself.  They say that 99% of species that ever walked the Earth are already extinct, and what makes us so special that we expect to stay on this planet forever?  The events of history show us that the human race is no more exempt from Nature’s wrecking ball than any other, down to the smallest insect and up to the largest dinosaur.

Who’s to say that some other catastrophic event – a meteor, say – or self-inflicted nuclear explosion, wouldn’t finish us off for good?  Because let me tell you, the human race has not learned one single lesson from the events of 1914-1919.  No, there is some inbuilt intent on the part of us as a race to kill each other.  And animals.  Kill anything that’s weaker and feel good about it.  Furthermore, there is no telling if some external force will kill us all, because we are, after all, just another species.

I don’t wish to get too astrophysical, but the Universe is huge.  So huge that there could be anything up to (there’s that phrase again) two hundred billion times two hundred billion stars out there organised into various galaxies.  I don’t know what that number equates to, but I suspect a lot.  Are we so arrogant as to assume that around that vast number of stars, there isn’t another planet which, through a series of miraculous coincidences, is not supporting life that, if not identical, is at least very similar to our own?  If you look up at the night sky and you could see, say, one million stars, that would equate to about 0.00005% of the number of stars estimated to be in this galaxy, the Milky Way, alone.

I’m a firm believer that there must be something life-like out there.  I have no scientific evidence to back that up, I just believe it.  And I hope one day, thousands upon thousands of years into the future, there may be a way that communication can be established between this disparate worlds.  For that to happen, a number of things must be true that, for the time being at least, there is no evidence to guarantee possibility; like travelling faster than the speed of light, for example.  It is said that, even if we could travel at light speed and try to reach another galaxy, they would be travelling so fast that we wouldn’t be able to reach them anyway.  Don’t ask me how that works, it’s all to do with Hubble’s Law and stuff.

In the one hundred years since we lost around five percent of humanity in five years, the human race has made seismic leaps in technological advancements.  Who would have thought a century ago we would have 3-D printers that can knock out almost anything?  But all this technology is a smokescreen.  The computer that I am typing this on is merely a smokescreen to allow humans to believe they have made large advances in technology, and therefore our purpose as the dominant race is justified.

But, as human beings, as people, we have made little, if any, advances at all.  It’s like your Dad going out into the shed to fiddle with his motorbike instead of dealing with some emotional crisis in the family – his daughter’s first relationship break-up, or similar.  That’s all the human race has ever done – gone out into its shed to fiddle with its motorbike while Mother Nature takes care of the hard stuff.  They come back into the house for their tea, proud that the motorbike now runs great but completely oblivious to the fact that they are still capable of killing each other but now in far larger numbers, because their motorbike now works.

As November 11, the centenary of the end of the First World War, approaches, I would like to think that we will remember how horrific it must have been for those who fought in that and every other war since; how young men barely 18 years of age went ‘over the top’ in their tens of thousands only to be mown down by the opposition and have all that potential, all their lives, snuffed out in an instant.

And even today, as the USA suffers a mass shooting almost every day now, the centenary of World War I might prick the consciences of the politicians who insist on keeping the gun laws intact despite a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution; of the millions of ‘conservative’ Americans who blame the ‘left’ for trying to ‘take their guns away from us’ – when, if it is a ‘left’ versus ‘right’ issue, then all the left is trying to do is preserve life, even conservative life.

There are wars, insurgencies, violent outbursts going on in all parts of the world.  South America, Asia – there’s got to be a way to say, come on, enough now already!

Why do I bring such depressing figures to my blog? Because those deaths were all, in my view, attributable either directly or indirectly to the war. We don’t know how much the Spanish flu pandemic would have spread without the war, it’s true, it might have been the same, but I believe the real lesson in that five year period as we do approach the centenary of the end of that war, is not to take our political differences to the battlefield. You would have thought that terrible conflict would have seen the end of legalised murder forever, but no, since 1918 there have been more than 220 separate wars, conflicts and uprisings including World War Two, which was much more deadly than the first. Not to mention civilian mass shootings and bombings, which happen almost on a daily basis now in the USA in particular.

Yes, I’m one of those noisy ‘liberals’ who wants all guns to be collected up and jettisoned into space. With a note attached, saying “This is what human beings do to each other.”

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