There Are Some Things You Can’t Change

It’s the New Year again, well, almost. You can’t begrudge me a couple of days late (I had to do a bit of research for this one). 2015 is opening up in front of us like the maw of a giant sarlacc that WILL swallow us all whether we want it to or not.

And, with 2015, we’re looking down the barrel at things that you can’t change.

Who’s “we”?

The biggest possible “we” there is. All of the human race. As a species, we’re like a BASE jumper that’s just taken his first half-step off of Half Dome and having that moment of “maybe I shouldn’t” just after it’s too late to do anything about it. We’re committed to the ride we signed up for–and that means there are some things we can’t change anymore.

We’ve had moments like this before. Once upon a time, one of the quadrupedal fish that crawled out of the pond to find food or escape from being food actually decided to make a habit of it, and found it could survive better on land. From that point forward, the land–every square inch of it, everywhere–was going to be populated. Nothing within the control of those creatures (or their descendants) could change that, ever. No matter what happens, until the universe takes this planet out, there will be life on the land. The era of empty land was over.



In 1492 when Columbus hit the Americas, he wasn’t the first European to do so. There is good reason to suspect that Romans had once maintained some kind of trade relationship with Brazil, and the Vikings tried several times to settle the East Coast of North America. However, each of these contacts, however solid, was lost as either the Americans got rid of the invaders (in the case of the Vikings) or the alien culture declined to the point where it was unable or unwilling to bear the risk of pan-Atlantic travel (in the case of the Romans). Columbus did not discover America, at least not in the traditional sense. What he did do was come back to America for good. The moment the boots of his rag-tag crew of refugees set foot in San Salvador, there was no going back. It changed the diets of every person on the planet, it changed the disease burden of every person on the planet, and it meant that there would never again be a time when goods and people did not cross the Atlantic regularly and in large numbers. The old world, at that point, was over (even in the “new world”).

Whether good or bad (almost always they’re a mix of both), change like that happens because something fundamental has shifted underneath the surface when the world wasn’t looking. That fundamental thing could be the ability to metabolize free oxygen, or it could be a collision with an alien world.

So, to kick your New Year off with a bang, here are ten things that are over, that we can’t change anymore: