Why Nothing Can Travel Faster Than Light by Barry and George Zimmerman

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The Most Venomous Animal was less interesting than some of the other essays I read, but still informative. The most venomous animal is the arrow-poison frog, an ounce of who’s venom can kill 100,000 people. The interesting thing about the arrow-poison frog is that it has no way of discharging its poison. The poison exists solely to make the frog unpleasant to eat. Indians would roast the frogs then collect the poison as it surfaced through the skin to coat their arrows. Many other terrifying venomous creatures exist, my least favorite being scorpions. Scorpions are the deadliest insect, killing the most people of any each year. The Black Mamba is the deadliest snake and the deadliest sea creatures are poisonous jellyfish and the rockfish. Rockfish is said to be so painful that people will put affected body parts into fire or attempt self-amputation. Poisonous animals always make me think that if humans continued the evolution process if we would every develop weapons built into our bodies.

The Most Successful Animal on Earth is the insect. There are one million discovered species of insects, and an estimated five to ten million more undiscovered. Insects all follow the same body pattern, which proves it might be the superior body form. A hard exoskeleton, a body split into three parts, six legs, and generally, wings. Does that make insects better than humans? If there are so many insects, they clearly have something figured out that we do not. Maybe humans are too preoccupied with accomplishment. Insects live only to survive and make more insects, humans live for, well, I do not know. Maybe insects have figured out the meaning of life and it is to reproduce.

I was right about What Happens to us When We Die? They did not actually tell me what happens, but it was still a very intriguing essay. I like reading works like this one because they always make me think of crazy possibilities. For example: imagine an ancient species, eons old, became advanced enough to create an electronic civilization. We are this electronic civilization, but we do not know it. The ancient species watches and controls our reality, but we have no idea, and think we are the superiors of the universe. All the evidence presented regarding the possibility of a soul were recounts of patients who experienced a near death experience, or NDE. Patients who had a NDE said they felt themselves float outside their body, head down a tunnel to a light, see dead relatives and friends, then eventually meet a god-like figure. Scientists, however, could recreate these exact experiences by stimulating a certain section of the brain, which leads me to believe it is just the brain trying to facilitate the death process.

I found those six essays the most interesting of the ones I read. I did not read in order, but instead picked a good title until I had reached one hundred pages. I plan to finish the book, as the essays I read were all informative and interesting. I would recommend the book to anyone with any sense of imagination or who possesses the ability to be curious. The book makes you think and ponder, something a book had not made me do in a while, it was quite refreshing.

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