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Grand Funk Railway was playing at the Montrieux Casino when a “stupid with a flare gun” fan fired a flare indoors. No one was hurt but the casino burned completely. The British band Deep Purple watched it burn from another hotel on Lake Geneva and wrote the song. They had been waiting for the casino to close for the season, so they could use the auditorium for rehearsals and recording sessions, but now they had to seek another venue.
“If you really book it” meaning several miles a year. Nomadic hunter-gatherers wander hundreds of miles a year. If they kept on in one direction, they could cover the 10,000 miles or so from Alaska to Patagonia in less than 100 years. But I don’t think that’s how it went.
The hunter-gatherers known today walk hundreds of miles in big loops, almost always ending up back exactly where they started – but all the habitable land around them is already occupied, and they’d have to fight to move outside of their ancestral lands. The first ones in the Americas would always be finding new land, with animals who hadn’t learned to fear human hunters. They’d have looped back over the same territory for a few years, then moved their base towards a new area. Most bands would stop moving rather than cross a desert or other difficult area, but a few bands would want to see what was on the other side. If the most daring moved base-camp 100 miles every 5 years on the average, the Folsom-point culture would spread out all over North and South America in 500 years.
They’d be even faster if they were using boats to go down the sea coasts rather than just walking – even with a primitive boat made by stretching a bison hide over a wooden frame, you go faster with less effort and can bring more stuff with you. Humans in Eurasia and Africa were crossing rivers and settling islands over ten thousand years before the Folsom-point culture reached North America, so they probably did know how to make boats.
The odds against something like the Miller-Urey experiment going all the way to a self-reproducing organism in a few years in a laboratory vessel are almost infinite. But life didn’t originate in a laboratory vessel, it originated anywhere on Earth – or any similar planet. That “experiment” was running in millions of pools of impure water on each of trillions of planets over hundreds of millions of years. There were an almost infinite number of chances for that almost infinitely unlikely event to happen. And we only know about one planet of the trillions in our galaxy – one where it did happen.
Grand Funk Railway was playing at the Montrieux Casino when a “stupid with a flare gun” fan fired a flare indoors. No one was hurt but the casino burned completely. The British band Deep Purple watched it burn from another hotel on Lake Geneva and wrote the song. They had been waiting for the casino to close for the season, so they could use the auditorium for rehearsals and recording sessions, but now they had to seek another venue.