Who Wants to Live Forever? Trivia Quiz

While the Soviets were first out of the block in the space race with the launch of the Sputnik orbiting satellite in 1957, the Americans won the space race in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked out of Apollo 11 onto the surface of the moon - not bad when heavier than air flight was only first demonstrated a bit over sixty years earlier! A total of 12 astronauts walked on the moon during the Apollo space program. Scientific research was conducted there. In the latter missions they even had a vehicle, the lunar rover, to explore further afield.

Of the 3.6 billion people on the earth at the the time, 2.6 billion were still alive to see in the new millennium in 2001.

The Renaissance (French - cultural rebirth) followed the Middle Ages in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The period was a time of massive advancements in arts, literature, architecture, religion, science, mathematics, and exploration. It started in Florence, spread to other Italian locales, and then to the rest of Europe. The period is best known for its contribution to the arts: For example, Botticelli painted the "Birth of Venus" in the 1470s in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci painted "The Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa" in Milan in the 1490s and it took four years for Michelangelo to paint the "Sistine Chapel Ceiling" in Rome between 1508 and 1512.

If a person saw the finished Sistine Chapel painting as a baby they would be almost 500 years old if they also witnessed the start of the third millennium.

In 1665 or 1666, Isaac Newton formulated his gravitational theory after watching an apple fall from a tree and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or upwards. This was the first of many discoveries Newton was to make.

From this initial work, Newton developed the three laws of motion: The Law of Inertia; the Law of Acceleration; and the Law of Action and Reaction. (Later his name was added to each of the laws.)

His other major mathematical interest was calculus, and with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, Newton developed differentiation and integration - two tools and techniques that remain absolutely fundamental to mathematics and science. In optics he correctly deduced, that white light is actually the combination of light of all the colours of the rainbow. This, he deduced, was because of chromatic aberration (ie inaccurate colour reproduction) in the telescopes of the time. He designed a telescope that used mirrors instead lenses, which allowed the new device to focus all the colours onto a single point-resulting in a more defined, more accurate image.

Newton published his findings in 1687 in "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", which is still considered one of the great treatises on science to this day. He was honoured with the unit of force (Newton) being named after him.

If you managed to live until the dawn of the third millennium and you saw the apple fall from the tree in front of Newton, you would be at least 334 years old.

In 1796 Edward Jenner became the first person to successfully vaccinate a person against infectious disease. He did this by injecting cowpox material into a child, and then testing immunity against smallpox. However, Jenner was not the first to propose vaccination, nor was he the person who discovered exposure to cowpox prevented smallpox.

As far back as the 15th century, people in China India and Asia Minor have attempted to prevent illness by intentionally exposing healthy people to smallpox. This practice was known as variolation (after the French name for smallpox, 'la variole').

In 1774, it was Dr Benjamin Jesty that made the breakthrough that infection with cowpox - a bovine virus that could spread to humans - could protect a person from smallpox.

In May 1796, physician Edward Jenner inoculated 8-year-old James Phipps with a concoction from a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid. He was unwell for several days, but Master Phipps made a full recovery. Two months later, in July 1796, Jenner inoculated Phipps with material from a smallpox sore to test Phipps' resistance or what was later termed immunity. Phipps did not get sick or feel even unwell, and became the first human to be vaccinated against smallpox.
The term 'vaccine' came later, and was taken from the Latin word for cow, 'vacca'.

You would need to be a double centurion to witness both the first vaccination and celebrate New Year's Day 2001.

Post-WWII Great Britain was rather a bleak place. While the war had been won, the cost was enormous. Britons were still on food rations, the country was broke, and the empire crumbled into the British Commonwealth. A rare royal wedding was just the tonic to cheer a beleaguered nation.

While austerity was the catch-cry of the day, Phillip Mountbatten, brushed off his naval uniform (he used the attached ceremonial sword to cut the wedding cake), renounced his Greek and Danish Royal titles, and adopted his maternal grandparents' surname, Mountbatten.

Princess Elizabeth had saved her clothing coupons to have a nice dress, which was made by Norman Hartnell (the government gifted her with a further 200 coupons). The princess did her own make-up on her wedding day.

The couple were married in Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947 before 2500 wedding guests. It was a celebration for the United Kingdom and perhaps a turning point for the nation.

A person born in 1947 would have been 53 on New Year's Day 2001.

The Vikings were a seafaring people from Scandinavia who initially raided and pirated parts of Europe from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries; then traded and settled throughout the lands that they had conquered. They voyaged as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and North America. This was known as the Viking Age.

The picture depicts the Siege of Paris, which occurred in 855 AD. A fleet of 120 Viking ships, containing over three thousand warriors, sailed up the Seine River in March, and as the smaller army of the Frankish King Charles the Bald was no match, they retreated. The Vikings reached Paris by Easter, and plundered and occupied the city. They withdrew after Charles paid a ransom of 7,000 French livres (Approximately 2,570 kg) in gold and silver.

Anybody who witnessed the siege in 855 would have been 1145 years old at the start of the third millennium.

German inventor Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press sometime between 1440 and 1450, and a working model was probably operational in 1445. The major factor in its success was the hand mould, a novel technique that facilitated the quick assembly of large quantities of metal movable type. While others in China and Korea had developed movable metal type, Gutenberg was the first to create a mechanical process that transferred the ink from type paper. (His manufacture of ink from linseed oil and carbon (soot) was also a revelation).

With this movable process of type, printing presses massively increased the speed with which copies of books could be manufactured, and subsequently, they led to the widespread dissemination of knowledge for the very first time. The Bible was the first book published by Gutenberg. This wider access to the Bible led to alternative versions. In 1519 a mere 60 years after the invention of the printing press, Martin Luther published "95 Theses" a document which started the Protestant Reformation.

If you were born in 1445, you would be 555 years old when 2000 clicked over to 2001.

Germany was divided in 1949 into the Soviet-occupied East Germany and the democratic West Germany. Similarly, Berlin was partitioned after WWII with West Berlin being an exclave of West Germany. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 by the Soviets to stop people from East Berlin escaping into West Berlin. Many young people and professionals defected to West Berlin in the 1950s. This concerned the Soviets as they felt it would appear as if communism was not working. Nikita Khrushchev ordered the wall to be built in 1961.

The Berlin Wall fell, but not literally in 1989. On November 9, the East German government announced that free passage would be allowed. East Germans celebrated and began knocking down the wall piece by piece with hammers and chisels. Germany became a unified country within two years, and similarly, Berlin became a single city again.

The author's daughter was born two weeks before the wall fell. She was 11 when we saw in the new year 2001.

When the Wright Brothers flew the first heavier-than-air power flight in 1903, there was no great celebration by the Wright brothers, they had performed years of meticulous research, and they knew it was just a matter of time before they flew, which they did. Their choice of location demonstrated that attention to detail: They had consulted the national weather bureau to find the windiest places in America. The Kill Devil Hills was listed as the sixth windiest place in America but it offered two things the top five places did not: Sand and isolation - sand for a soft landing of their aeroplane and isolation as they wanted to practice their craft in private until they had perfected it.

They had built four gliders previously and had flown in all of them. Their 1903 flight was the first in a powered flyer. Many people thought their inaugural flight was from Kitty Hawk, but this was the point from where the Brothers had telegraphed their achievement. The actual flight was behind Kitty Hawk in Kill Devil Hills.

Theoretically, it would have been possible to witness the Wright Brothers' achievement and witness the birth of the third millennium and not be a centurion as there were only 97 years between the two events.

The crucifixion of Jesus occurred in Judea, at a hill outside Golgotha (Greek) or Calvary (Latin) in either 30 or 33 AD. The four Gospels describe this period in great detail, however, minor differences exist or were omitted. This detailed period is referred to as the Passion.

Jesus' death by crucifixion and his subsequent resurrection are the central tenets of Christian theology involving both the doctrines of salvation and atonement. In three of the Gospels, while Jesus initially carried his cross to the crucifixion site, the Roman soldiers then made Simon of Cyrene carry it. The Gospel of John said Jesus carried the cross the whole distance. Prior to his death, the Gospels also cover the period from when Jesus is arrested and tried firstly by the Sanhedrin, and subsequently by Pontius Pilate. His sentence included flagellation before being handed over to Roman soldiers for crucifixion.

The Georgian Calendar is based on the date of the birth of Jesus, so when he died in his early thirties it should be no surprise there were almost two millennia between his death and the start of the third millennium.