What Could Have Been/Real Life: Difference between revisions

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* This is, as can be seen below, the entire point of [[Alternate History]].

 

== Arts & Entertainment ==

 

 

* In both the book and the series ''Cosmos'', astronomer [[Carl Sagan]] expresses his regret and frustration about how science, after being born before 500 AD and flourishing, soon became an ivory-tower intellectual thing which did not get shared, didn't improve the lives of the people, and was swallowed and scorned by superstition. Science died for a thousand years with the burning of the Library of Alexandria, which in both the book and the series he mourns with a quiet, heartfelt intensity.

{{quote|"It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, and passions were extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of [[Sophocles]] in the Library, only seven survived. One of those seven is ''[[Oedipus the King|Oedipus Rex]]''. Similar numbers apply to the works of [[Aeschylus]] and [[Euripides]]. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named [[William Shakespeare]] were ''[[Coriolanus]]'' and ''[[The Winter's Tale|The Winters Tale]]'', but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time, works entitled ''[[Hamlet]]'', ''[[Macbeth]]'', ''[[Julius Caesar (theatre)|Julius Caesar]]'', ''[[King Lear]]'', ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]''."}}