SortStack #2536 — 2033-05-19

By year · Order from earliest to most recent.

1. The Parthenon is completed atop the Acropolis in Athens 432 BCE

   It contains almost no perfectly straight lines: the columns bulge and the base curves slightly upward, optical tricks that make it look flawless.

2. A massive earthquake and tsunami destroy Lisbon 1755

   Striking on All Saints' Day while churches were full, it killed tens of thousands and shook European philosophy — Voltaire used it to attack the idea of a perfect world.

3. Christiaan Barnard performs the first human heart transplant in Cape Town 1967

   The first patient lived eighteen days. Barnard's second transplant patient lived more than eighteen months, proving the operation could work.

4. Nelson Mandela walks free after twenty-seven years in prison 1990

   Four years after his release he was elected South Africa's president — and he later joked that he was 'a pensioner taking up a new job' at age 75.

5. NASA's Curiosity rover lands on Mars 2012

   It was lowered to the surface on cables by a hovering rocket-powered 'sky crane' — a landing sequence engineers nicknamed the 'seven minutes of terror.'

6. The World Health Organization declares COVID a global pandemic 2020

   Within weeks, roughly half of humanity was living under some form of lockdown — the largest coordinated shutdown of public life in history.

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