Various surveys can be found ranking the ten worst years for Humanity.   Here is one from The Top Tens. #1    1939:  Nazi Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. Few remember that Hitler declared war on Poland with the Soviet Union  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republicans first formed in 1922. How this year so high is a mystery to me. #2    1350:  The Black Death ravaged Europe, killing perhaps 50% the population.  99% of the world was in extreme poverty. #3    1941:  Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany invaded ally Soviet Union.  Genocide of Jews and peak of World War II. #4    1914:  Beginning of World War 1.   #5    2016:  Terrorist attacks in Europe and the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. #6  2020:  Australia was on fired, Donald Trump was elected president of the USA and the Coronavirus Pandemic struck. #7  2001:  Terr...

Day 9 overnight was a different kind of cruise.  Ship tossed and turned.  Today, still roiling, so we won't be doing much, again. I'll thus start with, from  Time  magazine , the best space photos of 2025: Galaxy cluster lensing the light of a background spiral galaxy, called an Einstein ring. NASA's Lucy spacecraft, launched in 2021, on 20April2025 payed a call on the asteroid Donaldjohanson ( he was the anthropologist who found Lucy, the fossil skeleton around 3.2 million years old in Ethiopia in 1974, so named because the Beatle's  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds  was playing in the compound ) between Mars and Jupiter.  Video made from a series of photos taken 2 seconds apart. From the  James Webb Space Telescope , outflow from a newlyforming star called a cosmic tornado. Mid-infrared view of the planetary nebula, NGC 1514. Star birth featuring Pismis 24. About 2026, here is a  video from Space Mog featuring Maggie Lieu on what will happen i...