Dixie Victorious - What if the Confederacy Won the Civil War?

Four score and seven years after the founding of our great nation, the United States of America found itself embroiled in a bloody civil war which pitted brother against brother and father against son.   History records that the Union won this bitter conflict thus preserving the integrity and unity of the American republic.

Today on Far Future Horizons  we take another foray into alternative history and explore the world of Dixie Victorious and visit an alternate timeline where the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.) won the American Civil War and the institution of slavery persists till this day.

Dark Green represents the CSA proper; light green represents its territories

Our point of diversion occurs when the imperial powers of Great Britain and France intervened on the side of the Dixie Republic resulting in the defeat of the Union forces at Gettysburg in 1863………

Prehistoric Astronomers

Today on Far Future Horizons we explore a controversial theory concerning the Sistine Chapel of prehistory – Lascaux Cave and its astronomical connection.

The Search for Shangri-La

The dream of an earthly paradise immune to the squalid wickedness of the world and the ravages of time comes to us from the depths of antiquity. One such place was - Shangri-La.

In the novel “Lost Horizon” published in 1933, James Hilton takes us on an odyssey to the earthly paradise Shangri-La hidden in a valley somewhere in the Himalayas between Tibet and India. Of all of James Hilton’s works, this was always my most favourite.

But, is the legend of Shangri-La rooted in some, very real, earthly reality? Did such a place really exist? Today on Far Future Horizons we are going on an epic voyage in search of the real Shangri-La with renowned historian Michael Wood in his awe inspiring documentary series “In Search of Myths and Heroes.”

We are also going to teleport ourselves to Shangri-La through the power of cinematic magic and the vision of legendary film director Frank Capra in his film masterpiece that brought James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon to life on the silver screen.

My Pet Dinosaur

What if the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact that ended the reign of the Dinosaurs never occurred? Would these magnificent creatures, which could only be described by superlatives, still be walking the Earth? Would these creatures have gone on to evolve intelligence and perhaps a technological civilization? It is perhaps the greatest question concerning an alternative evolutionary history of life on Earth. 

Today on Far Future Horizons we explore this alternative evolutionary history with the BBC Horizon documentary – My Pet Dinosaur.

It's a palaeontologist's dream: the chance to live in a world where dinosaurs are not something to be dug out of the ground but are living among us. It may sound far-fetched but dinosaurs were actually rather unlucky. The meteorite impact that doomed them to extinction was an event with a probability of millions to one. What if the meteorite had missed?

 In the early 1980s, paleontologist Dale Russell, curator of vertebrate fossils at the National Museums of Canada, in Ottowa, explored this possibility of Intelligent Dinosaurs.

Had dinosaurs survived, the world today would be very different. If humans managed to survive alongside them (very unlikely), we wouldn't have the company of most, if not all, of the mammals with which we are familiar today. Giraffes, elephants and other mammals wouldn't have had space to evolve.

The Three Rocketeers

 

Today on Far Future Horizons we present the BBC 4 documentary The Three Rocketeers, about the men behind the revolutionary single stage to orbit space vehicle - Skylon.

For his entire life, one man has nursed the dream of putting mankind into space. Inspired by the Dan Dare comic strip, Alan Bond first started building rockets as a teenager in his back garden. 

Into the Belly of the Gravitational Beast

Today on Far Future Horizons we will embark on a voyage that will take us into the belly of a gravitational beast the –  Supermassive Blackhole.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one, the Great Pyramid of Cheops survives. But history and archaeology are able to tell us the stories of all seven, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria. 


Join us today on Far Future Horizons as we take an imaginary voyage through time and space for a guided tour of these magnificent feats of engineering and human ingenuity.