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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_segmentation] | [TOKENS: 2183] |
Contents Speech segmentation Speech segmentation is the process of identifying the boundaries between words, syllables, or phonemes in spoken natural languages. The term applies both to the mental processes used by humans, and to artificial processes of natural language processing. In the field of automatic pronunciation assessment, the process of segmenting an utterance against expected word(s) is called forced alignment. Speech segmentation is a subfield of general speech perception and an important subproblem of the technologically focused field of speech recognition, and cannot be adequately solved in isolation. As in most natural language processing problems, one must take into account context, grammar, and semantics, and even so the result is often a probabilistic division (statistically based on likelihood) rather than a categorical one. Though it seems that coarticulation—a phenomenon which may happen between adjacent words just as easily as within a single word—presents the main challenge in speech segmentation across languages, some other problems and strategies employed in solving those problems can be seen in the following sections. This problem overlaps to some extent with the problem of text segmentation that occurs in some languages which are traditionally written without inter-word spaces, like Chinese and Japanese, compared to writing systems which indicate speech segmentation between words by a word divider, such as the space. However, even for those languages, text segmentation is often much easier than speech segmentation, because the written language usually has little interference between adjacent words, and often contains additional clues not present in speech (such as the use of Chinese characters for word stems in Japanese). Lexical recognition In natural languages, the meaning of a complex spoken sentence can be understood by decomposing it into smaller lexical segments (roughly, the words of the language), associating a meaning to each segment, and combining those meanings according to the grammar rules of the language. Though lexical recognition is not thought to be used by infants in their first year, due to their highly limited vocabularies, it is one of the major processes involved in speech segmentation for adults. Three main models of lexical recognition exist in current research: first, whole-word access, which argues that words have a whole-word representation in the lexicon; second, decomposition, which argues that morphologically complex words are broken down into their morphemes (roots, stems, inflections, etc.) and then interpreted and; third, the view that whole-word and decomposition models are both used, but that the whole-word model provides some computational advantages and is therefore dominant in lexical recognition. To give an example, in a whole-word model, the word "cats" might be stored and searched for by letter, first "c", then "ca", "cat", and finally "cats". The same word, in a decompositional model, would likely be stored under the root word "cat" and could be searched for after removing the "s" suffix. "Falling", similarly, would be stored as "fall" and suffixed with the "ing" inflection. Though proponents of the decompositional model recognize that a morpheme-by-morpheme analysis may require significantly more computation, they argue that the unpacking of morphological information is necessary for other processes (such as syntactic structure) which may occur parallel to lexical searches. As a whole, research into systems of human lexical recognition is limited due to little experimental evidence that fully discriminates between the three main models. In any case, lexical recognition likely contributes significantly to speech segmentation through the contextual clues it provides, given that it is a heavily probabilistic system—based on the statistical likelihood of certain words or constituents occurring together. For example, one can imagine a situation where a person might say "I bought my dog at a ____ shop" and the missing word's vowel is pronounced as in "net", "sweat", or "pet". While the probability of "netshop" is extremely low, since "netshop" isn't currently a compound or phrase in English, and "sweatshop" also seems contextually improbable, "pet shop" is a good fit because it is a common phrase and is also related to the word "dog". Moreover, an utterance can have different meanings depending on how it is split into words. A popular example, often quoted in the field, is the phrase "How to wreck a nice beach", which sounds very similar to "How to recognize speech". As this example shows, proper lexical segmentation depends on context and semantics which draws on the whole of human knowledge and experience, and would thus require advanced pattern recognition and artificial intelligence technologies to be implemented on a computer. Lexical recognition is of particular value in the field of computer speech recognition, since the ability to build and search a network of semantically connected ideas would greatly increase the effectiveness of speech-recognition software. Statistical models can be used to segment and align recorded speech to words or phones. Applications include automatic lip-synch timing for cartoon animation, follow-the-bouncing-ball video sub-titling, and linguistic research. Automatic segmentation and alignment software is commercially available. Phonotactic cues For most spoken languages, the boundaries between lexical units are difficult to identify; phonotactics are one answer to this issue. One might expect that the inter-word spaces used by many written languages like English or Spanish would correspond to pauses in their spoken version, but that is true only in very slow speech, when the speaker deliberately inserts those pauses. In normal speech, one typically finds many consecutive words being said with no pauses between them, and often the final sounds of one word blend smoothly or fuse with the initial sounds of the next word. The notion that speech is produced like writing, as a sequence of distinct vowels and consonants, may be a relic of alphabetic heritage for some language communities. In fact, the way vowels are produced depends on the surrounding consonants just as consonants are affected by surrounding vowels; this is called coarticulation. For example, in the word "kit", the [k] is farther forward than when we say 'caught'. But also, the vowel in "kick" is phonetically different from the vowel in "kit", though we normally do not hear this. In addition, there are language-specific changes which occur in casual speech which makes it quite different from spelling. For example, in English, the phrase "hit you" could often be more appropriately spelled "hitcha". From a decompositional perspective, in many cases, phonotactics play a part in letting speakers know where to draw word boundaries. In English, the word "strawberry" is perceived by speakers as consisting (phonetically) of two parts: "straw" and "berry". Other interpretations such as "stra" and "wberry" are inhibited by English phonotactics, which does not allow the cluster "wb" word-initially. Other such examples are "day/dream" and "mile/stone" which are unlikely to be interpreted as "da/ydream" or "mil/estone" due to the phonotactic probability or improbability of certain clusters. The sentence "Five women left", which could be phonetically transcribed as [faɪvwɪmɘnlɛft], is marked since neither /vw/ in /faɪvwɪmɘn/ nor /nl/ in /wɪmɘnlɛft/ are allowed as syllable onsets or codas in English phonotactics. These phonotactic cues often allow speakers to easily distinguish the boundaries in words. Vowel harmony in languages like Finnish can also serve to provide phonotactic cues. While the system does not allow front vowels and back vowels to exist together within one morpheme, compounds allow two morphemes to maintain their own vowel harmony while coexisting in a word. Therefore, in compounds such as "selkä/ongelma" ('back problem') where vowel harmony is distinct between two constituents in a compound, the boundary will be wherever the switch in harmony takes place—between the "ä" and the "ö" in this case. Still, there are instances where phonotactics may not aid in segmentation. Words with unclear clusters or uncontrasted vowel harmony as in "opinto/uudistus" ('student reform') do not offer phonotactic clues as to how they are segmented. From the perspective of the whole-word model, however, these words are thought be stored as full words, so the constituent parts would not necessarily be relevant to lexical recognition. In infants and non-natives Infants are one major focus of research in speech segmentation. Since infants have not yet acquired a lexicon capable of providing extensive contextual clues or probability-based word searches within their first year, as mentioned above, they must often rely primarily upon phonotactic and rhythmic cues (with prosody being the dominant cue), all of which are language-specific. Between 6 and 9 months, infants begin to lose the ability to discriminate between sounds not present in their native language and grow sensitive to the sound structure of their native language, with the word segmentation abilities appearing around 7.5 months. Though much more research needs to be done on the exact processes that infants use to begin speech segmentation, current and past studies suggest that English-native infants approach stressed syllables as the beginning of words. At 7.5 months, infants appear to be able to segment bisyllabic words with strong-weak stress patterns, though weak-strong stress patterns are often misinterpreted, e.g. interpreting "guiTAR is" as "GUI TARis". It seems that infants also show some complexity in tracking frequency and probability of words, for instance, recognizing that although the syllables "the" and "dog" occur together frequently, "the" also commonly occurs with other syllables, which may lead to the analysis that "dog" is an individual word or concept instead of the interpretation "thedog". Language learners are another set of individuals being researched within speech segmentation. In some ways, learning to segment speech may be more difficult for a second-language learner than for an infant, not only in the lack of familiarity with sound probabilities and restrictions but particularly in the overapplication of the native language's patterns. While some patterns may occur between languages, as in the syllabic segmentation of French and English, they may not work well with languages such as Japanese, which has a mora-based segmentation system. Further, phonotactic restrictions like the boundary-marking cluster /ld/ in German or Dutch are permitted (without necessarily marking boundaries) in English. Even the relationship between stress and vowel length, which may seem intuitive to speakers of English, may not exist in other languages, so second-language learners face an especially great challenge when learning a language and its segmentation cues. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft#cite_note-104] | [TOKENS: 12858] |
Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_note-55] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2020-01-21-responsible-government.html] | [TOKENS: 2082] |
4 Principles for Responsible Government Use of Technology Rachel Thomas January 21, 2020 On this page As governments consider new uses of technology, whether that be sensors on taxi cabs, police body cameras, or gunshot detectors in public places, this raises issues around surveillance of vulnerable populations, unintended consequences, and potential misuse. There are several principles to keep in mind in how these decisions can be made in a healthier and more responsible manner. It can be tempting to reduce debates about government adoption of technology into binary for/against narratives, but that fails to capture many crucial and nuanced aspects of these decisions. We recently hosted the Tech Policy Workshop at the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics. One of the themes was how governments can promote the responsible use of technology. Here I will share some key recommendations that came out of these discussions. Listen to local communities There aren’t universal ethical answers that will make sense in every country and culture. Therefore, decisions on technology use should be made in close consultation with local communities. In 2013, Oakland announced plans for a new Domain Awareness Center (DAC), which would implement over 700 cameras throughout schools and public housing, facial recognition software, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), storage capacity for 300 terabytes of data, and a centralized facility with live monitroy. Brian Hofer was an Oakland resident who had never set foot in City Hall prior to this, but he was alarmed by the plans, particularly in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, which had been released the same month. Together with other citizens and privacy advocates, Hofer was concerned about the intrusiveness of the plans and began attending city council meetings. There were a number of reasons for their concerns, including the discovery that city staff had been discussing using DAC to surveil protests and demonstrations. Through the advocacy of local citizens, the plans were dramatically scaled back and the Oakland Privacy Commission was formed, which continues to provide valuable insight into potential government decisions and purchases. Sadly, the concerns of local communities are often overridden, in part due to corporate interests and racist stereotypes. For instance, in Detroit, a city that is 79% Black, citizens protested against police use of facial recognition. Yet the city council ended up voting to okay its use, in violation of the police department’s own policy. In contrast, the demographics of cities that have been successful at banning facial recognition are quite different: San Francisco is only 5% Black and Oakland is 25% Black (credit to Tawana Petty for highlighting these statistics). The racial composition of cities is a significant factor in where and how technology is deployed and used. In another sobering example of the significance of race, Baltimore Police Department used facial recognition to identify people protesting the death of Freddie Gray, a Black man killed in police custody. Beware how NDAs obscure public sector process and law In order for citizens to have a voice in the use of technology by their local governments, the first step is that they need to know what technology is being used. Unfortunately, many local governments are shrouded in secrecy on this topic, and they often sign overly strict non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), hiding even the existence of the technology they use. In 2017 New York City passed a measure appointing a task force on Automated Decision Systems to investigate the fairness of software being used by the city and make policy recommendations. However, members of the task force were repeatedly denied their requests for even a basic list of automated systems already in use, with the city claiming that this is proprietary information. When the city released the final report from the commission, many members dissented with it and released their own shadow report in tandem. Meredith Whittaker, a member of the task force and founder of AI Now Institute, described the city’s failure to share relevant information in what could have been a groundbreaking project, “It’s a waste, really. This is a sad precedent.” The law typically develops through lots of cases over time, explained Elizabeth Joh. However, NDAs often prevent citizens from finding out that a particular technology even exists, much less how it is being used in their city. For instance, cell-site simulators (often referred to as sting-rays), which help police locate a person’s cell phone, were protected by particularly strong NDAs, in which police had to agree that it was better to drop a case than to reveal that a cell-site simulator had been used in apprehending the suspect. How can our law develop when such important details remain hidden? The traditional process of developing and refining our legal system breaks down. “Typically we think we have oversight into what police can do,” Joh has said previously. “Now we have third-party intermediary, they have a kind of privacy shield, they’re not subject to state public record laws, and they have departments sign contracts that they are going to keep this secret.” Security is not the same as safety Project Green Light is a public-private partnership in Detroit in which high-definition surveillance cameras outside business stream live data to police and are prioritized by police over non-participants. Over 500 businesses are a part of it. This is the largest experiment of facial recognition on a concentrated group of Black people (700,000) to date. Black people are disproportionately likely to be stopped by police (even though when police search Black, Latino and Native American people, they are less likely to find drugs, weapons or other contraband compared to when they search white people), disproportionately likely to be written up on minor infractions, and thus disproportionately likely to have their faces appear in police face databases (which are unregulated and not audited for mistakes). This is particularly concerning when combined with knowledge of America’s long history of surveilling and abusing Black communities. While the aims of the program are ostensibly to make Detroit safer, we have to ask, “Safer FOR who? And safer FROM whom?” Tawana Petty is a poet and social justice organizer who was born and raised in Detroit. She serves as Director of Data Justice Programming for the Detroit Community Technology Project and co-leads the Our Data Bodies Project. At the CADE Tech Policy Workshop she shared how Project Green Light makes her feel less safe, and gave a more hopeful example of how to increase safety: give people chairs to sit on their front porches and encourage them to spend more time outside talking with their neighbors. Myrtle Thompson-Curtis wrote about the origins of the idea: in 1980 in Milwaukee “a group of young African Americans remembered how elders would sit on the front porch and keep an eye on them when they were small. These watchful eyes gave them a sense of safety, of being cared for and looked out for by the community. When these youth grew into adulthood, they noticed that no one sat on their porches anymore. Instead people were putting bars on their doors and windows, fearing one another.” Young people went door to door and offered free chairs to neighbors if they would agree to sit on their front porches while children walked to and from school. This program has since been replicated in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, to help defuse racial tensions, and now in Detroit, to illustrate an alternative to the city’s invasive Green Light Surveillance program. “Security is not safety,” Tawana stated, contrasting surveillance with true safety. Rumman Chowdhury, the leader of the Responsible AI group at Accenture, pointed out that surveillance is often part of a stealth increase in militarization. While on the surface, militarization is sold as improving security, it can often have the opposite effect. Low-trust societies tend to be very militarized, and militarized societies tend to be low-trust. As Zeynep Tufekci wrote in Wired, sociologists distinguish between high-trust societies (in which people can expect most interactions to work and to have access to due process) and low-trust societies (in which people expect to be cheated and that there is no recourse when you are wronged). In low trust societies, it is harder to make business deals, to find or receive credit, or to forge professional relationships. People in low-trust societies may also be more vulnerable to authoritarian rulers, who promise to impose order. We are already seeing a shift of the internet having gone from a high-trust environment to a low-trust environment, and the use of surveillance may be accelerating this shift in the physical world. Policy decisions should not be outsourced as design decisions When considering police body cameras, there are a number of significant decisions: should the officer be able to turn them on and off at any time? Should the camera have a blinking red light to let people know it is recording? Where should the videos be stored and who should have access to them? Even though these decisions will have a profound impact on the public, they are currently decided by private tech companies. This is just one of the examples Elizabeth Joh shared in illustrating how what should be policy decisions often end up being determined by corporations as design decisions. In the case of police body cameras, this lack of choice/control is worsened by the fact that Axon (previously known as Taser) has a monopoly on police-body cameras: since they have a relationship with 17,000 of the 18,000 police departments in the USA, cities may not even have much choice. Vendor-customer relationships influence how police do their jobs and how we can hold them accountable. Heather Patterson, a privacy researcher at Intel and a member of Oakland’s Privacy Commission, spoke about how tech companies often neglect cities, failing to build products that fit with their needs and requirements, and treating them as an afterthought. In many cases, cities may want to have fewer options or collect less data, which goes against the prevailing tech approach which Mozilla Head of Policy Chris Riley described as “collect now, monetize later, store forever just in case”. These principles can guide us towards a more responsible use of technology by local governments. Technology can be used for good when it is developed and deployed responsibly, with input from a diverse group of relevant stakeholders, and embedded with the appropriate transparency and accountability. More responsible government use of technology was just one of the themes discussed at the Tech Policy Workshop. Stay tuned for more resources and insights from the workshop! |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_flight_simulation_game] | [TOKENS: 4378] |
Contents Space flight simulation game Space flight simulation is a genre of flight simulator video games that lets players experience space flight to varying degrees of realism. Common mechanics include space exploration, space trade and space combat. Overview Some games in the genre aim to recreate a realistic portrayal of space flight, involving the calculation of orbits within a more complete physics simulation than pseudo space flight simulators. Others focus on gameplay rather than simulating space flight in all its facets. The realism of the latter games is limited to what the game designer deems to be appropriate for the gameplay, instead of focusing on the realism of moving the spacecraft in space. Some "flight models" use a physics system based on Newtonian physics, but these are usually limited to maneuvering the craft in its direct environment, and do not take into consideration the orbital calculations that would make such a game a simulator. Many of the pseudo simulators feature faster than light travel. Examples of true simulators which aim at piloting a space craft in a manner that conforms with the laws of nature include Orbiter, Kerbal Space Program and Microsoft Space Simulator. Examples of more fantastical video games that bend the rules of physics in favor of streamlining and entertainment, include Wing Commander, Star Wars: X-Wing and Freelancer. The modern space flight game genre emerged at the point when home computers became sufficiently powerful to draw basic wireframe graphics in real-time. The game Elite is widely considered to be the breakthrough game of the genre, and as having successfully melded the "space trading" and flight sim genres. Elite was highly influential upon later games of its type, although it did have some precursors. Games similar to Elite are sometimes called "Elite-clones". Space flight games and simulators, at one time popular, have for much of the new millennium been considered a "dead" genre. However, the early 2010s saw a temporary reversal in this trend when open-source and enthusiast communities managed to produce some working, modern titles (e.g. Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator); and 2011's commercially released Kerbal Space Program was notably well-received, even by the aerospace community. 2014 saw one of the most successful entries in this genre, most notably Elite: Dangerous, which brought new attention to the space trading and combat game subgenre, but after its release the genre returned to relative quiet. Subgenres Realistic space simulators seek to represent a vessel's behaviour under the influence of the laws of physics. As such, the player normally concentrates on following checklists or planning tasks. Piloting is generally limited to dockings, landings or orbital maneuvers. The reward for the player is on mastering real or realistic spacecraft, celestial mechanics and astronautics. Classical games with this approach include Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space (1982), Rendezvous: A Space Shuttle Simulation (1982), The Halley Project (1985), Shuttle (1992) and Microsoft Space Simulator (1994). If the definition is expanded to include decision making and planning, then Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space (1992) is also notable for historical accuracy and detail. In this game, the player takes the role of Administrator of NASA or Head of the Soviet Space Program with the ultimate goal of being the first side to conduct a successful human Moon landing. Orbiter and, to an extent, Space Shuttle Mission 2007, provide more elaborate simulations. They have 3D virtual cockpits and external views. Orbiter has been continually developed into modern times including having modern graphics, while others above have not been. FlightGear is used professionally in aerospace engineering and research, with a flight dynamics engine (JSBSim) that is used in a 2015 NASA benchmark to judge new simulation code to the standards of the space industry. FlightGear simulates orbital and atmospheric flight, but as of 2021 does not cover flight between planets (although its flight dynamics engine supports Mars and has been used to model the NASA ARES glider). The simulation has been continually developed into modern times, as FlightGear is free and open-source - the project receives development from people with scientific and engineering backgrounds, and is open to contributions from any source. FlightGear can accurately handle speeds from subsonic, transonic, through to high hypersonic or re-entry regimes with a flight dynamics engine that can incorporate windtunnel data or computational fluid dynamics, and uses a 3D model of gravity used for spaceflight based on spherical harmonics which can simulate the twisting force caused by gravity varying over a craft. It has an accurate celestial simulation that also feeds star tracker instruments for navigation. FlightGear has the ability to accelerate time supported by the fact that the physics simulation runs on a separate clock than the visuals - this is very important to simulate long space missions. Being modern, FlightGear has realistic graphics and an orbital renderer that can handle calculations of light scattering and auroral emission with huge distances involved. Of particular note is FlightGear's Space Shuttle project, whose simulation is backed by NASA windtunnel data and is the most detailed and accurate simulation outside of NASA's internal ones. Kerbal Space Program can be considered a space simulator, even though it portrays an imaginary universe with tweaked physics, masses and distances to enhance gameplay. Nevertheless, the physics and rocket design principles are much more realistic than in the space combat or trading subgenres. Mods for the game such as Real Solar System, Realism Overhaul, Principia, FAR and Kerbalism can be installed to add more realism to the game by replacing the standard in-game solar system with a 1:1 replica of the real Solar System as well as adding more realistic rocket engines, radiation, life support and other elements to make the game more realistic. Whilst the original graphics remain dated, several user-made mods have dramatically increased fidelity of the visuals. Some examples include, Scatterer, Firefly, Environmental Visual Enhancements, Waterfall, and Parallax Continued. The game Lunar Flight (2012) simulates flying around the lunar surface in a craft resembling the Apollo Lunar Module, while Perilune (2019) is an example of a lunar landing simulation with realistic physics designed for Android mobile devices. The game/program SpaceEngine includes a realistic space flight simulator within its full scale representation of the universe (including both real and procedurally generated astronomical objects), utilizing realistic orbital mechanics and an atmospheric model for certain flyable shuttles. It also includes interstellar travel using the hypothetical Alcubierre drive, but this is implemented in a realistic method to complement the more realistic elements of the game. Most games in the space combat genre feature futuristic scenarios involving space flight and extraplanetary combat. Such games generally place the player into the controls of a small starfighter or smaller starship in a military force of similar and larger spaceships and do not take into account the physics of space flight, often citing some technological advancement to explain the lack thereof. The prominent Wing Commander, X-Wing and Freespace series all use this approach. Exceptions include Independence War, Independence War 2 and the Star Trek: Bridge Commander series, which model craft at a larger scale and/or in a more strategic fashion. I-War also features Newtonian style physics for the behaviour of the spacecraft, but not orbital mechanics. Space combat games tend to be mission-based, as opposed to the more open-ended nature of space trading and combat games. The general formula for the space trading and combat game, which has changed little since its genesis, is for the player to begin in a relatively small, outdated ship with little money or status and for the player to gain in status and power through trading, exploration, combat or a mix of different methods. The ship the player controls is generally larger than that in pure space combat simulator. Notable examples of the genre include Elite, the X series, Wing Commander: Privateer, Freelancer, and No Man's Sky. In some instances, plot plays only a limited role and only a loose narrative framework tends to be provided. In certain titles of the X series, for instance, players may ignore the plot for as long as they wish and are even given the option to disable the plot completely and instead play in sandbox mode. Many games of this genre place a strong emphasis on factional conflict, leading to many small mission-driven subplots that unravel the tensions of the galaxy. Games of this type often allow the player to choose among multiple roles to play and multiple paths to victory. This aspect of the genre is very popular, but some people have complained that, in some titles, the leeway given to the player too often is only superficial, and that, in reality, the roles offered to players are very similar, and open-ended play too frequently restricted by scripted sequences. As an example, Freelancer has been in one reviewer's opinion critiqued as being rigid in its narrative structure, being in one case compared negatively with Grand Theft Auto, another series praised for its open-ended play. All space trading and combat games feature the core gameplay elements of directly controlling the flight of some sort of space vessel, generally armed, and of navigating from one area to another for a variety of reasons. As technology has improved it has been possible to implement a number of extensions to gameplay, such as dynamic economies and cooperative online play. Overall, however, the core gameplay mechanics of the genre have changed little over the years. Besides the array of space-themed trade and combat games, there also exist a small number of games with similar mechanics, but with a less traditional historical setting. These include the Sid Meier's Pirates! and Mount and Blade franchises. Some more recent games, such as 2003's EVE Online, have expanded the scope of the experience by including thousands of simultaneous online players in what is sometimes referred to as a "living universe" – a dream some have held since the genre's early beginnings. Also with massive battles, Star Citizen, a title in development by Cloud Imperium Games (headed by Chris Roberts, who was involved in Freelancer and Wing Commander), aims to bridge the gap between the EVE-like living universe game and the fast action of other games in the genre. An additional sub-class of space trading games eliminate combat entirely, focusing instead entirely on trading and economic manipulation in order to achieve success.[citation needed] Control systems Most modern space flight games on the personal computer allow a player to utilise a combination of the WASD keys of the keyboard and mouse as a means of controlling the game (games such as Microsoft's Freelancer use this control system exclusively). By far the most popular control system among genre enthusiasts, however, is the joystick. Most fans prefer to use this input method whenever possible, but expense and practicality mean that many are forced to use the keyboard and mouse combination (or gamepad if such is the case). The lack of uptake among the majority of modern gamers has also made joysticks a sort of anachronism, though some new controller designs and simplification of controls offer the promise that space sims may be playable in their full capacity on gaming consoles at some time in the future. In fact, X3: Reunion, sometimes considered one of the more cumbersome and difficult series to master within the trading and combat genre, was initially planned for the Xbox but later cancelled. Realistic simulators feature spacecraft systems and instrument simulation, using a combination of extensive keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks on virtual instrument panels. Most of the maneuvers and operations consist of setting certain systems into the desired configuration, or in setting autopilots. Real time hands on piloting can happen, depending on the simulated spacecraft. For example, it is common to use a joystick analog control to land a Space Shuttle (or any other spaceplane) or the Apollo Lunar Module (or similar landers). Dockings can be performed more precisely using the numerical keypad. Overall, the simulations have more complex control systems than game, with the limit being the physical reproduction of the actual simulated spacecraft (see Simulation cockpit). History Early attempts at 3D space simulation date back as far as 1974's Spasim, an online multi-player space simulator in which players attempt to destroy each other's ships. The earliest known space trader dates to 1974's Star Trader, a game where the entire interface was text-only and included a star map with multiple ports buying and selling 6 commodities. It was written in BASIC. Star Raiders was introduced in 1980 for the then-new Atari 8-bit computers and became the killer app for the system. Doug Neubauer created the game as a combination of Star Wars and the text-based Star Trek mainframe game. Using smoothly scaled 2D sprites and 3D particles to mimic a first person view of a volume of space, Star Raiders simulates clearing sectors of enemy ships while managing resources and damage to the ship's different systems. In addition to forward and rear views from the ship, the game provides both a galactic map and sector scanner to show enemy and friendly starbase locations. The game does not pause while these displays are active; they keep updating in real-time. It is one of the games that inspired Elite and the Wing Commander series. It also resulted in direct clones, including Space Spartans for Intellivision and Starmaster for the Atari 2600, both from 1982. Elite has made a lasting impression on developers, worldwide, extending even into different genres. In interviews, senior producers of CCP Games cited Elite as one of the inspirations for their acclaimed MMORPG EVE Online. Þórólfur Beck, CCP's co-founder, credits Elite as the game that impacted him most on the Commodore 64. Developers of Jumpgate Evolution, Battlecruiser 3000AD, Infinity: The Quest for Earth, Hard Truck: Apocalyptic Wars and Flatspace likewise all claim Elite as a source of inspiration. Elite was named one of the sixteen most influential games in history at Telespiele, a German technology and games trade show, and is being exhibited at such places as the London Science Museum in the "Game On" exhibition organized and toured by the Barbican Art Gallery. Elite was also named #12 on IGN's 2000 "Top 25 PC Games of All Time" list, the #3 most influential video game ever by the Times Online in 2007, and "best game ever" for the BBC Micro by Beebug Magazine in 1984. Elite's sequel, Frontier: Elite II, was named #77 on PC Zone's "101 Best PC Games Ever" list in 2007. Similar praise has been bestowed elsewhere in the media from time to time. Elite is one of the most popularly requested games to be remade, and some argue that it is still the best example of the genre to date, with more recent titles—including its sequels—not rising up to its level. It has been credited as opening the door for future online persistent worlds, such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, and as being the first truly open-ended game. It is to this day one of the most ambitious games ever made, residing in only 22 kilobytes of memory and on a single floppy disk. The latest incarnation of the franchise, titled Elite: Dangerous, was released on 16 December 2014, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. Though not as well known as Elite, Trade Wars is noteworthy as the first multiplayer space trader. A BBS door, Trade Wars was released in 1984 as an entirely different branch of the space trader tree, having been inspired by Hunt the Wumpus, the board game Risk, and the original space trader, Star Trader. As a pure space trader, Trade Wars lacked any space flight simulator elements, instead featuring abstract open world trading and combat set in an outer space populated by both human and NPC opponents.[citation needed] In 2009, it was named the #10 best PC game by PC World Magazine. Other notable early examples include Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space (1982), Rendezvous: A Space Shuttle Simulation (1982), and Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator (1982), which featured five different controls to learn, six different enemies, and 40 different simulation levels of play, making it one of the most elaborate vector games ever released. Other early examples include Nasir Gebelli's 1982 Apple II computer games Horizon V which featured an early radar mechanic and Zenith which allowed the player ship to rotate, and Ginga Hyoryu Vifam, which allowed first-person open space exploration with a radar displaying the destination and player/enemy positions as well as an early physics engine where approaching a planet's gravitational field pulls the player towards it. Following Elite were games such as The Halley Project (1985), Echelon (1987) and Microsoft Space Simulator (1994). Star Luster, released for the NES console and arcades in 1985, featured a cockpit view, a radar displaying enemy and base locations, the ability to warp anywhere, and a date system keeping track of the current date. Another notable Apple II game by developer FTL Games was SunDog: Frozen Legacy (1984) which allowed the player to fly through many systems, choose multiple planets to land on in several of those systems, and even walk around on the surface within the cities. Many other space sim games have allowed the player to exit their ship on planets, but the "walking" is just clicking on a location such as "Bar," "Ship Dealer," etc. The game also featured a unique story line involving cryogenics. SunDog: Frozen Legacy was also released on the Atari ST in 1985. Some tabletop and board games, such as Traveller or Merchant of Venus, also feature themes of space combat and trade. Traveller influenced the development of Elite (the main character in Traveller is named "Jamison"; the main character in Elite is named "Jameson") and Jumpgate Evolution. The Wing Commander (1990–2007) series from Origin Systems, Inc. was a marked departure from the standard formula up to that point, bringing space combat to a level approaching the Star Wars films. Set beginning in the year 2654, and characterized by designer Chris Roberts as "World War II in space", it features a multinational cast of pilots from the "Terran Confederation" flying missions against the predatory, aggressive Kilrathi, a feline warrior race (heavily inspired by the Kzinti of Larry Niven's Known Space universe).[citation needed] Wing Commander (1990) was a best seller and caused the development of competing space combat games, such as LucasArts' X-Wing. Wing Commander eventually became a media franchise consisting of space combat simulation video games, an animated television series, a feature film, a collectible card game, a series of novels, and action figures. Game designer Chris Crawford said in an interview that Wing Commander "raised the bar for the whole industry", as the game was five times more expensive to create than most of its contemporaries. Because the game was highly successful, other publishers had to match its production value in order to compete. This forced a large portion of the video game industry to become more conservative, as big-budget games need to be an assured hit for it to be profitable in any way. Crawford opined that Wing Commander in particular affected the marketing and economics of computer games and reestablished the "action game" as the most lucrative type of computer game. The seeming decline of the space flight simulators and games in the late 1990s also coincided with the rise of the RTS, FPS and RPG game genres, with such examples as Warcraft, Doom and Diablo. The very things that made these games classics, such as their open-endedness, complex control systems and attention to detail, have been cited as reasons for their decline. It was believed that no major new space sim series would be produced as long as the genre relied on complex control systems such as the keyboard and joystick. There were outliers, however, such as the X series (1999–2018) and Eve Online. Crowdfunding was a good source for space sims in early 2010s, however. In November 2012 Star Citizen set a new record, managing to raise more than $114 million as of May 2016, and is still under development. Elite: Dangerous was also successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter in November and December 2012. The game was completed and released in 2014, and expansions are being released in stages, or "seasons". Born Ready Games also closed a successful Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2012, having raised nearly $180,000 to assist with the completion of Strike Suit Zero. The game was completed and released in January 2013. Lastly, the non-linear roguelike-like space shooter Everspace garnered almost $250,000 on Kickstarter, was released in May 2017. The open source community was also been active, with projects such as FS2 Open and Vega Strike serving as platforms for non-professional efforts. Unofficial remakes of Elite[citation needed] and Privateer are being developed using the Vega Strike engine, and the latter has reached the stage where it is offered as a working title to the public. In 2013 a hobbyist space flight simulator project was realized under usage of the open source Pioneer software. After 2014, the genre saw another extended period without any notable or successful releases, as of 2026. See also References |
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Contents Speech synthesis Page version status This is an accepted version of this page Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity.[citation needed] For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written words on a home computer. The earliest computer operating system to have included a speech synthesizer was Unix in 1974, through the Unix speak utility. In 2000, Microsoft Sam was the default text-to-speech voice synthesizer used by the narrator accessibility feature, which shipped with all Windows 2000 operating systems, and subsequent Windows XP systems. A text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer—then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which is then imposed on the output speech. History Long before the invention of electronic signal processing, some people tried to build machines to emulate human speech.[better source needed] There were also legends of the existence of "Brazen Heads", such as those involving Pope Silvester II (d. 1003 AD), Albertus Magnus (1198–1280), and Roger Bacon (1214–1294). In 1779, the German-Danish scientist Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein won the first prize in a competition announced by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts for models he built of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds (in International Phonetic Alphabet notation: [aː], [eː], [iː], [oː] and [uː]). There followed the bellows-operated "acoustic-mechanical speech machine" of Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg, Hungary, described in a 1791 paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in 1846, Joseph Faber exhibited the "Euphonia". In 1923, Paget resurrected Wheatstone's design. In the 1930s, Bell Labs developed the vocoder, which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tones and resonances. From his work on the vocoder, Homer Dudley developed a keyboard-operated voice-synthesizer called The Voder (Voice Demonstrator), which he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories built the Pattern playback in the late 1940s and completed it in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device; only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues discovered acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels). The first computer-based speech-synthesis systems originated in the late 1950s. Noriko Umeda et al. developed the first general English text-to-speech system in 1968, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and his colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs.[citation needed] Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer (vocoder) recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman puts it to sleep. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research into mechanical speech-synthesizers continues.[independent source needed] Linear predictive coding (LPC), a form of speech coding, began development with the work of Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in 1966. Further developments in LPC technology were made by Bishnu S. Atal and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs during the 1970s. LPC was later the basis for early speech synthesizer chips, such as the Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips used in the Speak & Spell toys from 1978. In 1975, Fumitada Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT. From 1975 to 1981, Itakura studied problems in speech analysis and synthesis based on the LSP method. In 1980, his team developed an LSP-based speech synthesizer chip. LSP is an important technology for speech synthesis and coding, and in the 1990s was adopted by almost all international speech coding standards as an essential component, contributing to the enhancement of digital speech communication over mobile channels and the internet. In 1975, MUSA was released, and was one of the first Speech Synthesis systems. It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and a specialized software that enabled it to read Italian. A second version, released in 1978, was also able to sing Italian in an "a cappella" style. Dominant systems in the 1980s and 1990s were the DECtalk system, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, and the Bell Labs system; the latter was one of the first multilingual language-independent systems, making extensive use of natural language processing methods. Handheld electronics featuring speech synthesis began emerging in the 1970s. One of the first was the Telesensory Systems Inc. (TSI) Speech+ portable calculator for the blind in 1976. Other devices had primarily educational purposes, such as the Speak & Spell toy produced by Texas Instruments in 1978. Fidelity released a speaking version of its electronic chess computer in 1979. The first video game to feature speech synthesis was the 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game, Stratovox (known in Japan as Speak & Rescue), from Sun Electronics. The first personal computer game with speech synthesis was Manbiki Shoujo (Shoplifting Girl), released in 1980 for the PET 2001, for which the game's developer, Hiroshi Suzuki, developed a "zero cross" programming technique to produce a synthesized speech waveform. Another early example, the arcade version of Berzerk, also dates from 1980. The Milton Bradley Company produced the first multi-player electronic game using voice synthesis, Milton, in the same year. In 1976, Computalker Consultants released their CT-1 Speech Synthesizer. Designed by D. Lloyd Rice and Jim Cooper, it was an analog synthesizer built to work with microcomputers using the S-100 bus standard. Synthesized voices typically sounded male until 1990, when Ann Syrdal, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, created a female voice. Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that as the cost-performance ratio caused speech synthesizers to become cheaper and more accessible, more people would benefit from the use of text-to-speech programs. In September 2016, DeepMind released WaveNet, which demonstrated that deep learning models are capable of modeling raw waveforms and generating speech from acoustic features like spectrograms or mel-spectrograms, starting the field of deep learning speech synthesis. Although WaveNet was initially considered to be computationally expensive and slow to be used in consumer products at the time, a year after its release, DeepMind unveiled a modified version of WaveNet known as "Parallel WaveNet," a production model 1,000 times faster than the original. This was followed by Google AI's Tacotron 2 in 2018, which demonstrated that neural networks could produce highly natural speech synthesis but required substantial training data—typically tens of hours of audio—to achieve acceptable quality. Tacotron 2 employed an autoencoder architecture with attention mechanisms to convert input text into mel-spectrograms, which were then converted to waveforms using a separate neural vocoder. When trained on smaller datasets, such as 2 hours of speech, the output quality degraded while still being able to maintain intelligible speech, and with just 24 minutes of training data, Tacotron 2 failed to produce intelligible speech. In 2019, Microsoft Research introduced FastSpeech, which addressed speed limitations in autoregressive models like Tacotron 2. The same year saw the release of HiFi-GAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based vocoder that improved the efficiency of waveform generation while producing high-fidelity speech. In 2020, the release of Glow-TTS introduced a flow-based approach that allowed for both fast inference and voice style transfer capabilities. In March 2020, the free text-to-speech website 15.ai was launched. 15.ai gained widespread international attention in early 2021 for its ability to synthesize emotionally expressive speech of fictional characters from popular media with minimal amount of data. The creator of 15.ai stated that 15 seconds of training data is sufficient to perfectly clone a person's voice (hence its name, "15.ai"), a significant reduction from the previously known data requirement of tens of hours. 15.ai is credited as the first platform to popularize AI voice cloning in memes and content creation. In January 2022, the first instance of speech synthesis NFT fraud occurred when a cryptocurrency company called Voiceverse generated voice lines using 15.ai, pitched them up to sound unrecognizable, promoted them as the byproduct of their own technology, and sold them as NFTs without permission. In January 2023, ElevenLabs launched its browser-based text-to-speech platform, which employs advanced algorithms to analyze contextual aspects of text and detect emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness, or alarm. The platform is able to adjust intonation and pacing based on linguistic context to produce lifelike speech with human-like inflection, and offers features including multilingual speech generation and long-form content creation. In March 2024, OpenAI corroborated the 15 second benchmark to clone a human's voice. However, they deemed their Voice Engine tool "too risky" for general release, stating that they would only release a preview and not release the technology for public use. Synthesizer technologies The most important qualities of a speech synthesis system are naturalness and intelligibility. Naturalness describes how closely the output sounds like human speech, while intelligibility is the ease with which the output is understood. The ideal speech synthesizer is both natural and intelligible. Speech synthesis systems usually try to maximize both characteristics. The two primary technologies generating synthetic speech waveforms are concatenative synthesis and formant synthesis. Each technology has strengths and weaknesses, and the intended uses of a synthesis system will typically determine which approach is used. Concatenative synthesis is based on the concatenation (stringing together) of segments of recorded speech. Generally, concatenative synthesis produces the most natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, differences between natural variations in speech and the nature of the automated techniques for segmenting the waveforms sometimes result in audible glitches in the output. There are three main sub-types of concatenative synthesis. Unit selection synthesis uses large databases of recorded speech. During database creation, each recorded utterance is segmented into some or all of the following: individual phones, diphones, half-phones, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Typically, the division into segments is done using a specially modified speech recognizer set to a "forced alignment" mode with some manual correction afterward, using visual representations such as the waveform and spectrogram. An index of the units in the speech database is then created based on the segmentation and acoustic parameters like the fundamental frequency (pitch), duration, position in the syllable, and neighboring phones. At run time, the desired target utterance is created by determining the best chain of candidate units from the database (unit selection). This process is typically achieved using a specially weighted decision tree. Unit selection provides the greatest naturalness, because it applies only a small amount of digital signal processing (DSP) to the recorded speech. DSP often makes recorded speech sound less natural, although some systems use a small amount of signal processing at the point of concatenation to smooth the waveform. The output from the best unit-selection systems is often indistinguishable from real human voices, especially in contexts for which the TTS system has been tuned. However, maximum naturalness typically require unit-selection speech databases to be very large, in some systems ranging into the gigabytes of recorded data, representing dozens of hours of speech. Also, unit selection algorithms have been known to select segments from a place that results in less than ideal synthesis (e.g. minor words become unclear) even when a better choice exists in the database. Recently, researchers have proposed various automated methods to detect unnatural segments in unit-selection speech synthesis systems. Diphone synthesis uses a minimal speech database containing all the diphones (sound-to-sound transitions) occurring in a language. The number of diphones depends on the phonotactics of the language: for example, Spanish has about 800 diphones, and German about 2500. In diphone synthesis, only one example of each diphone is contained in the speech database. At runtime, the target prosody of a sentence is superimposed on these minimal units by means of digital signal processing techniques such as linear predictive coding, PSOLA or MBROLA. or more recent techniques such as pitch modification in the source domain using discrete cosine transform. Diphone synthesis suffers from the sonic glitches of concatenative synthesis and the robotic-sounding nature of formant synthesis, and has few of the advantages of either approach other than small size. As such, its use in commercial applications is declining,[citation needed] although it continues to be used in research because there are a number of freely available software implementations. An early example of Diphone synthesis is a teaching robot, Leachim, that was invented by Michael J. Freeman. Leachim contained information regarding class curricular and certain biographical information about the students whom it was programmed to teach. It was tested in a fourth grade classroom in the Bronx, New York. Domain-specific synthesis concatenates prerecorded words and phrases to create complete utterances. It is used in applications where the variety of texts the system will output is limited to a particular domain, like transit schedule announcements or weather reports. The technology is very simple to implement, and has been in commercial use for a long time, in devices like talking clocks and calculators. The level of naturalness of these systems can be very high because the variety of sentence types is limited, and they closely match the prosody and intonation of the original recordings.[citation needed] Because these systems are limited by the words and phrases in their databases, they are not general-purpose and can only synthesize the combinations of words and phrases with which they have been preprogrammed. The blending of words within naturally spoken language however can still cause problems unless the many variations are taken into account. For example, in non-rhotic dialects of English the "r" in words like "clear" /ˈklɪə/ is usually only pronounced when the following word has a vowel as its first letter (e.g. "clear out" is realized as /ˌklɪəɹˈʌʊt/). Likewise in French, many final consonants become no longer silent if followed by a word that begins with a vowel, an effect called liaison. This alternation cannot be reproduced by a simple word-concatenation system, which would require additional complexity to be context-sensitive. Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an acoustic model (physical modelling synthesis). Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components. Many systems based on formant synthesis technology generate artificial, robotic-sounding speech that would never be mistaken for human speech. However, maximum naturalness is not always the goal of a speech synthesis system, and formant synthesis systems have advantages over concatenative systems. Formant-synthesized speech can be reliably intelligible, even at very high speeds, avoiding the acoustic glitches that commonly plague concatenative systems. High-speed synthesized speech is used by the visually impaired to quickly navigate computers using a screen reader. Formant synthesizers are usually smaller programs than concatenative systems because they do not have a database of speech samples. They can therefore be used in embedded systems, where memory and microprocessor power are especially limited. Because formant-based systems have complete control of all aspects of the output speech, a wide variety of prosodies and intonations can be output, conveying not just questions and statements, but a variety of emotions and tones of voice. Examples of non-real-time but highly accurate intonation control in formant synthesis include the work done in the late 1970s for the Texas Instruments toy Speak & Spell, and in the early 1980s Sega arcade machines and in many Atari, Inc. arcade games using the TMS5220 LPC Chips. Creating proper intonation for these projects was painstaking, and the results have yet to be matched by real-time text-to-speech interfaces.[when?] For tonal languages, such as Chinese or Taiwanese language, there are different levels of tone sandhi required and sometimes the output of speech synthesizer may result in the mistakes of tone sandhi. Articulatory synthesis consists of computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The first articulatory synthesizer regularly used for laboratory experiments was developed at Haskins Laboratories in the mid-1970s by Philip Rubin, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, known as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues. Until recently, articulatory synthesis models have not been incorporated into commercial speech synthesis systems. A notable exception is the NeXT-based system originally developed and marketed by Trillium Sound Research, a spin-off company of the University of Calgary, where much of the original research was conducted. Following the demise of the various incarnations of NeXT (started by Steve Jobs in the late 1980s and merged with Apple Computer in 1997), the Trillium software was published under the GNU General Public License, with work continuing as gnuspeech. The system, first marketed in 1994, provides full articulatory-based text-to-speech conversion using a waveguide or transmission-line analog of the human oral and nasal tracts controlled by Carré's "distinctive region model". More recent synthesizers, developed by Jorge C. Lucero and colleagues, incorporate models of vocal fold biomechanics, glottal aerodynamics and acoustic wave propagation in the bronchi, trachea, nasal and oral cavities, and thus constitute full systems of physics-based speech simulation. HMM-based synthesis is a synthesis method based on hidden Markov models, also called Statistical Parametric Synthesis. In this system, the frequency spectrum (vocal tract), fundamental frequency (voice source), and duration (prosody) of speech are modeled simultaneously by HMMs. Speech waveforms are generated from HMMs themselves based on the maximum likelihood criterion. Sinewave synthesis is a technique for synthesizing speech by replacing the formants (main bands of energy) with pure tone whistles. Deep learning speech synthesis uses deep neural networks (DNN) to produce artificial speech from text (text-to-speech) or spectrum (vocoder). The deep neural networks are trained using a large amount of recorded speech and, in the case of a text-to-speech system, the associated labels and/or input text. Audio deepfake technology, also referred to as voice cloning or deepfake audio, is an application of artificial intelligence designed to generate speech that convincingly mimics specific individuals, often synthesizing phrases or sentences they have never spoken. Initially developed with the intent to enhance various aspects of human life, it has practical applications such as generating audiobooks and assisting individuals who have lost their voices due to medical conditions. Additionally, it has commercial uses, including the creation of personalized digital assistants, natural-sounding text-to-speech systems, and advanced speech translation services. In 2023, VICE reporter Joseph Cox published findings that he had recorded five minutes of himself talking and then used a tool developed by ElevenLabs to create voice deepfakes that defeated a bank's voice-authentication system. Challenges The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are full of heteronyms, numbers, and abbreviations that all require expansion into a phonetic representation. There are many spellings in English which are pronounced differently based on context. For example, "My latest project is to learn how to better project my voice" contains two pronunciations of "project". Most text-to-speech (TTS) systems do not generate semantic representations of their input texts, as processes for doing so are unreliable, poorly understood, and computationally ineffective. As a result, various heuristic techniques are used to guess the proper way to disambiguate homographs, like examining neighboring words and using statistics about frequency of occurrence. Recently TTS systems have begun to use HMMs (discussed above) to generate "parts of speech" to aid in disambiguating homographs. This technique is quite successful for many cases such as whether "read" should be pronounced as "red" implying past tense, or as "reed" implying present tense. Typical error rates when using HMMs in this fashion are usually below five percent. These techniques also work well for most European languages, although access to required training corpora is frequently difficult in these languages. Deciding how to convert numbers is another problem that TTS systems have to address. It is a simple programming challenge to convert a number into words (at least in English), like "1325" becoming "one thousand three hundred twenty-five". However, numbers occur in many different contexts; "1325" may also be read as "one three two five", "thirteen twenty-five" or "thirteen hundred and twenty five". A TTS system can often infer how to expand a number based on surrounding words, numbers, and punctuation, and sometimes the system provides a way to specify the context if it is ambiguous. Roman numerals can also be read differently depending on context. For example, "Henry VIII" reads as "Henry the Eighth", while "Chapter VIII" reads as "Chapter Eight". Similarly, abbreviations can be ambiguous. For example, the abbreviation "in" for "inches" must be differentiated from the word "in", and the address "12 St John St." uses the same abbreviation for both "Saint" and "Street". TTS systems with intelligent front ends can make educated guesses about ambiguous abbreviations, while others provide the same result in all cases, resulting in nonsensical (and sometimes comical) outputs, such as "Ulysses S. Grant" being rendered as "Ulysses South Grant". Speech synthesis systems use two basic approaches to determine the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling, a process which is often called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (phoneme is the term used by linguists to describe distinctive sounds in a language). The simplest approach to text-to-phoneme conversion is the dictionary-based approach, where a large dictionary containing all the words of a language and their correct pronunciations is stored by the program. Determining the correct pronunciation of each word is a matter of looking up each word in the dictionary and replacing the spelling with the pronunciation specified in the dictionary. The other approach is rule-based, in which pronunciation rules are applied to words to determine their pronunciations based on their spellings. This is similar to the "sounding out", or synthetic phonics, approach to learning reading. Each approach has advantages and drawbacks. The dictionary-based approach is quick and accurate, but completely fails if it is given a word which is not in its dictionary. As dictionary size grows, so too does the memory space requirements of the synthesis system. On the other hand, the rule-based approach works on any input, but the complexity of the rules grows substantially as the system takes into account irregular spellings or pronunciations. (Consider that the word "of" is very common in English, yet is the only word in which the letter "f" is pronounced [v].) As a result, nearly all speech synthesis systems use a combination of these approaches. Languages with a phonemic orthography have a very regular writing system, and the prediction of the pronunciation of words based on their spellings is quite successful. Speech synthesis systems for such languages often use the rule-based method extensively, resorting to dictionaries only for those few words, like foreign names and loanwords, whose pronunciations are not obvious from their spellings. On the other hand, speech synthesis systems for languages like English, which have extremely irregular spelling systems, are more likely to rely on dictionaries, and to use rule-based methods only for unusual words, or words that are not in their dictionaries. The consistent evaluation of speech synthesis systems may be difficult because of a lack of universally agreed objective evaluation criteria. Different organizations often use different speech data. The quality of speech synthesis systems also depends on the quality of the production technique (which may involve analogue or digital recording) and on the facilities used to replay the speech. Evaluating speech synthesis systems has therefore often been compromised by differences between production techniques and replay facilities. Since 2005, however, some researchers have started to evaluate speech synthesis systems using a common speech dataset. A study in the journal Speech Communication by Amy Drahota and colleagues at the University of Portsmouth, UK, reported that listeners to voice recordings could determine, at better than chance levels, whether or not the speaker was smiling. It was suggested that identification of the vocal features that signal emotional content may be used to help make synthesized speech sound more natural. One of the related issues is modification of the pitch contour of the sentence, depending upon whether it is an affirmative, interrogative or exclamatory sentence. One of the techniques for pitch modification uses discrete cosine transform in the source domain (linear prediction residual). Such pitch synchronous pitch modification techniques need a priori pitch marking of the synthesis speech database using techniques such as epoch extraction using dynamic plosion index applied on the integrated linear prediction residual of the voiced regions of speech. In general, prosody remains a challenge for speech synthesizers, and is an active research topic. Dedicated hardware Hardware and software systems Popular systems offering speech synthesis as a built-in capability. In the early 1980s, TI was known as a pioneer in speech synthesis, and a highly popular plug-in speech synthesizer module was available for the TI-99/4 and 4A. Speech synthesizers were offered free with the purchase of a number of cartridges and were used by many TI-written video games (games offered with speech during this promotion included Alpiner and Parsec). The synthesizer uses a variant of linear predictive coding and has a small in-built vocabulary. The original intent was to release small cartridges that plugged directly into the synthesizer unit, which would increase the device's built-in vocabulary. However, the success of software text-to-speech in the Terminal Emulator II cartridge canceled that plan. The Mattel Intellivision game console offered the Intellivoice Voice Synthesis module in 1982. It included the SP0256 Narrator speech synthesizer chip on a removable cartridge. The Narrator had 2kB of Read-Only Memory (ROM), and this was utilized to store a database of generic words that could be combined to make phrases in Intellivision games. Since the Orator chip could also accept speech data from external memory, any additional words or phrases needed could be stored inside the cartridge itself. The data consisted of strings of analog-filter coefficients to modify the behavior of the chip's synthetic vocal-tract model, rather than simple digitized samples. Also released in 1982, Software Automatic Mouth was the first commercial all-software voice synthesis program. It was later used as the basis for Macintalk. The program was available for non-Macintosh Apple computers (including the Apple II, and the Lisa), various Atari models and the Commodore 64. The Apple version preferred additional hardware that contained DACs, although it could instead use the computer's one-bit audio output (with the addition of much distortion) if the card was not present. The Atari made use of the embedded POKEY audio chip. Speech playback on the Atari normally disabled interrupt requests and shut down the ANTIC chip during vocal output. The audible output is extremely distorted speech when the screen is on. The Commodore 64 made use of the 64's embedded SID audio chip. Arguably, the first speech system integrated into an operating system was the circa 1983 unreleased Atari 1400XL/1450XL computers. These used the Votrax SC01 chip and a finite-state machine to enable World English Spelling text-to-speech synthesis. The Atari ST computers were sold with "stspeech.tos" on floppy disk. The first speech system integrated into an operating system that shipped in quantity was Apple Computer's MacInTalk. The software was licensed from third-party developers Joseph Katz and Mark Barton (later, SoftVoice, Inc.) and was featured during the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh computer. This January demo required 512 kilobytes of RAM. As a result, it could not run in the 128 kilobytes of RAM the first Mac actually shipped with. So, the demo was accomplished with a prototype 512k Mac, although those in attendance were not told of this and the synthesis demo created considerable excitement for the Macintosh. In the early 1990s Apple expanded its capabilities offering system wide text-to-speech support. With the introduction of faster PowerPC-based computers they included higher quality voice sampling. Apple also introduced speech recognition into its systems which provided a fluid command set. More recently, Apple has added sample-based voices. Starting as a curiosity, the speech system of Apple Macintosh has evolved into a fully supported program, PlainTalk, for people with vision problems. VoiceOver was for the first time featured in 2005 in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). During 10.4 (Tiger) and first releases of 10.5 (Leopard) there was only one standard voice shipping with Mac OS X. Starting with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the user can choose out of a wide range list of multiple voices. VoiceOver voices feature the taking of realistic-sounding breaths between sentences, as well as improved clarity at high read rates over PlainTalk. Mac OS X also includes say, a command-line based application that converts text to audible speech. The AppleScript Standard Additions includes a say verb that allows a script to use any of the installed voices and to control the pitch, speaking rate and modulation of the spoken text. Used in Alexa and as Software as a Service in AWS (from 2017). The second operating system to feature advanced speech synthesis capabilities was AmigaOS, introduced in 1985. The voice synthesis was licensed by Commodore International from SoftVoice, Inc., who also developed the original MacinTalk text-to-speech system. It featured a complete system of voice emulation for American English, with both male and female voices and "stress" indicator markers, made possible through the Amiga's audio chipset. The synthesis system was divided into a translator library which converted unrestricted English text into a standard set of phonetic codes and a narrator device which implemented a formant model of speech generation.. AmigaOS also featured a high-level "Speak Handler", which allowed command-line users to redirect text output to speech. Speech synthesis was occasionally used in third-party programs, particularly word processors and educational software. The synthesis software remained largely unchanged from the first AmigaOS release and Commodore eventually removed speech synthesis support from AmigaOS 2.1 onward. Despite the American English phoneme limitation, an unofficial version with multilingual speech synthesis was developed. This made use of an enhanced version of the translator library which could translate a number of languages, given a set of rules for each language. Modern Windows desktop systems can use SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 components to support speech synthesis and speech recognition. SAPI 4.0 was available as an optional add-on for Windows 95 and Windows 98. Windows 2000 added Narrator, a text-to-speech utility for people who have visual impairment. Third-party programs such as JAWS for Windows, Window-Eyes, Non-visual Desktop Access, Supernova and System Access can perform various text-to-speech tasks such as reading text aloud from a specified website, email account, text document, the Windows clipboard, the user's keyboard typing, etc. Not all programs can use speech synthesis directly. Some programs can use plug-ins, extensions or add-ons to read text aloud. Third-party programs are available that can read text from the system clipboard. Microsoft Speech Server is a server-based package for voice synthesis and recognition. It is designed for network use with web applications and call centers. From 1971 to 1996, Votrax produced a number of commercial speech synthesizer components. A Votrax synthesizer was included in the first generation Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind. Text-to-speech systems Text-to-speech (TTS) refers to the ability of computers to read text aloud. A TTS engine converts written text to a phonemic representation, then converts the phonemic representation to waveforms that can be output as sound. TTS engines with different languages, dialects and specialized vocabularies are available through third-party publishers. Version 1.6 of Android added support for speech synthesis (TTS). Currently, there are a number of applications, plugins and gadgets that can read messages directly from an e-mail client and web pages from a web browser or Google Toolbar. Some specialized software can narrate RSS-feeds. On one hand, online RSS-narrators simplify information delivery by allowing users to listen to their favourite news sources and to convert them to podcasts. On the other hand, on-line RSS-readers are available on almost any personal computer connected to the Internet. Users can download generated audio files to portable devices, e.g. with a help of podcast receiver, and listen to them while walking, jogging or commuting to work. A growing field in Internet based TTS is web-based assistive technology, e.g. 'Browsealoud' from a UK company and Readspeaker. It can deliver TTS functionality to anyone (for reasons of accessibility, convenience, entertainment or information) with access to a web browser. The non-profit project Pediaphon was created in 2006 to provide a similar web-based TTS interface to the Wikipedia. Other work is being done in the context of the W3C through the W3C Audio Incubator Group with the involvement of The BBC and Google Inc. Some open-source software systems are available, such as: At the 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) researchers from Google presented the work 'Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis', which transfers learning from speaker verification to achieve text-to-speech synthesis, that can be made to sound almost like anybody from a speech sample of only 5 seconds. Also researchers from Baidu Research presented a voice cloning system with similar aims at the 2018 NeurIPS conference, though the result is rather unconvincing. By 2019 the digital sound-alikes found their way to the hands of criminals as Symantec researchers know of 3 cases where digital sound-alikes technology has been used for crime. This increases the stress on the disinformation situation coupled with the facts that Speech synthesis markup languages A number of markup languages have been established for the rendition of text as speech in an XML-compliant format. The most recent is Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), which became a W3C recommendation in 2004. Older speech synthesis markup languages include Java Speech Markup Language (JSML) and SABLE. Although each of these was proposed as a standard, none of them have been widely adopted.[citation needed] Speech synthesis markup languages are distinguished from dialogue markup languages. VoiceXML, for example, includes tags related to speech recognition, dialogue management and touchtone dialing, in addition to text-to-speech markup.[citation needed] Applications Speech synthesis has long been a vital assistive technology tool and its application in this area is significant and widespread. It allows environmental barriers to be removed for people with a wide range of disabilities. The longest application has been in the use of screen readers for people with visual impairment, but text-to-speech systems are now commonly used by people with dyslexia and other reading disabilities as well as by pre-literate children. They are also frequently employed to aid those with severe speech impairment usually through a dedicated voice output communication aid. Work to personalize a synthetic voice to better match a person's personality or historical voice is becoming available. A noted application, of speech synthesis, was the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind which incorporated text-to-phonetics software based on work from Haskins Laboratories and a black-box synthesizer built by Votrax. Speech synthesis techniques are also used in entertainment productions such as games and animations. In 2007, Animo Limited announced the development of a software application package based on its speech synthesis software FineSpeech, explicitly geared towards customers in the entertainment industries, able to generate narration and lines of dialogue according to user specifications. The application reached maturity in 2008, when NEC Biglobe announced a web service that allows users to create phrases from the voices of characters from the Japanese anime series Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2. 15.ai has been frequently used for content creation in various fandoms, including the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom, the Team Fortress 2 fandom, the Portal fandom, and the SpongeBob SquarePants fandom. Text-to-speech for disability and impaired communication aids have become widely available. Text-to-speech is also finding new applications; for example, speech synthesis combined with speech recognition allows for interaction with mobile devices via natural language processing interfaces. Some users have also created AI virtual assistants using 15.ai and external voice control software. Text-to-speech is also used in second language acquisition. Voki, for instance, is an educational tool created by Oddcast that allows users to create their own talking avatar, using different accents. They can be emailed, embedded on websites or shared on social media. Content creators have used voice cloning tools to recreate their voices for podcasts, narration, and comedy shows. Publishers and authors have also used such software to narrate audiobooks and newsletters. Another area of application is AI video creation with talking heads. Webapps and video editors like Elai.io or Synthesia allow users to create video content involving AI avatars, who are made to speak using text-to-speech technology. Speech synthesis is a valuable computational aid for the analysis and assessment of speech disorders. A voice quality synthesizer, developed by Jorge C. Lucero et al. at the University of Brasília, simulates the physics of phonation and includes models of vocal frequency jitter and tremor, airflow noise and laryngeal asymmetries. The synthesizer has been used to mimic the timbre of dysphonic speakers with controlled levels of roughness, breathiness and strain. In the 2010s, singing synthesis technology took advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence, deep listening and machine learning, to better represent the nuances of the human voice. New high-fidelity sample libraries combined with digital audio workstations facilitate editing in fine detail, such as shifting of formants, adjustment of vibrato, and adjustments to vowels and consonants. Sample libraries for various languages and various accents are available. With advancements in vocal synthesis, artists sometimes use sample libraries in lieu of backing singers. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_note-56] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World#cite_note-91] | [TOKENS: 5641] |
Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents Concordancer A concordancer is a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance. The output of a concordancer may serve as input to a translation memory system for computer-assisted translation, or as an early step in machine translation. Concordancers are also used in corpus linguistics to retrieve alphabetically or otherwise sorted lists of linguistic data from the corpus in question, which the corpus linguist then analyzes. A number of concordancers have been published, notably Oxford Concordance Program (OCP), a concordancer first released in 1981 by Oxford University Computing Services, which claims to be used in over 200 organisations worldwide. See also References This article about computer-assisted translation is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. This article about machine translation is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. This scientific software article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. This corpus linguistics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2020-01-20-nb2md.html] | [TOKENS: 791] |
Blogging with Jupyter Notebooks Jeremy Howard January 20, 2020 On this page Jupyter Notebooks is a great environment for creating “code heavy” blog posts. Maybe you didn’t even plan to write a blog post, but you’ve done some interesting experiments in a notebook and you realize afterwards that you have results worth sharing. Either way, you’ll want some way to get your notebook onto your blog. fast_template and nbdev are set up to handle Jupyter Notebooks nicely. Jupyter Notebooks and GitHub Pages already have some support for exporting notebooks to markdown; but I suggest you use fast_template and nbdev, with the process described in this post, because otherwise you won’t get useful features such as: This whole post was created using this method. You can see the source notebook here. Writing your notebook Your markdown cells, code cells, and all outputs will appear in your exported blog post. The only thing that won’t be shown is interactive outputs (e.g. ipywidgets, bokeh plots, etc), or cells you explicitly hide using the #hide marker discussed below. When you write your notebook, just write whatever you want your audience to see. Since most writing platforms make it much harder to include code and outputs, many of us are in a habit of including less real examples than we should. So try to get into a new habit of including lots of examples as you write. Often you’ll want to hide boilerplate such as import statements. Add #hide to the top of any cell to make it not show up in output. Jupyter displays the result of the last line of a cell, so there’s no need to include print(). (And including extra code that isn’t needed means there’s more cognitive overhead for the reader; so don’t include code that you don’t really need!) It works not just for text, but also for images. For instance, here’s an example of the flip_lr data augmentation using fastai.vision: You can also paste images, such as screenshots, directly into a markdown cell in Jupyter. This creates a file embedded in the notebook that Jupyter calls an “attachment”. Or you can use Markdown to refer to an image on the internet by its URL. Exporting to markdown Before you export to markdown, you first need to make sure your notebook is saved, so press s or click File➡Save. Then close the browser tab with the open notebook. This is important, because when we export to markdown any attachments will be exported to files, and the notebook will be updated to refer to those external files. Therefore, the notebook itself will change; if you leave it open, you may accidentally end up overwriting the updated notebook. You’ll need nbdev installed; if you haven’t already, then install it with: Then, in your terminal, cd to the folder containing your notebook, and type (assuming your notebook is called name.ipynb): You’ll see that a file name.md and folder name_files have been created (where “name” is replaced by your notebook file name). One problem is that the markdown exporter assumes your images will be in name_files, but on your blog they’ll be in /images/name_files. So we need to do a search and replace to fix this in the markdown file. We can do this automatically with python. Create a file called upd_md.py with the following contents: Then, in the terminal, run (assuming that upd_md.py and your markdown doc are in the same folder): This will modify your markdown doc inplace, so it will have the correct /images/ prefix on each image reference. Finally, copy name_files to the images folder in your blog repo, and name.md to your _posts folder, and rename name.md to have the required YEAR-MONTH-DAY-name.md format. Commit and push this to GitHub, and you should see your post! |
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Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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Contents 2008 financial crisis The 2008 financial crisis, also known as the global financial crisis (GFC) or the Panic of 2008, was a major worldwide financial crisis centered in the United States. The causes included excessive speculation on property values by both homeowners and financial institutions, leading to the 2000s United States housing bubble. This was exacerbated by predatory lending for subprime mortgages and by deficiencies in regulation. Cash out refinancings had fueled an increase in consumption that could no longer be sustained when home prices declined. The first phase of the crisis was the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and bank runs in several countries. The crisis exacerbated the Great Recession, a global recession that began in mid-2007, as well as the United States bear market of 2007–2009. It was also a contributor to the 2008–2011 Icelandic financial crisis and the euro area crisis. During the 1990s, the U.S. Congress had passed legislation that intended to expand affordable housing through looser financing rules, and in 1999, parts of the 1933 Banking Act (Glass–Steagall Act) were repealed, enabling institutions to mix low-risk operations, such as commercial banking and insurance, with higher-risk operations such as investment banking and proprietary trading. As the Federal Reserve ("Fed") lowered the federal funds rate from 2000 to 2003, institutions increasingly targeted low-income homebuyers, largely belonging to racial minorities, with high-risk loans; this development went unattended by regulators. As interest rates rose from 2004 to 2006, the cost of mortgages rose and the demand for housing fell; in early 2007, as more U.S. subprime mortgage holders began defaulting on their repayments, lenders went bankrupt, culminating in the bankruptcy of New Century Financial in April. As demand and prices continued to fall, the financial contagion spread to global credit markets by August 2007, and central banks began injecting liquidity. In March 2008, Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest U.S. investment bank, was sold to JPMorgan Chase in a "fire sale" backed by Fed financing. In response to the growing crisis, governments around the world deployed massive bailouts of financial institutions and used monetary policy and fiscal policies to prevent an economic collapse of the global financial system. By July 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, companies which together owned or guaranteed half of the U.S. housing market, verged on collapse; the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 enabled the federal government to seize them on September 7. Lehman Brothers (the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank) filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on September 15, which was followed by a Fed bail-out of American International Group (the country's largest insurer) the next day, and the seizure of Washington Mutual in the largest bank failure in U.S. history on September 25. On October 3, Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, authorizing the Treasury Department to purchase toxic assets and bank stocks through the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Fed began a program of quantitative easing by buying treasury bonds and other assets, such as MBS, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed in February 2009 by newly elected president Barack Obama, included a range of measures intended to preserve existing jobs and create new ones. These initiatives combined, coupled with actions taken in other countries, ended the worst of the Great Recession by mid-2009. Assessments of the crisis's impact in the U.S. vary, but suggest that some 8.7 million jobs were lost, causing unemployment to rise from 5% in 2007 to a high of 10% in October 2009. The percentage of citizens living in poverty rose from 12.5% in 2007 to 15.1% in 2010. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 53% between October 2007 and March 2009, and some estimates suggest that one in four households lost 75% or more of their net worth. In 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed, overhauling financial regulations. It was opposed by many Republicans, and it was weakened by the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act in 2018. The Basel III capital and liquidity standards were also adopted by countries around the world. Background The crisis exacerbated the Great Recession, a global recession that began in mid-2007. It was also followed by the euro area crisis, which began with the start of the Greek government-debt crisis in late 2009, and the 2008–2011 Icelandic financial crisis, which involved the bank failure of all three of the major banks in Iceland and, relative to the size of its economy, was the largest economic collapse suffered by any country in history. It was among the five worst financial crises the world had experienced and led to a loss of more than $2 trillion from the global economy. U.S. home mortgage debt relative to GDP increased from an average of 46% during the 1990s to 73% during 2008, reaching $10.5 (~$15 trillion in 2024) trillion. The increase in cash out refinancings, as home values rose, fueled an increase in consumption that could no longer be sustained when home prices declined. Many financial institutions owned investments whose value was based on home mortgages such as mortgage-backed securities, or credit derivatives used to insure them against failure, which declined in value significantly. The International Monetary Fund estimated that large U.S. and European banks lost more than $1 trillion on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009. Lack of investor confidence in bank solvency and declines in credit availability led to plummeting stock and commodity prices in late 2008 and early 2009. The crisis rapidly spread into a global economic shock, resulting in several bank failures. Economies worldwide slowed during this period since credit tightened and international trade declined. Housing markets suffered and unemployment soared, resulting in evictions and foreclosures. Several businesses failed. From its peak in the second quarter of 2007 at $61.4 trillion, household wealth in the United States fell $11 trillion, to $50.4 trillion by the end of the first quarter of 2009, resulting in a decline in consumption, then a decline in business investment. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the quarter-over-quarter decline in real GDP in the U.S. was 8.4%. The U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 11.0% in October 2009, the highest rate since 1983 and roughly twice the pre-crisis rate. The average hours per work week declined to 33, the lowest level since the government began collecting the data in 1964. The economic crisis started in the U.S. but spread to the rest of the world. U.S. consumption accounted for more than a third of the growth in global consumption between 2000 and 2007 and the rest of the world depended on the U.S. consumer as a source of demand. Toxic securities were owned by corporate and institutional investors globally. Derivatives such as credit default swaps also increased the linkage between large financial institutions. The de-leveraging of financial institutions, as assets were sold to pay back obligations that could not be refinanced in frozen credit markets, further accelerated the solvency crisis and caused a decrease in international trade. Reductions in the growth rates of developing countries were due to falls in trade, commodity prices, investment and remittances sent from migrant workers (example: Armenia). States with fragile political systems feared that investors from Western states would withdraw their money because of the crisis. As part of national fiscal policy response to the Great Recession, governments and central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England, provided then-unprecedented trillions of dollars in bailouts and stimulus, including expansive fiscal policy and monetary policy to offset the decline in consumption and lending capacity, avoid a further collapse, encourage lending, restore faith in the integral commercial paper markets, avoid the risk of a deflationary spiral, and provide banks with enough funds to allow customers to make withdrawals. In effect, the central banks went from being the "lender of last resort" to the "lender of only resort" for a significant portion of the economy. In some cases the Fed was considered the "buyer of last resort". During the fourth quarter of 2008, these central banks purchased US$2.5 trillion (~$3.57 trillion in 2024) of government debt and troubled private assets from banks. This was the largest liquidity injection into the credit market, and the largest monetary policy action in world history. Following a model initiated by the 2008 United Kingdom bank rescue package, the governments of European nations and the United States guaranteed the debt issued by their banks and raised the capital of their national banking systems, ultimately purchasing $1.5 trillion newly issued preferred stock in major banks. The Federal Reserve created then-significant amounts of new currency as a method to combat the liquidity trap. Bailouts came in the form of trillions of dollars of loans, asset purchases, guarantees, and direct spending. Significant controversy accompanied the bailouts, such as in the case of the AIG bonus payments controversy, leading to the development of a variety of "decision making frameworks", to help balance competing policy interests during times of financial crisis. Alistair Darling, the U.K.'s Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the crisis, stated in 2018 that Britain came within hours of "a breakdown of law and order" the day that Royal Bank of Scotland was bailed-out. Instead of financing more domestic loans, some banks instead spent some of the stimulus money in more profitable areas such as investing in emerging markets and foreign currencies. In July 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the United States to "promote the financial stability of the United States". The Basel III capital and liquidity standards were adopted worldwide. Since the 2008 financial crisis, consumer regulators in America have more closely supervised sellers of credit cards and home mortgages in order to deter anticompetitive practices that led to the crisis. At least two major reports on the causes of the crisis were produced by the U.S. Congress: the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, released January 2011, and a report by the United States Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations entitled Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, released April 2011. In total, 47 bankers served jail time as a result of the crisis, over half of whom were from Iceland, where the crisis was the most severe and led to the collapse of all three major Icelandic banks. In April 2012, Geir Haarde of Iceland became the only politician to be convicted as a result of the crisis. Only one banker in the United States served jail time as a result of the crisis, Kareem Serageldin, a banker at Credit Suisse who was sentenced to 30 months in jail and returned $24.6 million in compensation for manipulating bond prices to hide $1 billion of losses. No individuals in the United Kingdom were convicted as a result of the crisis. In SEC v. Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs paid a $550 million civil penalty and acknowledged that its marketing materials for CDO contained incomplete information, settling securities fraud charges after allegedly anticipating the financial crisis and selling toxic investments to its clients. With fewer resources to risk in creative destruction, the number of patent applications was flat, compared to exponential increases in patent application in prior years. Typical American families did not fare well, nor did the "wealthy-but-not-wealthiest" families just beneath the pyramid's top. However, half of the poorest families in the United States did not have wealth declines at all during the crisis because they generally did not own financial investments whose value could fluctuate. The Federal Reserve surveyed 4,000 households from 2007 to 2009, and found that the total wealth of 63% of all Americans declined in that period and 77% of the richest families had a decrease in total wealth, while only 50% of those on the bottom of the pyramid suffered a decrease. Timeline The following is a timeline of the major events of the financial crisis, including government responses, and the subsequent economic recovery. There is a really good reason for tighter credit. Tens of millions of homeowners who had substantial equity in their homes two years ago have little or nothing today. Businesses are facing the worst downturn since the Great Depression. This matters for credit decisions. A homeowner with equity in her home is very unlikely to default on a car loan or credit card debt. They will draw on this equity rather than lose their car and/or have a default placed on their credit record. On the other hand, a homeowner who has no equity is a serious default risk. In the case of businesses, their creditworthiness depends on their future profits. Profit prospects look much worse in November 2008 than they did in November 2007 ... While many banks are obviously at the brink, consumers and businesses would be facing a much harder time getting credit right now even if the financial system were rock solid. The problem with the economy is the loss of close to $6 trillion in housing wealth and an even larger amount of stock wealth. ... the pace of economic contraction is slowing. Conditions in financial markets have generally improved in recent months. Household spending has shown further signs of stabilizing but remains constrained by ongoing job losses, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Businesses are cutting back on fixed investment and staffing but appear to be making progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales. Although economic activity is likely to remain weak for a time, the Committee continues to anticipate that policy actions to stabilize financial markets and institutions, fiscal and monetary stimulus, and market forces will contribute to a gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth in a context of price stability. In the table, the names of emerging and developing economies are shown in boldface type, while the names of developed economies are in Roman (regular) type. The twenty largest economies contributing to global GDP (PPP) growth (2007–2017) Federal actions towards the crisis The expansion of central bank lending in response to the crisis was not confined to the Federal Reserve's provision of aid to individual financial institutions. The Federal Reserve has also conducted several innovative lending programs to improve liquidity and strengthen different financial institutions and markets, such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In this case, the major problem in the market is the lack of free cash reserves and flows to secure the loans. The Federal Reserve took many steps to deal with financial market liquidity worries. One of these steps was a credit line for major traders, who act as the Fed's partners in open market activities. Also, loan programs were set up to make the money market mutual funds and commercial paper market more flexible. Also, the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) was put in place thanks to a joint effort with the US Department of the Treasury. This plan made it easier for consumers and businesses to get credit by giving Americans who owned high-quality asset-backed securities more credit. Before the crisis, the Federal Reserve's stocks of Treasury securities were sold to pay for the increase in credit. This method was meant to keep banks from trying to give out their extra savings, which could cause the federal funds rate to drop below where it was supposed to be. However, in October 2008, the Federal Reserve was granted the power to provide banks with interest payments on their surplus reserves. This created a motivation for banks to retain their reserves instead of disbursing them, thus reducing the need for the Federal Reserve to hedge its increased lending by decreases in alternative assets. Money market funds also went through runs when people lost faith in the market. To keep it from getting worse, the Fed said it would give money to mutual fund companies. Also, the Department of Treasury said that it would briefly cover the assets of the fund. Both of these things helped get the fund market back to normal, which helped the commercial paper market, which most businesses use to run. The FDIC also did several things, such as raising the insurance cap from $100,000 to $250,000, to boost customer trust. They engaged in quantitative easing, which added more than $4 trillion to the financial system and got banks to start lending again, both to each other and to people. Many homeowners who were trying to keep their homes from going into default got housing credits. A package of policies was passed that let borrowers refinance their loans even though the value of their homes was less than what they still owed on their mortgages. Causes While the causes of the bubble and subsequent crash are disputed, the precipitating factor for the Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 was the bursting of the United States housing bubble and the subsequent subprime mortgage crisis, which occurred due to a high default rate and resulting foreclosures of mortgage loans, particularly adjustable-rate mortgages. Some or all of the following factors contributed to the crisis: The relaxing of credit lending standards by investment banks and commercial banks allowed for a significant increase in subprime lending. Subprime had not become less risky; Wall Street just accepted this higher risk. Due to competition between mortgage lenders for revenue and market share, and when the supply of creditworthy borrowers was limited, mortgage lenders relaxed underwriting standards and originated riskier mortgages to less creditworthy borrowers. In the view of some analysts, the relatively conservative government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) policed mortgage originators and maintained relatively high underwriting standards prior to 2003. However, as market power shifted from securitizers to originators, and as intense competition from private securitizers undermined GSE power, mortgage standards declined and risky loans proliferated. The riskiest loans were originated in 2004–2007, the years of the most intense competition between securitizers and the lowest market share for the GSEs. The GSEs eventually relaxed their standards to try to catch up with the private banks. A contrarian view is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led the way to relaxed underwriting standards, starting in 1995, by advocating the use of easy-to-qualify automated underwriting and appraisal systems, by designing no-down-payment products issued by lenders, by the promotion of thousands of small mortgage brokers, and by their close relationship to subprime loan aggregators such as Countrywide. Depending on how "subprime" mortgages are defined, they remained below 10% of all mortgage originations until 2004, when they rose to nearly 20% and remained there through the 2005–2006 peak of the United States housing bubble. The majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, written by the six Democratic appointees, the minority report, written by three of the four Republican appointees, studies by Federal Reserve economists, and the work of several independent scholars generally contend that government affordable housing policy was not the primary cause of the financial crisis. Although they concede that governmental policies had some role in causing the crisis, they contend that GSE loans performed better than loans securitized by private investment banks, and performed better than some loans originated by institutions that held loans in their own portfolios. In his dissent to the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, conservative American Enterprise Institute fellow Peter J. Wallison stated his belief that the roots of the financial crisis can be traced directly and primarily to affordable housing policies initiated by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the 1990s and to massive risky loan purchases by government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Based upon information in the SEC's December 2011 securities fraud case against six former executives of Fannie and Freddie, Peter Wallison and Edward Pinto estimated that, in 2008, Fannie and Freddie held 13 million substandard loans totaling over $2 trillion. In the early and mid-2000s, the Bush administration called numerous times for investigations into the safety and soundness of the GSEs and their swelling portfolio of subprime mortgages[citation needed]. On September 10, 2003, the United States House Committee on Financial Services held a hearing, at the urging of the administration, to assess safety and soundness issues and to review a recent report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) that had uncovered accounting discrepancies within the two entities. The hearings never resulted in new legislation or formal investigation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as many of the committee members refused to accept the report and instead rebuked OFHEO for their attempt at regulation. Some, such as Wallison, believe this was an early warning to the systemic risk that the growing market in subprime mortgages posed to the U.S. financial system that went unheeded. A 2000 United States Department of the Treasury study of lending trends for 305 cities from 1993 to 1998 showed that $467 billion of mortgage lending was made by Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)-covered lenders into low and mid-level income (LMI) borrowers and neighborhoods, representing 10% of all U.S. mortgage lending during the period. The majority of these were prime loans. Sub-prime loans made by CRA-covered institutions constituted a 3% market share of LMI loans in 1998, but in the run-up to the crisis, fully 25% of all subprime lending occurred at CRA-covered institutions and another 25% of subprime loans had some connection with CRA. However, most sub-prime loans were not made to the LMI borrowers targeted by the CRA, especially in the years 2005–2006 leading up to the crisis, nor did it find any evidence that lending under the CRA rules increased delinquency rates or that the CRA indirectly influenced independent mortgage lenders to ramp up sub-prime lending.[verification needed] To other analysts the delay between CRA rule changes in 1995 and the explosion of subprime lending is not surprising, and does not exonerate the CRA. They contend that there were two, connected causes to the crisis: the relaxation of underwriting standards in 1995 and the ultra-low interest rates initiated by the Federal Reserve after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Both causes had to be in place before the crisis could take place. Critics also point out that publicly announced CRA loan commitments were massive, totaling $4.5 trillion in the years between 1994 and 2007. They also argue that the Federal Reserve's classification of CRA loans as "prime" is based on the faulty and self-serving assumption that high-interest-rate loans (3 percentage points over average) equal "subprime" loans. Others have pointed out that there were not enough of these loans made to cause a crisis of this magnitude. In an article in Portfolio magazine, Michael Lewis spoke with one trader who noted that "There weren't enough Americans with [bad] credit taking out [bad loans] to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product." Essentially, investment banks and hedge funds used financial innovation to enable large wagers to be made, far beyond the actual value of the underlying mortgage loans, using derivatives called credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and synthetic CDOs. By March 2011, the FDIC had paid out $9 billion (c. $12.3 billion in 2024) to cover losses on bad loans at 165 failed financial institutions. The Congressional Budget Office estimated, in June 2011, that the bailout to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exceeds $300 billion (c. $411 billion in 2024) (calculated by adding the fair value deficits of the entities to the direct bailout funds at the time). Economist Paul Krugman argued in January 2010 that the simultaneous growth of the residential and commercial real estate pricing bubbles and the global nature of the crisis undermines the case made by those who argue that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, CRA, or predatory lending were primary causes of the crisis. In other words, bubbles in both markets developed even though only the residential market was affected by these potential causes. Countering Krugman, Wallison wrote: "It is not true that every bubble—even a large bubble—has the potential to cause a financial crisis when it deflates." Wallison notes that other developed countries had "large bubbles during the 1997–2007 period" but "the losses associated with mortgage delinquencies and defaults when these bubbles deflated were far lower than the losses suffered in the United States when the 1997–2007 [bubble] deflated." According to Wallison, the reason the U.S. residential housing bubble (as opposed to other types of bubbles) led to financial crisis was that it was supported by a huge number of substandard loans—generally with low or no downpayments. Krugman's contention (that the growth of a commercial real estate bubble indicates that U.S. housing policy was not the cause of the crisis) is challenged by additional analysis. After researching the default of commercial loans during the financial crisis, Xudong An and Anthony B. Sanders reported (in December 2010): "We find limited evidence that substantial deterioration in CMBS [commercial mortgage-backed securities] loan underwriting occurred prior to the crisis." Other analysts support the contention that the crisis in commercial real estate and related lending took place after the crisis in residential real estate. Business journalist Kimberly Amadeo reported: "The first signs of decline in residential real estate occurred in 2006. Three years later, commercial real estate started feeling the effects."[verification needed] Denice A. Gierach, a real estate attorney and CPA, wrote: ... most of the commercial real estate loans were good loans destroyed by a really bad economy. In other words, the borrowers did not cause the loans to go bad-it was the economy. Between 1998 and 2006, the price of the typical American house increased by 124%. During the 1980s and 1990s, the national median home price ranged from 2.9 to 3.1 times median household income. By contrast, this ratio increased to 4.0 in 2004, and 4.6 in 2006. This housing bubble resulted in many homeowners refinancing their homes at lower interest rates, or financing consumer spending by taking out second mortgages secured by the price appreciation. In a Peabody Award-winning program, NPR correspondents argued that a "Giant Pool of Money" (represented by $70 trillion in worldwide fixed income investments) sought higher yields than those offered by U.S. Treasury bonds early in the decade. This pool of money had roughly doubled in size from 2000 to 2007, yet the supply of relatively safe, income generating investments had not grown as fast. Investment banks on Wall Street answered this demand with products such as the mortgage-backed security and the collateralized debt obligation that were assigned safe ratings by the credit rating agencies. In effect, Wall Street connected this pool of money to the mortgage market in the US, with enormous fees accruing to those throughout the mortgage supply chain, from the mortgage broker selling the loans to small banks that funded the brokers and the large investment banks behind them. By approximately 2003, the supply of mortgages originated at traditional lending standards had been exhausted, and continued strong demand began to drive down lending standards. The collateralized debt obligation in particular enabled financial institutions to obtain investor funds to finance subprime and other lending, extending or increasing the housing bubble and generating large fees. This essentially places cash payments from multiple mortgages or other debt obligations into a single pool from which specific securities draw in a specific sequence of priority. Those securities first in line received investment-grade ratings from rating agencies. Securities with lower priority had lower credit ratings but theoretically a higher rate of return on the amount invested. By September 2008, average U.S. housing prices had declined by over 20% from their mid-2006 peak. As prices declined, borrowers with adjustable-rate mortgages could not refinance to avoid the higher payments associated with rising interest rates and began to default. During 2007, lenders began foreclosure proceedings on nearly 1.3 million properties, a 79% increase over 2006. This increased to 2.3 million in 2008, an 81% increase vs. 2007. By August 2008, approximately 9% of all U.S. mortgages outstanding were either delinquent or in foreclosure. By September 2009, this had risen to 14.4%. After the bubble burst, Australian economist John Quiggin wrote: "And, unlike the Great Depression, this crisis was entirely the product of financial markets. There was nothing like the postwar turmoil of the 1920s, the struggles over gold convertibility and reparations, or the Smoot-Hawley tariff, all of which have shared the blame for the Great Depression." Instead, Quiggin lays the blame for the 2008 near-meltdown on financial markets, on political decisions to lightly regulate them, and on rating agencies which had self-interested incentives to give good ratings. Lower interest rates encouraged borrowing. From 2000 to 2003, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target from 6.5% to 1.0%. This was done to soften the effects of the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the September 11 attacks, as well as to combat a perceived risk of deflation. As early as 2002, it was apparent that credit was fueling housing instead of business investment as some economists went so far as to advocate that the Fed "needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble". Moreover, empirical studies using data from advanced countries show that excessive credit growth contributed greatly to the severity of the crisis. Additional downward pressure on interest rates was created by a growing U.S. current account deficit, which peaked along with the housing bubble in 2006. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke explained how trade deficits required the U.S. to borrow money from abroad, in the process bidding up bond prices and lowering interest rates. Bernanke explained that between 1996 and 2004, the U.S. current account deficit increased by $650 billion, from 1.5% to 5.8% of GDP. Financing these deficits required the country to borrow large sums from abroad, much of it from countries running trade surpluses. These were mainly the emerging economies in Asia and oil-exporting nations. The balance of payments identity requires that a country (such as the US) running a current account deficit also have a capital account (investment) surplus of the same amount. Hence large and growing amounts of foreign funds (capital) flowed into the U.S. to finance its imports. All of this created demand for various types of financial assets, raising the prices of those assets while lowering interest rates. Foreign investors had these funds to lend either because they had very high personal savings rates (as high as 40% in China) or because of high oil prices. Ben Bernanke referred to this as a "saving glut". A flood of funds (capital or liquidity) reached the U.S. financial markets. Foreign governments supplied funds by purchasing Treasury bonds and thus avoided much of the direct effect of the crisis. U.S. households used funds borrowed from foreigners to finance consumption or to bid up the prices of housing and financial assets. Financial institutions invested foreign funds in mortgage-backed securities.[citation needed] The Fed then raised the Fed funds rate significantly between July 2004 and July 2006. This contributed to an increase in one-year and five-year adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) rates, making ARM interest rate resets more expensive for homeowners. This may have also contributed to the deflation of the housing bubble, as asset prices generally move inversely to interest rates. It became riskier to speculate in housing. U.S. housing and financial assets dramatically declined in value after the housing bubble burst. Subprime lending standards declined in the U.S.: in early 2000, a subprime borrower had a FICO score of 660 or less. By 2005, many lenders dropped the required FICO score to 620, making it much easier to qualify for prime loans and making subprime lending a riskier business. Proof of income and assets were de-emphasized. Loans at first required full documentation, then low documentation, then no documentation. One subprime mortgage product that gained wide acceptance was the no income, no job, no asset verification required (NINJA) mortgage. Informally, these loans were aptly referred to as "liar loans" because they encouraged borrowers to be less than honest in the loan application process. Testimony given to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission by whistleblower Richard M. Bowen III on events during his tenure as the Business Chief Underwriter for Correspondent Lending in the Consumer Lending Group for Citigroup, where he was responsible for over 220 professional underwriters, suggests that by 2006 and 2007, the collapse of mortgage underwriting standards was endemic. His testimony stated that by 2006, 60% of mortgages purchased by Citigroup from some 1,600 mortgage companies were "defective" (were not underwritten to policy, or did not contain all policy-required documents). This, despite the fact that each of these 1,600 originators was contractually responsible (certified via representations and warrantees) that its mortgage originations met Citigroup standards. Moreover, during 2007, "defective mortgages (from mortgage originators contractually bound to perform underwriting to Citi's standards) increased to over 80% of production". In separate testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, officers of Clayton Holdings, the largest residential loan due diligence and securitization surveillance company in the United States and Europe, testified that Clayton's review of over 900,000 mortgages issued from January 2006 to June 2007 revealed that scarcely 54% of the loans met their originators' underwriting standards. The analysis, conducted on behalf of 23 investment and commercial banks, including 7 "too big to fail" banks, additionally showed that 28% of the sampled loans did not meet the minimal standards of any issuer. Clayton's analysis further showed that 39% of these loans (i.e. those not meeting any issuer's minimal underwriting standards) were subsequently securitized and sold to investors. Predatory lending refers to the practice of unscrupulous lenders enticing borrowers to enter into unfair or abusive secured loans for inappropriate purposes. In June 2008, Countrywide Financial was sued by then California Attorney General Jerry Brown for unfair business practices and false advertising, alleging that Countrywide used "deceptive tactics to push homeowners into complicated, risky, and expensive loans so that the company could sell as many loans as possible to third-party investors". In May 2009, Bank of America modified 64,000 Countrywide loans as a result. When housing prices decreased, homeowners in ARMs then had little incentive to pay their monthly payments, since their home equity had disappeared. This caused Countrywide's financial condition to deteriorate, ultimately resulting in a decision by the Office of Thrift Supervision to seize the lender. One Countrywide employee, who would later plead guilty to two counts of wire fraud and spent 18 months in prison, stated that, "If you had a pulse, we gave you a loan." Former employees from Ameriquest, which was the United States' leading wholesale lender, described a system in which they were pushed to falsify mortgage documents and then sell the mortgages to Wall Street banks eager to make fast profits. There is growing evidence that such mortgage frauds may be a cause of the crisis. According to Barry Eichengreen, the roots of the financial crisis lay in the deregulation of financial markets. A 2012 OECD study suggested that bank regulation based on the Basel accords encouraged unconventional business practices and contributed to or reinforced the financial crisis. In other cases, laws were changed or enforcement weakened in parts of the financial system. Key examples include: A 2011 paper suggested that Canada's avoidance of a banking crisis in 2008 (as well as in prior eras) could be attributed to Canada possessing a single, powerful, overarching regulator, while the United States had a weak, crisis prone and fragmented banking system with multiple competing regulatory bodies. Prior to the crisis, financial institutions became highly leveraged, increasing their appetite for risky investments and reducing their resilience in case of losses. Much of this leverage was achieved using complex financial instruments such as off-balance sheet securitization and derivatives, which made it difficult for creditors and regulators to monitor and try to reduce financial institution risk levels.[verification needed] U.S. households and financial institutions became increasingly indebted or overleveraged during the years preceding the crisis. This increased their vulnerability to the collapse of the housing bubble and worsened the ensuing economic downturn. Key statistics include: Free cash used by consumers from home equity extraction doubled from $627 billion in 2001 to $1,428 billion in 2005 as the housing bubble built, a total of nearly $5 trillion over the period, contributing to economic growth worldwide. U.S. home mortgage debt relative to GDP increased from an average of 46% during the 1990s to 73% during 2008, reaching $10.5 trillion (c. $15 trillion in 2024). U.S. household debt as a percentage of annual disposable personal income was 127% at the end of 2007, versus 77% in 1990. In 1981, U.S. private debt was 123% of GDP; by the third quarter of 2008, it was 290%. From 2004 to 2007, the top five U.S. investment banks each significantly increased their financial leverage, which increased their vulnerability to a financial shock. Changes in capital requirements, intended to keep U.S. banks competitive with their European counterparts, allowed lower risk weightings for AAA-rated securities. The shift from first-loss tranches to AAA-rated tranches was seen by regulators as a risk reduction that compensated the higher leverage. These five institutions reported over $4.1 trillion in debt for fiscal year 2007, about 30% of U.S. nominal GDP for 2007. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and was liquidated, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were sold at fire-sale prices, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley became commercial banks, subjecting themselves to more stringent regulation. With the exception of Lehman, these companies required or received government support. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two U.S. government-sponsored enterprises, owned or guaranteed nearly $5 trillion (c. $7.13 trillion in 2024) trillion in mortgage obligations at the time they were placed into conservatorship by the U.S. government in September 2008. These seven entities were highly leveraged and had $9 trillion in debt or guarantee obligations; yet they were not subject to the same regulation as depository banks. Behavior that may be optimal for an individual, such as saving more during adverse economic conditions, can be detrimental if too many individuals pursue the same behavior, as ultimately one person's consumption is another person's income. Too many consumers attempting to save or pay down debt simultaneously is called the paradox of thrift and can cause or deepen a recession. Economist Hyman Minsky also described a "paradox of deleveraging" as financial institutions that have too much leverage (debt relative to equity) cannot all de-leverage simultaneously without significant declines in the value of their assets. In April 2009, Federal Reserve vice-chair Janet Yellen discussed these paradoxes: Once this massive credit crunch hit, it didn't take long before we were in a recession. The recession, in turn, deepened the credit crunch as demand and employment fell, and credit losses of financial institutions surged. Indeed, we have been in the grips of precisely this adverse feedback loop for more than a year. A process of balance sheet deleveraging has spread to nearly every corner of the economy. Consumers are pulling back on purchases, especially on durable goods, to build their savings. Businesses are cancelling planned investments and laying off workers to preserve cash. And financial institutions are shrinking assets to bolster capital and improve their chances of weathering the current storm. Once again, Minsky understood this dynamic. He spoke of the paradox of deleveraging, in which precautions that may be smart for individuals and firms—and indeed essential to return the economy to a normal state—nevertheless magnify the distress of the economy as a whole. The term financial innovation refers to the ongoing development of financial products designed to achieve particular client objectives, such as offsetting a particular risk exposure (such as the default of a borrower) or to assist with obtaining financing. Examples pertinent to this crisis included: the adjustable-rate mortgage; the bundling of subprime mortgages into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) or collateralized debt obligations (CDO) for sale to investors, a type of securitization; and a form of credit insurance called credit default swaps (CDS). The usage of these products expanded dramatically in the years leading up to the crisis. These products vary in complexity and the ease with which they can be valued on the books of financial institutions.[citation needed] CDO issuance grew from an estimated $20 billion in Q1 2004 to its peak of over $180 billion by Q1 2007, then declined back under $20 billion by Q1 2008. Further, the credit quality of CDO's declined from 2000 to 2007, as the level of subprime and other non-prime mortgage debt increased from 5% to 36% of CDO assets. As described in the section on subprime lending, the CDS and portfolio of CDS called synthetic CDO enabled a theoretically infinite amount to be wagered on the finite value of housing loans outstanding, provided that buyers and sellers of the derivatives could be found. For example, buying a CDS to insure a CDO ended up giving the seller the same risk as if they owned the CDO, when those CDO's became worthless. This boom in innovative financial products went hand in hand with more complexity. It multiplied the number of actors connected to a single mortgage (including mortgage brokers, specialized originators, the securitizers and their due diligence firms, managing agents and trading desks, and finally investors, insurances and providers of repo funding). With increasing distance from the underlying asset these actors relied more and more on indirect information (including FICO scores on creditworthiness, appraisals and due diligence checks by third party organizations, and most importantly the computer models of rating agencies and risk management desks). Instead of spreading risk this provided the ground for fraudulent acts, misjudgments and finally market collapse. Economists have studied the crisis as an instance of cascades in financial networks, where institutions' instability destabilized other institutions and led to knock-on effects. Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, wrote in June 2009 that certain financial innovations enabled firms to circumvent regulations, such as off-balance sheet financing that affects the leverage or capital cushion reported by major banks, stating: "an enormous part of what banks did in the early part of this decade—the off-balance-sheet vehicles, the derivatives and the 'shadow banking system' itself—was to find a way round regulation." Mortgage risks were underestimated by almost all institutions in the chain from originator to investor by underweighting the possibility of falling housing prices based on historical trends of the past 50 years. Limitations of default and prepayment models, the heart of pricing models, led to overvaluation of mortgage and asset-backed products and their derivatives by originators, securitizers, broker-dealers, rating-agencies, insurance underwriters and the vast majority of investors (with the exception of certain hedge funds). While financial derivatives and structured products helped partition and shift risk between financial participants, it was the underestimation of falling housing prices and the resultant losses that led to aggregate risk. For a variety of reasons, market participants did not accurately measure the risk inherent with financial innovation such as MBS and CDOs or understand its effect on the overall stability of the financial system. The pricing model for CDOs clearly did not reflect the level of risk they introduced into the system. Banks estimated that $450 billion of CDO were sold between "late 2005 to the middle of 2007"; among the $102 billion of those that had been liquidated, JPMorgan estimated that the average recovery rate for "high quality" CDOs was approximately 32 cents on the dollar, while the recovery rate for mezzanine capital CDO was approximately five cents for every dollar. AIG insured obligations of various financial institutions through the usage of credit default swaps. The basic CDS transaction involved AIG receiving a premium in exchange for a promise to pay money to party A in the event party B defaulted. However, AIG did not have the financial strength to support its many CDS commitments as the crisis progressed and was taken over by the government in September 2008. U.S. taxpayers provided over $180 billion in government loans and investments in AIG during 2008 and early 2009, through which the money flowed to various counterparties to CDS transactions, including many large global financial institutions.[unreliable source?] The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) made the major government study of the crisis. It concluded in January 2011: The Commission concludes AIG failed and was rescued by the government primarily because its enormous sales of credit default swaps were made without putting up the initial collateral, setting aside capital reserves, or hedging its exposure—a profound failure in corporate governance, particularly its risk management practices. AIG's failure was possible because of the sweeping deregulation of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, including credit default swaps, which effectively eliminated federal and state regulation of these products, including capital and margin requirements that would have lessened the likelihood of AIG's failure. The limitations of a widely used financial model also were not properly understood. This formula assumed that the price of CDS was correlated with and could predict the correct price of mortgage-backed securities. Because it was highly tractable, it rapidly came to be used by a huge percentage of CDO and CDS investors, issuers, and rating agencies. According to one Wired article: Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril ... Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees. As financial assets became more complex and harder to value, investors were reassured by the fact that the international bond rating agencies and bank regulators accepted as valid some complex mathematical models that showed the risks were much smaller than they actually were. George Soros commented that "The super-boom got out of hand when the new products became so complicated that the authorities could no longer calculate the risks and started relying on the risk management methods of the banks themselves. Similarly, the rating agencies relied on the information provided by the originators of synthetic products. It was a shocking abdication of responsibility." A conflict of interest between investment management professional and institutional investors, combined with a global glut in investment capital, led to bad investments by asset managers in over-priced credit assets. Professional investment managers generally are compensated based on the volume of client assets under management. There is, therefore, an incentive for asset managers to expand their assets under management in order to maximize their compensation. As the glut in global investment capital caused the yields on credit assets to decline, asset managers were faced with the choice of either investing in assets where returns did not reflect true credit risk or returning funds to clients. Many asset managers continued to invest client funds in over-priced (under-yielding) investments, to the detriment of their clients, so they could maintain their assets under management. They supported this choice with a "plausible deniability" of the risks associated with subprime-based credit assets because the loss experience with early "vintages" of subprime loans was so low. Despite the dominance of the above formula, there are documented attempts of the financial industry, occurring before the crisis, to address the formula limitations, specifically the lack of dependence dynamics and the poor representation of extreme events. The volume Credit Correlation: Life After Copulas, published in 2007 by World Scientific, summarizes a 2006 conference held by Merrill Lynch in London where several practitioners attempted to propose models rectifying some of the copula limitations. See also the article by Donnelly and Embrechts and the book by Brigo, Pallavicini and Torresetti, that reports relevant warnings and research on CDOs appeared in 2006. There is strong evidence that the riskiest, worst performing mortgages were funded through the "shadow banking system" and that competition from the shadow banking system may have pressured more traditional institutions to lower their underwriting standards and originate riskier loans. In a June 2008 speech, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner—who in 2009 became United States Secretary of the Treasury—placed significant blame for the freezing of credit markets on a run on the entities in the "parallel" banking system, also called the shadow banking system. These entities became critical to the credit markets underpinning the financial system, but were not subject to the same regulatory controls. Further, these entities were vulnerable because of asset–liability mismatch, meaning that they borrowed short-term in liquid markets to purchase long-term, illiquid and risky assets. This meant that disruptions in credit markets would force them to engage in rapid deleveraging, selling their long-term assets at depressed prices. He described the significance of these entities: In early 2007, asset-backed commercial paper conduits, in structured investment vehicles, in auction-rate preferred securities, tender option bonds and variable rate demand notes, had a combined asset size of roughly $2.2 trillion. Assets financed overnight in tri-party repo grew to $2.5 trillion. Assets held in hedge funds grew to roughly $1.8 trillion. The combined balance sheets of the five largest investment banks totaled $4 trillion. In comparison, the total assets of the top five bank holding companies in the United States at that point were just over $6 trillion, and total assets of the entire banking system were about $10 trillion. The combined effect of these factors was a financial system vulnerable to self-reinforcing asset price and credit cycles. Economist Paul Krugman, laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, described the run on the shadow banking system as the "core of what happened" to cause the crisis. He referred to this lack of controls as "malign neglect" and argued that regulation should have been imposed on all banking-like activity. Without the ability to obtain investor funds in exchange for most types of mortgage-backed securities or asset-backed commercial paper, investment banks and other entities in the shadow banking system could not provide funds to mortgage firms and other corporations. This meant that nearly one-third of the U.S. lending mechanism was frozen and continued to be frozen into June 2009. According to the Brookings Institution, at that time the traditional banking system did not have the capital to close this gap: "It would take a number of years of strong profits to generate sufficient capital to support that additional lending volume." The authors also indicate that some forms of securitization were "likely to vanish forever, having been an artifact of excessively loose credit conditions". While traditional banks raised their lending standards, it was the collapse of the shadow banking system that was the primary cause of the reduction in funds available for borrowing. In a 2008 paper, Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas argued that the financial crisis was attributable to "global asset scarcity, which led to large capital flows toward the United States and to the creation of asset bubbles that eventually burst". Caballero, Farhi, and Gourinchas argued "that the sharp rise in oil prices following the subprime crisis – nearly 100 percent in just a matter of months and on the face of recessionary shocks – was the result of a speculative response to the financial crisis itself, in an attempt to rebuild asset supply. That is, the global economy was subject to one shock with multiple implications rather than to two separate shocks (financial and oil)." Long-only commodity index funds became popular – by one estimate investment increased from $90 billion in 2006 to $200 billion at the end of 2007, while commodity prices increased 71% – which raised concern as to whether these index funds caused the commodity bubble. The empirical research has been mixed. The cause of the global asset bubble can be partially attributable to the global savings glut. As theorized by Andrew Metrick, the demand for safe assets following the Asian Financial Crisis coupled with the lack of circulating treasuries created an unmet demand for "risk free" assets. Thus, institutional investors like sovereign wealth funds and pension funds began purchasing synthetic safe assets like Triple-A Mortgage Backed Securities. As a consequence, the demand for so-called safe assets fueled the free flow of capital into housing in the United States. This greatly worsened the crisis as banks and other financial institutions were incentivized to issue more mortgages than before. Some commentators and economists associated with the Austrian School of economics, including former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul and historian Tom Woods, have offered a libertarian interpretation of the crisis which differs from the explanations centered on deregulation and government oversight. In Ron Paul's book, End the Fed, Paul argues that the Federal Reserve's prolonged policy of artificially low interest rates in the early 2000s created a credit bubble that allowed for speculative investments and unsustainable levels of debt, particularly in housing. In Tom Woods' book Meltdown, he also contends that Federal Reserve manipulation of the money supply and credit markets distorted normal price signals, leading to widespread malinvestment, resulting in an inevitable correction. Paul and Woods also criticized Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's role in the crisis, asserting that the entities engaged in excessive risk-taking by expanding homeownership beyond sustainable levels. In doing this, the government intervention created moral hazard by assuring large financial institutions that they would receive government support in times of crisis, which Paul and Woods believe encouraged riskier behavior. In a 1998 book, John McMurtry suggested that a financial crisis is a systemic crisis of capitalism itself. In his 1978 book, The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, Ravi Batra suggests that growing inequality of financial capitalism produces speculative bubbles that burst and result in depression and major political changes. He also suggested that a "demand gap" related to differing wage and productivity growth explains deficit and debt dynamics important to stock market developments. John Bellamy Foster, a political economy analyst and editor of the Monthly Review, believed that the decrease in GDP growth rates since the early 1970s is due to increasing market saturation. Marxian economics followers Andrew Kliman, Michael Roberts, and Guglielmo Carchedi, in contradistinction to the Monthly Review school represented by Foster, pointed to capitalism's long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the underlying cause of crises generally. From this point of view, the problem was the inability of capital to grow or accumulate at sufficient rates through productive investment alone. Low rates of profit in productive sectors led to speculative investment in riskier assets, where there was potential for greater return on investment. The speculative frenzy of the late 1990s and 2000s was, in this view, a consequence of a rising organic composition of capital, expressed through the fall in the rate of profit. According to Michael Roberts, the fall in the rate of profit "eventually triggered the credit crunch of 2007 when credit could no longer support profits". In 2005 book, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, John C. Bogle wrote that "Corporate America went astray largely because the power of managers went virtually unchecked by our gatekeepers for far too long". Echoing the central thesis of James Burnham's 1941 seminal book, The Managerial Revolution, Bogle cites issues, including: In his book The Big Mo, Mark Roeder, a former executive at the Swiss-based UBS Bank, suggested that large-scale momentum, or The Big Mo, "played a pivotal role" in the financial crisis. Roeder suggested that "recent technological advances, such as computer-driven trading programs, together with the increasingly interconnected nature of markets, has magnified the momentum effect. This has made the financial sector inherently unstable." Robert Reich attributed the economic downturn to the stagnation of wages in the United States, particularly those of the hourly workers who comprise 80% of the workforce. This stagnation forced the population to borrow to meet the cost of living. Economists Ailsa McKay and Margunn Bjørnholt argued that the financial crisis and the response to it revealed a crisis of ideas in mainstream economics and within the economics profession, and call for a reshaping of both the economy, economic theory and the economics profession. A report by the International Labour Organization concluded that cooperative banking institutions were less likely to fail than their competitors during the crisis. The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7% of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and first quarter of 2011. In 2008, in the U.S., the rate of commercial bank failures was almost triple that of credit unions, and almost five times the credit union rate in 2010. Credit unions increased their lending to small- and medium-sized businesses while overall lending to those businesses decreased. Prediction by economists Economists, particularly followers of mainstream economics, mostly failed to predict the crisis. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania's online business journal examined why economists failed to predict a major global financial crisis and concluded that economists used mathematical models that failed to account for the critical roles that banks and other financial institutions, as opposed to producers and consumers of goods and services, play in the economy. Several followers of heterodox economics predicted the crisis, with varying arguments. Dirk Bezemer credits 12 economists with predicting the crisis: Dean Baker (US), Wynne Godley (UK), Fred Harrison (UK), Michael Hudson (US), Eric Janszen (US), Steve Keen (Australia), Jakob Broechner Madsen & Jens Kjaer Sørensen (Denmark), Med Jones (US) Kurt Richebächer (US), Nouriel Roubini (US), Peter Schiff (US), and Robert Shiller (US). Shiller, a founder of the Case–Shiller index that measures home prices, wrote an article a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in which he predicted that a slowing U.S. housing market would cause the housing bubble to burst, leading to financial collapse. Peter Schiff regularly appeared on television in the years before the crisis and warned of the impending real estate collapse. The Austrian School regarded the crisis as a vindication and classic example of a predictable credit-fueled bubble caused by laxity in monetary supply. There were other economists that did warn of a pending crisis. The former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, had predicted the crisis in 2005 when he became chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In 2005, at a celebration honoring Alan Greenspan, who was about to retire as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Rajan delivered a controversial paper that was critical of the financial sector. In that paper, Rajan "argued that disaster might loom". Rajan argued that financial sector managers were encouraged to "take risks that generate severe adverse consequences with small probability but, in return, offer generous compensation the rest of the time. These risks are known as tail risks. But perhaps the most important concern is whether banks will be able to provide liquidity to financial markets so that if the tail risk does materialize, financial positions can be unwound and losses allocated so that the consequences to the real economy are minimized." Stock trader and financial risk engineer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the 2007 book The Black Swan, spent years warning against the breakdown of the banking system in particular and the economy in general owing to their use of and reliance on bad risk models and reliance on forecasting, and framed the problem as part of "robustness and fragility". He also took action against the establishment view by making a big financial bet on banking stocks and making a fortune from the crisis ("They didn't listen, so I took their money"). According to David Brooks from The New York Times, "Taleb not only has an explanation for what's happening, he saw it coming." Popular articles published in the mass media have led the general public to believe that the majority of economists have failed in their obligation to predict the financial crisis. For example, an article in The New York Times noted that economist Nouriel Roubini warned of such crisis as early as September 2006, and stated that the profession of economics is bad at predicting recessions. According to The Guardian, Roubini was ridiculed for predicting a collapse of the housing market and worldwide recession, while The New York Times labelled him "Dr. Doom". In a 2012 article in the journal Japan and the World Economy, Andrew K. Rose and Mark M. Spiegel used a Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause (MIMIC) model on a cross-section of 107 countries to evaluate potential causes of the 2008 crisis. The authors examined various economic indicators, ignoring contagion effects across countries. The authors concluded: "We include over sixty potential causes of the crisis, covering such categories as: financial system policies and conditions; asset price appreciation in real estate and equity markets; international imbalances and foreign reserve adequacy; macroeconomic policies; and institutional and geographic features. Despite the fact that we use a wide number of possible causes in a flexible statistical framework, we are unable to link most of the commonly cited causes of the crisis to its incidence across countries. This negative finding in the cross-section makes us skeptical of the accuracy of 'early warning' systems of potential crises, which must also predict their timing." IndyMac The first visible institution to run into trouble in the United States was the Southern California–based IndyMac, a spin-off of Countrywide Financial. Before its failure, IndyMac Bank was the largest savings and loan association in the Los Angeles market and the seventh-largest mortgage loan originator in the United States. The failure of IndyMac Bank on July 11, 2008, was (until the crisis precipitated even larger failures) the fourth-largest bank failure in United States history, and the second-largest failure of a regulated thrift. IndyMac Bank's parent corporation was IndyMac Bancorp until the FDIC seized IndyMac Bank. IndyMac Bancorp filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in July 2008. IndyMac Bank was founded as Countrywide Mortgage Investment in 1985 by David S. Loeb and Angelo Mozilo as a means of collateralizing Countrywide Financial loans too big to be sold to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In 1997, Countrywide spun off IndyMac as an independent company run by Mike Perry, who remained its CEO until the downfall of the bank in July 2008. The primary causes of its failure were largely associated with its business strategy of originating and securitizing Alt-A loans on a large scale. This strategy resulted in rapid growth and a high concentration of risky assets. From its inception as a savings association in 2000, IndyMac grew to the seventh largest savings and loan and ninth largest originator of mortgage loans in the United States. During 2006, IndyMac originated over $90 billion (~$134 billion in 2024) of mortgages. IndyMac's aggressive growth strategy, use of Alt-A and other nontraditional loan products, insufficient underwriting, credit concentrations in residential real estate in the California and Florida markets—states, alongside Nevada and Arizona, where the housing bubble was most pronounced—and heavy reliance on costly funds borrowed from a Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) and from brokered deposits, led to its demise when the mortgage market declined in 2007. IndyMac often made loans without verification of the borrower's income or assets, and to borrowers with poor credit histories. Appraisals obtained by IndyMac on underlying collateral were often questionable as well. As an Alt-A lender, IndyMac's business model was to offer loan products to fit the borrower's needs, using an extensive array of risky option-adjustable-rate mortgages (option ARMs), subprime loans, 80/20 loans, and other nontraditional products. Ultimately, loans were made to many borrowers who simply could not afford to make their payments. The thrift remained profitable only as long as it was able to sell those loans in the secondary mortgage market. IndyMac resisted efforts to regulate its involvement in those loans or tighten their issuing criteria: see the comment by Ruthann Melbourne, Chief Risk Officer, to the regulating agencies. On May 12, 2008, in the "Capital" section of its last 10-Q, IndyMac revealed that it may not be well capitalized in the future. IndyMac reported that during April 2008, Moody's and Standard & Poor's downgraded the ratings on a significant number of Mortgage-backed security (MBS) bonds—including $160 million (~$228 million in 2024) issued by IndyMac that the bank retained in its MBS portfolio. IndyMac concluded that these downgrades would have harmed its risk-based capital ratio as of June 30, 2008. Had these lowered ratings been in effect on March 31, 2008, IndyMac concluded that the bank's capital ratio would have been 9.27% total risk-based. IndyMac warned that if its regulators found its capital position to have fallen below "well capitalized" (minimum 10% risk-based capital ratio) to "adequately capitalized" (8–10% risk-based capital ratio) the bank might no longer be able to use brokered deposits as a source of funds. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) later pointed out that brokered deposits made up more than 37% of IndyMac's total deposits, and asked the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) whether it had considered ordering IndyMac to reduce its reliance on these deposits. With $18.9 billion in total deposits reported on March 31, Senator Schumer would have been referring to a little over $7 billion in brokered deposits. While the breakout of maturities of these deposits is not known exactly, a simple averaging would have put the threat of brokered deposits loss to IndyMac at $500 million a month, had the regulator disallowed IndyMac from acquiring new brokered deposits on June 30. IndyMac was taking new measures to preserve capital, such as deferring interest payments on some preferred securities. Dividends on common shares had already been suspended for the first quarter of 2008, after being cut in half the previous quarter. The company still had not secured a significant capital infusion nor found a ready buyer. IndyMac reported that the bank's risk-based capital was only $47 million above the minimum required for this 10% mark. But it did not reveal some of that $47 million (~$67 million in 2024) capital it claimed it had, as of March 31, 2008, was fabricated. When home prices declined in the latter half of 2007 and the secondary mortgage market collapsed, IndyMac was forced to hold $10.7 billion (~$15.5 billion in 2024) of loans it could not sell in the secondary market. Its reduced liquidity was further exacerbated in late June 2008 when account holders withdrew $1.55 billion (~$2.21 billion in 2024) or about 7.5% of IndyMac's deposits. This bank run on the thrift followed the public release of a letter from Senator Charles Schumer to the FDIC and OTS. The letter outlined the Senator's concerns with IndyMac. While the run was a contributing factor in the timing of IndyMac's demise, the underlying cause of the failure was the unsafe and unsound way it was operated. On June 26, 2008, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, chairman of Congress' Joint Economic Committee and the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, released several letters he had sent to regulators, in which he was"concerned that IndyMac's financial deterioration poses significant risks to both taxpayers and borrowers." Some worried depositors began to withdraw money. On July 7, 2008, IndyMac announced on the company blog that it: IndyMac announced the closure of both its retail lending and wholesale divisions, halted new loan submissions, and cut 3,800 jobs. On July 11, 2008, citing liquidity concerns, the FDIC put IndyMac Bank into conservatorship. A bridge bank, IndyMac Federal Bank, FSB, was established to assume control of IndyMac Bank's assets, its secured liabilities, and its insured deposit accounts. The FDIC announced plans to open IndyMac Federal Bank, FSB on July 14, 2008. Until then, depositors would have access to their insured deposits through ATMs, their existing checks, and their existing debit cards. Telephone and Internet account access was restored when the bank reopened. The FDIC guarantees the funds of all insured accounts up to US$100,000, and declared a special advance dividend to the roughly 10,000 depositors with funds in excess of the insured amount, guaranteeing 50% of any amounts in excess of $100,000. Yet, even with the pending sale of Indymac to IMB Management Holdings, an estimated 10,000 uninsured depositors of Indymac are still at a loss of over $270 million. With $32 billion in assets, IndyMac Bank was one of the largest bank failures in American history. IndyMac Bancorp filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on July 31, 2008. Initially the companies affected were those directly involved in home construction and mortgage lending such as Northern Rock and Countrywide Financial, as they could no longer obtain financing through the credit markets. Over 100 mortgage lenders went bankrupt during 2007 and 2008. Concerns that investment bank Bear Stearns would collapse in March 2008 resulted in its fire-sale to JP Morgan Chase. The financial institution crisis hit its peak in September and October 2008. Several major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover. These included Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Citigroup, and AIG. On October 6, 2008, three weeks after Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, Lehman's former CEO Richard S. Fuld Jr. found himself before Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Fuld said he was a victim of the collapse, blaming a "crisis of confidence" in the markets for dooming his firm. Notable books and movies See also References The initial articles and some subsequent material were adapted from the Wikinfo article Financial crisis of 2007–2008 released under the GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2 Further reading External links Reports on causes Journalism and interviews |
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Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks] | [TOKENS: 17701] |
Contents September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks,[f] colloquially known as 9/11,[g] were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four airliners, then flew one into each of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The third crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in a rural Pennsylvania field during a passenger revolt. In response to the attacks, the United States launched the global war on terror over two decades, with the mission to eliminate hostile groups deemed terrorist organizations, and the governments purported to support them. Ringleader and hijacker Mohamed Atta flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex at 8:46 a.m. At 9:03 a.m.,[h] hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower. Both collapsed within an hour and forty-two minutes,[i] destroying the remaining five structures in the complex. Hijacker Hani Hanjour flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., causing a partial collapse. United Airlines Flight 93, flown by hijacker Ziad Jarrah, was believed to target either the United States Capitol or the White House. Alerted to the previous attacks, the passengers revolted and the hijackers crashed the aircraft into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a ground stop for all traffic in U.S. airspace, requiring all airborne aircraft to return to their point of origin or divert to Canada. The actions undertaken in Canada to support incoming aircraft and their occupants were collectively titled Operation Yellow Ribbon. That evening, the Central Intelligence Agency informed President George W. Bush that its Counterterrorism Center had identified the attacks as having been the work of al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden. The United States responded by launching the war on terror and invading Afghanistan. NATO's invocation of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—its only usage to date—called upon allies to fight al-Qaeda. As U.S. and allied invasion forces swept through Afghanistan, bin Laden eluded them. He denied any involvement until 2004, when excerpts of a taped statement in which he accepted responsibility for the attacks were released. Al-Qaeda's cited motivations included U.S. support of Israel, the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and sanctions against Iraq. The nearly decade-long manhunt for bin Laden concluded in May 2011, when he was killed during a U.S. military raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The war in Afghanistan continued for another eight years. The attacks killed 2,977 people, injured thousands more,[j] and gave rise to long-term health consequences, while causing at least US$10 billion in infrastructure and property damage. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in history, as well as the deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement personnel in American history, killing 343 and 72 members, respectively. The crashes of Flight 11 and Flight 175 were the deadliest aviation disasters of all time, and the collision of Flight 77 with the Pentagon resulted in the fourth-highest number of ground fatalities in a plane crash in history. The destruction of the World Trade Center and its environs seriously harmed the U.S. economy and induced global market shocks. Many other countries strengthened anti-terrorism legislation and expanded their powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The total number of deaths caused by the attacks, combined with the death tolls from the conflicts they directly incited, has been estimated by the Costs of War Project to be over 4.5 million. Cleanup of the World Trade Center site (colloquially known as "Ground Zero") was completed in May 2002, while the Pentagon was repaired within a year. After delays in the design of a replacement complex, six new buildings were planned to replace the lost towers at the World Trade Center site, along with a museum and memorial dedicated to those who were killed or injured in the attacks. The tallest building, One World Trade Center, began construction in 2006, and opened in 2014. Memorials to the attacks include the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington County, Virginia, and the Flight 93 National Memorial at the Pennsylvania crash site. Background In 1996, Osama bin Laden, by then a former Saudi Arabian citizen who led the Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda, issued his first fatwā, which declared holy war against the United States and demanded the expulsion of all American troops stationed in the Arabian Peninsula. An adherent of Islam, bin Laden interpreted Muhammad as banning non-Muslims from the Peninsula. He thus considered the U.S. troop presence a provocation to all Muslims. Regarding his holy war Bin-laden stated: "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms, and civilians; they are all targets of this fatwa". Bin Laden was living in Sudan prior to 1996, when the Sudanese government exiled him after Saudi and U.S. pressure. Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, which was ran by the Taliban. They allowed al-Qaeda to use the country as its base of operations. He then orchestrated the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. in 2001. He personally told his subordinate participants to target the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, with hijacked planes. He initially denied his role in the attacks, but later recanted his denial. Al Jazeera broadcast a statement by bin Laden on September 16, 2001: "I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation". In November 2001, U.S. forces recovered a videotape in which bin Laden, talking to Khaled al-Harbi, admitted foreknowledge of the attacks. In a 2004 video, he unambiguously confirmed that he had organized 9/11. A video by Al Jazeera in 2006 shows bin Laden with one of the attacks' chief planners, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, as well as hijackers, Hamza al-Ghamdi and Wail al-Shehri, amidst making preparations for the attacks. Bin Laden's 1996 fatwā, and similar statements that called for the killing of Americans, are seen by investigators as evidence of his motivation for the attacks. In a second fatwā in 1998, he outlined more of his objections to American foreign policy, such as American support of Israel, and the U.S. and other nations' sanctions against Iraq, condemning the "protracted blockade" which he said constitute a declaration of war against "Allah, his messenger, and Muslims". He believed that the U.S. was being directed by an international Jewish conspiracy into killing as many Muslims as possible, and that all Muslims must wage a defensive war against the U.S. to combat its aggression against them. This was to be done until the aggression ceased. Bin Laden further believed it would send a message to the American people, forcing the U.S. to reevaluate their policies. In a 1998 interview with American journalist John Miller, he stated: American history does not distinguish between civilians and military, not even women and children. They are the ones who used bombs against Nagasaki. Can these bombs distinguish between infants and military? America does not have a religion that will prevent it from destroying all people. So we tell the Americans as people and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalist government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. After 9/11, bin Laden maintained that women and children were not targeted in the attack—rather, symbols of America's "economic and military power". In December 2001, a video of bin Laden was released, in which he stops short of admitting responsibility for 9/11, but says: It has become clear that the West in general and America in particular have an unspeakable hatred for Islam. [...] It is the hatred of crusaders. Terrorism against America deserves to be praised because it was a response to injustice, aimed at forcing America to stop its support for Israel, which kills our people. [...] We say that the end of the United States is imminent, whether bin Laden or his followers are alive or dead, for the awakening of the Muslim ummah [nation] has occurred. [...] It is important to hit the economy [of the U.S.], which is the base of its military power... If the economy is hit, they will become reoccupied. In a 2002 manifesto, he listed multiple factors implied to have motivated 9/11, including U.S. support of: Israel, against Lebanon during their occupation of Southern Lebanon, and against Palestinians during the Second Intifada; the Philippines, against Muslim militants; Russia, against Muslim militants; and India, against Muslim civilians in Kashmir. He also listed the former U.S.-led intervention against Muslim militants in Somalia; pollution caused by the U.S.; and the U.S.' refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. In the 2004 video, he said he was inspired to destroy the World Trade Center's Twin Towers after watching the destruction of towers in Lebanon by Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War. "God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers, but after [witnessing] [...] the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America, so it could taste some of what we are tasting, and to stop killing our children and women." Other motives have been suggested in addition to those stated by him and other al-Qaeda members. Some authors suggested the "humiliation" that resulted from the Islamic world falling behind the Western world—this discrepancy was rendered especially visible by globalization—as well as a desire to provoke the U.S. into a broader war against the Islamic world in the hope of motivating more allies to support al-Qaeda. Similarly, others have argued the 9/11 attacks were a strategic move to provoke America into a war that would incite a pan-Islamic revolution. In April 2002, Yosri Fouda of Al Jazeera met al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who were in hiding, and they admitted to him their involvement in the attacks. Before 9/11, Mohammed had been an organizer and financier of al-Qaeda's 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and he was the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber in that attack. In the Bojinka plot, Mohammed and Yousef then moved on to plan a new terrorist attack planned for January 1995. Despite its failure, and Yousef's imprisonment by the U.S. afterwards, the plot would influence the later 9/11 attacks. The 2004 9/11 Commission Report determined that the animosity which Mohammed, the principal architect of 9/11, felt towards the U.S. had stemmed from his "violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel". Documents seized during the 2011 operation that killed bin Laden included notes handwritten by bin Laden in September 2002 with the heading "The Birth of the Idea of September 11". He describes how he was inspired by the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in October 1999, which was deliberately crashed by co-pilot Gameel Al-Batouti, killing over 200 passengers. "This is how the idea of 9/11 was conceived and developed in my head, and that is when we began the planning" bin Laden continued, adding that no one but Mohammed Atef and Abu al-Khair knew about it at the time. The 9/11 Commission Report identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11, but he is not mentioned in bin Laden's notes. During the trial of alleged 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the U.S. government identified five people as having been completely aware of the operation's details; Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atef, Abu Turab al-Urduni, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. The attacks were conceived by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who first presented it to bin Laden in 1996. Many targets were listed that al-Qaeda hijackers could crash planes into, including the Library Tower (now the U.S. Bank Tower) in Los Angeles. Bin Laden rejected the plan for being too elaborate.[page needed] Al-Qaeda's first attacks against the U.S. after Bin Laden's 1998 fatwā were the 1998 African embassy bombings. In late 1998 or early 1999, bin Laden approved Mohammed to go forward with a new version of the 1996 plan. Bin Laden provided leadership and financial support, and was involved in selecting participants. Atef provided operational support, including target selections and helping arrange travel for the hijackers. He initially selected Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both experienced jihadists who had fought in the Bosnian war. The two arrived in the United States in mid-January 2000. In early 2000, they took flying lessons in San Diego, California. Both spoke little English. They performed poorly in flying lessons, and so they eventually served as secondary "muscle" hijackers. The Hamburg cell in Germany included Islamists who came to be key operatives in the 9/11 attacks. In late 1999, cell members bin al-Shibh, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah arrived to meet al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Bin Laden selected these men because they were educated, could speak English, and had experience living in the West. New recruits were routinely screened for special skills and al-Qaeda leaders consequently discovered that Hani Hanjour already had a commercial pilot's license. Hanjour arrived in San Diego on December 8, 2000, joining al-Hazmi.: 6–7 They soon left for Arizona, where Hanjour took refresher training.: 7 Marwan al-Shehhi arrived at the end of May 2000, while Atta arrived on June 3, 2000, and Jarrah arrived on June 27, 2000.: 6 Bin al-Shibh applied several times for a visa to the United States, but as a Yemeni, he was rejected out of concerns he would overstay his visa.: 4, 14 Bin al-Shibh stayed in Hamburg, providing coordination between Atta and Mohammed.: 16 The three Hamburg cell members all took pilot training in South Florida at Huffman Aviation.: 6 In the spring of 2001, the secondary hijackers began arriving in the United States. In July 2001, Atta met with bin al-Shibh in Spain, where they coordinated details of the plot, including final target selection. Bin al-Shibh passed along bin Laden's wish for the attacks to be carried out as soon as possible. Some of the hijackers received passports from corrupt Saudi officials who were family members or used fraudulent passports to gain entry. In late 1999, al-Qaeda associate Walid bin Attash ("Khallad") contacted al-Mihdhar and told him to meet in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; al-Hazmi and Abu Bara al Yemeni would also be in attendance. The NSA intercepted a telephone call mentioning the meeting, al-Mihdhar, and the name "Nawaf" (al-Hazmi); while the agency feared "Something nefarious might be afoot", it took no further action. The CIA had already been alerted by Saudi intelligence about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi being al-Qaeda members. A CIA team broke into al-Mihdhar's Dubai hotel room and discovered that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. While Alec Station alerted intelligence agencies worldwide, it did not share this information with the FBI. The Malaysian Special Branch observed the January 5, 2000, meeting of the two al-Qaeda members and informed the CIA that al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi, and Khallad were flying to Bangkok, but the CIA never notified other agencies of this, nor did it ask the State Department to put al-Mihdhar on its watchlist. An FBI liaison asked permission to inform the FBI of the meeting but was told: "This is not a matter for the FBI". By late June, senior counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke and CIA director George Tenet were "convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come", although the CIA believed the attacks would likely occur in Saudi Arabia or Israel. In early July, Clarke put domestic agencies on "full alert", telling them, "Something spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon". He asked the FBI and the State Department to alert the embassies and police departments, and the Defense Department to go to "Threat Condition Delta". Clarke later wrote: Somewhere in CIA there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in the FBI, there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States. [...] They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House. [...] by July , with word spreading of a coming attack, a schism emerged among the senior leadership of al Qaeda. Several senior members reportedly agreed with Mullah Omar. Those who reportedly sided with bin Ladin included Atef, Sulayman Abu Ghayth, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But those said to have opposed him were weighty figures in the organization-including Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, Sheikh Saeed al Masri, and Sayf al Adl. One senior al Qaeda operative claims to recall Bin Ladin arguing that attacks against the United States needed to be carried out immediately to support insurgency in the Israeli-occupied territories and protest the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. On July 13, Tom Wilshire, a CIA agent assigned to the FBI's international terrorism division, emailed his superiors at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) requesting permission to inform the FBI that Hazmi was in the country and that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. The CIA never responded. The same day, Margarette Gillespie, an FBI analyst working in the CTC, was told to review material about the Malaysia meeting. She was not told of the participant's presence in the U.S. The CIA gave Gillespie surveillance photos of Mihdhar and Hazmi from the meeting to show to FBI counterterrorism but did not tell her their significance. The Intelink database informed her not to share intelligence material with criminal investigators. When shown the photos, the FBI refused more details on their significance, and they were not given Mihdhar's date of birth or passport number. In late August 2001, Gillespie told the INS, the State Department, the Customs Service, and the FBI to put Hazmi and Mihdhar on their watchlists, but the FBI was prohibited from using criminal agents in searching for the duo, hindering their efforts. Also in July, a Phoenix-based FBI agent sent a message to FBI headquarters, Alec Station, and FBI agents in New York alerting them to "the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges". The agent, Kenneth Williams, suggested the need to interview flight school managers and identify all Arab students seeking flight training. In July, Jordan alerted the U.S. that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on the U.S.; "months later", Jordan notified the U.S. that the attack's codename was "The Big Wedding" and that it involved airplanes. On August 6, 2001, the CIA's Presidential Daily Brief, designated "For the President Only", was entitled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US. The memo noted that FBI information "indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks". In mid-August, one Minnesota flight school alerted the FBI about Zacarias Moussaoui, who had asked "suspicious questions". The FBI found that Moussaoui was a radical who had traveled to Pakistan, and the INS arrested him for overstaying his French visa. Their request to search his laptop was denied by FBI headquarters due to the lack of probable cause. The failures in intelligence-sharing were attributed to 1995 Justice Department policies limiting intelligence-sharing, combined with CIA and NSA reluctance to reveal "sensitive sources and methods" such as tapped phones. Testifying before the 9/11 Commission in April 2004, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recalled that the "single greatest structural cause for the September 11th problem was the wall that segregated or separated criminal investigators and intelligence agents". Clarke also wrote: "[T]here were ... failures to get information to the right place at the right time". Attacks Early on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners (two Boeing 757s and two Boeing 767s). Large planes with long flights were selected for hijacking because they would have more fuel. * Eastern Daylight Time (UTC−04:00)† Excluding hijackers§ Including emergency workers‡ Including hijackers At 7:59 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Logan International Airport in Boston. Fifteen minutes into the flight, five hijackers armed with boxcutters took over the plane, injuring at least three people (and possibly killing one) before forcing their way into the cockpit. The terrorists also displayed an apparent explosive and sprayed mace into the cabin, to frighten the hostages into submission and further hinder resistance. Back at Logan, United Airlines Flight 175 took off at 8:14 a.m. Hundreds of miles southwest at Dulles International Airport, American Airlines Flight 77 left the runway at 8:20 a.m. Flight 175's journey proceeded normally for 28 minutes until 8:42 am, when a group of five hijacked the plane, murdering both pilots and stabbing several crew members before assuming control of the aircraft. These hijackers also used bomb threats to instill fear into the passengers and crew, also spraying "tear gas, pepper spray or another irritant" in the cabin to force passengers and flight attendants to the rear of the cabin. Concurrently, United Airlines Flight 93 departed from Newark International Airport in New Jersey; originally scheduled to pull away from the gate at 8:00 a.m., the plane was running 42 minutes late. At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 was deliberately crashed into the north face of the World Trade Center's North Tower between the 93rd and 99th floors. The initial presumption by many was that it was an accident. At 8:51 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 was also taken over by five hijackers who forcibly entered the cockpit 31 minutes after take-off. Although they were equipped with knives, there were no reports of anyone on board being stabbed, nor did the two people who made phone calls mention the use of mace or a bomb threat. Flight 175 was flown into the South Tower's southern facade (2 WTC) between the 77th and 85th floors at 9:03 a.m.,[h] demonstrating that the first crash was a deliberate act of terrorism. Four men aboard Flight 93 struck suddenly, killing at least one passenger, after having waited 46 minutes—a holdup that proved disastrous for the terrorists when combined with the delayed takeoff. They stormed the cockpit and seized control of the plane at 9:28 a.m., turning the plane eastbound towards Washington, D.C. Much like their counterparts on the first two flights, the fourth team used bomb threats and filled the cabin with mace. Nine minutes after Flight 93 was hijacked, Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. Because of the two delays, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 had time to learn of the previous attacks through phone calls to the ground, and, as a result, an uprising was hastily organized to take control of the aircraft at 9:57 a.m. Within minutes, passengers had fought their way to the front of the cabin and began breaking down the cockpit door. Fearing their captives would gain the upper hand, the hijackers rolled the plane and pitched it into a nosedive, crashing into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh, at 10:03:11 a.m. The plane was about twenty minutes away from reaching D.C. at the time of the crash, and its target is believed to have been either the Capitol Building or the White House. Some passengers and crew who called from the aircraft using the cabin air phone service and mobile phones provided details: several hijackers were aboard each plane; they used mace, tear gas, or pepper spray to overcome attendants; and some people aboard had been stabbed. Reports indicated hijackers stabbed and killed pilots, flight attendants, and one or more passengers. According to the 9/11 Commission's final report, the hijackers had recently purchased multi-function hand tools and assorted Leatherman-type utility knives with locking blades (which were not forbidden to passengers at the time), but these were not found among the possessions left behind by the hijackers. A flight attendant on Flight 11, a passenger on Flight 175, and passengers on Flight 93 said the hijackers had bombs, but one of the passengers said he thought the bombs were fake. The FBI found no traces of explosives at the crash sites, and the 9/11 Commission concluded that the bombs were probably fake. On at least two of the hijacked flights—American 11 and United 93—the terrorists claimed over the PA system that they were taking hostages and were returning to the airport to have a ransom demand met, a clear attempt to prevent passengers from fighting back. Both attempts failed, however, as both hijacker pilots in these instances (Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, respectively) mistakenly transmitted their messages to ATC instead of the people on the plane as intended, tipping off the flight controllers that the planes had been hijacked. Three buildings in the World Trade Center collapsed due to fire-induced structural failure. Although the South Tower was struck around seventeen minutes after the North Tower, the plane's impact zone was far lower, at a much faster speed, and into a corner, with the unevenly-balanced additional structural weight causing it to collapse first at 9:59 a.m.,: 80 : 322 having burned for exactly 56 minutes[o] in the fire caused by the crash of United Airlines Flight 175 and the explosion of its fuel. The North Tower lasted another 29 minutes and 24 seconds before collapsing at 10:28 a.m.,[p] one hour, forty-one minutes, and fifty-three seconds[i] after being struck by American Airlines Flight 11. When the North Tower collapsed, debris fell on the nearby 7 World Trade Center building (7 WTC), damaging the building and starting fires. These fires burned for nearly seven hours, compromising the building's structural integrity, and 7 WTC collapsed at 5:21 p.m. The west side of the Pentagon sustained significant damage. At 9:42 a.m., the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all civilian aircraft within the continental U.S., and civilian aircraft already in flight were told to land immediately. All international civilian aircraft were either turned back or redirected to airports in Canada or Mexico, and were banned from landing on United States territory for three days. The attacks created widespread confusion among news organizations and air traffic controllers. Among unconfirmed and often contradictory news reports aired throughout the day, one of the most prevalent claimed a car bomb had been detonated at the U.S. State Department's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Another jet (Delta Air Lines Flight 1989) was suspected of having been hijacked, but the aircraft responded to controllers and landed safely in Cleveland, Ohio. In an April 2002 interview, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who are believed to have organized the attacks, said Flight 93's intended target was the United States Capitol, not the White House. During the planning stage of the attacks, Mohamed Atta (Flight 11's hijacker and pilot) thought the White House might be too tough a target and sought an assessment from Hani Hanjour (who hijacked and piloted Flight 77). Mohammed said al-Qaeda initially planned to target nuclear installations rather than the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but decided against it, fearing things could "get out of control". Final decisions on targets, according to Mohammed, were left in the hands of the pilots. If any pilot could not reach his intended target, he was to crash the plane. The attack on the World Trade Center's North Tower alone[q] made 9/11 the deadliest act of terrorism in history. Taken together, the four crashes killed 2,996 people (including the hijackers) and injured thousands more. The death toll included 265 on the four planes (from which there were no survivors); 2,606 in the World Trade Center and the surrounding area; and 125 at the Pentagon. Most who died were civilians, as well as 343 firefighters, 72 law enforcement officers, 55 military personnel, and the 19 terrorists. More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks. In New York City, more than 90% of those who died in the towers had been at or above the points of impact. In the North Tower, between 1,344 and 1,402 people were at, above or one floor below the point of impact and all died. Hundreds were killed instantly when the plane struck. The estimated 800 people who survived the impact were trapped and died in the fires or from smoke inhalation, fell or jumped from the tower to escape the smoke and flames, or were killed in the building's collapse. The destruction of all three staircases in the North Tower when Flight 11 hit made it impossible for anyone from the impact zone upward to escape. 107 people not trapped by the impact died. When Flight 11 struck between floors 93 and 99, the 92nd floor was rendered inescapable: the crash severed all elevator shafts while falling debris blocked the stairwells, ensuring the deaths of all 69 workers on the floor. In the South Tower, around 600 people were on or above the 77th floor when Flight 175 struck; few survived. As with the North Tower, hundreds were killed at the moment of impact. Unlike those in the North Tower, the estimated 300 survivors of the crash were not technically trapped, but most were either unaware that a means of escape still existed or were unable to use it. One stairway, Stairwell A, narrowly avoided being destroyed, allowing 14 people located on the floors of impact (including Stanley Praimnath, a man who saw the plane coming at him) and four more from the floors above to escape. New York City 9-1-1 operators who received calls from people inside the tower were not well informed of the situation as it rapidly unfolded and as a result, told callers not to descend the tower on their own. In total, 630 people died in the South Tower, fewer than half the number killed in the North Tower. Of the 100–200 people witnessed jumping or falling to their deaths, only three recorded sightings were from the South Tower.: 86 Casualties in the South Tower were significantly reduced because some occupants decided to leave the building immediately following the first crash, and because Eric Eisenberg, an executive at AON Insurance, decided to evacuate the floors occupied by AON (92 and 98–105) following the impact of Flight 11. The 17-minute gap allowed over 900 of the 1,100 AON employees present to evacuate from above the 77th floor before the South Tower was struck; Eisenberg was among the nearly 200 who did not escape. Similar pre-impact evacuations were carried out by Fiduciary Trust, CSC, and Euro Brokers, all of whom had offices on floors above the point of impact. The failure to order a full evacuation of the South Tower after the first plane crash into the North Tower was described by USA Today as "one of the day's great tragedies". As exemplified in the photograph The Falling Man, more than 200 people fell to their deaths from the burning towers, most of whom were forced to jump to escape the extreme heat, fire and smoke. Some occupants of each tower above the point of impact made their way toward the roof in the hope of helicopter rescue, but the roof access doors were locked. No plan existed for helicopter rescues, and the combination of roof equipment, thick smoke and intense heat prevented helicopters from approaching. At the World Trade Center complex, 414 emergency workers died as they tried to rescue people and fight fires, while another law enforcement officer was killed when United 93 crashed. 343 firefighters of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) died, including a chaplain and two paramedics. 23 officers of New York City Police Department (NYPD) died. 37 officers of the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) had died. Eight emergency medical technicians and paramedics from private emergency medical services units were killed. Almost all of the emergency personnel who died at the scene were killed as a result of the towers collapsing, with the exception of one who was struck by a civilian falling from the South Tower. 658 employees from Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., an investment bank on the North Tower's 101st–105th floors, died, considerably more than any other employer. 358 employees from Marsh Inc., located immediately below Cantor Fitzgerald on floors 93–100, died, and 176 employees from Aon Corporation died. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) estimated that about 17,400 civilians were in the World Trade Center complex at the time of the attacks.: xxxiii Turnstile counts from the Port Authority suggest 14,154 people were typically in the Twin Towers by 8:45 a.m. Most people below the impact zone safely evacuated. In Arlington County, Virginia, 125 Pentagon workers died when Flight 77 crashed into the building's western side. Seventy were civilians and 55 were military personnel, many of whom worked for the United States Army or the United States Navy. 47 civilian employees, six civilian contractors, and 22 soldiers working for the Army died, while six civilian employees, three civilian contractors, and 33 sailors working for the Navy died. Seven Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) civilian employees and one Office of the Secretary of Defense contractor died. Timothy Maude, a Lieutenant General and Army Deputy Chief of Staff, was the highest-ranking military official killed at the Pentagon. Weeks after the attack, the death toll was estimated to be over 6,000, more than twice the number of deaths eventually confirmed. The city was only able to identify remains for about 1,600 of the World Trade Center victims. The medical examiner's office collected "about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead". Bone fragments were still being found in 2006 by workers who were preparing to demolish the damaged Deutsche Bank Building. In 2010, a team of anthropologists and archaeologists searched for human remains and personal items at the Fresh Kills Landfill, where 72 more human remains were recovered, bringing the total found to 1,845. As of 2011, DNA profiling was ongoing in an attempt to identify additional victims. In 2014, three coffin-size cases carrying 7,930 unidentified remains were transferred to a medical examiner's repository located at the same site as the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Victims' families are permitted to visit a private "reflection room" which is closed to the public. The choice to place the remains in an underground area attached to a museum has been controversial; families of some victims have attempted to have the remains instead interred in a separate, above-ground monument. In August 2017, the 1,641st victim was identified as a result of newly available DNA technology, and a 1,642nd during July 2018. Three more victims were identified in October 2019, two in September 2021 and an additional two in September 2023. As of 2025, 1,103 victims remain unidentified, amounting to 40% of the deaths in the World Trade Center attacks. On September 25, 2023, the FDNY reported that the department had now lost the same number of members to 9/11-related illnesses as it did on the day of the attacks. The Twin Towers, Marriott World Trade Center (3 WTC), 7 WTC, and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church were destroyed. The U.S. Customs House (6 World Trade Center), 4 World Trade Center, 5 World Trade Center, and both pedestrian bridges connecting buildings were severely damaged. All surrounding streets were in ruins. The last fires at the World Trade Center site were extinguished on December 20. The Deutsche Bank Building was damaged and was later condemned as uninhabitable because of toxic conditions; it was deconstructed starting in 2007. Buildings of the World Financial Center were damaged. The Borough of Manhattan Community College's Fiterman Hall was condemned due to extensive damage, and then reopened in 2012. Other neighboring buildings (including 90 West Street and the Verizon Building) suffered major damage but have been restored. World Financial Center buildings, One Liberty Plaza, the Millennium Hilton, and 90 Church Street had moderate damage and have been restored. Communications equipment on top of the North Tower was also destroyed, with only WCBS-TV maintaining a backup transmitter on the Empire State Building, but media stations were quickly able to reroute the signals and resume their broadcasts. The PATH train system's World Trade Center station was located under the complex and was demolished when the towers collapsed. The tunnels leading to Exchange Place station in Jersey City were flooded with water. The station was rebuilt as the $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which reopened in March 2015. The Cortlandt Street station on the New York City Subway's IRT Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line was also in close proximity to the World Trade Center complex, and the entire station, along with the surrounding track, was reduced to rubble. The station was rebuilt and reopened to the public on September 8, 2018. The Pentagon was extensively damaged, causing one section of the building's E ring to collapse. As the Flight 77 approached the Pentagon, its wings knocked down light poles, and its right engine hit a power generator before crashing into the western side of the building. The plane hit the Pentagon at the first-floor level. The front part of the fuselage disintegrated on impact; debris from the tail section penetrated the furthest into the building, breaking through 310 feet (94 m) of the three outermost of the building's five rings. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) deployed more than 200 units (approximately half of the department) to the World Trade Center. Their efforts were supplemented by off-duty firefighters, Hatzolah, and emergency medical technicians. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) sent its Emergency Service Units and other police personnel and deployed its aviation unit, which determined that helicopter rescues from the towers were not feasible. Numerous police officers of the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) also participated in rescue efforts. Once on the scene, the FDNY, the NYPD, and the PAPD did not coordinate efforts and performed redundant searches for civilians. As conditions deteriorated, the NYPD aviation unit relayed information to police commanders, who issued orders for personnel to evacuate the towers; most NYPD officers were able to evacuate before the buildings collapsed. With separate command posts set up and incompatible radio communications between the agencies, warnings were not passed along to FDNY commanders. After the first tower collapsed, FDNY commanders issued evacuation warnings. Due to malfunctioning radio repeater systems, many firefighters never heard the evacuation orders. 9-1-1 dispatchers also received information from callers that was not passed along to commanders on the scene. Reactions The 9/11 attacks resulted in immediate responses, including domestic reactions; closings and cancellations; hate crimes; international responses; and military responses. Shortly after the attacks, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was created by an Act of Congress. The purpose of the fund was to compensate the victims of the attacks and their families with their agreement not to file lawsuits against the airlines involved. Legislation authorizes the fund to disburse a maximum of $7.375 billion, including operational and administrative costs, of U.S. government funds. The fund was set to expire by 2020 but was in 2019 prolonged to allow claims to be filed until October 2090. At 8:32 a.m., FAA officials were notified Flight 11 had been hijacked and they, in turn, notified the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). NORAD scrambled two F-15s from Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts; they were airborne by 8:53 a.m. Because of slow and confused communication from FAA officials, NORAD had nine minutes' notice, and no notice about any of the other flights before they crashed. After both of the Twin Towers had been hit, more fighters were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia at 9:30 a.m. At 10:20 am, Vice President Dick Cheney issued orders to shoot down any commercial aircraft that could be positively identified as being hijacked. These instructions were not relayed in time for the fighters to take action. Some fighters took to the air without live ammunition, knowing that to prevent the hijackers from striking their intended targets, the pilots might have to intercept and crash their fighters into the hijacked planes, possibly ejecting at the last moment. For the first time in U.S. history, the emergency preparedness plan Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids (SCATANA) was invoked, stranding tens of thousands of passengers across the world. Ben Sliney, in his first day as the National Operations Manager of the FAA, ordered that American airspace be closed to all international flights, causing about 500 flights to be turned back or redirected to other countries. Canada received 226 of the diverted flights and launched Operation Yellow Ribbon to deal with the large numbers of grounded planes and stranded passengers. The 9/11 attacks had immediate effects on the American people. Police and rescue workers from around the country traveled to New York City to help recover bodies from the remnants of the Twin Towers. Over 3,000 children lost a parent in the attacks. Blood donations across the U.S. surged in the weeks after 9/11. Following the attacks, Bush's approval rating increased to 90%. On September 20, he addressed the nation and a joint session of Congress regarding the events, the rescue and recovery efforts, and his intended response to the attacks. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani's highly visible role resulted in praise in New York and nationally. Many relief funds were immediately set up to provide financial assistance to the survivors of the attacks and the victims' families. By the deadline for victims' compensation on September 11, 2003, 2,833 applications had been received from the families of those killed. Contingency plans for the continuity of government and the evacuation of leaders were implemented soon after the attacks. Congress was not told that the United States had been under a continuity of government status until February 2002. In the largest restructuring of the U.S. government in contemporary history, the United States enacted the Homeland Security Act of 2002, creating the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Congress also passed the USA PATRIOT Act, saying it would help detect and prosecute terrorism and other crimes. Civil liberties groups have criticized the PATRIOT Act, saying it allows law enforcement to invade citizens' privacy and that it eliminates judicial oversight of law enforcement and domestic intelligence. To effectively combat future acts of terrorism, the National Security Agency (NSA) was given broad powers. The NSA commenced warrantless surveillance of telecommunications, which was sometimes criticized as permitting the agency "to eavesdrop on telephone and e-mail communications between the United States and people overseas without a warrant". In response to requests by intelligence agencies, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court permitted an expansion of powers by the U.S. government in seeking, obtaining, and sharing information on U.S. citizens as well as non-Americans around the world. Six days after the attacks, President Bush made a public appearance at Washington, D.C.'s largest Islamic Center where he acknowledged the "incredibly valuable contribution" of American Muslims and called for them "to be treated with respect". Numerous incidents of harassment and hate crimes against Muslims and South Asians were reported in the days following the attacks. Sikhs were also targeted due to their use of turbans, which are stereotypically associated with Muslims. There were reports of attacks on mosques and other religious buildings (including the firebombing of a Hindu temple), and assaults on individuals, including one murder: Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh mistaken for a Muslim, who was fatally shot on September 15, 2001, in Mesa, Arizona. Two dozen members of Osama bin Laden's family were urgently evacuated out of the country on a private charter plane under FBI supervision three days after the attacks. According to an academic study, people perceived to be Middle Eastern were as likely to be victims of hate crimes as followers of Islam during this time. The study also found a similar increase in hate crimes against people who may have been perceived as Muslims, Arabs, and others thought to be of Middle Eastern origin. A report by the South Asian American advocacy group South Asian Americans Leading Together documented media coverage of 645 bias incidents against Americans of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent between September 11 and 17, 2001. Crimes such as vandalism, arson, assault, shootings, harassment, and threats in numerous places were documented. Women wearing the hijab were also targeted. A poll of Arab-Americans in May 2002 found that 20% had personally experienced discrimination since September 11. A July 2002 poll of Muslim Americans found that 48% believed their lives had changed for the worse since September 11, and 57% had experienced an act of bias or discrimination. Following the September 11 attacks, many Pakistani Americans identified themselves as Indians to avoid potential discrimination and obtain jobs. By May 2002, there were 488 complaints of employment discrimination reported to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). 301 of those were complaints from people fired from their jobs. Similarly, by June 2002, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) had investigated 111 September 11th-related complaints from airline passengers purporting that their religious or ethnic appearance caused them to be singled out at security screenings, and an additional 31 complaints from people who alleged they were blocked from boarding airplanes on the same grounds. Muslim organizations in the United States were swift to condemn the attacks and called "upon Muslim Americans to come forward with their skills and resources to help alleviate the sufferings of the affected people and their families". These organizations included the Islamic Society of North America, American Muslim Alliance, American Muslim Council, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Circle of North America, and the Shari'a Scholars Association of North America. Along with monetary donations, many Islamic organizations launched blood drives and provided medical assistance, food, and shelter for victims. Curiosity about Islam increased after the attacks. As a result, many mosques and Islamic centers began holding open houses and participating in outreach efforts to educate non-Muslims about the faith. In the first 10 years after the attacks, interfaith community service increased from 8 to 20 percent and the percentage of U.S. congregations involved in interfaith worship doubled from 7 to 14 percent. The attacks were denounced by mass media and governments worldwide. Nations offered pro-American support and solidarity. Leaders in most Middle Eastern countries, as well as Libya and Afghanistan, condemned the attacks. Iraq was a notable exception, with an immediate official statement that "the American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity". The government of Saudi Arabia officially condemned the attacks, but privately many Saudis favored bin Laden's cause. Although Palestinian Authority (PA) president Yasser Arafat also condemned the attacks, there were reports of celebrations of disputed size in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Palestinian leaders discredited news broadcasters that justified the attacks or showed celebrations, and the Authority claimed such celebrations do not represent the Palestinians' sentiment. Footage by CNN[vague] and other news outlets were suggested by a report originating at a Brazilian university to be from 1991; this was later proven to be a false accusation. As in the United States, the aftermath of the attacks saw tensions increase in other countries between Muslims and non-Muslims. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368 condemned the attacks and expressed readiness to take all necessary steps to respond and combat terrorism in accordance with their Charter. Numerous countries introduced anti-terrorism legislation and froze bank accounts they suspected of al-Qaeda ties. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies in a number of countries arrested alleged terrorists. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Britain stood "shoulder to shoulder" with the United States. In a speech to Congress nine days after the attacks, which Blair attended as a guest, President Bush declared "America has no truer friend than Great Britain". Subsequently, Prime Minister Blair embarked on two months of diplomacy to rally international support for military action; he held 54 meetings with world leaders. The U.S. set up the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to hold inmates they defined as "illegal enemy combatants". The legitimacy of these detentions has been questioned by the European Union and human rights organizations. On September 25, 2001, Iran's president Mohammad Khatami, meeting British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, said: "Iran fully understands the feelings of the Americans about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11". He said although the American administrations had been at best indifferent about terrorist operations in Iran, the Iranians felt differently and had expressed their sympathetic feelings with bereaved Americans in the tragic incidents in the two cities. He also stated that "Nations should not be punished in place of terrorists". According to Radio Farda's website, when the news of the attacks was released, some Iranian citizens gathered in front of the Embassy of Switzerland in Tehran, which serves as the protecting power of the United States in Iran, to express their sympathy, and some of them lit candles as a symbol of mourning. Radio Farda's website also states that in 2011, on the anniversary of the attacks, the United States Department of State published a post on its blog, in which the Department thanked the Iranian people for their sympathy and stated that it would never forget Iranian people's kindness. After the attacks, both the President and the Supreme Leader of Iran condemned the attacks. The BBC and Time magazine published reports on holding candlelit vigils for the victims by Iranian citizens on their websites. According to Politico Magazine, following the attacks, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, "suspended the usual 'Death to America' chants at Friday prayers" temporarily. At 2:40 pm on September 11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was issuing orders to his aides to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement. According to notes taken by senior policy official Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld asked for, "Best info fast. Judge whether they are good enough to hit S.H. at the same time. Not only OBL". In a meeting at Camp David on September 15 the Bush administration rejected the idea of attacking Iraq in response to the September 11 attacks. Nonetheless, they later invaded the country with allies, citing "Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism". At the time, as many as seven in ten Americans believed the Iraqi president played a role in the 9/11 attacks. Three years later, Bush conceded that he had not. The NATO council declared that the terrorist attacks on the United States were an attack on all NATO nations that satisfied Article 5 of the NATO charter. This marked the first invocation of Article 5, which had been written during the Cold War with an attack by the Soviet Union in mind. Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who was in Washington, D.C., during the attacks, invoked Article IV of the ANZUS treaty. The Bush administration announced a war on terror, with the stated goals of bringing bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justice and preventing the emergence of other terrorist networks. These goals would be accomplished by imposing economic and military sanctions against states harboring terrorists, and increasing global surveillance and intelligence sharing. On September 14, 2001, the U.S. Congress passed the Authorization for the use of Military Force Against Terrorists, which grants the President the authority to use all "necessary and appropriate force" against those whom he determined "planned, authorized, committed or aided" the September 11 attacks or who harbored said persons or groups. It is still in effect. On October 7, 2001, the war in Afghanistan began when U.S. and British forces initiated aerial bombing campaigns targeting Taliban and al-Qaeda camps, then later invaded Afghanistan with ground troops of the Special Forces. This eventually led to the overthrow of the Taliban's rule of Afghanistan with the Fall of Kandahar on December 7, by U.S.-led coalition forces. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who went into hiding in the White Mountains, was targeted by U.S. coalition forces in the Battle of Tora Bora, but he escaped across the Pakistani border and remained out of sight for almost ten years. In an interview with Tayseer Allouni on October 21, 2001, bin Laden stated: The events proved the extent of terrorism that America exercises in the world. Bush stated that the world has to be divided in two: Bush and his supporters, and any country that doesn't get into the global crusade is with the terrorists. What terrorism is clearer than this? Many governments were forced to support this "new terrorism"... America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel. Aftermath Hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic debris containing more than 2,500 contaminants and known carcinogens were spread across Lower Manhattan when the towers collapsed. Exposure to the toxins in the debris is alleged to have contributed to fatal or debilitating illnesses among people who were at Ground Zero. The Bush administration ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue reassuring statements regarding air quality in the aftermath of the attacks, citing national security, but the EPA did not determine that air quality had returned to pre–September 11 levels until June 2002. Health effects extended to residents, students, and office workers of Lower Manhattan and nearby Chinatown. Several deaths have been linked to the toxic dust, and victims' names were included in the World Trade Center memorial. An estimated 18,000 people have developed illnesses as a result of the toxic dust. There is also scientific speculation that exposure to toxic products in the air may have negative effects on fetal development. A study of rescue workers released in April 2010 found that all those studied had impaired lung function. Years after the attacks, legal disputes over the costs of related illnesses were still in the court system. In 2006, a federal judge rejected New York City's refusal to pay for health costs for rescue workers, allowing for the possibility of suits against the city. Government officials have been faulted for urging the public to return to lower Manhattan in the weeks shortly after the attacks. Christine Todd Whitman, administrator of the EPA in the attacks' aftermath, was heavily criticized by a U.S. District Judge for incorrectly saying that the area was environmentally safe. Mayor Giuliani was criticized for urging financial industry personnel to return quickly to the greater Wall Street area. The James L. Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act (2010) allocated $4.2 billion to create the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides testing and treatment for people with long-term health problems related to the 9/11 attacks. The WTC Health Program replaced preexisting 9/11-related health programs such as the Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program and the WTC Environmental Health Center program. In 2020, the NYPD confirmed that 247 NYPD police officers had died due to 9/11-related illnesses. In September 2022, the FDNY confirmed that 299 firefighters had died due to 9/11-related illnesses. Both agencies believe that the death toll will rise dramatically in the coming years. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department (PAPD), the law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over the World Trade Center, confirmed that four of its police officers have died of 9/11-related illnesses. The chief of the PAPD at the time, Joseph Morris, made sure that industrial-grade respirators were provided to all PAPD police officers within 48 hours and decided that the same 30 to 40 police officers would be stationed at the World Trade Center pile, drastically lowering the number of total PAPD personnel who would be exposed to the air. The FDNY and NYPD had rotated hundreds, if not thousands, of different personnel from all over New York City to the pile without adequate respirators and breathing equipment that could have prevented future diseases. The attacks had a significant economic impact on the U.S. and world markets. The stock exchanges did not open on September 11 and remained closed until September 17. Reopening, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell 684 points, or 7.1%, to 8921, a record-setting one-day point decline. By the end of the week, the DJIA had fallen 1,369.7 points (14.3%), at the time its largest one-week point drop in history. In 2001 dollars, U.S. stocks lost US$1.4 trillion in valuation for the week. In New York City, about 430,000 job months and US$2.8 billion in wages were lost in the first three months after the attacks. The economic effects were mainly on the economy's export sectors. The city's GDP was estimated to have declined by US$27.3 billion for the last three months of 2001 and all of 2002. The U.S. government provided US$11.2 billion in immediate assistance to the Government of New York City in September 2001, and US$10.5 billion in early 2002 for economic development and infrastructure needs. Also hurt were small businesses in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center (18,000 of which were destroyed or displaced), resulting in lost jobs and wages. Assistance was provided by Small Business Administration loans; federal government Community Development Block Grants; and Economic Injury Disaster Loans. Some 31,900,000 square feet (2,960,000 m2) of Lower Manhattan office space was damaged or destroyed. Many wondered whether these jobs would return, and if the damaged tax base would recover. Studies of 9/11's economic effects show the Manhattan office real-estate market and office employment were less affected than first feared, because of the financial services industry's need for face-to-face interaction. North American air space was closed for several days after the attacks and air travel decreased upon its reopening, leading to a nearly 20% cutback in air travel capacity, and exacerbating financial problems in the struggling U.S. airline industry. The September 11 attacks also led to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as additional homeland security spending, totaling at least US$5 trillion. If Americans are clamouring to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, they ought to know that this nation does not have so far to go. This is a post-apocalyptic place of felled cities, parched land and downtrodden people. Most of the Afghan population was already going hungry at the time of the attacks. In the aftermath of the attacks, tens of thousands of people attempted to flee Afghanistan due to the possibility of military retaliation by the U.S. Pakistan, already home to many Afghan refugees from previous conflicts, closed its border with Afghanistan on September 17, 2001. Thousands of Afghans also fled to the frontier with Tajikistan but were denied entry. The Taliban leaders in Afghanistan pleaded against military action, saying "We appeal to the United States not to put Afghanistan into more misery because our people have suffered so much", referring to two decades of conflict and the humanitarian crisis attached to it. All United Nations expatriates had left Afghanistan after the attacks and no national or international aid workers were at their post. Workers were instead preparing in bordering countries like Pakistan, China and Uzbekistan to prevent a potential "humanitarian catastrophe", amid a critically low food stock for the Afghan population. The World Food Programme stopped importing wheat to Afghanistan on September 12 due to security risks. Approximately one month after the attacks, the United States led a broad coalition of international forces to overthrow the Taliban regime from Afghanistan for their harboring of al-Qaeda. Though Pakistani authorities were initially reluctant to align themselves with the U.S. against the Taliban, they permitted the coalition access to their military bases, and arrested and handed over to the U.S. over 600 suspected al-Qaeda members. In 2011, the U.S. and NATO under President Obama initiated a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan finalized in 2016. During the presidencies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2020 and 2021, the United States alongside its NATO allies withdrew all troops from Afghanistan, completing the withdrawal of all regular U.S. troops on August 30, 2021. The withdrawal marked the end of the 2001–2021 war in Afghanistan. Biden said that after nearly 20 years of war, it was clear that the U.S. military could not transform Afghanistan into a modern democracy. Immediate responses to 9/11 included greater focus on home life and time spent with family, higher church attendance, and increased expressions of patriotism such as the flying of American flags. The radio industry responded by removing certain songs from playlists, and the attacks have subsequently been used as background, narrative, or thematic elements in film, music, literature, and humour. Already-running television shows as well as programs developed after 9/11 have reflected post-9/11 cultural concerns. 9/11 conspiracy theories have become a social phenomenon, despite a lack of support from expert scientists, engineers, and historians. 9/11 has also had a major impact on the religious faith of many individuals; for some it strengthened, to find consolation to cope with the loss of loved ones and overcome their grief; others started to question their faith or lose it entirely because they could not reconcile it with their view of religion. The culture of America, after the attacks, is noted for heightened security and an increased demand thereof, as well as paranoia and anxiety regarding future terrorist attacks against most of the nation. Psychologists have also confirmed that there has been an increased amount of national anxiety in commercial air travel. Anti-Muslim hate crimes rose nearly ten-fold in 2001 and have subsequently remained "roughly five times higher than the pre-9/11 rate". The September 11 attacks introduced foreign terrorism as a major security issue to the US, as they indicated smaller states and terrorist organizations had become increasingly capable even against major global powers. Many governments across the world passed legislation to combat terrorism as a result to the attacks. In Germany, where several of the 9/11 terrorists had resided and taken advantage of that country's liberal asylum policies, two major anti-terrorism packages were enacted. The first removed legal loopholes that permitted terrorists to live and raise money in Germany. The second addressed the effectiveness and communication of intelligence and law enforcement. Canada passed the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act, their first anti-terrorism law. The United Kingdom passed the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. New Zealand enacted the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security was created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to coordinate domestic anti-terrorism efforts. The USA Patriot Act gave the federal government greater powers, including the authority to detain foreign terror suspects for a week without charge; to monitor terror suspects' telephone communications, e-mail, and Internet use; and to prosecute suspected terrorists without time restrictions. The FAA ordered that airplane cockpits be reinforced with a secondary flight deck to prevent terrorists from gaining control of planes and assigned sky marshals to flights. Further, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act made the federal government, rather than airports, responsible for airport security. The law created the Transportation Security Administration to inspect passengers and luggage, causing long delays and concern over passenger privacy. After suspected abuses of the USA Patriot Act were brought to light in June 2013 with articles about the collection of American call records by the NSA and the PRISM program, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (of Wisconsin), who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the NSA overstepped its bounds. Criticism of the war on terror has focused on its morality, efficiency, and cost. According to a 2021 report by the Costs of War Project, the several post-9/11 wars participated in by the United States in its war on terror have caused the displacement, conservatively calculated, of 38 million people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. They estimated these wars caused the deaths of 897,000 to 929,000 people directly and cost US$8 trillion. In a 2023 report, the Costs of War Project estimated that there have been between 3.6 and 3.7 million indirect deaths in the post-9/11 war zones, with the total death toll being 4.5 to 4.6 million. The report defined post-9/11 war zones as conflicts that included significant United States counter-terrorism operations since 9/11, which in addition to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, also includes the civil wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. The report derived its estimate of indirect deaths using a calculation from the Geneva Declaration of Secretariat which estimates that for every person directly killed by war, four more die from the indirect consequences of war. The U.S. Constitution and U.S. law prohibits the use of torture, yet such human rights violations occurred during the war on terror under the euphemism "enhanced interrogation". In 2005, The Washington Post and Human Rights Watch (HRW) published revelations concerning CIA flights and "black sites", covert prisons operated by the CIA. The term "torture by proxy" is used by some critics to describe situations in which the CIA and other U.S. agencies have transferred suspected terrorists to countries known to employ torture. As all 19 hijackers died in the attacks, they were never prosecuted. Osama bin Laden was never formally indicted; he was ultimately killed by U.S. special forces on May 2, 2011, in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after a 10-year manhunt.[r] The main trial of the attacks against Mohammed and his co-conspirators Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi remains unresolved. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, by Pakistani security officials working with the CIA. He was then held at multiple CIA secret prisons and Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where he was interrogated and tortured with methods including waterboarding. In 2003, al-Hawsawi and Abd al-Aziz Ali were arrested and transferred to U.S. custody. Both would later be accused of providing money and travel assistance to the hijackers. During U.S. hearings at Guantanamo Bay in March 2007, Mohammed again confessed his responsibility for the attacks, stating he "was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z" and that his statement was not made under duress. In January 2023, the U.S. government opened up about a potential plea deal, with Biden giving up on the effort in September that year. To date, only peripheral persons have thus been convicted for charges in connection with the attacks. These include: In July 2024, The New York Times reported that Mohammed, bin Attash, and al-Hawsawi had agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy in exchange for life sentences, avoiding trial and execution. However, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked a plea agreement with Mohammed days later. Investigations Immediately after the attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started PENTTBOM, the largest criminal inquiry in U.S. history. At its height, more than half of the FBI's agents worked on the investigation and followed a half-million leads. The FBI concluded that there was "clear and irrefutable" evidence linking al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the attacks. The FBI quickly identified the hijackers, including leader Mohamed Atta, when his luggage was discovered at Boston's Logan Airport. Atta had been forced to check two of his three bags due to space limitations on the 19-seat commuter flight he took to Boston. Due to a new policy instituted to prevent flight delays, the luggage failed to make it aboard American Airlines Flight 11 as planned. The luggage contained the hijackers' names, assignments, and al-Qaeda connections. "It had all these Arab-language [sic] papers that amounted to the Rosetta stone of the investigation," said one FBI agent. Within hours of the attacks, the FBI released the names and in many cases the personal details of the suspected pilots and hijackers. Abu Jandal, who served as bin Laden's chief bodyguard for years, confirmed the identity of seven hijackers as al-Qaeda members during interrogations with the FBI on September 17. He had been jailed in a Yemeni prison since 2000. On September 27, photos of all 19 hijackers were released, along with information about possible nationalities and aliases. Fifteen of the men were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt, and one was from Lebanon. By midday, the U.S. National Security Agency and German intelligence agencies had intercepted communications pointing to Osama bin Laden. Two of the hijackers were known to have traveled with a bin Laden associate to Malaysia in 2000 and hijacker Mohamed Atta had previously gone to Afghanistan. He and others were part of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany. One of the members of the Hamburg cell in Germany was discovered to have been in communication with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was identified as a member of al-Qaeda. Authorities in the United States and the United Kingdom also obtained electronic intercepts, including telephone conversations and electronic bank transfers, which indicated that Mohammed Atef was a key figure in the planning of the 9/11 attacks. Intercepts were also obtained of conversations that took place days before September 11 between bin Laden and an associate in Pakistan referring to "an incident that would take place in America on, or around, September 11" and discussing potential repercussions. In another conversation with an associate in Afghanistan, bin Laden discussed the "scale and effects of a forthcoming operation." These conversations did not specifically mention the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or other specifics. In their annual violent crime index for the year 2001, the FBI recorded the deaths from the attacks as murder, in separate tables so as not to mix them with other reported crimes for that year. In a disclaimer, the FBI stated that "the number of deaths is so great that combining it with the traditional crime statistics will have an outlier effect that falsely skews all types of measurements in the program's analyses." New York City also did not include the deaths in their annual crime statistics for 2001. In 2004, John L. Helgerson, the Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), conducted an internal review of the agency's pre-9/11 performance and was harshly critical of senior CIA officials for not doing everything possible to confront terrorism. According to Philip Giraldi in The American Conservative, Helgerson criticized their failure to stop two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they entered the United States and their failure to share information on the two men with the FBI. In May 2007, senators from both major U.S. political parties (the Republican and Democratic parties) drafted legislation to make the review public. One of the backers, Senator Ron Wyden said, "The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months before 9/11". The report was released in 2009 by President Barack Obama. In February 2002, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence formed a joint inquiry into the performance of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Their 832-page report released in December 2002 detailed failings of the FBI and CIA to use available information, including about terrorists the CIA knew were in the United States, to disrupt the plots. The joint inquiry developed its information about possible involvement of Saudi Arabian government officials from non-classified sources. The Bush administration demanded 28 related pages remain classified. In December 2002, the inquiry's chair Bob Graham revealed in an interview that there was "evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States". Victim families were frustrated by the unanswered questions and redacted material from the congressional inquiry and demanded an independent commission. September 11 victim families, members of Congress and the Saudi Arabian government are still seeking the release of the documents. In June 2016, CIA chief John Brennan said that he believes 28 redacted pages of a congressional inquiry into 9/11 will soon be made public, and that they will prove that the government of Saudi Arabia had no involvement in the September 11 attacks. In September 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act that would allow relatives of victims of the September 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for its government's alleged role in the attacks. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11 Commission, chaired by Thomas Kean,[s] was formed in late 2002 to prepare a thorough account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks. The commission issued the 9/11 Commission Report in July 2004, a 585-page report based on its investigations. The report detailed the events leading up to the attacks, concluding that they were carried out by al-Qaeda. The commission also examined how security and intelligence agencies were inadequately coordinated to prevent the attacks. According to the report, "We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management." The commission made numerous recommendations on how to prevent future attacks, and in 2011 was dismayed that several of its recommendations had yet to be implemented. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology investigated the collapses of the Twin Towers and 7 WTC. The investigations examined why the buildings collapsed and what fire protection measures were in place, and evaluated how fire protection systems might be improved in future construction. The investigation into the collapse of 1 WTC and 2 WTC was concluded in October 2005 and that of 7 WTC was completed in August 2008. NIST found that the fireproofing on the Twin Towers' steel infrastructures was blown off by the initial impact of the planes and that had this not occurred, the towers likely would have remained standing. A 2007 study of the north towers' collapse published by researchers of Purdue University determined that since the plane's impact had stripped off much of the structure's thermal insulation, the heat from a typical office fire would have softened and weakened the exposed girders and columns enough to initiate the collapse regardless of the number of columns cut or damaged by the impact. The director of the original investigation stated that "the towers did amazingly well. The terrorist aircraft didn't bring the buildings down; it was the fire that followed. It was proven that you could take out two-thirds of the columns in a tower and the building would still stand." The fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, making the floors sag. The sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns causing the exterior columns to bow inward. With the damage to the core columns, the buckling exterior columns could no longer support the buildings, causing them to collapse. Additionally, the report found the towers' stairwells were not properly reinforced to provide adequate emergency escape for people above the impact zones. NIST concluded that uncontrolled fires in 7 WTC caused floor beams and girders to heat and subsequently "caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down." In July 2016, the Obama administration released a document compiled by U.S. investigators Dana Lesemann and Michael Jacobson, known as "File 17," which contains a list naming three dozen people, including the suspected Saudi intelligence officers attached to Saudi Arabia's embassy in Washington, D.C., which connects Saudi Arabia to the hijackers. In September 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The practical effect of the legislation was to allow the continuation of a longstanding civil lawsuit brought by families of victims of the September 11 attacks against Saudi Arabia for its government's alleged role in the attacks. In March 2018, a U.S. judge formally allowed a suit to move forward against the government of Saudi Arabia brought by 9/11 survivors and victims' families. In 2022, the families of some 9/11 victims obtained two videos and a notepad seized from Saudi national Omar al-Bayoumi by the British courts. The first video showed him hosting a party in San Diego for Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first two hijackers to arrive in the U.S. The other video showed al-Bayoumi greeting the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was blamed for radicalizing Americans and later killed in a CIA drone strike. The notepad depicted a hand-drawn airplane and some mathematical equations that, according to a pilot's court statement, might have been used to calculate the rate of descent to get to a target. According to a 2017 FBI memo, from the late 1990s until the 9/11 attack, al-Bayoumi was a paid cooptee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. As of April 2022[update] he is believed to be living in Saudi Arabia, which has denied any involvement in 9/11. Rebuilding and memorials On the day of the attacks, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani stated: "We will rebuild. We're going to come out of this stronger than before, politically stronger, economically stronger. The skyline will be made whole again". Within hours of the attack, a substantial search and rescue operation was launched. After months of around-the-clock operations, the World Trade Center site was cleared by the end of May 2002. The damaged section of the Pentagon was rebuilt and occupied within a year of the attacks. The temporary World Trade Center PATH station opened in late 2003 and construction of the new 7 World Trade Center was completed in 2006. Work on rebuilding the main World Trade Center site was delayed until late 2006 when leaseholder Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed on financing. The construction of One World Trade Center began in April 2006, and reached its full height in May 2013. The spire was installed atop the building at that date, putting One WTC's height at 1,776 feet (541 m) and thus claiming the title of the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. One WTC finished construction and opened on November 3, 2014. On the World Trade Center site, three more office towers were to be built one block east of where the original towers stood. 4 WTC, meanwhile, opened in November 2013, making it the second tower on the site to open behind 7 World Trade Center, as well as the first building on the Port Authority property. 3 WTC opened in June 2018, becoming the fourth skyscraper at the site to be completed. In December 2022, the Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church fully reopened for regular services followed by the opening of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center in September 2023. With construction beginning in 2008, 2 World Trade Center remains as of 2025 unfinished. Scale models of the building were publicly revealed in September 2024, although Silverstein Properties was still trying to secure funding for the tower at the time. In the days immediately following the attacks, many memorials and vigils were held around the world, and photographs of the dead and missing were posted around Ground Zero. A witness described being unable to "get away from faces of innocent victims who were killed. Their pictures are everywhere, on phone booths, street lights, and walls of subway stations. Everything reminded me of a huge funeral, people were quiet and sad, but also very nice. Before, New York gave me a cold feeling; now people were reaching out to help each other". President Bush proclaimed Friday, September 14, 2001, as Patriot Day. One of the first memorials was the Tribute in Light, an installation of 88 searchlights at the footprints of the World Trade Center towers. In New York City, the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition was held to design an appropriate memorial on the site. The winning design, Reflecting Absence, was selected in August 2006, and consists of a pair of reflecting pools in the footprints of the towers, surrounded by a list of the victims' names in an underground memorial space. The memorial was completed on the 10th anniversary of the attacks in 2011; a museum also opened on site in May 2014. The Sphere by the German sculptor Fritz Koenig is the world's largest bronze sculpture of modern times, and stood between the Twin Towers on the Austin J. Tobin Plaza from 1971 until the attacks. The sculpture, weighing more than 20 tons, was the only remaining work of art to be recovered largely intact from the ruins of the towers. Since then, the work of art, known in the U.S. as The Sphere, has been transformed into a symbolic monument of 9/11 commemoration. After being dismantled and stored near a hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the sculpture was the subject of the 2001 documentary The Sphere by filmmaker Percy Adlon. In August 2017, the work was installed at Liberty Park, close to the new World Trade Center aerial and the 9/11 Memorial. In Arlington County, the Pentagon Memorial was completed and opened to the public on the seventh anniversary of the attacks in 2008. It consists of a landscaped park with 184 benches facing the Pentagon. When the Pentagon was repaired in 2001–2002, a private chapel and indoor memorial were included at the spot where Flight 77 crashed into the building. In Shanksville, a concrete-and-glass visitor center was opened in 2015, situated on a hill overlooking the crash site and the white marble Wall of Names. An observation platform at the visitor center and the white marble wall are both aligned beneath the path of Flight 93. New York City firefighters donated a cross made of steel from the World Trade Center and mounted on top of a platform shaped like the Pentagon. It was installed outside the firehouse on August 25, 2008. Many other permanent memorials are elsewhere. Scholarships and charities have been established by the victims' families and by many other organizations and private figures. On every anniversary in New York City, the names of the victims who died there are read out over music. The President of the United States attends a memorial service at the Pentagon, and asks Americans to observe Patriot Day with a moment of silence. Smaller services are held in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which are usually attended by the First Lady. In 2023, Joe Biden did not attend services in the affected areas, instead marking the day in Anchorage, Alaska, the only U.S. president to do so since the attacks. See also References Bibliography Further reading External links Multimedia |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq] | [TOKENS: 29699] |
Contents 2003 invasion of Iraq Prelude Invasion (2003) Post-invasion insurgency (2003–2006) Civil war (2006–2008) Insurgency (2008–2011) Main phase Later phase The 2003 invasion of Iraq[b] was the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion began on 20 March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations. The invasion was conducted by a U.S.-led combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland. According to U.S. president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair, the coalition aimed "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction [WMDs], to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people"; however, just before the start of the invasion, a UN inspection team led by Hans Blix found no evidence of the existence of WMDs. According to Blair, the trigger was Iraq's failure to take a "final opportunity" to disarm itself of alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that U.S. and British officials called an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace. The invasion was strongly opposed by some long-standing U.S. allies, including the governments of Canada, France, Germany, and New Zealand. In September 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the invasion illegal under international law and said it was a breach of the UN Charter. On 15 February 2003, a month before the invasion, there were worldwide protests against the anticipated invasion of Iraq, including a rally of three million people in Rome which the Guinness World Records listed as the largest-ever anti-war rally. The invasion was preceded by an airstrike on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad on 20 March 2003. The following day, coalition forces launched an incursion into Basra Governorate from their massing point close to the Iraqi–Kuwaiti border. While special forces launched an amphibious assault from the Persian Gulf to secure Basra and the surrounding petroleum fields, the main invasion army moved into southern Iraq, occupying the region and engaging in the Battle of Nasiriyah on 23 March. Massive air strikes across the country and against Iraqi command and control threw the defending army into chaos and prevented an effective resistance. On 26 March, the 173rd Airborne Brigade was airdropped near the northern city of Kirkuk, where they joined forces with Kurdish rebels and fought several actions against the Iraqi Army, to secure the northern part of the country. The main body of coalition forces continued their drive into the heart of Iraq and were met with little resistance. Most of the Iraqi military was quickly defeated. On 9 April 2003, 22 days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by coalition forces after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. Other operations included the capture and occupation of Kirkuk on 10 April and the attack on and capture of Tikrit on 15 April. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi central leadership went into hiding as the coalition forces completed the occupation of the country. On 1 May, U.S. president George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in his Mission Accomplished speech. This declaration ended the invasion period of the Iraq War and began the period of military occupation. Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces on 13 December 2003. Prelude to the invasion Hostilities of the Gulf War were suspended on 28 February 1991, with a cease-fire negotiated between the UN coalition and Iraq. The U.S. and its allies tried to keep Saddam in check with military actions such as Operation Southern Watch, which was conducted by Joint Task Force Southwest Asia (JTF-SWA) with the mission of monitoring and controlling airspace south of the 32nd Parallel (extended to the 33rd Parallel in 1996) as well as using economic sanctions. It was revealed that a biological weapons (BW) program in Iraq had begun in the early 1980s with help from the U.S. and Europe who were unaware of Iraq's intentions, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972. Details of the BW program—along with a chemical weapons program—surfaced after the Gulf War (1990–91) following investigations conducted by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) which had been charged with the post-war disarmament of Saddam's Iraq. The investigation concluded that the program had not continued after the war. The U.S. and its allies then maintained a policy of "containment" towards Iraq. This policy involved numerous economic sanctions by the UN Security Council; the enforcement of Iraqi no-fly zones declared by the U.S. and the UK to protect the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan and Shias in the south from aerial attacks by the Iraqi government; and ongoing inspections. Iraqi military helicopters and planes regularly contested the no-fly zones. In October 1998, removing the Iraqi government became official U.S. foreign policy with enactment of the Iraq Liberation Act. Enacted following the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors the preceding August (after some had been accused of spying for the U.S.), the act provided $97 million for Iraqi "democratic opposition organizations" to "establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq." This legislation contrasted with the terms set out in United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, which focused on weapons and weapons programs and made no mention of regime change. One month after the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, the U.S. and UK launched a bombardment campaign of Iraq called Operation Desert Fox. The campaign's express rationale was to hamper Saddam Hussein's government's ability to produce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but U.S. intelligence personnel also hoped it would help weaken Saddam's grip on power. With the election of George W. Bush as president in 2000, the U.S. moved towards a more aggressive policy toward Iraq. The Republican Party's campaign platform in the 2000 election called for "full implementation" of the Iraq Liberation Act as "a starting point" in a plan to "remove" Saddam. After leaving the George W. Bush administration, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that an attack on Iraq had been planned since Bush's inauguration and that the first United States National Security Council meeting involved discussion of an invasion. O'Neill later backtracked, saying that these discussions were part of a continuation of foreign policy first put into place by the Clinton administration. Despite the Bush administration's stated interest in invading Iraq, little formal movement towards an invasion occurred until the 11 September attacks. On the morning of 11 September 2001, the Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda executed four coordinated attacks against the United States utilizing hijacked commercial jet airliners to crash into major symbols of American economic and military power. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, while more than 6,000 were injured. National Security Agency (NSA) intercept data available by midday of the 11th pointed to al-Qaeda's culpability in the attacks. By mid-afternoon however, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans for attacking Iraq. According to aides who were with him in the National Military Command Center on that day, Rumsfeld asked for: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" (Osama bin Laden). According to the 9/11 Commission Report, "Rumsfeld later explained that at the time, he had been considering either one of them, or perhaps someone else, as the responsible party." On the evening of 12 September, President Bush ordered White House counter-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to investigate possible Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Shocked by the sophistication of the attacks, the administration wondered whether a state sponsor was involved. Clarke's office issued a memo on 18 September that noted wide ideological gaps between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and that only weak anecdotal evidence linked the two.: 334 Similarly, a 21 September President's Daily Brief (prepared at Bush's request) indicated that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks and there was "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." The PDB wrote off the few contacts that existed between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda as attempts to monitor the group, not work with it. However, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld expressed skepticism toward's the CIA's intelligence. They questioned whether the CIA were competent enough to produce accurate information as the agency underestimated threats and failed to accurately predict events such as the Iranian Revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. They instead preferred outside analysis, of which information was supplied by the Iraqi National Congress as well as unvetted pieces of intelligence. This information alleged that a highly secretive relationship existed between Saddam and al-Qaeda from 1992, specifically through a series of meetings reportedly involving the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). The rationale for invading Iraq as a response to 9/11 has been widely questioned, as there was no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. On 20 September 2001, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress (telecast live to the world), and announced his new "war on terror". This announcement was accompanied by the doctrine of "pre-emptive" military action, later termed the Bush Doctrine. On 21 November, Bush spoke with Rumsfeld and instructed him to conduct a confidential review of OPLAN 1003, the war plan for invading Iraq. Rumsfeld met with General Tommy Franks, the commander of US Central Command, on 27 November to go over the plans. A record of the meeting includes the question "How start?", listing multiple possible justifications for a US–Iraq War. Some Bush advisers favored an immediate invasion of Iraq, while others advocated building an international coalition and obtaining United Nations authorization. Bush eventually decided to seek UN authorization, while still reserving the option of invading without it. General David Petraeus recalled in an interview his experience during the time before the invasion, stating that "When we were getting ready for what became the invasion of Iraq, the prevailing wisdom was that we were going to have a long, hard fight to Baghdad, and it was really going to be hard to take Baghdad. The road to deployment, which was a very compressed road for the 101st Airborne Division, started with a seminar on military operations in urban terrain, because that was viewed as the decisive event in the takedown of the regime in Iraq — that and finding and destroying the weapons of mass destruction." While there had been some earlier talk of action against Iraq, the Bush administration waited until September 2002 to call for action, with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card saying, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Bush began formally making his case to the international community for an invasion of Iraq in his 12 September 2002 address to the United Nations General Assembly. Benjamin Netanyahu testified before US Congress on September 12, 2002 with an expert testimony, encouraging America to invade Iraq and stating that there is "no question" that Saddam is working on WMDs. The United Kingdom agreed with the U.S. actions, while France and Germany were critical of plans to invade Iraq, arguing instead for continued diplomacy and weapons inspections. After considerable debate, the UN Security Council adopted a compromise resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which authorized the resumption of weapons inspections and promised "serious consequences" for non-compliance. Security Council members France and Russia made clear that they did not consider these consequences to include the use of force to overthrow the Iraqi government. Both the U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, and the UK ambassador, Jeremy Greenstock, publicly confirmed this reading of the resolution, assuring that Resolution 1441 provided no "automaticity" or "hidden triggers" for an invasion without further consultation of the Security Council. Resolution 1441 gave Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" and set up inspections by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Saddam accepted the resolution on 13 November and inspectors returned to Iraq under the direction of UNMOVIC chairman Hans Blix and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei. As of February 2003, the IAEA "found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq"; the IAEA concluded that certain items which could have been used in nuclear enrichment centrifuges, such as aluminum tubes, were in fact intended for other uses. UNMOVIC "did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption of programs of weapons of mass destruction" or significant quantities of proscribed items. UNMOVIC did supervise the destruction of a small number of empty chemical rocket warheads, 50 liters of mustard gas that had been declared by Iraq and sealed by UNSCOM in 1998, and laboratory quantities of a mustard gas precursor, along with about 50 Al-Samoud missiles of a design that Iraq stated did not exceed the permitted 150 km range, but which had traveled up to 183 km in tests. Shortly before the invasion, UNMOVIC stated that it would take "months" to verify Iraqi compliance with resolution 1441. In October 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the Iraq Resolution, which authorized the President to "use any means necessary" against Iraq. Americans polled in January 2003 widely favored further diplomacy over an invasion. Later that year, however, Americans began to agree with Bush's plan. The U.S. government engaged in an elaborate domestic public relations campaign to market the war to its citizens. Americans overwhelmingly believed Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction: 85% said so, even though the inspectors had not uncovered those weapons. Of those who thought Iraq had weapons sequestered somewhere, about half responded that said weapons would not be found in combat. By February 2003, 64% of Americans supported taking military action to remove Saddam from power. In the 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs". On 5 February 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations General Assembly, continuing U.S. efforts to gain UN authorization for an invasion. His presentation to the UN Security Council contained a computer-generated image of a "mobile biological weapons laboratory". However, this information was based on claims of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who later admitted that his claims had been false. Powell also presented false assertions alleging Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda. As a follow-up to Powell's presentation, the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Spain proposed a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, but Canada, France, and Germany, together with Russia, strongly urged continued diplomacy. Facing a losing vote as well as a likely veto from France and Russia, the US, UK, Poland, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Japan, and Australia eventually withdrew their resolution. Opposition to the invasion coalesced in the worldwide 15 February 2003 anti-war protest that attracted between six and ten million people in more than 800 cities, the largest such protest in human history according to the Guinness Book of World Records.[citation needed] On 16 March 2003, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, President of the United States George W. Bush, and Prime Minister of Portugal José Manuel Durão Barroso as host met in the Azores to discuss the invasion of Iraq and Spain's potential involvement in the war, as well as the beginning of the invasion. This encounter was extremely controversial in Spain, even now remaining a very sensitive point for the Aznar government. Almost a year later, Madrid suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe since the Lockerbie bombing, motivated by Spain's decision to participate in the Iraq war, prompting some Spaniards to accuse the Prime Minister of being responsible. In March 2003, the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Australia, Spain, Denmark, and Italy began preparing for the invasion of Iraq, with a host of public relations and military moves. In his 17 March 2003 address to the nation, Bush demanded that Saddam and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, surrender and leave Iraq, giving them a 48-hour deadline. The UK House of Commons held a debate on going to war on 18 March 2003 where the government motion was approved 412 to 149. The vote was a key moment in the history of the Blair administration, as the number of government MPs who rebelled against the vote was the greatest since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Three government ministers resigned in protest at the war, John Denham, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the then Leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook. In a passionate speech to the House of Commons after his resignation, he said, "What has come to trouble me is the suspicion that if the 'hanging chads' of Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops to action in Iraq." During the debate, it was stated that the Attorney General had advised that the war was legal under previous UN Resolutions. Attempts to avoid war In December 2002, a representative of the head of Iraqi Intelligence, the General Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, contacted former Central Intelligence Agency Counterterrorism Department head Vincent Cannistraro stating that Saddam "knew there was a campaign to link him to 11 September and prove he had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)." Cannistraro further added that "the Iraqis were prepared to satisfy these concerns. I reported the conversation to senior levels of the state department and I was told to stand aside and they would handle it." Cannistraro stated that the offers made were all "killed" by the George W. Bush administration because they allowed Saddam to remain in power, an outcome viewed as unacceptable. It has been suggested that Saddam Hussein was prepared to go into exile if allowed to keep US$1 billion. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's national security advisor, Osama El-Baz, sent a message to the U.S. State Department that the Iraqis wanted to discuss the accusations that the country had weapons of mass destruction and ties with Al-Qaeda. Iraq also attempted to reach the U.S. through the Syrian, French, German, and Russian intelligence services. In January 2003, Lebanese-American Imad Hage met with Michael Maloof of the U.S. Department of Defense's Office of Special Plans. Hage, a resident of Beirut, had been recruited by the department to assist in the war on terror. He reported that Mohammed Nassif, a close aide to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, had expressed frustrations about the difficulties of Syria contacting the United States, and had attempted to use him as an intermediary. Maloof arranged for Hage to meet with civilian Richard Perle, then head of the Defense Policy Board. In January 2003, Hage met with the chief of Iraqi intelligence's foreign operations, Hassan al-Obeidi. Obeidi told Hage that Baghdad did not understand why they were targeted and that they had no WMDs. He then made the offer for Washington to send in 2000 FBI agents to confirm this. He additionally offered petroleum concessions but stopped short of having Saddam give up power, instead suggesting that elections could be held in two years. Later, Obeidi suggested that Hage travel to Baghdad for talks; he accepted. Later that month, Hage met with General Habbush and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. He was offered top priority to U.S. firms in oil and mining rights, UN-supervised elections, U.S. inspections (with up to 5,000 inspectors), to have al-Qaeda agent Abdul Rahman Yasin (in Iraqi custody since 1994) handed over as a sign of good faith, and to give "full support for any U.S. plan" in the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. They also wished to meet with high-ranking U.S. officials. On 19 February, Hage faxed Maloof his report of the trip. Maloof reports having brought the proposal to Jaymie Duran. The Pentagon denies that either Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld, Duran's bosses, were aware of the plan. On 21 February, Maloof informed Duran in an email that Richard Perle wished to meet with Hage and the Iraqis if the Pentagon would clear it. Duran responded "Mike, working this. Keep this close hold." On 7 March, Perle met with Hage in Knightsbridge, and stated that he wanted to pursue the matter further with people in Washington (both have acknowledged the meeting). A few days later, he informed Hage that Washington refused to let him meet with Habbush to discuss the offer (Hage stated that Perle's response was "that the consensus in Washington was it was a no-go"). Perle told The Times, "The message was 'Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.′" Casus belli and rationale According to General Tommy Franks, the objectives of the invasion were, "First, end the regime of Saddam Hussein. Second, to identify, isolate and eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Third, to search for, to capture, and to drive out terrorists from that country. Fourth, to collect such intelligence as we can related to terrorist networks. Fifth, to collect such intelligence as we can related to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction. Sixth, to end sanctions and to immediately deliver humanitarian support to the displaced and to many needy Iraqi citizens. Seventh, to secure Iraq's oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people. And last, to help the Iraqi people create conditions for a transition to a representative self-government." Throughout 2002, the Bush administration insisted that removing Saddam from power to restore international peace and security was a major goal. The principal stated justifications for this policy of "regime change" were that Iraq's continuing production of weapons of mass destruction and known ties to terrorist organizations, as well as Iraq's continued violations of UN Security Council resolutions, amounted to a threat to the U.S. and the world community. George W. Bush, speaking in October 2002, said that "The stated policy of the United States is regime change. ... However, if Saddam were to meet all the conditions of the United Nations, the conditions that I have described very clearly in terms that everybody can understand, that in itself will signal the regime has changed." Citing reports from certain intelligence sources, Bush stated on 6 March 2003 that he believed that Saddam was not complying with UN Resolution 1441. The main allegations were: that Saddam possessed or was attempting to produce weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam Hussein had used in places such as Halabja, possessed, and made efforts to acquire, particularly considering two previous attacks on Baghdad nuclear weapons production facilities by both Iran and Israel which were alleged to have postponed weapons development progress; and, further, that he had ties to terrorists, specifically al-Qaeda. The Bush administration's overall rationale for the invasion of Iraq was presented in detail by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February 2003. In summary, he stated, We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he's determined to make more. Given Saddam Hussein's history of aggression ... given what we know of his terrorist associations and given his determination to exact revenge on those who oppose him, should we take the risk that he will not some day use these weapons at a time and the place and in the manner of his choosing at a time when the world is in a much weaker position to respond? The United States will not and cannot run that risk to the American people. Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post–September 11 world. In September 2002, Tony Blair stated, in an answer to a parliamentary question, that "Regime change in Iraq would be a wonderful thing. That is not the purpose of our action; our purpose is to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction..." In November of that year, Blair further stated that, "So far as our objective, it is disarmament, not regime change – that is our objective. Now I happen to believe the regime of Saddam is a very brutal and repressive regime, I think it does enormous damage to the Iraqi people ... so I have got no doubt Saddam is very bad for Iraq, but on the other hand I have got no doubt either that the purpose of our challenge from the United Nations is the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, it is not regime change." At a press conference on 31 January 2003, Bush again reiterated that the single trigger for the invasion would be Iraq's failure to disarm, "Saddam Hussein must understand that if he does not disarm, for the sake of peace, we, along with others, will go disarm Saddam Hussein." As late as 25 February 2003, it was still the official line that the only cause of invasion would be a failure to disarm. As Blair made clear in a statement to the House of Commons, "I detest his regime. But even now he can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." In September 2002, the Bush administration said attempts by Iraq to acquire thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes pointed to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. Powell, in his address to the UN Security Council just before the war, referred to the aluminum tubes. A report released by the Institute for Science and International Security in 2002, however, reported that it was highly unlikely that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium. Powell later admitted he had presented an inaccurate case to the United Nations on Iraqi weapons, based on sourcing that was wrong and in some cases "deliberately misleading." The Bush administration asserted that the Saddam government had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. On 7 March 2003, the U.S. submitted intelligence documents as evidence to the International Atomic Energy Agency. These documents were dismissed by the IAEA as forgeries, with the concurrence in that judgment of outside experts. At the time, a US official stated that the evidence was submitted to the IAEA without knowledge of its provenance and characterized any mistakes as "more likely due to incompetence not malice". Since the invasion, the U.S. government statements concerning Iraqi weapons programs and links to al-Qaeda have been discredited, though chemical weapons were found in Iraq during the occupation period. While the debate of whether Iraq intended to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in the future remains open, no WMDs have been found in Iraq since the invasion despite comprehensive inspections lasting more than 18 months. In Cairo, on 24 February 2001, Colin Powell had predicted as much, saying, "[Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours." Another justification included the alleged connection between the regime of Saddam Hussein and that of terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda that had attacked the United States during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. While it never made an explicit connection between Iraq and the 11 September attacks, the George W. Bush administration repeatedly insinuated a link, thereby creating a false impression for the U.S. public. Grand jury testimony from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trials cited numerous direct linkages from the bombers to Baghdad and Department 13 of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in that initial attack marking the second anniversary to vindicate the surrender of Iraqi armed forces in Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi National Congress alleged that Saddam was collaborating with al-Qaeda from 1992 via the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). For example, The Washington Post has noted that, While not explicitly declaring Iraqi culpability in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, administration officials did, at various times, imply a link. In late 2001, Cheney said it was "pretty well confirmed" that attack mastermind Mohamed Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. Later, Cheney called Iraq the "geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, observed in March 2003 that "[t]he administration has succeeded in creating a sense that there is some connection [between 11 Sept. and Saddam Hussein]". This was after a New York Times/CBS poll showed that 45% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the 11 September atrocities. As The Christian Science Monitor observed at the time, while "[s]ources knowledgeable about U.S. intelligence say there is no evidence that Saddam played a role in the 11 Sept. attacks, nor that he has been or is currently aiding Al Qaeda. ... the White House appears to be encouraging this false impression, as it seeks to maintain American support for a possible war against Iraq and demonstrate seriousness of purpose to Saddam's regime." The CSM went on to report that, while polling data collected "right after 11 Sept. 2001" showed that only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein, attitudes "had been transformed" by January 2003, with a Knight Ridder poll showing that 44% of Americans believed "most" or "some" of the 11 September hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The BBC has also noted that, while President Bush "never directly accused the former Iraqi leader of having a hand in the attacks on New York and Washington", he "repeatedly associated the two in keynote addresses delivered since 11 September", adding that "Senior members of his administration have similarly conflated the two." For instance, the BBC report quotes Colin Powell in February 2003, stating that "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September 11, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America." The same BBC report also noted the results of a recent opinion poll, which suggested that "70% of Americans believe the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks." Also in September 2003, The Boston Globe reported that "Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the 11 Sept. attacks." A year later, presidential candidate John Kerry alleged that Cheney was continuing "to intentionally mislead the American public by drawing a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in an attempt to make the invasion of Iraq part of the global war on terror." Since the invasion, assertions of operational links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda have largely been discredited by the intelligence community, and Secretary Powell himself later admitted he had no proof. In October 2002, a few days before the US Senate vote on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, about 75 senators were told in closed session that the Iraqi government had the means of delivering biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drones that could be launched from ships off the US' Atlantic coast to attack US eastern seaboard cities. Colin Powell suggested in his presentation to the United Nations that UAVs were transported out of Iraq and could be launched against the United States. In fact, Iraq had no offensive UAV fleet or any capability of putting UAVs on ships. Iraq's UAV fleet consisted of less than a handful of outdated Czech training drones. At the time, there was a vigorous dispute within the intelligence community whether the CIA's conclusions about Iraq's UAV fleet were accurate. The US Air Force denied outright that Iraq possessed any offensive UAV capability. Additional justifications used at various times included Iraqi violation of UN resolutions, the Iraqi government's repression of its citizens, and Iraqi violations of the 1991 cease-fire. As evidence supporting U.S. and British charges about Iraqi Weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism weakened, some supporters of the invasion have increasingly shifted their justification to the human rights violations of the Saddam government. Leading human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have argued, however, that they believe human rights concerns were never a central justification for the invasion, nor do they believe that military intervention was justifiable on humanitarian grounds, most significantly because "the killing in Iraq at the time was not of the exceptional nature that would justify such intervention." Legality of invasion The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 was passed by Congress with Republicans voting 98% in favor in the Senate, and 97% in favor in the House. Democrats supported the joint resolution 58% and 39% in the Senate and House respectively. The resolution asserts the authorization by the Constitution of the United States and the Congress for the President to fight anti-United States terrorism. Citing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, the resolution reiterated that it should be the policy of the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein regime and promote a democratic replacement. The resolution "supported" and "encouraged" diplomatic efforts by President George W. Bush to "strictly enforce through the U.N. Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq" and "obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion, and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." The resolution authorized President Bush to use the Armed Forces of the United States "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq." The legality of the invasion of Iraq under international law has been challenged since its inception on a number of fronts, and several prominent supporters of the invasion in all the invading states have publicly and privately cast doubt on its legality. It has been argued by US and British governments that the invasion was fully legal because authorization was implied by the United Nations Security Council. International legal experts, including the International Commission of Jurists, a group of 31 leading Canadian law professors, and the U.S.-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, have denounced this rationale. On Thursday 20 November 2003, an article published in The Guardian alleged that Richard Perle, a senior member of the administration's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, conceded that the invasion was illegal but still justified. The United Nations Security Council has passed nearly 60 resolutions on Iraq and Kuwait since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The most relevant to this issue is Resolution 678, passed on 29 November 1990. It authorizes "member states co-operating with the Government of Kuwait ... to use all necessary means" to (1) implement Security Council Resolution 660 and other resolutions calling for the end of Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwaiti territory and (2) "restore international peace and security in the area." Resolution 678 has not been rescinded or nullified by succeeding resolutions and Iraq was not alleged after 1991 to invade Kuwait or to threaten to do so. Resolution 1441 was most prominent during the run-up to the war and formed the main backdrop for Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the Security Council one month before the invasion. According to an independent commission of inquiry set up by the government of the Netherlands, UN resolution 1441 "cannot reasonably be interpreted (as the Dutch government did) as authorising individual member states to use military force to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council's resolutions." Accordingly, the Dutch commission concluded that the 2003 invasion violated international law. At the same time, Bush Administration officials advanced a parallel legal argument using the earlier resolutions, which authorized force in response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Under this reasoning, by failing to disarm and submit to weapons inspections, Iraq was in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 660 and 678, and the U.S. could legally compel Iraq's compliance through military means. Critics and proponents of the legal rationale based on the U.N. resolutions argue that the legal right to determine how to enforce its resolutions lies with the Security Council alone, not with individual nations and therefore the invasion of Iraq was not legal under international law, and in direct violation of Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter. In February 2006, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the lead prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, reported that he had received 240 separate communications regarding the legality of the war, many of which concerned British participation in the invasion. In a letter addressed to the complainants, Mr. Moreno Ocampo explained that he could only consider issues related to conduct during the war and not to its underlying legality as a possible crime of aggression because no provision had yet been adopted which "defines the crime and sets out the conditions under which the Court may exercise jurisdiction with respect to it." In a March 2007 interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Moreno Ocampo encouraged Iraq to sign up with the court so that it could bring cases related to alleged war crimes. United States Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich held a press conference on the evening of 24 April 2007, revealing US House Resolution 333 and the three articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. He charged Cheney with manipulating the evidence of Iraq's weapons program, deceiving the public about Iraq's connection to al-Qaeda, and threatening aggression against Iran in violation of the United Nations Charter. Military aspects In November 2002, President George W. Bush, visiting Europe for a NATO summit, declared that, "should Iraqi President Saddam Hussein choose not to disarm, the United States will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm him." Thereafter, the Bush administration briefly used the term coalition of the willing to refer to the countries who supported, militarily or verbally, the military action in Iraq and subsequent military presence in post-invasion Iraq since 2003. The original list prepared in March 2003 included 49 members. Of those 49, only six besides the U.S. contributed troops to the invasion force (the United Kingdom, Australia, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark), and 33 provided some number of troops to support the occupation after the invasion was complete. Six members have no military, meaning that they withheld troops completely. A U.S. Central Command, Combined Forces Air Component Commander report, indicated that, as of 30 April 2003, 466,985 U.S. personnel were deployed for the invasion of Iraq. This included; Ground forces element: 336,797 personnel Air forces element: 64,246 personnel Naval forces element: 63,352 personnel Approximately 148,000 soldiers from the United States, 50,000 British soldiers, 2,000 Australian soldiers and 194 Polish soldiers from the special forces unit GROM were sent to Kuwait for the invasion. The invasion force was also supported by Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, estimated to number upwards of 70,000. In the latter stages of the invasion, 620 troops of the Iraqi National Congress opposition group were deployed to southern Iraq. Canada discreetly contributed some military resources towards the campaign, such as personnel from the Royal Canadian Air Force who crewed American planes on missions in Iraq to train with the platforms, and eleven Canadian aircrew who manned AWACS aircraft. The Canadian Armed Forces had ships, planes, and 1,200 Royal Canadian Navy personnel at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to help support Operation Enduring Freedom, and a secret U.S. briefing cable noted that despite public promises by Canadian officials that these assets would not be used in support of the war in Iraq, "they will also be available to provide escort services in the Straits and will otherwise be discreetly useful to the military effort." However, the Department of National Defence issued an order to naval commanders to not do anything in support of the American-led operation, and it is not known whether this order was ever broken. Eugene Lang, chief of staff to then-defence minister John McCallum, stated that it is "quite possible" that Canadian forces indirectly supported the American operation. According to Lang, Canada's military strongly advocated to be involved in the Iraqi War instead of the war in Afghanistan, and Canada mainly decided to keep its assets in the Gulf to maintain good relations with America. After the invasion, Brigadier General Walter Natynczyk, of the Canadian Army, served as Deputy Commanding General of the Multi-National Corps – Iraq, which comprised 35,000 American soldiers in ten brigades spread across Iraq. Plans to open a second front in the north were severely hampered when Turkey refused the use of its territory for such purposes. In response to Turkey's decision, the United States dropped several thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade into northern Iraq, a number significantly less than the 15,000-strong 4th Infantry Division that the U.S. originally planned to deploy to the northern front. The number of personnel in the Iraqi military before the war was uncertain, but it was believed to have been poorly equipped. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated the Iraqi armed forces to number 389,000 (Iraqi Army 350,000, Iraqi Navy 2,000, Iraqi Air Force 20,000 and air defense 17,000), the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam 44,000, Republican Guard 80,000 and reserves 650,000. Another estimate numbers the Army and Republican Guard at between 280,000 and 350,000 and 50,000 to 80,000, respectively, and the paramilitary between 20,000 and 40,000.[citation needed] There were an estimated thirteen infantry divisions, ten mechanized and armored divisions, as well as some special forces units. The Iraqi Air Force and Navy played a negligible role in the conflict. During the invasion, foreign volunteers traveled to Iraq from Syria and took part in the fighting, usually commanded by the Fedayeen Saddam. It is not known for certain how many foreign fighters fought in Iraq in 2003, however, intelligence officers of the U.S. First Marine Division estimated that 50% of all Iraqi combatants in central Iraq were foreigners. In addition, the Kurdish Islamist militant group Ansar al-Islam controlled a small section of northern Iraq in an area outside Saddam Hussein's control. Ansar al-Islam had been fighting against secular Kurdish forces since 2001. At the time of the invasion they fielded about 600 to 800 fighters. Ansar al-Islam was led by the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would later become an important leader in the Iraqi insurgency. Ansar al-Islam was driven out of Iraq in late March by a joint American-Kurdish force during Operation Viking Hammer. According to information provided to the Dutch Ministry of Defence by American forces, it is estimated that more than 300,000 depleted uranium rounds were fired during the invasion, many in or near populated areas of Iraq, including Samawah, Nasiriyah, and Basra, the vast majority by US forces. In the information, the US forces provided the Dutch Ministry of Defense with the GPS coordinates of the DU rounds, along with a list of targets and numbers fired. Then, the Dutch Ministry of Defence released the data to Dutch peace group Pax under the Freedom of Information Act. US forces used white phosphorus and Napalm as incendiary weapons during the Battle of Mosul and Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. On the March 2005, Field artillery, a magazine published by the US Army, published reports of the use of white phosphorus in the battle for Fallujah. the British Ministry of Defence confirmed the use of Mark 77 bomb by US forces during the war. US-led coalition forces used 61,000 cluster munitions containing 20 million submunitions during the 1991 Gulf War, and 13,000 cluster munitions containing two million submunitions during the 2003 invasion and subsequent insurgency. Thousands of unexploded munitions from the invasion and previous wars, including cluster munitions, mines and other unexploded ordnance, still posed a threat to civilians as of 2022. CIA Special Activities Division (SAD) and MI6 (E Squadron) paramilitary teams entered Iraq in July 2002 before the 2003 invasion. Once on the ground they prepared for the subsequent arrival of US and British military forces. SAD teams then combined with U.S. Army Special Forces to organize the Kurdish Peshmerga. This joint team combined to defeat Ansar al-Islam, an ally of Al Qaeda, in a battle in the northeast corner of Iraq. A chemical weapons facility at Sargat was also captured. Sargat was the only facility of its type discovered in the Iraq war. The U.S. side was carried out by Paramilitary Officers from SAD and the Army's 10th Special Forces Group. SAD teams also conducted high-risk special reconnaissance missions behind Iraqi lines to identify senior leadership targets. These missions led to the initial strikes against Saddam Hussein and his key generals. Although the initial strikes against Saddam were unsuccessful in killing the dictator or his generals, they were successful in effectively ending the ability to command and control Iraqi forces. Other strikes against key generals were successful and significantly degraded the command's ability to react to and maneuver against the U.S.-led invasion force coming from the south. SAD operations officers were also successful in convincing key Iraqi army officers to surrender their units once the fighting started or not to oppose the invasion force. NATO member Turkey refused to allow its territory to be used for the invasion. As a result, the SAD/SOG and U.S. Army Special Forces joint teams and the Kurdish Peshmerga constituted the entire northern force against government forces during the invasion. Their efforts kept the 5th Corps of the Iraqi army in place to defend against the Kurds rather than moving to contest the coalition force in the south. Four of these CIA officers were awarded the Intelligence Star for their actions. MI6 conducted Operation Mass Appeal which was a campaign to plant stories about Iraq's WMDs in the media and boost support for the invasion. MI6 also went on to bribe many of Saddam's closest allies to turn over information and intelligence. According to General Tommy Franks, April Fool, an American officer working undercover as a diplomat, was approached by an Iraqi intelligence agent. April Fool then sold the Iraqi false "top secret" invasion plans provided by Franks' team. This deception misled the Iraqi military into deploying major forces in northern and western Iraq in anticipation of attacks by way of Turkey or Jordan, which never took place. This greatly reduced the defensive capacity in the rest of Iraq and facilitated the actual attacks via Kuwait and the Persian Gulf in the southeast. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. and UK had been attacked by Iraqi air defenses while enforcing Iraqi no-fly zones. These zones, and the attacks to enforce them, were described as illegal by the former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine. Other countries, notably Russia and China, also condemned the zones as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. In mid-2002, the U.S. began more carefully selecting targets in the southern part of the country to disrupt the military command structure in Iraq. A change in enforcement tactics was acknowledged at the time, but it was not made public that this was part of a plan known as Operation Southern Focus. The amount of ordnance dropped on Iraqi positions by coalition aircraft in 2001 and 2002 was less than in 1999 and 2000 which was during the Clinton administration. However, information obtained by the UK Liberal Democrats showed that the UK dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001. The tonnage of UK bombs dropped increased from 0 in March 2002 and 0.3 in April 2002 to between 7 and 14 tons per month in May–August, reaching a pre-war peak of 54.6 tons in September – before the U.S. Congress' 11 October authorization of the invasion. The 5 September attacks included a 100+ aircraft attack on the main air defense site in western Iraq. According to an editorial in New Statesman this was "Located at the furthest extreme of the southern no-fly zone, far away from the areas that needed to be patrolled to prevent attacks on the Shias, it was destroyed not because it was a threat to the patrols, but to allow allied special forces operating from Jordan to enter Iraq undetected." Tommy Franks, who commanded the invasion of Iraq, has since admitted that the bombing was designed to "degrade" Iraqi air defences in the same way as the air attacks that began the 1991 Gulf War. These "spikes of activity" were, in the words of then British Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, designed to 'put pressure on the Iraqi regime' or, as The Times reported, to "provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war". In this respect, as provocations designed to start a war, leaked British Foreign Office legal advice concluded that such attacks were illegal under international law. Another attempt at provoking the war was mentioned in a leaked memo from a meeting between George W. Bush and Tony Blair on 31 January 2003 at which Bush allegedly told Blair that "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach." On 17 March 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave the country, along with his sons Uday and Qusay, or face war. Invasion On the night of 17 March 2003, the majority of B and D squadron British 22nd SAS Regiment, designated as Task Force 14, crossed the border from Jordan to conduct a ground assault on a suspected chemical munitions site at a water-treatment plant in the city of al-Qa'im. It had been reported that the site might have been a SCUD missile launch site or a depot; an SAS officer was quoted by author Mark Nicol as saying "it was a location where missiles had been fired at Israel in the past, and a site of strategic importance for WMD material." The 60 members of D squadron, along with their 'Pinkie' Desert Patrol Vehicles (the last time the vehicles were used before their retirement), were flown 120 km (75 miles) into Iraq in 6 MH-47Ds in 3 waves. Following their insertion, D squadron established a patrol laager at a remote location outside al-Qa'im and awaited the arrival of B squadron, who had driven overland from Jordan. Their approach to the plant was compromised, and a firefight developed which ended in one 'pinkie' having to be abandoned and destroyed. Repeated attempts to assault the plant were halted, leading the SAS to call in an air strike which silenced the opposition. In the early morning of 19 March 2003, U.S. forces abandoned the plan for initial, non-nuclear decapitation strikes against 55 top Iraqi officials, in light of reports that Saddam Hussein was visiting his sons, Uday and Qusay, at Dora Farms, within the al-Dora farming community on the outskirts of Baghdad. At approximately 04:42 Baghdad time, two F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters from the 8th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron dropped four enhanced, satellite-guided 2,000-pound GBU-27 'Bunker Busters' on the compound. Complementing the aerial bombardment were nearly 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from several ships, including the Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Cowpens, credited with the first to strike, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers USS Donald Cook and USS Porter, as well as two submarines in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. One bomb missed the compound entirely, while the other three impacted the site on the other side of an electrified wall surrounding the main palace building, damaging it and destroying every other structure in the compound. Saddam Hussein was not present, nor were any members of the Iraqi leadership. Baghdad-area hospitals reported that the attack killed one civilian and injured fourteen others, including four men, nine women and one child. Later sources indicated that Saddam Hussein had not visited the farm since 1995, while others claimed that Saddam had been at the compound that morning, but had left before the strike, which Bush had ordered delayed until the 48-hour deadline had expired. On 19 March 2003 at 21:00, the first strike of the operation was carried out by members of the 160th SOAR: a flight of MH-60L DAPs (Direct Action Penetrators) and four 'Black Swarm' flights – each consisting of a pair of AH-6M Little Birds and a FLIR equipped MH-6M to identify targets for the AH-6s (each Black swarm flight was assigned a pair of A-10As) engaged Iraqi visual observation posts along the southern and western borders of Iraq. Within seven hours, more than 70 sites were destroyed, effectively depriving the Iraqi military of any early warning of the coming invasion. As the sites were eliminated, the first heliborne SOF teams launched from H-5 air base in Jordan, including vehicle-mounted patrols from the British and Australian components transported by the MH-47Ds of the 160th SOAR. Ground elements of Task Force Dagger, Task Force 20, Task Force 14, and Task Force 64 breached the sand berms along the Iraqi border with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait in the early morning hours and drove into Iraq. Unofficially, the British, Australians, and Task Force 20 had been in Iraq weeks prior. On 20 March 2003 at approximately 02:30 UTC, at 05:34 local time, explosions were heard in Baghdad. Special operations commandos from the CIA's Special Activities Division from the Northern Iraq Liaison Element infiltrated throughout Iraq and called in the early air strikes. At 03:16 UTC, or 10:16 pm EST, George W. Bush announced that he had ordered an attack against "selected targets of military importance" in Iraq. When this word was given, the troops on standby crossed the border into Iraq. Before the invasion, many observers had expected a longer campaign of aerial bombing before any ground action, taking as examples the 1991 Persian Gulf War or the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. In practice, U.S. plans envisioned simultaneous air and ground assaults to incapacitate the Iraqi forces quickly which resulted in the shock and awe military campaign attempting to bypass Iraqi military units and cities in most cases. The assumption was that superior mobility and coordination of coalition forces would allow them to attack the heart of the Iraqi command structure and destroy it in a short time, and that this would minimize civilian deaths and damage to infrastructure. It was expected that the elimination of the leadership would lead to the collapse of the Iraqi Forces and the government, and that much of the population would support the invaders once the government had been weakened. Occupation of cities and attacks on peripheral military units were viewed as undesirable distractions. Following Turkey's decision to deny any official use of its territory, the coalition was forced to modify the planned simultaneous attack from north and south. Special Operations forces from the CIA and U.S. Army managed to build and lead the Kurdish Peshmerga into an effective force and assault for the North. The primary bases for the invasion were in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf states. One result of this was that one of the divisions intended for the invasion was forced to relocate and was unable to take part in the invasion until well into the war. Many observers felt that the coalition devoted sufficient numbers of troops to the invasion, but too many were withdrawn after it ended, and that the failure to occupy cities put them at a major disadvantage in achieving security and order throughout the country when local support failed to meet expectations. The United States launched its invasion of Iraq as an effective operational continuation of the First Gulf War. Their main objectives were to destroy the Iraqi army, cripple their ability to fight, and dismantle the Iraqi government. However, the Iraqis immediately adapted and began using unconventional tactics. Already on March 22, just two days into the war, the Americans encountered their first taste of the insurgency tactics that would later define the war. Sgt. 1st Class Anthony Broadhead, a platoon sergeant in the Crazy Horse troop of the 3rd Infantry Division's cavalry unit, was in a tank heading towards a bridge in Samawah on the invasion route. He waved at a group of Iraqis, but instead of waving back, they began attacking the American tanks with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. Because these types of paramilitary forces were well-armed, but indistinguishable from civilians, they would come to pose a significant challenge for U.S. forces throughout Iraq War. The invasion itself was swift, leading to the collapse of the Iraqi government and the military of Iraq in about three weeks. The oil infrastructure of Iraq was rapidly seized and secured with limited damage in that time. Securing the oil infrastructure was considered of great importance. In the first Gulf War, while retreating from Kuwait, the Iraqi army had set many oil wells on fire and had dumped oil into the Gulf waters; this was to disguise troop movements and to distract coalition forces. Before the 2003 invasion, Iraqi forces had mined some 400 oil wells around Basra and the Al-Faw peninsula with explosives. Coalition troops launched an air and amphibious assault on the Al-Faw peninsula during the closing hours of 19 March to secure the oil fields there; the amphibious assault was supported by warships of the Royal Navy, Polish Navy, and Royal Australian Navy. In the meantime, Royal Air Force Tornados from 9 and 617 Squadrons attacked the radar defence systems protecting Baghdad, but lost a Tornado on 22 March along with the pilot and navigator (Flight Lieutenant Kevin Main and Flight Lieutenant Dave Williams), shot down by an American Patriot missile as they returned to their air base in Kuwait. On 1 April, an F-14 from USS Kitty Hawk crashed in southern Iraq reportedly due to engine failure, and a S-3B Viking plunged off the deck of the USS Constellation after a malfunction and an AV-8B Harrier jump jet went into the Gulf while it was trying to land on the USS Nassau. The British 3 Commando Brigade, with the United States Navy's Special Boat Team 22, Task Unit Two, as well as the United States Marine Corps' 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Polish Special Forces unit GROM attached, attacked the port of Umm Qasr. There they met with heavy resistance by Iraqi troops. A total of 14 coalition troops and 30–40 Iraqi troops were killed, and 450 Iraqis taken prisoner. The British Army's 16 Air Assault Brigade alongside elements of the Royal Air Force Regiment also secured the oil fields in southern Iraq in places like Rumaila while the Polish commandos captured offshore oil platforms near the port, preventing their destruction. Despite the rapid advance of the invasion forces, some 44 oil wells were destroyed and set ablaze by Iraqi explosives or by incidental fire. However, the wells were quickly capped and the fires put out, preventing the ecological damage and loss of oil production capacity that had occurred at the end of the Gulf War. In keeping with the rapid advance plan, the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division moved westward and then northward through the western desert toward Baghdad, while the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force moved along Highway 1 through the center of the country, and 1 (UK) Armoured Division moved northward through the eastern marshland. During the first week of the war, Iraqi forces fired a Scud missile at the American Battlefield Update Assessment center in Camp Doha, Kuwait. The missile was intercepted and shot down by a Patriot missile seconds before hitting the complex. Subsequently, two A-10 Warthogs attacked the missile launcher. Initially, the 1st Marine Division (United States) fought through the Rumaila oil fields, and moved north to Nasiriyah—a moderate-sized, Shi'ite-dominated city with important strategic significance as a major road junction and its proximity to nearby Tallil Airfield. It was also situated near a number of strategically important bridges over the Euphrates River. The city was defended by a mix of regular Iraqi army units, Ba'ath loyalists, and Fedayeen from both Iraq and abroad. The United States Army 3rd Infantry Division defeated Iraqi forces entrenched in and around the airfield and bypassed the city to the west. On 23 March, a convoy from the 3rd Infantry Division, including the female American soldiers Jessica Lynch, Shoshana Johnson, and Lori Piestewa, was ambushed after taking a wrong turn into the city. Eleven U.S. soldiers were killed, and seven, including Lynch and Johnson, were captured. Piestewa died of wounds shortly after capture, while the remaining five prisoners of war were later rescued. Piestewa, who was from Tuba City, Arizona, and an enrolled member of the Hopi Tribe, was believed to have been the first Native American woman killed in combat in a foreign war. On the same day, U.S. Marines from the 2nd Marine Division entered Nasiriyah in force, facing heavy resistance as they moved to secure two major bridges in the city. Several marines were killed during a firefight with Fedayeen in the urban fighting. At the Saddam Canal, another 18 marines were killed in heavy fighting with Iraqi soldiers. An Air Force A-10 was involved in a case of friendly fire that resulted in the death of six Marines when it accidentally attacked an American amphibious vehicle. Two other vehicles were destroyed when a barrage of RPG and small arms fire killed most of the Marines inside. A Marine from Marine Air Control Group 28 was killed by enemy fire, and two Marine engineers drowned in the Saddam Canal. The bridges were secured and the Second Marine division set up a perimeter around the city. On the evening of 24 March, the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, which was attached to Regimental Combat Team One (RCT-1), pushed through Nasiriyah and established a perimeter 15 km (9.3 miles) north of the city. Iraqi reinforcements from Kut launched several counterattacks. The Marines managed to repel them using indirect fire and close air support. The last Iraqi attack was beaten off at dawn. The battalion estimated that 200–300 Iraqi soldiers were killed, without a single U.S. casualty. Nasiriyah was declared secure, but attacks by Iraqi Fedayeen continued. These attacks were uncoordinated, and resulted in firefights that killed many Fedayeen. Because of Nasiriyah's strategic position as a road junction, significant gridlock occurred as U.S. forces moving north converged on the city's surrounding highways. With the Nasiriyah and Tallil Airfields secured, coalition forces gained an important logistical center in southern Iraq and established FOB/EAF Jalibah, some 10 miles (16 km) outside Nasiriyah. Additional troops and supplies were soon brought through this forward operating base. The 101st Airborne Division continued its attack north in support of the 3rd Infantry Division. By 28 March, a severe sandstorm slowed the coalition advance as the 3rd Infantry Division halted its northward drive halfway between Najaf and Karbala. Air operations by helicopters, poised to bring reinforcements from the 101st Airborne, were blocked for three days. There was particularly heavy fighting in and around the bridge near the town of Kufl. Another fierce battle was at Najaf, where U.S. airborne and armored units with British air support fought an intense battle with Iraqi Regulars, Republican Guard units, and paramilitary forces. It started with U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships setting out on a mission to attack Republican Guard armored units; while flying low the Apaches came under heavy anti-aircraft, small arms, and RPG fire which heavily damaged many helicopters and shot one down, frustrating the attack. They attacked again successfully on 26 March, this time after a pre-mission artillery barrage and with support from F/A-18 Hornet jets, with no gunships lost. The 1st Brigade Combat Team's air defense battery supported by a COLT (combat observation lasing team) and the Brigade Recon Troop moved in to secure the bridge at Al Kifl late on 24 March 03. When the ADA company was unable to secure the western bank of the bridge the commander called for reinforcements. Col. Grimsley order LTC Marcone Task Force 3-69 Armor to send a quick reaction force to support the ADA company. LTC Marcone sent B 3-7 Infantry to clear and secure the bridge. Bravo Company was made up of two infantry platoons with M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and one platoon of M1A2 Abrams tanks. Bravo 3-7 Infantry secured the bridge and fought for 36 hours through a sandstorm. During that time the soldiers fought against Iraqi Military and Fedayeen forces. After 36 hours B co 3-7 Infantry was relieved on 26 March. [citation needed] The 101st Airborne Division on 29 March, supported by a battalion from the 1st Armored Division, attacked Iraqi forces in the southern part of the city, near the Imam Ali Mosque and captured Najaf's airfield. Four Americans were killed by a suicide bomber. On 31 March the 101st made a reconnaissance-in-force into Najaf. On 1 April elements of the 70th Armored Regiment launched a "Thunder Run", an armored thrust through Najaf's city center, and, with air support, defeated the Iraqi forces after several days of heavy fighting. The city was secured by 4 April.[citation needed] The Iraqi port city of Umm Qasr was the first British obstacle. A joint Polish-British-American force ran into unexpectedly stiff resistance, and it took several days to clear the Iraqi forces out. Farther north, the British 7 Armoured Brigade ("The Desert Rats"), fought their way into Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, on 6 April, coming under constant attack by regulars and Fedayeen, while 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment cleared the 'old quarter' of the city that was inaccessible to vehicles. Entering Basra was achieved after two weeks of fierce fighting, including a tank battle when the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards destroyed 14 Iraqi tanks on 27 March. A few members of D Squadron, British SAS, were deployed to southern Iraq to support the coalition advance on Basra. The team conducted forward route reconnaissance and infiltrated the city and brought in strikes on the Ba'athist loyalist leadership. Elements of 1 (UK) Armoured Division began to advance north towards U.S. positions around Al Amarah on 9 April. Pre-existing electrical and water shortages continued throughout the conflict and looting began as Iraqi forces collapsed. While coalition forces began working with local Iraqi Police to enforce order, a joint team composed of Royal Engineers and the Royal Logistic Corps of the British Army rapidly set up and repaired dockyard facilities to allow humanitarian aid to begin to arrive from ships arriving in the port city of Umm Qasr. After a rapid initial advance, the first major pause occurred near Karbala. There, U.S. Army elements met resistance from Iraqi troops defending cities and key bridges along the Euphrates River. These forces threatened to interdict supply routes as American forces moved north. Eventually, troops from the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army secured the cities of Najaf and Karbala to prevent any Iraqi counterattacks on the 3rd Infantry Division's lines of communication as the division pressed its advance toward Baghdad. Eleven British soldiers were killed, while 395–515 Iraqi soldiers, irregulars, and Fedayeen were killed. The efforts of the British Army facilitated the re-establishment of the rail lines from the port to Baghdad. The Karbala Gap was a 20–25-mile wide strip of land with the Euphrates River to the east and Lake Razazah to the west. This strip of land was recognized by Iraqi commanders as a key approach to Baghdad, and was defended by some of the best units of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The Iraqi high command had originally positioned two Republican Guard divisions blocking the Karbala Gap. Here these forces suffered heavy coalition air attacks. However, the coalition had since the beginning of March been conducting a strategic deception operation to convince the Iraqis that the U.S. 4th Infantry Division would be mounting a major assault into northern Iraq from Turkey. B Squadron, Delta Force (known as "Wolverines"), accompanied by several Air Force Special Tactics teams, a Delta intelligence and Target Acquisition[clarification needed], several military working dog teams and two Iraqi-American interpreters, was the first US SOF unit to enter western Iraq, crossing the border from Arar, Saudi Arabia in 15 customized Pinzgauer 6x6 Special Operations Vehicles and several armed Toyota Hilux pick up trucks. As part of Task Force 20, their formal role was to conduct selected high-priority site exploitation on suspected chemical weapon facilities before heading for the Haditha Dam complex. Along the way, Delta supported the seizure of H-3 Air Base and also conducted numerous deception operations to confuse the Iraqis as to the disposition of coalition forces in the west. From the south, a week before the invasion began, two members of Special Boat Team 22's Delta Detachment and the Commanding Officer of the 539th Assault Squadron Royal Marine Commandos, were infiltrated into southern Iraq by Kuwait intelligence operatives to gather critical intelligence for the upcoming assault on the port of Um Qasr. On 18 March 2003, B and D Squadrons of the British 22nd SAS Regiment had now infiltrated Iraq in full strength (D Squadron by air and B Squadron by ground) along with 1 Squadron Australian SASR and headed for H-2 and H-3 Air Base. They set up observation posts and called in airstrikes that defeated the Iraqi defenders. The combined British and Australian Squadrons took H-2 virtually unopposed. H-3 was secured on 25 March with the assistance of members of Delta Force and by Green Beret ODAs from Bravo company, 1st Battalion 5th SFG; a company of Rangers and Royal Marines from 45 Commando flew from Jordan to the bases and the base was handed over to them. The SAS teams moved to the next objective – the intersection of the two main highways linking Baghdad with Syria and Jordan, where both squadrons were involved in conducting interdictions of fleeing Iraqi leadership targets heading for Syria. Previously, 16 (Air) Troop of D squadron conducted mounted reconnaissance of an Iraqi army facility near the Syrian border, followed by a harassing attack on the site, two other troops had conducted mobile ambushes on Iraqi units in the area, although they themselves were being hunted by a large Fedayeen Saddam unit mounted in technicals. In northern Iraq in early March, a small reconnaissance team from M Squadron of the British Special Boat Service mounted on Honda ATVs inserted into Iraq from Jordan. Its first mission was to conduct reconnaissance of an Iraqi air base at al-Sahara. The team was compromised by an anti-special forces Fedayeen unit and barely escaped thanks to a U.S. F-15E that flew air cover for the team and an RAF Chinook that extracted the team from out under the Fedayeen's "noses". A second larger SBS operation was launched by M Squadron in full strength in a mix of land rovers and ATVs into northern Iraq from H-2 air base, the objective was to locate, make contact and take the surrender of the Iraqi 5th Army Corps somewhere past Tikrit and to survey and mark viable temporary landing zones for follow-on forces. However the Squadron was compromised by a goat herder; the SBS drove for several days while unknown to them anti-special forces Fedayeen units followed them. At an overnight position near Mosul, the Fedayeen ambushed the Squadron with DShK heavy machine guns and RPGs, the SBS returned fire and began taking fire from a T-72, the Squadron scattered and escaped the well-constructed trap. A number of Land Rovers became bogged down in a nearby wadi, so they mined the vehicles and abandoned them – though several did not detonate and were captured and exhibited on Iraqi television. The SBS was now in three distinct groups: one with several operational Land Rovers was being pursued by the Iraqi hunter force, a second mainly equipped with ATVs was hunkered down and trying to arrange extraction, the third with just 2 operators on an ATV raced for the Syrian border. The first group tried to call in coalition strike aircraft but the aircraft could not identify friendly forces because the SBS were not equipped with infra-red strobes – although their vehicles did have Blue Force Tracker units, they eventually made it to an emergency rendezvous point and were extracted by an RAF Chinook. The second group was also extracted by an RAF Chinook and the third group made it to Syria and was held there until their release was negotiated, there were no SBS casualties. In the early hours of 21 March 2003, as part of Operation Viking Hammer, 64 Tomahawk cruise missiles struck the Ansar al-Islam camp and the surrounding sites, the terrorist group – numbering around 700 – had inhabited a valley near Halabja Iraqi Kurdistan, along with a small Kurdish splinter faction; they had prepared a number of defensive positions including anti-aircraft machine guns and maintained a facility, that US intelligence suspected, at which chemical and biological agents may have been developed and stored for future terrorist attacks. Viking Hammer was set to begin on 21 March, however, the ground component of the operation was set back several days owing to the issues around infiltrating most of the 3rd Battalion 10th SFG into Iraq. The Islamic Group of Kurdistan surrendered after having suffered 100 men killed in the 21 March strikes. On 28 March 2003, the ground element of Operation Viking Hammer was finally launched with a six-pronged advance, each prong was composed of several ODAs from 3rd Battalion, 10th SFG and upwards of 1,000 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. The main advance set off towards Sargat – the location of the suspected chemical and biological weapons site; the force was soon pinned down by DShK heavy machine-gun fire from the surrounding hills. A pair of US Navy F/A-18s responded to an urgent CAS request from the force and dropped two 500lb JDAMs on the Ansar al-Islam machine gun nests and strafed the positions with 20 mm cannon before departing due to being low on fuel. The advance began again only to be halted once more by fire from prepared DShK and PKM machine gun nests, Green Berets from ODA 081 deployed a Mk 19 grenade launcher from the back of a Toyota Tacoma and suppressed the gun positions allowing the Peshmerga to assault and wipe out the terrorists. After capturing the town of Gulp, the force continued onto the village of Sargat; the village was heavily defended by fortified fighting positions mounting DShKs and mortars along with several BM-21 Grad. Unable to call in airstrikes due to the close proximity of the Peshmerga, a Green Beret sergeant used a dismounted M2 HMG to suppress the entrenched terrorists, his actions allowed the Peshmerga to bring forward their own 82 mm Mortars and Grads which forced the Ansar al-Islam fighters to retreat. Task Force Viking advanced to secure the Daramar Gorge – which was surrounded by caves in the rock walls – the Peshmerga were again engaged by small arms fire and RPGs which it and the ODAs returned fire with heavy weapons, however, it became obvious that they could not advance any further without air support. To dislodge the terrorists, the Combat Controllers attached to the ODAs vectored in US Navy F/A-18s which dropped six 500 lb JDAMs that shut down any further resistance. During the night, four AC-130 gunships maintained the pressure on the retreating Ansar al-Islam terrorists as they pulled back toward the Iranian border; the next day, Task Force Viking seized the high ground and pushed down through the valley – surrounding and killing small pockets of remnants from Ansar al-Islam. With their objectives completed, the 3rd Battalion and their Peshmerga returned to the green line to assist the push on Kirkuk and Mosul. A specialist SSE team was brought in to document the find at Sargat, the team recovered traces of several chemicals including Ricin along with stocks of NBC protective suits, atropine injectors and Arabic manuals on chemical weapons and IED construction. Estimates of Ansar al-Islam dead number over 300, many of them foreign fighters, while only 22 Peshmerga fighters were killed. Also in the North, the 10th Special Forces Group (10th SFG) and CIA paramilitary officers from their Special Activities Division had the mission of aiding the Kurdish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, de facto rulers of Iraqi Kurdistan since 1991, and employing them against the 13 Iraqi Divisions located near Kirkuk and Mosul. Turkey had officially prohibited any coalition troops from using their bases or airspace, so lead elements of the 10th SFG had to make a detour infiltration; their flight was supposed to take four hours but instead took ten. On 22 March 2003, the majority of 2nd and 3rd Battalions 10th SFG, from Task Force Viking flew from their forward staging area in Constanta, Romania to a location near Irbil aboard six MC-130H Combat Talons. Several were engaged by Iraqi air defences on the flight into northern Iraq (one was sufficiently damaged enough that it was forced to make an emergency landing at Incirlik Air Base). The initial lift had deployed 19 Green Beret ODAs and four ODBs into Northern Iraq. Hours after the first of such flights, Turkey did allow the use of its air space and the rest of the 10th SFG infiltrated in. The preliminary mission was to destroy the base of the Kurdish terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, believed to be linked to al-Qaeda. Concurrent and follow-on missions involved attacking and fixing Iraqi forces in the north, thus preventing their deployment to the southern front and the main effort of the invasion. Eventually Task Force Viking would number 51 ODAs and ODBs alongside some 60,000 Kurdish Peshmerga militia of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). On 26 March 2003, the 173rd Airborne Brigade augmented the invasion's northern front by parachuting into northern Iraq onto Bashur Airfield, controlled at the time by elements of 10th SFG and Kurdish peshmerga. The fall of Kirkuk on 10 April 2003 to the 10th SFG, CIA Paramilitary Teams and Kurdish peshmerga precipitated the 173rd's planned assault, preventing the unit's involvement in combat against Iraqi forces during the invasion. Following the Battle of Haditha Dam, Delta Force handed the dam over to the Rangers and headed north to conduct ambushes along the highway above Tikrit, tying up Iraqi forces in the region and attempting to capture fleeing high-value targets trying to escape to Syria. On 2 April, Delta was engaged by half a dozen armed technicals from the same anti-special forces Fedayeen that had previously fought the SBS. Two Delta operators were wounded (one serious); the squadron requested an urgent aeromedical evacuation and immediate close-air support as a company of truck-borne Iraqi reinforcements arrived. Two MH-60K Blackhawks carrying a para jumper medical team and two MH-60L DAPs of the 160th SOAR responded and engaged the Iraqis, which allowed the Delta operators to move their casualties to an emergency HLZ and they were medevaced to H-1 escorted by a pair of A-10As, however Master Sergeant George Fernandez died. The DAPs stayed on station and continued to engage the Iraqis, destroying a truck carrying a mortar and several infantry squads, while Delta snipers killed Iraqi infantryman firing on the DAPs, another pair of A-10As arrived and dropped airburst 500 lb bombs within 20m of Delta positions and killed a large number of Iraqi infantry gathering in a wadi. The DAPs spotted several Iraqi units and engaged them until they were dangerously low on fuel. Task Force Viking launched an operation to seize the town of Ain Sifni. The town was strategically important because it straddles the main highway into Mosul. Once the town fell, it would be clear for the coalition to advance on Mosul. ODAs from the 3rd and 10th SFG called in airstrikes on the Iraqi garrisons in and around the town, causing many of the Iraqi conscripts to flee. By 5 April 2003, there appeared to be only two Iraqi platoons left in the town. On 6 April, ODAs 051, 055, and 056 assaulted the town – ODAs 055 and 056 provided fire support along with Peshmerga heavy weapons teams, while ODA 51 made the actual assault on the town. As ODA 51 cautiously advanced on the village, it came under intense fire – the two platoons of Iraqis turned out to be closer to battalion strength and equipped with heavy weapons like 82 mm mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and an artillery piece. After 4 hours of F/A-18 airstrikes and constant heavy weapons fire from ODA 055 and 056, the assault force entered Ain Sifni; soon afterward, Iraqi infantry counterattacked, supported by several mortars, attempting to retake the town, but it was beaten back by ODA 51 and the Kurds. On 6 April 2003, ODA 391 and ODA 392 from the 3rd SFG and ODA 044 from 10th SFG with about 150 Kurdish fighters were the main force involved in the Battle of Debecka Pass. On 9 April, nine ODAs from FOB 103 encircled Kirkuk after fierce fighting to capture the ridges overlooking the approaches to the city. The earlier capture of the nearby city of Tuz had largely broken the will of the Iraqi Army and only the Fedayeen remained in Kirkuk. The first ODA units entered the city the next day; a week later the 173rd Airborne took over responsibility for the city. After some minor skirmishes the Fedayeen fled. Staging out of MSS Grizzly, Delta mounted operations to interdict Ba'ath Party HVTs on Highway 1 (Highway 2 and 4 in western Iraq had been secured by British SAS and Australian SAS teams), on 9 April, the combined team seized an airfield near Tikrit. The successful occupation of Kirkuk came after approximately two weeks of fighting that included the Battle of the Green Line (the unofficial border of the Kurdish autonomous zone) and the subsequent Battle of Kani Domlan Ridge (the ridgeline running northwest to southeast of Kirkuk), the latter fought exclusively by 3rd Battalion, 10th SFG and Kurdish peshmerga against the Iraqi 1st Corps. The 173rd Brigade would eventually take responsibility for Kirkuk days later, becoming involved in the counterinsurgency fight and remain there until redeploying a year later. On 11 April an advanced element from FOB 102 numbering no more than 30 Green Berets advanced into Mosul. The advance had followed several days of heavy airstrikes on three Iraqi divisions defending Mosul. On 13 April, 3rd Battalion 3rd SFG and a battalion from the 10th Mountain Division were ordered to Mosul to relieve the 10th SFG and their Peshmerga allies. Further reinforcing operations in Northern Iraq, the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable), serving as Landing Force Sixth Fleet, deployed in April to Erbil and subsequently Mosul via Marine KC-130 flights. The 26 MEU (SOC) maintained security of the Mosul airfield and surrounding area until relief by the 101st Airborne Division. On 21 March, ODA 554 of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion 5th SFG crossed the border with the United States Marines to support the seizure of the Rumaylah oil fields which was later secured by UK forces; half the team later drove to the outskirts of Basra and successfully picked up four Iraqi oil industry technicians who had been recruited by the CIA to assist in safeguarding the oil fields from destruction. They later rejoined the other half of the team and fought roving bands of Fedayeen. The ODAs next mission was to work with a CIA-recruited Sheikh and assist British forces in identifying targets around Basra. The ODA soon established an informant network, they eventually assisted the British in rounding up some 170 Fedayeen in the city; they were eventually replaced by members of G Squadron 22nd SAS Regiment. The Battle of Haditha Dam occurred on 24 March 2003, Rangers from 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, conducted a combat parachute drop onto H-1 Air Base, securing the site as a staging area for operations in the west. Delta Force recce operators drove through Iraqi lines around the Haditha Dam on customised ATVs, marking targets for coalition airstrikes resulting in the eventual destruction of a large number of Iraqi armoured vehicles and anti aircraft systems. Delta's reconnaissance of the dam indicated that a larger force would be needed to seize it, so a request was made and approved for a second Delta squadron from Fort Bragg to be dispatched with a further Ranger battalion, along with M1A1 Abrams tanks from C Company, 2nd Battalion 70th Armor. C-17 flew the company from Tallil to H-1 and then to MSS (Mission Support Site) Grizzly – a desert strip established by Delta Force located between Haditha and Tikrit; C Squadron, Delta Force was flown directly to MSS Grizzly. On 1 April, C squadron, Delta Force and 3/75th Ranger Regiment conducted a night-time ground assault in their Pinzgauers and GMVs against the Haditha Dam complex. Three platoons of Rangers seized the dams' administrative buildings with little initial opposition, while a pair of AH-6M Six Guns orbited overhead. After daybreak, a Ranger sniper shot and killed 3 Iraqis carrying RPGs on the western side of the dam and Rangers on the eastern side engaged a truck carrying infantry, which led to an hour-long contract. South of the dam, another Ranger platoon was securing the dam's power station and electricity transformer against sabotage, another platoon was occupied establishing blocking positions on the main road into the dam complex. The blocking positions came under the sporadic mortar fire, resulting in the AH-6Ms flying multiple gun runs to silence the mortar positions, another mortar team, firing from a small island was engaged and silenced by a Ranger Javelin team. For five days, Iraqi forces continued to harass the Rangers at the dam, principally with episodic artillery and mortar fire along with several infantry counterattacks against the blocking positions; the HIMARS rocket system saw its first combat deployment at the dam – firing counter-battery missions, 3 Rangers were killed on 3 April by a VBIED at the blocking positions, the car was driven by a pregnant Iraqi woman acting distressed and asking for water. Rangers captured an Iraqi forward observer dressed as a civilian after sinking his kayak with .50cal fire, the observer had maps of the Rangers positions. Intelligence indicated that chemical and biological weapons stocks may have been located at a complex known as al Qadisiyah Research Centre along the shore of the al Qadisiyah reservoir among government and residential buildings, on the evening of 26 March, a DEVGRU assault element supported by B Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment assaulted the complex (codenamed Objective Beaver). While the first of four MH-60Ks inserted the Rangers into their blocking positions, it was engaged by small arms fire from a nearby building, an AH-6M spotted the muzzle flashes and fired a 2.75-inch rocket into the location silencing the small arms fire, the second MH-60K was also struck by small arms fire but its door gunner suppressed it. A-10As engaged nearby electricity transformers successfully blacking out the area, but it resulted in a series of explosions and a resulting fire at the stations that dramatically lit the sky – pinpointing the orbiting helicopters for enemy gunmen. Small arms fire increased as the final two MH-60Ks inserted their blocking teams, one Ranger was wounded, the two pairs of AH-6Ms and MH-60L DAPs supporting the mission continued to suppress targets as the four MH-47Es carrying the DEVGRU main assault force inserted under heavy enemy small arms fire while DEVGRU sniper teams aboard a pair of MH-6Ms engaged numerous gunmen and vehicles, one Nightstalker crew was wounded as the MH-47Es lifted off. The SEALs conducted a hasty SSE while the Ranger blocking positions received and returned fire, the AH-6Ms and the aerial snipers continued to engage enemy gunmen while the DAPs pushed further out to ensure no reinforcements approached – engaging and destroying numerous Fedayeen armed technicals. The SSE took longer than expected owing to the size and maze-like structure of the building, the mission completed after 45 minutes, later tests of the material recovered by DEVGRU showed no evidence of chemical or biological weapons at the Objective Beaver. Bravo and Charlie companies of 1st Battalion 5th SFG crossed the Kuwait border at H-Hour with ODA 531 using breaching demolition charges to clear a path through the sand berms. Charlie company's seven ODAs in 35 vehicles took the southeastern operation box of the western desert heading towards the towns of Nukyab, Habbariya and Mudyasis, ODA's 534 and 532 split off to head for the area surrounding Nukyab searching for mobile Scud-B TEL launch sites. ODA 532 also inserted a mobile weather station that provided planners with vital real time weather updates of the battle space. Bravo company set out for the central town of Ar Rutba and H-3 Air Base with six ODAs and a support ODB (Operational Detachment Bravo). ODAs 523 and 524 searched a suspected Scud-B storage facility while ODAs 521 and 525 were tasked with clearing several abandoned airfields, with no sign of Scud launchers, ODA 525 deployed a Special Reconnaissance team to conduct pattern of life surveillance on the town of Ar Rutba. A two-man team called in a pair of nearby F-16C Fighting Falcons to destroy an Iraqi Army radio direction-finding facility they had identified. A second reconnaissance team from ODA 525 deployed to cover the two highways leading to Ar Rutbah, however as the team was compromised by roving Bedouins who informed the Iraqi Army garrison at Ar Rutbah of the teams presence and location, armed Iraqi technicals crewed by the Fedayeen drove out to search for them, so the Green Berets mounted their GMVs, left their hide and found a position to ambush the Fedayeen, under the weight of fire the Fedayeen retreated. ODA 525 attempted to link up with the two-man reconnaissance team and extract it to safety but large numbers of Iraqi vehicles began driving out of the town to them, the ODAs called in immediate air support. While waiting, the reconnaissance team and Target Acquisition Marines fired on the Fedayeen leaders with their suppressed MK12 sniper rifle and contacted ODA 521 (who were clearing suspects east of the town) and they reinforced ODA 525. Within minutes, F-16Cs arrived and engaged the Fedayeen vehicles, another Fedayeen convoy attempted to outflank ODA 525 but ran into the guns of ODA 524, after 4 hours of constant and punishing airstrikes on the encircling Fedayeen, eight GMVs of ODA 521 and 525 managed to extract the exposed reconnaissance team under the cover of a B-1B strategic bomber, the vehicles withdrew to ODB 520s staging area south of Ar Rutbah. Over 100 Fedayeen fighters were killed and four armed technicals were destroyed. To the west ODA 523 reinforced ODA 524, but ran into a pair of armed technicals on the highway, both were destroyed by the GMVs, the Green Berets ceased fire when a civilian station wagon full of Iraqi children drove into the middle of the firefight. ODA 522 also identified two Fedayeen armed technicals proceeding down the highway toward ODA 523, they set an ambush for them, destroying the vehicles and killing 15 Fedayeen. The strategic intent of the US Army Special Forces ODAs had been to shut down the main supply routes and deny access around Ar Rutbah and the strategically important H-3 air base, which was defended by a battalion of Iraqi troops and significant numbers of mobile and static anti aircraft guns. On 24 March 2003, the surrounding ODAs supported by Task Force 7 (British Special Air Service) and Task Force 64 (Australian Special Air Service Regiment) called in constant 24 hours of precision airstrikes on H-3 using SOFLAM target designators, the aerial bombardment forced the Iraqi military vehicles to leave the base and headed towards Baghdad. ODA 521 over watching the highway they were travelling on ambushed the convoy destroying a truck mounted ZU-23, the convoy was thrown into disarray, a sandstorm prevented the ODA calling in airstrikes and the convoy scattered into the desert. Bravo company 5th SFG and the coalition SOF secured the airfield, finding a Roland surface-to-air missile system, around 80 assorted anti aircraft cannon guns including ZSU-23-4 Shilka, SA-7 grail handheld SAMs and an enormous amount of ammunition. H-3 was established as an Advanced Operating Base for Bravo company, with supplies delivered by C-130s and MH-47Es; ODA 581 vehicle checkpoint managed to capture the Iraqi general in command of H-3 as he was trying to escape in civilian attire, he was secured and flown by an unmarked CIA SAD Air Branch Little Bird on 28 March for further interrogation. Additionally, ODA 523 discovered what may have been chemical weapons samples in a laboratory on the grounds of H-3. Bravo company turned its attention to Ar Rutbah, signals intercepts by SOT-A (Support Operations Team – Alpha) and an informer network among the Bedouins as well as inhabitants of the town indicated that around 800 Fedayeen remained in the town; Fedayeen patrols from the town were engaged by surrounding Green Berets and captured. ODAs guided precision airstrikes on Fedayeen anti aircraft guns on the outskirts of the town and on top of the airstrikes, they also struck large groups of Fedayeen militia with Javelin missiles. On 9 April, nine ODAs secured the main roads into the town and commenced a day of near continuous final airstrikes from fix-wing aircraft and Apache helicopters. Civilians from the town approached the Green Berets asking them to stop the bombing, the Green Berets struck a deal with the civilians and they entered the town the next day. A B-52 and 2 F-16Cs flew show of force flights over the town as the Green Berets entered, the Fedayeen blended in with the population. Within days, the Green Berets helped the town to elect a mayor and set up markets, get sixty percent of the electricity grid working and repair water supplies. ODA 521 and 525 continued to operate in the region, stopping several trucks carrying foreign fighters, they disarmed them, took their details and warned them not to come back before sending them to Syria; in late May, the teams were replaced by the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment. The 2nd Battalion of the U.S. 5th Special Forces Group, United States Army Special Forces (Green Berets) conducted reconnaissance in the cities of Basra, Karbala and various other locations. After Sargat was taken, Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 10th SFG and CIA paramilitary officers along with their Kurdish allies pushed south towards Tikrit and the surrounding towns of Northern Iraq. Previously, during the Battle of the Green Line, Bravo Company, 3/10 with their Kurdish allies pushed back, destroyed, or routed the 13th Iraqi Infantry Division. The same company took Tikrit. Iraq was the largest deployment of the U.S. Special Forces since Vietnam. ODA 563 worked in support of the US Marines around Al Diwaniyah with local Sheikhs and their militias supported by AV-8Bs and F/A-18s; managing to capture the city of Qwam al Hamza. The following day ODA 563, their local Sheikh and his militia and a small Force Recon team captured the bridge leading to Diwaniyah and the militia attacked Iraqi positions over the bridge, forcing the Iraqi army and Fedayeen to flee toward Baghdad while being harassed by Marine Corps aircraft. Private first class Jessica Lynch of the 507th Maintenance Company was seriously injured and captured after her convoy was ambushed by Iraqi forces during the Battle of Nasiriyah. Initial intelligence that led to her rescue was provided by an informant who approached ODA 553 when it was working in Nasiriyah, the intelligence was passed on and Task Force 20 planned a rescue mission.[citation needed] Launching from the recently captured airfield at Tallil, the rescue force consisted of 290 Rangers from 1st and 2nd battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, around 60 SEALs from DEVGRU along with Pararescue Jumpers and Combat Controllers from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron conventional Marines from Task Force Tarawa then currently fighting through the city and aviators from the Army, Marines and Air Force.[citation needed] The plan called for Task Force Tarawa to conduct a deception mission by seizing the bridges across the Euphrates to draw attention away from the hospital Lynch was held at, an airstrike by US Marine AV-8 Harriers would be conducted against one of the bridges to confuse the opposition further and US Marine AH-1W Cobras were tasked to fly over the area to conceal the sound of incoming SOF helicopters. Air cover was provided by an AC-130 Spectre and a Marine EA-6B Prowler to jam any enemy SAM systems that might be present. With the deception mission underway, the SEAL and select Ranger elements would be inserted by MH-60K Blackhawks and four MH-6 Little Birds, supported by four AH-6 attack helicopters and two MH-60L DAPs, the other Rangers would be flown in by Marine CH-46s and CH-53 transport helicopters to establish a cordon around the hospital grounds. The main assault force of SEALs would arrive by a ground convoy of AGMS Pandur forearmed vehicles and GMV trucks while the hostage rescue element landed directly on the objective in MH-6 Little Birds. At 0100 on 1 April 2003, TF Tarawa commenced their deception mission, CIA elements cut the city's power as the helicopters approached their objective, the AH-6s led the way, behind them the MH-6s dropped off Task Force 20 sniper teams at strategic locations around and on the hospital.[citation needed] The DAPs and the AH-6s covered the MH-60Ks as they dropped off assault teams on the hospital roof and another by the front door, the ground assault convoy arrived and the assaulters raced inside and onto the second floor where Lynch was located.[citation needed] 13 minutes later, a MH-60K touched down near the hospital entrance with a team of PJs and SOAR medics on board and transported Lynch to Tallil where it rendezvoused with a standby medical flight and then onto Kuwait and finally the United States.[citation needed] The hospital was devoid of any Fedayeen,[citation needed] although evidence suggested they were using it as a base; the Ranger blocking teams experienced some sporadic direct fire, the SEALs and the Rangers eventually recovered the remains of eight members of Lynch's unit that had been killed or died of their wounds. Task Force 20 carried out one of the first successful U.S. prisoner of war rescue missions since World War II. Three weeks into the invasion, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, with the 1st Marine Division also present, moved into Baghdad. Units of the Iraqi Special Republican Guard led the defence of the city. The rest of the defenders were a mixture of Republican Guard units, regular army units, Fedayeen Saddam, and non-Iraqi Arab volunteers. Initial plans were for coalition units to surround the city and gradually move in, forcing Iraqi armor and ground units to cluster into a central pocket in the city, and then attack with air and artillery forces. This plan soon became unnecessary, as an initial engagement of armored units south of the city saw most of the Republican Guard's assets destroyed and routes in the southern outskirts of the city occupied. On 5 April, Task Force 1–64 Armor of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division executed a raid, later called the "Thunder Run", to test remaining Iraqi defenses, with 29 tanks and 14 Bradley armored fighting vehicles advancing to the Baghdad airport. They met significant resistance, but were successful in reaching the airport, and eventually secured it after heavy fighting. The next day, another brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division attacked downtown Baghdad and occupied one of the palaces of Saddam Hussein in fierce fighting. U.S. Marines also faced heavy shelling from Iraqi artillery as they attempted to cross a river bridge, but the river crossing was successful. The Iraqis managed to inflict some casualties on the U.S. forces near the airport from defensive positions but suffered severe casualties from air bombardment. Within hours of the palace seizure and with television coverage of this spreading through Iraq, U.S. forces ordered Iraqi forces within Baghdad to surrender, or the city would face a full-scale assault. Iraqi government officials had either disappeared or had conceded defeat. On 9 April 2003, Baghdad was formally occupied by coalition forces, and a statue of Saddam was toppled. Much of Baghdad remained unsecured, however, and fighting continued within the city and its outskirts well into the period of occupation. Saddam had vanished, and his whereabouts were unknown. On 10 April, a rumor emerged that Saddam Hussein and his top aides were in a mosque complex in the Al Az'Amiyah District of Baghdad. Three companies of Marines were sent to capture him and came under heavy fire from rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and assault rifles. One Marine was killed and 20 were wounded, but neither Saddam or any of his top aides were found. U.S. forces supported by mortars, artillery, and aircraft continued to attack Iraqi forces still loyal to Saddam Hussein and non-Iraqi Arab volunteers. U.S. aircraft flying in support were met with Iraqi anti-aircraft fire. On 12 April, by late afternoon, all fighting had ceased. A total of 34 American soldiers and 2,320 Iraqi fighters were killed. Many Iraqis celebrated the downfall of Saddam by vandalizing the many portraits and statues of him together with other pieces of his cult of personality. One widely publicized event was the dramatic toppling of a large statue of Saddam in Baghdad's Firdos Square. This attracted considerable media coverage at the time. As the British Daily Mirror reported, For an oppressed people this final act in the fading daylight, the wrenching down of this ghastly symbol of the regime, is their Berlin Wall moment. Big Moustache has had his day." As Staff Sergeant Brian Plesich reported in On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, The Marine Corps colonel in the area saw the Saddam statue as a target of opportunity and decided that the statue must come down. Since we were right there, we chimed in with some loudspeaker support to let the Iraqis know what it was we were attempting to do... Somehow along the way, somebody had gotten the idea to put a bunch of Iraqi kids onto the wrecker that was to pull the statue down. While the wrecker was pulling the statue down, there were Iraqi children crawling all over it. Finally they brought the statue down. The fall of Baghdad saw the outbreak of regional, sectarian violence throughout the country, as Iraqi tribes and cities began to fight each other over old grudges. The Iraqi cities of Al-Kut and Nasiriyah launched attacks on each other immediately following the fall of Baghdad to establish dominance in the new country, and the U.S.-led coalition quickly found themselves embroiled in a potential civil war. U.S.-led coalition forces ordered the cities to cease hostilities immediately, explaining that Baghdad would remain the capital of the new Iraqi government. Nasiriyah responded favorably and quickly backed down; however, Al-Kut placed snipers on the main roadways into town, with orders that invading forces were not to enter the city. After several minor skirmishes, the snipers were removed, but tensions and violence between regional, city, tribal, and familial groups continued. U.S. General Tommy Franks assumed control of Iraq as the supreme commander of the coalition occupation forces. Shortly after the sudden collapse of the defense of Baghdad, rumors were circulating in Iraq and elsewhere that there had been a deal struck (a "safqua") wherein the U.S.-led coalition had bribed key members of the Iraqi military elite and/or the Ba'ath party itself to stand down. In May 2003, General Franks retired, and confirmed in an interview with Defense Week that the U.S.-led coalition had paid Iraqi military leaders to defect. The extent of the defections and their effect on the war are unclear. U.S.-led coalition troops promptly began searching for the key members of Saddam Hussein's government. These individuals were identified by a variety of means, most famously through sets of most-wanted Iraqi playing cards. Later during the military occupation period after the invasion, on 22 July 2003 during a raid by the U.S. 101st Airborne Division and men from Task Force 20, Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, and one of his grandsons were killed in a massive fire-fight. Saddam Hussein himself was captured on 13 December 2003 by the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division and members of Task Force 121 during Operation Red Dawn. U.S. special forces had also been involved in the extreme south of Iraq, attempting to occupy key roads to Syria and air bases. In one case two armored platoons were used to convince Iraqi leadership that an entire armored battalion was entrenched in the west of Iraq.[citation needed] On 15 April, U.S. forces took control of Tikrit, the last major outpost in central Iraq, with an attack led by the Marines' Task Force Tripoli. About a week later the Marines were relieved in place by the Army's 4th Infantry Division. Coalition aircraft flew over 41,000 sorties, of which over 9,000 were tanker sorties. Aftermath of the invasion After the invasion, several factors contributed to the destabilization of Iraq. On 23 May, L. Paul Bremer issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, dissolving the Iraqi Army and other entities of the former Ba'athist state. Ba'athists were excluded from the newly formed Iraqi government. The first postwar election was won by the United Iraqi Alliance, an electoral coalition composed of mainly Shi’ite groups, which proceeded to ostracize Sunnis. Shia militia groups pushed Sunnis out of several areas, even emptying entire Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad during the 2007 troop surge. The US military established prison camps where disgruntled Iraqis, former Ba'athists and Jihadist met. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, future leader of the Islamic State, joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq while detained at Camp Bucca in 2004. Future leader of al-Nusra Front and Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham; and later President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, which he went under the name of Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who was a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was also held there and released in 2008. All these factors contributed to Iraq's sectarian violence and the formation and spread of terrorist organizations. On 1 May 2003, Bush gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in the Iraq war. He landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, in a Lockheed S-3 Viking and delivered his speech there. Bush's landing was criticized by opponents as an unnecessarily theatrical and expensive stunt. Clearly visible in the background was a banner stating "Mission Accomplished." The banner, made by White House staff and supplied by request of the United States Navy, was criticized as premature. The White House subsequently released a statement that the sign and Bush's visit referred to the initial invasion of Iraq and disputing the charge of theatrics. The speech itself noted: "We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous." Post-invasion Iraq was marked by a long and violent conflict between U.S.-led forces and Iraqi insurgents that entailed a very high number of casualties. Coalition and Allied contingent involvement Members of the coalition included Australia: 2,000 invasion, Poland: 200 invasion—2,500 peak, Spain: 1,300 invasion, United Kingdom: 46,000 invasion, United States: 150,000 to 250,000 invasion. Other members of the coalition were Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Palau, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Singapore, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Tonga, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. BBC News said 15 other countries were "providing assistance, such as over-flight rights, but which do not want to declare support." Australia contributed approximately 2,000 Australian Defence Force personnel, including a special forces task group, three warships and 14 F/A-18 Hornet aircraft. On 16 April 2003, Australian special operations forces captured the undefended Al Asad air base west of Baghdad. The base would later become the second largest coalition facility post-invasion. The Battle of Umm Qasr was the first military confrontation in the Iraq War, with its objective the capture of the port. Polish GROM troops supported the amphibious assault on Umm Qasr with the British 3 Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines, and the US 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit. After the waterway was de-mined by a Detachment from HM-14 and Naval Special Clearance Team ONE of the U.S. Navy and reopened, Umm Qasr played an important role in the shipment of humanitarian supplies to Iraqi civilians. British troops, in what was codenamed Operation (or Op) TELIC participated in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The 1st Armoured Division was deployed to the Persian Gulf and commanded British forces in the area, securing areas in southern Iraq, including the city of Basra during the invasion. A total of 46,000 troops of all the British services were committed to the operation at its start, including some 5,000 Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary sailors and 4,000 Royal Marines, 26,000 British Army soldiers, and 8,100 Royal Air Force airmen. The British special forces deployment was codenamed Operation Row and were known as Task Force 7 under Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-West (Task Force Dagger). Summary of the invasion The U.S.-led coalition forces toppled the government and captured the key cities of a large nation in only 26 days. The invasion did require a large army build-up like the 1991 Gulf War, but many did not see combat and many were withdrawn after the invasion ended. This proved to be short-sighted, however, due to the requirement for a much larger force to combat the irregular Iraqi forces in the Iraqi insurgency. General Eric Shinseki, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, recommended "several hundred thousand" troops be used to maintain post-war order, but then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—and especially his deputy, civilian Paul Wolfowitz—strongly disagreed. General Abizaid later said General Shinseki had been right. The Iraqi army, armed mainly with older Soviet and Eastern European built equipment, was overall ill-equipped in comparison to the American and British forces. Attacks on U.S. supply routes by Fedayeen militiamen were repulsed. The Iraqis' artillery proved largely ineffective, and they were unable to mobilize their air force to attempt a defense. The Iraqi T-72 tanks, the most powerful armored vehicles in the Iraqi army, were both outdated and ill-maintained, and when they were mobilized they were rapidly destroyed, thanks in part to the coalition air supremacy. The U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps and Naval Aviation, and British Royal Air Force operated with impunity throughout the country, pinpointing heavily defended resistance targets and destroying them before ground troops arrived. The main battle tanks of the U.S. and UK forces, the U.S. M1 Abrams and British Challenger 2, functioned well in the rapid advance across the country. Despite the many RPG attacks by irregular Iraqi forces, few U.S. and UK tanks were lost, and no tank crew-members were killed by hostile fire, although nearly 40 M1 Abrams were damaged in the attacks. The only tank loss sustained by the British Army was a Challenger 2 of the Queen's Royal Lancers that was hit by another Challenger 2, killing two crew members. The Iraqi army suffered from poor morale, even among the elite Republican Guard. Entire units disbanded into the crowds upon the approach of invading troops, or actually sought out U.S. and UK forces to surrender to. Many Iraqi commanding officers were bribed by the CIA or coerced into surrendering. The leadership of the Iraqi army was incompetent – reports state that Qusay Hussein, charged with the defense of Baghdad, dramatically shifted the positions of the two main divisions protecting Baghdad several times in the days before the arrival of U.S. forces, and as a result the units were confused, and further demoralized when U.S. forces attacked. The invasion force did not see the entire Iraqi military thrown against it; U.S. and UK units had orders to move to and seize objective target points rather than seek to engage Iraqi units. This resulted in most regular Iraqi military units emerging from the war without having been engaged, and fully intact, especially in southern Iraq. It is assumed that most units disintegrated to return to their homes. According to a declassified Pentagon report, "The largest contributing factor to the complete defeat of Iraq's military forces was the continued interference by Saddam." The report, designed to help U.S. officials understand in hindsight how Saddam and his military commanders prepared for and fought the invasion, paints a picture of an Iraqi government blind to the threat it faced, hampered by Saddam's inept military leadership and deceived by its own propaganda and inability to believe an invasion was imminent without further Iraqi provocation. According to the BBC, the report portrays Saddam Hussein as "chronically out of touch with reality – preoccupied with the prevention of domestic unrest and with the threat posed by Iran." Casualties Estimates on the number of casualties during the invasion in Iraq vary widely. Estimates on civilian casualties are more variable than those for military personnel. According to Iraq Body Count, a group that relies on press reports, NGO-based reports and official figures to measure civilian casualties, approximately 7,500 civilians were killed during the invasion phase. The Project on Defense Alternatives study estimated that 3,200–4,300 civilians died during the invasion. Fedayeen Saddam militia, Republican Guard and Iraqi security forces were reported to have executed Iraqi soldiers who tried to surrender on multiple occasions, as well as threatening the families of those who refused to fight. One such incident was directly observed during the Battle of Debecka Pass. Many incidents of Fedayeen fighters using human shields were reported from various towns in Iraq. Iraqi Republican Guard units were also reported to be using human shields. Some reports indicate that the Fedayeen used ambulances to deliver messages and transport fighters into combat. On 31 March, Fedayeen in a Red Crescent-marked ambulance attacked American soldiers outside Nasiriyah, wounding three. During the Battle of Basra, British forces of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) reported that on 28 March, Fedayeen forces opened fire on thousands of civilian refugees fleeing the city. After the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company during the Battle of Nasiriyah on 23 March, the bodies of several U.S. soldiers who had been killed in the ambush were shown on Iraqi television. Some of these soldiers had visible gunshot wounds to the head, leading to speculation that they had been executed. Except for Sgt. Donald Walters, no evidence has since surfaced to support this scenario and it is generally accepted that the soldiers were killed in action. Five live prisoners of war were also interviewed on the air, a violation of the Third Geneva Convention. Sergeant Walters was initially reported to have been killed in the ambush after killing several Fedayeen before running out of ammunition. However, an eyewitness later reported that he had seen Walters being guarded by several Fedayeen in front of a building. Forensics work later found Walters' blood in front of the building and blood spatter suggesting he died from two gunshot wounds to the back at close range. This led the Army to conclude that Walters had been executed after being captured, and he was posthumously awarded the Prisoner of War Medal in 2004. It was alleged in the authorized biography of Pfc. Jessica Lynch that she was raped by her captors after her capture, based on medical reports and the pattern of her injuries, though this is not supported by Ms Lynch. Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, who later helped American forces rescue Lynch, stated that he saw an Iraqi Colonel slap Lynch while she was in her hospital bed. The staff at the hospital where Lynch was held later denied both stories, saying that Lynch was well cared for. While Lynch suffers from amnesia due to her injuries, Lynch herself has denied any mistreatment while in captivity. Also on 23 March, a British Army engineering unit made a wrong turn near the town of Az Zubayr, which was still held by Iraqi forces. The unit was ambushed and Sapper Luke Allsopp and Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth became separated from the rest. Both were captured and executed by Iraqi irregular forces. In 2006, a video of Allsopp lying on the ground surrounded by Iraqi irregular forces was discovered. During the Battle of Nasiriyah, Iraqi irregulars feigned surrender to approach an American unit securing a bridge. After getting close to the soldiers, the Iraqis suddenly opened fire, killing 10 soldiers and wounding 40. In response, American forces reinforced security procedures for dealing with prisoners of war. Marine Sergeant Fernando Padilla-Ramirez was reported missing from his supply unit after an ambush north of Nasiriyah on 28 March. His body was later dragged through the streets of Ash-Shatrah and hung in the town square, and later taken down and buried by sympathetic locals. The corpse was discovered by U.S. forces on 10 April. On 20 March 2023, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, Amnesty International released a report calling for accountability and reparations for human rights violations perpetrated by the US-led coalition during the invasion and subsequent occupation between 2003 and 2011. They cited violations of international humanitarian law including secret prisons, torture and other cruel treatment of detainees, indiscriminate attacks that killed and injured civilians, and forced disappearances. The report stated that both President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had publicly confessed to involvement in secret detentions and faced no criminal accountability. The report also noted that despite the conclusions of the International Criminal Court in 2020 that British forces had committed war crimes in Iraq, including deliberate killings, rape and torture, no senior British officials have been held criminally accountable. Security, looting and war damage Massive looting took place in the days following the 2003 invasion. According to U.S. officials, the "reality of the situation on the ground" was that hospitals, water plants, and ministries with vital intelligence needed security more than other sites. There were only enough U.S. troops on the ground to guard a certain number of the many sites that ideally needed protection, and so, apparently, some "hard choices" were made. It was reported that The Iraq Museum was among the looted sites. The director at the time was archaeologist Nawala Al-Mutawalli. The FBI was soon called into Iraq to track down the stolen items. It was found that the initial allegations of looting of substantial portions of the collection were heavily exaggerated. Initial reports asserted a near-total looting of the museum, estimated at upwards of 170,000 inventory lots, or about 501,000 pieces. The more recent estimate places the number of stolen pieces at around 15,000, and about 10,000 of them probably were taken in an "inside job" before U.S. troops arrived, according to Bogdanos. Over 5,000 looted items have since been recovered. An assertion that U.S. forces did not guard the museum because they were guarding the Ministry of Oil and Ministry of Interior is disputed by investigator Colonel Matthew Bogdanos in his 2005 book Thieves of Baghdad. Bogdanos notes that the Ministry of Oil building was bombed, but the museum complex, which took some fire, was not bombed. He also writes that Saddam Hussein's troops set up sniper's nests inside and on top of the museum, and nevertheless U.S. Marines and soldiers stayed close enough to prevent wholesale looting. "Two great libraries, with priceless ancient collections"—the Awqaf Library (Library of the Ministry of Religious Endowments) and the National Library of Iraq and National Centre for Archives (the House of Wisdom)—"have been burned," The Boston Globe reported in 2003, adding that the libraries at the University of Mosul and University of Basra had been looted. András Riedlmayer, a specialist in Islamic architecture at Harvard University, said the U.S. State Department had asked him for advice before the invasion, and that "everybody warned them that the greatest danger was not from Tomahawk missiles but from looting." Noting that Iraq had been unified only in 1922 and that relatively little attention had been paid to this local history, Keith D. Waterpaugh, a specialist in Ottoman history, said, "Imagine if we could not go back and read The New York Times from 1922 on. If we are going to help the Iraqi people build a new nation, we don't do it by letting their past be destroyed." More serious for the post-war state of Iraq was the looting of cached weaponry and ordnance which fueled the subsequent insurgency. As many as 250,000 tons of explosives were unaccounted for by October 2004. Disputes within the US Defense Department led to delays in the post-invasion assessment and protection of Iraqi nuclear facilities. Tuwaitha, the Iraqi site most scrutinized by UN inspectors since 1991, was left unguarded and was looted. Zainab Bahrani, professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, reported that a helicopter landing pad was constructed in the heart of the ancient city of Babylon, and "removed layers of archeological earth from the site. The daily flights of the helicopters rattle the ancient walls and the winds created by their rotors blast sand against the fragile bricks. When my colleague at the site, Maryam Moussa, and I asked military personnel in charge that the helipad be shut down, the response was that it had to remain open for security reasons, for the safety of the troops." Bahrani also reported that in the summer of 2004, "the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters." Electrical power is scarce in post-war Iraq, Bahrani reported, and some fragile artifacts, including the Ottoman Archive, would not survive the loss of refrigeration. Media coverage The U.S. invasion of Iraq was the most widely and closely reported war in military history.[needs update?] Television network coverage was largely pro-war and viewers were six times more likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war. The New York Times ran a number of articles describing Saddam Hussein's attempts to build weapons of mass destruction. The 8 September 2002 article titled "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts" would be discredited, leading The New York Times to issue a public statement admitting it was not as rigorous as it should have been. At the start of the war in March 2003, as many as 775 reporters and photographers were traveling as embedded journalists. These reporters signed contracts with the military that limited what they were allowed to report on. When asked why the military decided to embed journalists with the troops, Lt. Col. Rick Long of the U.S. Marine Corps replied, "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment." In 2003, a study released by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting stated the network news disproportionately focused on pro-war sources and left out many anti-war sources. According to the study, 64% of total sources supported the Iraq War while total anti-war sources made up 10% of the media (only 3% of US sources were anti-war). The study looked only at 6 American news networks after 20 March for three weeks. The study stated that "viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1." A September 2003 poll revealed that seventy percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of 9/11. 80% of Fox News viewers were found to hold at least one such belief about the invasion, compared to 23% of PBS viewers. Ted Turner, founder of CNN, charged that Rupert Murdoch was using Fox News to advocate an invasion. Critics have argued that this statistic is indicative of misleading coverage by the U.S. media since viewers in other countries were less likely to have these beliefs. A post-2008 election poll by FactCheck.org found that 48% of Americans believe Saddam played a role in the 9/11 attacks, the group concluded that "voters, once deceived, tend to stay that way despite all evidence." Independent media also played a prominent role in covering the invasion. The Indymedia network, among many other independent networks including many journalists from the invading countries, provided reports on the Iraq war. In the United States Democracy Now, hosted by Amy Goodman has been critical of the reasons for the 2003 invasion and the alleged crimes committed by the U.S. authorities in Iraq. The Israeli Military Censor have released gag orders to Fresh and Rotter news platforms preventing them releasing any information about events and action related to the invasion. On the other side, among media not opposing to the invasion, The Economist stated in an article on the matter that "the normal diplomatic tools—sanctions, persuasion, pressure, UN resolutions—have all been tried, during 12 deadly but failed years" then giving a mild conditional support to the war stating that "if Mr Hussein refuses to disarm, it would be right to go to war". Australian war artist George Gittoes collected independent interviews with soldiers while producing his documentary Soundtrack To War. The war in Iraq provided the first time in history that military on the front lines were able to provide direct, uncensored reportage themselves, thanks to blogging software and the reach of the internet. Dozens of such reporting sites, known as soldier blogs or milblogs, were started during the war. These blogs were more often than not largely pro-war and stated various reasons why the soldiers and Marines felt they were doing the right thing. International coverage of the war differed from coverage in the U.S. in a number of ways. The Arab-language news channel Al Jazeera and the German satellite channel Deutsche Welle featured almost twice as much information on the political background of the war. Al Jazeera also showed scenes of civilian casualties and insurgent attacks rarely seen in the U.S. media. Criticism Opponents of the military intervention in Iraq have attacked the decision to invade Iraq along a number of lines, including the human cost of war, calling into question the evidence used to justify the war, arguing for continued diplomacy, challenging the war's legality, suggesting that the U.S. had other more pressing security priorities, (i.e., Afghanistan and North Korea) and predicting that the war would destabilize the Middle East region. In 2010, an independent commission of inquiry set up by the government of the Netherlands, maintained that UN resolution 1441 "cannot reasonably be interpreted (as the Dutch government did) as authorising individual member states to use military force to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council's resolutions." Accordingly, the Dutch commission concluded that the invasion violated international law. The central U.S. justification for launching the war was that Saddam Hussein's alleged development of nuclear and biological weapons and purported ties to al-Qaeda made his regime a "grave and growing" threat to the United States and the world community. During the lead-up to the war and the aftermath of the invasion, critics cast doubt on the evidence supporting this rationale. Concerning Iraq's weapons programs, prominent critics included Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector who argued in 2002 that inspections had eliminated the nuclear and chemical weapons programs, and that evidence of their reconstitution would "have been eminently detectable by intelligence services ..." Although it is popularly believed[citation needed] that Saddam Hussein had forced the IAEA weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, they were withdrawn at the request of the US before Operation Desert Fox, the 1998 American bombing campaign. After the build-up of U.S. troops in neighboring states, Saddam welcomed them back and promised complete cooperation with their demands. Experienced IAEA inspection teams were already back in Iraq and had made some interim reports on its search for various forms of WMD. American diplomat Joseph C. Wilson investigated the contention that Iraq had sought uranium for nuclear weapons in Niger and reported that the contention had no substance. Similarly, alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda were called into question during the lead-up to the war, and were discredited by a 21 October 2004 report from U.S. Senator Carl Levin, which was later corroborated by an April 2006 report from the Defense Department's inspector general. These reports further alleged that Bush Administration officials, particularly former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, manipulated evidence to support links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. During his 2003–2004 interrogation, Saddam asserted that the majority of Iraq's WMD stockpiles had been destroyed in the 1990s by UN inspectors, and the remainder were destroyed unilaterally by Iraq; the illusion of maintaining a WMD program and WMDs was maintained as a deterrent against possible Iranian invasion. An FBI agent who interrogated Saddam during this time also believes that while Iraq may not have possessed WMDs after the 1990s, Saddam likely intended to restart the WMD program if given the opportunity to do so. One of the main questions in the lead-up to the war was whether the United Nations Security Council would authorize military intervention in Iraq. It became increasingly clear that U.N. authorization would require significant further weapons inspections. Many criticized their effort as unwise, immoral, and illegal. Robin Cook, then the leader of the United Kingdom House of Commons and a former foreign secretary, resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet in protest over the UK's decision to invade without the authorization of a U.N. resolution. Cook said at the time that: "In principle I believe it is wrong to embark on military action without broad international support. In practice I believe it is against Britain's interests to create a precedent for unilateral military action." In addition, senior government legal advisor Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned, stating her legal opinion that an invasion would be illegal.[citation needed] United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in an interview with the BBC in September 2004, "[F]rom our point of view and from the Charter point of view [the war] was illegal." This drew immediate criticism from the United States and was immediately played down. His annual report to the General Assembly for 2003 included no more than the statement: "Following the end of major hostilities which resulted in the occupation of Iraq..." A similar report from the Security Council was similarly terse in its reference to the event: "Following the cessation of hostilities in Iraq in April 2003 ..." The United Nations Security Council has passed nearly 60 resolutions on Iraq and Kuwait since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The most relevant to this issue is Resolution 678, passed on 29 November 1990. It authorizes "member states co-operating with the Government of Kuwait... to use all necessary means" to (1) implement Security Council Resolution 660 and other resolutions calling for the end of Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwaiti territory and (2) "restore international peace and security in the area." Criticisms about the evidence used to justify the war notwithstanding, many opponents of military intervention objected, saying that a diplomatic solution would be preferable, and that war should be reserved as a truly last resort. This position was exemplified by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who responded to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 presentation to the U.N Security Council by saying that: "Given the choice between military intervention and an inspections regime that is inadequate because of a failure to cooperate on Iraq's part, we must choose the decisive reinforcement of the means of inspections." In response to Donald Rumsfeld's reference to European countries that did not support the invasion of Iraq as 'Old Europe', Dominique de Villepin ended his speech with words that would later come to embody the French-German political, economic, and military alliance throughout the beginning of the 21st century: "This message comes to you today from an old country, France, from a continent like mine, Europe, that has known wars, occupation and barbarity. (...) Faithful to its values, it wishes resolutely to act with all the members of the international community. It believes in our ability to build together a better world." The direct opposition between diplomatic solution and military intervention involving France and the United States which was personified by Chirac versus Bush and later Powell versus de Villepin, became a milestone in the Franco-American relations. Anti-French propaganda exploiting the classic Francophobic clichés immediately ensued in the United States and the United Kingdom. A call for a boycott on French wine was launched in the United States and the New York Post covered on the 1944 "Sacrifice" of the GIs that France had forgotten. It was followed a week later, on 20 February, by the British newspaper The Sun publishing a special issue entitled "Chirac is a worm" and including ad hominem attacks such as "Jacques Chirac has become the shame of Europe". Actually both newspapers expressed the opinion of their owner, U.S. billionaire Rupert Murdoch, a military intervention supporter and a George W. Bush partisan as argued by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian published on 17 February. Both supporters and opponents of the Iraq War widely viewed it within the context of a post–11 September world, where the U.S. has sought to make terrorism the defining international security paradigm. Bush often described the Iraq War as a "central front in the war on terror". Some critics of the war, particularly within the U.S. military community, argued pointedly against the conflation of Iraq and the war on terror, and criticized Bush for losing focus on the more important objective of fighting al-Qaeda. As Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon's former top operations officer, wrote in a 2006 Time article, "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat—al-Qaeda." Critics within this vein have further argued that containment would have been an effective strategy for the Saddam government, and that the top U.S. priorities in the Middle East should be encouraging a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, working for the moderation of Iran, and solidifying gains made in Afghanistan and Central Asia. In an October 2002 speech, Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East and State Department's envoy to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, called Iraq "maybe six or seven," in terms of U.S. Middle East priorities, adding that "the affordability line may be drawn around five." However, while commander of CENTCOM, Zinni held a very different opinion concerning the threat posed by Iraq. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2000, Zinni said: "Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf region. This is primarily due to its large conventional military force, pursuit of WMD, oppressive treatment of Iraqi citizens, refusal to comply with United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCR), persistent threats to enforcement of the No Fly Zones (NFZ), and continued efforts to violate UN Security Council sanctions through oil smuggling." However, it is important to note that Zinni specifically referred to "the Persian Gulf region" in his Senate testimony, which is a significantly smaller region of the world than the "Middle East", which he referred to in 2007. Besides arguing that Iraq was not the top strategic priority in the war on terrorism or in the Middle East, critics of the war also suggested that it could potentially destabilize the surrounding region. Prominent among such critics was Brent Scowcroft, who served as National Security Advisor to George H. W. Bush. In a 15 August 2002 The Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "Don't attack Saddam", Scowcroft wrote that, "Possibly the most dire consequences would be the effect in the region ... there would be an explosion of outrage against us ... the results could well destabilize Arab regimes", and, "could even swell the ranks of the terrorists." In an October 2015 CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for his 'mistakes' over Iraq War and admitted there were 'elements of truth' to the view that the invasion helped promote the rise of ISIS. In the opinion of Hayder al-Khoei, Iraq was already "destined for chaos" before 2003. Public opinion In a March 2003 Gallup poll, the day after the invasion, 76 percent of Americans supported the military action against Iraq. In a March 2003 YouGov poll, 54 percent of Britons had approved of military action against Iraq. By July 2007, opposition to the Iraq war had increased to 62 percent among Americans in a USA Today\Gallup poll. On the tenth anniversary of the invasion, in March 2013, a Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed believed the Iraq War was a mistake. On the 20th anniversary of the invasion, in March 2023, an Axios/Ipsos poll found that 61 percent of Americans surveyed stated that the U.S did not make the right decision by invading Iraq. Related phrases This campaign featured a variety of new terminology, much of it initially coined by the U.S. government or military. The military official name for the invasion was Operation Iraqi Freedom. Also notable was the usage "death squads" to refer to Fedayeen paramilitary forces. Members of the Saddam Hussein government were called by disparaging nicknames – e.g., "Chemical Ali" (Ali Hassan al-Majid), "Baghdad Bob" or "Comical Ali" (Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf), and "Mrs. Anthrax" or "Chemical Sally" (Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash). Terminology introduced or popularized during the war include: Many slogans and terms coined came to be used by Bush's political opponents, or those opposed to the war. For example, in April 2003 John Kerry, the Democratic candidate in the presidential election, said at a campaign rally: "What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States." George W. Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer talked about "Operation Iraqi liberation" in a 2003 press briefing, and "Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)" was also used by David Rovics, a popular folk protest singer. See also Intrigues: Lists: General: Similar events: Notes References Works cited Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization] | [TOKENS: 5894] |
Contents World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. Established on 1 January 1995, pursuant to the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement, it succeeded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1948. As the world's largest international economic organization, the WTO has 166 members, representing over 98% of global trade and global GDP. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The WTO's primary functions are to provide a framework for negotiating trade agreements and to resolve trade disputes among its members. Its agreements, which are negotiated and signed by the majority of the world's trading nations and ratified in their legislatures, cover trade in goods, services, and intellectual property. The organization operates on the principle of non-discrimination—enshrined in the most-favoured-nation and national treatment provisions—but allows for exceptions for environmental protection, national security, and other objectives. The WTO's highest decision-making body is the Ministerial Conference, which convenes biennially and makes decisions by consensus. Day-to-day business is managed by the General Council, composed of representatives from all member states. The organization is administered by a Secretariat led by the Director-General; since 2021, this position has been held by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria. The WTO's annual budget is approximately 200 million USD, contributed by members based on their share of international trade. Economic studies generally find that the WTO has boosted trade and reduced trade barriers. However, it has faced significant criticism. Critics argue that the benefits of WTO-facilitated free trade are not shared equally, that its agreements may disadvantage developing countries, and that commercial interests have been prioritised over environmental and labour concerns. The organization has also been central to major trade disputes and stalled negotiations, such as the Doha Development Round and the paralysis of its Appellate Body, which have raised questions about its future efficacy. History The WTO precursor, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was established by a multilateral treaty of 23 countries in 1947 after the end of World War II, in the wake of other new multilateral institutions dedicated to international economic cooperation—such as the World Bank (founded 1944) and the International Monetary Fund (founded 1944–1945). A comparable international institution for trade, named the International Trade Organization (ITO), never started, since the United States and other signatories did not ratify the establishment treaty, and so the GATT slowly became a de facto international organization. Seven rounds of negotiations occurred under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1949 to 1979). The first real[citation needed] GATT trade rounds (1947 to 1960) concentrated on further reducing tariffs. Then the Kennedy Round in the mid-sixties brought about a GATT anti-dumping agreement and a section on development. The Tokyo Round during the seventies represented the first major attempt to tackle trade barriers that do not take the form of tariffs, and to improve the system, adopting a series of agreements on non-tariff barriers, which in some cases interpreted existing GATT rules, and in others broke entirely new ground. Because not all GATT members accepted these plurilateral agreements, they were often informally called "codes". (The Uruguay Round amended several of these codes and turned them into multilateral commitments accepted by all WTO members. Only four remained plurilateral (those on government procurement, bovine meat, civil aircraft, and dairy products), but in 1997 WTO members agreed to terminate the bovine meat and dairy agreements, leaving only two.) Despite attempts in the mid-1950s and 1960s to establish some form of institutional mechanism for international trade, the GATT continued to operate for almost half a century as a semi-institutionalized multilateral treaty régime on a provisional basis. Well before GATT's 40th anniversary (due in 1987–1988), GATT members concluded that the GATT system was straining to adapt to a globalizing world economy. In response to problems identified in the 1982 Ministerial Declaration (structural deficiencies, spill-over impacts of certain countries' policies on world trade which GATT could not manage, etc.), a meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay, launched the eighth GATT round—known as the "Uruguay Round"—in September 1986. In the biggest negotiating mandate on trade ever agreed, the Uruguay Round talks aimed to extend the trading system into several new areas, notably trade in services and intellectual property, and to reform trade in the sensitive sectors of agriculture and textiles; all the original GATT articles were up for review. The Final Act concluding the Uruguay Round and officially establishing the WTO regime was signed on 15 April 1994, during the ministerial meeting at Marrakesh, Morocco—hence known as the Marrakesh Agreement. The GATT still exists as the WTO's umbrella treaty for trade in goods, updated as a result of the Uruguay Round negotiations (a distinction is made between GATT 1994, the updated parts of GATT, and GATT 1947, the original agreement which is still the heart of GATT 1994). GATT 1994 is not, however, the only legally binding agreement included via the Final Act at Marrakesh; a long list of about 60 agreements, annexes, decisions, and understandings was adopted. The agreements fall into six main parts: In terms of the WTO's principle relating to tariff "ceiling-binding" (No. 3), the Uruguay Round has been successful in increasing binding commitments by both developed and developing countries, as may be seen in the percentages of tariffs bound before and after the 1986–1994 talks. The highest decision-making body of the WTO, the Ministerial Conference, usually meets every two years. It brings together all members of the WTO, all of which are countries or customs unions. The Ministerial Conference can take decisions on all matters under any of the multilateral trade agreements. Some meetings, such as the inaugural ministerial conference in Singapore (1996) and the inaugural ministerial conference in Cancún, Mexico (2003) involved arguments between developed nations and low-income and lower-middle income countries, referred to as the "Singapore issues", such as agricultural subsidies; while others such as the Seattle conference in 1999 provoked large demonstrations. The fourth ministerial conference in Doha, Qatar in 2001 approved China's entry to the WTO and launched the Doha Development Round which was supplemented by the sixth WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong, which agreed to phase out agricultural export subsidies and to adopt the European Union's Everything but Arms initiative to phase out tariffs for goods from the least developed countries. At the sixth WTO Ministerial Conference of 2005 in December, WTO launched the Aid for Trade initiative and it is specifically to assist developing countries in trade as included in the Sustainable Development Goal 8 which is to increase aid for trade support and economic growth. The Twelfth Ministerial Conference (MC12) was due to be held in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, in June 2020, but was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was later held in Geneva, Switzerland from 12–17 June 2022. The Thirteenth Ministerial Conference (MC13) was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE on 26–29 February 2024, and extended to Friday 1 March 2024 to complete deliberations. The WTO launched the current round of negotiations, the Doha Development Round, at the fourth ministerial conference in Doha, Qatar in November 2001. This was to be an ambitious effort to make globalization more inclusive and help the world's poor, particularly by slashing barriers and subsidies in farming. The initial agenda comprised both further trade liberalization and new rule-making, underpinned by commitments to strengthen substantial assistance to developing countries. Progress stalled over differences between developed nations and the major low-income and lower-middle income countries on issues such as industrial tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade particularly against and between the EU and the US over their maintenance of agricultural subsidies—seen to operate effectively as trade barriers. Repeated attempts to revive the talks proved unsuccessful, though the adoption of the Bali Ministerial Declaration in 2013 addressed bureaucratic barriers to commerce. As of June 2012[update], the future of the Doha Round remained uncertain: the work programme lists 21 subjects in which the original deadline of 1 January 2005 was missed, and the round remains incomplete. The conflict between free trade in industrial goods and services but retention of protectionism on farm subsidies to domestic agricultural sectors (requested by developed countries) and the substantiation[jargon] of fair trade on agricultural products (requested by developing countries) remain the major obstacles. This impasse has made it impossible to launch new WTO negotiations beyond the Doha Development Round. As a result, there have been an increasing number of bilateral free trade agreements between governments. As of July 2012[update] there were various negotiation groups in the WTO system for the current stalemated agricultural trade negotiation. Functions The WTO has several functions: Decisions in GATT were, in practice, made through consensus, and member states were allowed numerous exceptions for not complying with GATT rules if GATT conflicted with legitimate domestic objectives. Many of the GATT's rules were ambiguous and flexible. GATT members could also block a dispute settlement if it was unlikely to lead to a mutually acceptable ruling. These organizational design decisions reflected a wariness among member states to delegate too much power to the international organization and fears that GATT would not allow member states to respond to domestic political pressures. Cooperation in GATT tended to be the outcome of shared norms, rather than explicit rules and threats of punishment. WTO was created in order to accommodate more issue areas (such as services and intellectual property) and a vastly enlarged membership. In comparison to GATT, the WTO included vastly more numerous and more precise obligations on member states. Member states that were non-compliant were subject to punishment or to dispute settlements that could produce adverse outcomes. The consensus-based nature of rule changes has contributed to deadlock in the WTO and discontent among member states, as they are unable to resolve problems. The WTO is recognized for producing authoritative annual reports that provide clarity on the complexities of global trade, such as: Principles of the trading system The WTO establishes a framework for trade policies; it does not define or specify outcomes. That is, it is concerned with setting the rules of "trade policy". Five principles are of particular importance in understanding both the pre-1994 GATT and the WTO: There are three types of provision in this direction: Exceptions to the MFN principle also allow for preferential treatment of developing countries, regional free trade areas and customs unions.: fol.93 Organizational structure The highest authority of the WTO is the Ministerial Conference, which must meet at least every two years. The Ministerial Conference met most recently in June 2022 in Geneva. In between each Ministerial Conference, the daily work is handled by three bodies whose membership is the same; they only differ by the terms of reference under which each body is constituted: The General Council, whose Chair as of 2020 is David Walker of New Zealand, has the following subsidiary bodies which oversee committees in different areas: The Service Council has three subsidiary bodies: financial services, domestic regulations, GATS rules, and specific commitments. The council has several different committees, working groups, and working parties. There are committees on the following: Trade and Environment; Trade and Development (Subcommittee on Least-Developed Countries); Regional Trade Agreements; Balance of Payments Restrictions; and Budget, Finance and Administration. There are working parties on the following: Accession. There are working groups on the following: Trade, debt and finance; and Trade and technology transfer. As of 31 December 2022, the number of WTO staff on a regular budget is 340 women and 283 men. Decision-making The WTO describes itself as "a rules-based, member-driven organization—all decisions are made by the member governments, and the rules are the outcome of negotiations among members". The WTO Agreement foresees votes where consensus cannot be reached, but the practice of consensus dominates the process of decision-making. Richard Harold Steinberg (2002) argues that although the WTO's consensus governance model provides law-based initial bargaining, trading rounds close through power-based bargaining favoring Europe and the U.S., and may not lead to Pareto improvement. Disputes A dispute is typically initiated when a member country (the complainant) files a request for consultations, alleging that another member's (the respondent) domestic policies—such as tariffs, subsidies, or regulations—unfairly restrict trade. WTO disputes serve as a barometer for international trade tensions. Beyond traditional tariff disagreements, the Dispute Settlement Body is increasingly a venue for 'climate-trade' conflicts. Recent studies suggest that a country’s past "quarrelsomness" or litigiousness within the WTO is a strong predictor of how it will react to environmental trade barriers. Major economies like the US, China, India, and Russia are identified as high-probability opponents to carbon-related tariffs based on their history of initiating appeals. Dispute settlement The WTO's dispute-settlement system "is the result of the evolution of rules, procedures and practices developed over almost half a century under the GATT 1947". In 1994, the WTO members agreed on the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) annexed to the "Final Act" signed in Marrakesh in 1994. Dispute settlement is regarded by the WTO as the central pillar of the multilateral trading system, and as a "unique contribution to the stability of the global economy". WTO members have agreed that, if they believe fellow-members are violating trade rules, they will use the multilateral system of settling disputes instead of taking action unilaterally. The operation of the WTO dispute settlement process involves case-specific panels appointed by the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), the Appellate Body, the Director-General and the WTO Secretariat, arbitrators, and advisory experts. The priority is to settle disputes, preferably through a mutually agreed solution, and provision has been made for the process to be conducted in an efficient and timely manner so that "If a case is adjudicated, it should normally take no more than one year for a panel ruling and no more than 16 months if the case is appealed... If the complainant deems the case urgent, consideration of the case should take even less time. WTO member nations are obliged to accept the process as exclusive and compulsory. According to a 2018 study in the Journal of Politics, states are less likely and slower to enforce WTO violations when the violations affect states in a diffuse manner. This is because states face collective action problems with pursuing litigation: they all expect other states to carry the costs of litigation. A 2016 study in International Studies Quarterly challenges that the WTO dispute settlement system leads to greater increases in trade. However, the dispute settlement system cannot be used to resolve trade disputes that arise from political disagreements. When Qatar requested the establishment of a dispute panel concerning measures imposed by the UAE, other GCC countries and the US were quick to dismiss its request as a political matter, stating that national security issues were political and not appropriate for the WTO dispute system. Since 2019, when the Donald Trump administration blocked appointments to the body, the Appellate Body has been unable to enforce WTO rules and punish violators of WTO rules. In March 2020, the European Union and 15 other WTO members agreed to a Multiparty Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA). This gave access to an alternative appellate mechanism (arbitration as an appellate mechanism) while the Appellate Body is not functional. Accession and membership The process of becoming a WTO member is unique to each applicant country, and the terms of accession are dependent upon the country's stage of economic development and the current trade regime. The process takes about five years, on average, but it can last longer if the country is less than fully committed to the process or if political issues interfere. The shortest accession negotiation was that of the Kyrgyz Republic, while the longest was that of Russia, which, having first applied to join GATT in 1993, was approved for membership in December 2011 and became a WTO member on 22 August 2012. Kazakhstan also had a long accession negotiation process. The Working Party on the Accession of Kazakhstan was established in 1996 and was approved for membership in 2015. The second longest was that of Vanuatu, whose Working Party on the Accession of Vanuatu was established on 11 July 1995. After a final meeting of the Working Party in October 2001, Vanuatu requested more time to consider its accession terms. In 2008, it indicated its interest to resume and conclude its WTO accession. The Working Party on the Accession of Vanuatu was reconvened informally on 4 April 2011 to discuss Vanuatu's future WTO membership. The re-convened Working Party completed its mandate on 2 May 2011. The General Council formally approved the Accession Package of Vanuatu on 26 October 2011. On 24 August 2012, the WTO welcomed Vanuatu as its 157th member. An offer of accession is only given once consensus is reached among interested parties. A 2017 study argues that "political ties rather than issue-area functional gains determine who joins" and shows "how geopolitical alignment shapes the demand and supply sides of membership". The "findings challenge the view that states first liberalize trade to join the GATT/WTO. Instead, democracy and foreign policy similarity encourage states to join." A country wishing to accede to the WTO submits an application to the General Council, and has to describe all aspects of its trade and economic policies that have a bearing on WTO agreements. The application is submitted to the WTO in a memorandum which is examined by a working party open to all interested WTO Members. After all necessary background information has been acquired, the working party focuses on issues of discrepancy between the WTO rules and the applicant's international and domestic trade policies and laws. The working party determines the terms and conditions of entry into the WTO for the applicant nation and may consider transitional periods to allow countries some leeway in complying with the WTO rules. The final phase of accession involves bilateral negotiations between the applicant nation and other working party members regarding the concessions and commitments on tariff levels and market access for goods and services. The new member's commitments are to apply equally to all WTO members under normal non-discrimination rules, even though they are negotiated bilaterally. For instance, as a result of joining the WTO, Armenia offered a 15 per cent ceiling bound tariff rate on accessing its market for goods. Together with the tariff bindings being ad valorem there are no specific or compound rates. Moreover, there are no tariff-rate quotas on both industrial and agricultural products. Armenia's economic and trade performance growth was noted since its first review in 2010, especially its revival from the 2008 financial crisis, with an average annual 4% GDP growth rate, despite some fluctuations. Armenia's economy was marked by low inflation, diminishing poverty, and essential progress in enhancing its macroeconomic steadiness in which trade in goods and services, which is the equivalent of 87% of GDP, played a growing role. When the bilateral talks conclude, the working party sends to the general council or ministerial conference an accession package, which includes a summary of all the working party meetings, the Protocol of Accession (a draft membership treaty), and lists ("schedules") of the member to be commitments. Once the general council or ministerial conference approves of the terms of accession, the applicant's parliament must ratify the Protocol of Accession before it can become a member. Some countries may have faced tougher and a much longer accession process due to challenges during negotiations with other WTO members, such as Vietnam, whose negotiations took more than 11 years before it became an official member in January 2007. The WTO has 166 members and 23 observer governments. Most recently, on 26 February 2024 at the 13th Ministerial Conference in Abu Dhabi, Comoros and Timor Leste were approved to became the 165th and 166th members. In addition to states, the European Union, and each EU country in its own right, is a member. WTO members do not have to be fully independent states; they need only be a customs territory with full autonomy in the conduct of their external commercial relations. Thus Hong Kong has been a member since 1995 (as "Hong Kong, China" since 1997) predating the People's Republic of China, which joined in 2001 after 15 years of negotiations. Taiwan acceded to the WTO in 2002 as the "Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu." The WTO Secretariat omits the official titles (such as Counsellor, First Secretary, Second Secretary and Third Secretary) of the members of Taiwan's Permanent Mission to the WTO, except for the titles of the Permanent Representative and the Deputy Permanent Representative. As of 2007, WTO members represented 96.4% of global trade and 96.7% of global GDP. Iran, followed by Algeria, are the economies with the largest GDP and trade outside the WTO, using 2005 data. With the exception of the Holy See, observers must start accession negotiations within five years of becoming observers. A number of international intergovernmental organizations have also been granted observer status to WTO bodies. Ten UN members have no affiliation with the WTO. Agreements The WTO oversees about 60 different agreements which have the status of international legal texts. Member countries must sign and ratify all WTO agreements on accession. A discussion of some of the most important agreements follows. The Agreement on Agriculture came into effect with the establishment of the WTO at the beginning of 1995. The AoA has three central concepts, or "pillars": domestic support, market access and export subsidies. The General Agreement on Trade in Services was created to extend the multilateral trading system to service sector, in the same way as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) provided such a system for merchandise trade. The agreement entered into force in January 1995. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property (IP) regulation. It was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994. The Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures—also known as the SPS Agreement—was negotiated during the Uruguay Round of GATT, and entered into force with the establishment of the WTO at the beginning of 1995. Under the SPS agreement, the WTO sets constraints on members' policies relating to food safety (bacterial contaminants, pesticides, inspection, and labeling) as well as animal and plant health (imported pests and diseases). The Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade is an international treaty of the World Trade Organization. It was negotiated during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and entered into force with the establishment of the WTO at the end of 1994. The object ensures that technical negotiations and standards, as well as testing and certification procedures, do not create unnecessary obstacles to trade". The Agreement on Customs Valuation, formally known as the Agreement on Implementation of Article VII of GATT, prescribes methods of customs valuation that Members are to follow. Chiefly, it adopts the "transaction value" approach. In December 2013, the biggest agreement within the WTO was signed and known as the Bali Package. Office of director-general The procedures for the appointment of the WTO director-general were updated in January 2003, and include quadrennial terms. Additionally, there are four deputy directors-general. As of 13 June 2018[update] under director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the four deputy directors-general are: Source: Official website In May 2020, Director-General Roberto Azevedo announced that he would step down on 31 August 2020. As of October 2020[update], a nomination and selection process is currently under way with eight candidates and the final selection is expected on 7 November 2020 with the consensus of 164 member countries. A strong consensus had formed around the candidacy of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala but on 28 October it emerged that the US representative was opposed to her appointment. WTO members made history on 15 February 2021 when the General Council agreed by consensus to select Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria as the organization's seventh Director-General. Okonjo-Iweala became the first woman and the first African to be chosen as Director-General. Budget The WTO derives most of the income for its annual budget from contributions by its Members. These are established according to a formula based on their share of international trade. Impact Studies show that the WTO boosted trade. Research shows that in the absence of the WTO, the average country would face an increase in tariffs on their exports by 32 percentage points. The dispute settlement mechanism in the WTO is one way in which trade is increased. A 2023 study suggests that WTO membership has not enhanced trade for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. According to a 2017 study in the Journal of International Economic Law, "nearly all recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs) reference the WTO explicitly, often dozens of times across multiple chapters. Likewise, in many of these same PTAs we find that substantial portions of treaty language—sometime the majority of a chapter—is copied verbatim from a WTO agreement... the presence of the WTO in PTAs has increased over time." A 2026 study found that WTO membership contributes to a formalization of the economy and reduction in the informal economy. Criticism Although tariffs and other trade barriers have been significantly reduced thanks to GATT and WTO, the promise that free trade will accelerate economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase people's incomes has been questioned by many critics. Economist Ha-Joon Chang argues that there is a "paradox" in neo-liberal beliefs regarding free trade because the economic growth of developing countries was higher in the 1960–1980 period compared to the 1980–2000 period even though its trade policies are now far more liberal than before. Also, there are results of research that show that new countries actively reduce trade barriers only after becoming significantly rich. From the results of the study, WTO critics argue that trade liberalization does not guarantee economic growth and certainly not poverty alleviation. He also cites the example of El Salvador; in the early 1990s, El Salvador removed all quantitative barriers to imports and also cut tariffs. However, the country's economic growth remained weak. On the other hand, Vietnam, which only began reforming its economy in the late 1980s, saw a great deal of success by deciding to follow China's economic model and liberalizing slowly along with implementing safeguards for domestic commerce. Vietnam has largely succeeded in accelerating economic growth and reducing poverty without immediately removing substantial trade barriers. Critics also put forward the view that the benefits derived from WTO facilitated free trade are not shared equally. This criticism is usually supported by historical accounts of the outcomes of negotiations and/or data showing that the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, especially in China and India, where economic inequality was growing at the time even though economic growth is very high. In addition, WTO approaches aiming to reduce trade barriers can harm developing countries. Trade liberalization that is too early without any prominent domestic barriers is feared to trap the developing economies in the primary sector, which often does not require skilled labor. Also, when these developing countries decide to advance their economy utilizing industrialization, the premature domestic industry cannot immediately skyrocket as expected, making it difficult to compete with other countries whose industries are more advanced. On 24 September, 2025, China announced that it will no longer request so-called Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) benefits, which arise from its developing country status, in WTO negotiations on future deals. The WTO has been criticized for not sufficiently preventing monopolistic behavior by individual countries, as exemplified by the rare earths trade dispute. See also Notes and references Further reading External links World portal |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World#cite_note-98] | [TOKENS: 5641] |
Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents World map A world map is a map of most or all of the surface of Earth. World maps, because of their scale, must deal with the problem of projection. Maps rendered in two dimensions by necessity distort the display of the three-dimensional surface of the Earth. While this is true of any map, these distortions reach extremes in a world map. Many techniques have been developed to present world maps that address diverse technical and aesthetic goals. Charting a world map requires global knowledge of the Earth, its oceans, and its continents. From prehistory through the Middle Ages, creating an accurate world map would have been impossible because less than half of Earth's coastlines and only a small fraction of its continental interiors were known to any culture. With exploration that began during the European Renaissance, knowledge of the Earth's surface accumulated rapidly, such that most of the world's coastlines had been mapped, at least roughly, by the mid-1700s and the continental interiors by the twentieth century. Maps of the world generally focus either on political features or on physical features. Political maps emphasize territorial boundaries and human settlement. Physical maps show geographical features such as mountains, soil type, or land use. Geological maps show not only the surface, but characteristics of the underlying rock, fault lines, and subsurface structures. Choropleth maps use color hue and intensity to contrast differences between regions, such as demographic or economic statistics. Map projections All world maps are based on one of several map projections, or methods of representing a globe on a plane. All projections distort geographic features, distances, and directions in some way. The various map projections that have been developed provide different ways of balancing accuracy and the unavoidable distortion inherent in making world maps. Perhaps the best-known projection is the Mercator Projection, originally designed as a nautical chart. Thematic maps A thematic map shows geographical information about one or a few focused subjects. These maps "can portray physical, social, political, cultural, economic, sociological, agricultural, or any other aspects of a city, state, region, nation, or continent". Historical maps Early world maps cover depictions of the world from the Iron Age to the Age of Discovery and the emergence of modern geography during the early modern period. Old maps provide information about places that were known in past times, as well as the philosophical and cultural basis of the map, which were often much different from modern cartography. Maps are one means by which scientists distribute their ideas and pass them on to future generations. See also References Further reading |
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Contents Holon (philosophy) A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In this way, a holon can be considered a subsystem within a larger hierarchical system. An individual holon is also made up of constituent parts. In this way holons can be seen as having three aspects: (1) the whole self-contained thing itself,(2) it is made up of parts, and (3) it is also a part of something larger. A bias of only seeing what parts a thing is made up of in order to understand its nature is at the heart of reductionism. A bias of seeing only what a thing is a part of is gaiaism. A holon can be seen as an object within a recursive field, a whole, made of parts, and part of something larger. The holon represents a way to overcome the dichotomy between parts and wholes, as well as a way to account for both the self-assertive and the integrative tendencies of organisms. Holons are sometimes discussed in the context of self-organizing holarchic open (SOHO) systems. Etymology The word holon (Ancient Greek: ὅλον) is a combination of the Greek holos (ὅλος) meaning 'whole', with the suffix -on which denotes a particle or part (as in proton and neutron). Holons are self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence and can handle contingencies without asking higher authorities for instructions (i.e., they have a degree of autonomy). These holons are also simultaneously subject to control from one or more of these higher authorities. The first property ensures that holons are stable forms that are able to withstand disturbances, while the latter property signifies that they are intermediate forms, providing a context for the proper functionality for the larger whole. History The term holon was coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (1967), though Koestler first articulated the concept in The Act of Creation (1964), in which he refers to the relationship between the searches for subjective and objective knowledge: Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet. Koestler would finally propose the term holon in The Ghost in the Machine (1967), using it to describe natural organisms as composed of semi-autonomous sub-wholes (or, parts) that are linked in a form of hierarchy, a holarchy, to form a whole. The title of the book itself points to the notion that the entire 'machine' of life and of the universe itself is ever-evolving toward more and more complex states, as if a ghost were operating the machine. The first observation was influenced by a story told to him by Herbert A. Simon—the 'parable of the two watchmakers'—in which Simon concludes that complex systems evolve from simple systems much more rapidly when there are stable intermediate forms present in the evolutionary process compared to when they are not present: There once were two watchmakers, named Bios and Mekhos, who made very fine watches. The phones in their workshops rang frequently; new customers were constantly calling them. However, Bios prospered while Mekhos became poorer and poorer. In the end, Mekhos lost his shop and worked as a mechanic for Bios. What was the reason behind this? The watches consisted of about 1000 parts each. The watches that Mekhos made were designed such that, when he had to put down a partly assembled watch (for instance, to answer the phone), it immediately fell into pieces and had to be completely reassembled from the basic elements. On the other hand Bios designed his watches so that he could put together subassemblies of about ten components each. Ten of these subassemblies could be put together to make a larger sub-assembly. Finally, ten of the larger subassemblies constituted the whole watch. When Bios had to put his watches down to attend to some interruption they did not break up into their elemental parts but only into their sub-assemblies. Now, the watchmakers were each disturbed at the same rate of once per hundred assembly operations. However, due to their different assembly methods, it took Mekhos four thousand times longer than Bios to complete a single watch. — Herbert Simon, quoted by Arthur Koestler (1967) The second observation was made by Koestler himself in his analysis of hierarchies and stable intermediate forms in non-living matter (atomic and molecular structure), living organisms, and social organizations. See also References Further reading External links |
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Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World#cite_ref-Sandkühler_5-7] | [TOKENS: 5641] |
Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World#cite_ref-Sandkühler_5-10] | [TOKENS: 5641] |
Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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