The MIT scientist Andrew, the founder and curator of Weird History, is a real Renaissance man. Originally from Ottawa in Canada, he is a SpaceX Mission Manager, book author, game designer, and podcast host currently living in Los Angeles in California. Since Andrew launched the Weird History page on Twitter more than a decade ago in 2011, he has amassed 182.3K followers and counting! Simultaneously, Andrew’s personal Twitter account which he created in 2013, 2 years after the Weird History page, has an audience of 897.7k followers.
In 2013, he won the Discovery Channel’s competitive television series Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All. He's the author of Beyond the Known, a history of exploration from the beginning of humanity to our spacefaring future, and of three books in the Epic Space Adventure series (Epic Space Adventure, Mars Rover Rescue, Europa Excursion) and the children's book Rocket Science.
According to Andrew, we tend to think of exploration as escape, but it’s actually about forging connections. “On a personal level, we travel to connect with our roots, connect with nature, connect with fellow travelers, or connect with new lands and people. At the level of civilizations, connections precipitated the circulation of people, ideas, technologies, and resources,” he wrote in his blog.
Andrew argues that more connections meant more people working collaboratively to solve problems, like the historical version of the internet. “Most technologies are not invented from scratch, but modified from ideas spread by others. Writing has only been invented on our planet very few times—possibly only twice—but spread to evolve into almost four thousand written languages. As Isaac Newton famously expressed, progress begins with ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, where one discovery forms the foundation upon which the next is based.” Therefore Andrew believes that the more ideas exchanged, the more shoulders there are to stand on, and the more people standing on top of them.
