To steal an idea from Barney Stinson, of CBS’s How I Met Your Mother fame, when something is termed impossible, it’s merely a starting point, not an end-all, be-all, go ahead and go home definitive answer. As Stinson so eloquently put it, “All my life I have dared to go past what is possible.” To the impossible? No, he continues, “Past that, to the place where the possible and impossible meet to become, the possimpible.” Yes, the possimpible is real; in fact, it is well chronicled in human history. Still skeptical? Take a look for yourself

• At one point under a century ago, it was firmly believed that no human being could ever run 5,280 feet in less than 240 seconds. To put it in more common terms, no runner could complete a mile long trek in under 4 minutes, some might say it would take a miracle. When Roger Bannister first accomplished the feat in 1954, clocking in at 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, he proved legions of disbelievers wrong, simultaneously coining the phrase “Miracle Mile.”
• To say the world revolves around you today is just plain arrogant, but once upon a time all of society claimed the assertion to be a scientific certainty. It wasn’t until the early 1600′s when the astronomer Galileo finally contradicted the widely held conviction that all heavenly bodies circled the Earth. Of course, Galileo is also an example of what’s wrong with attempting to live before your time. Though his good name would be vindicated by research in subsequent eras, Galileo was shunned by religious folk of his time, put on trial by the Inquisition and forced to live out his life on what we might call “house arrest” today. Read the rest of this entry