As I've already explained, trade secrets and techniques advanced compared to other in common use in Ancient times were commonly lost. But there was no advanced civilization comparable to ours in any way, shape or form. Just look around you. Look at the concrete gigantic cities, the road and electrical and sewage networks, the non-bio-degradable products and garbage, the consumption of resources and the massive footprint we're leaving on the planet. Do you really thing another civilization like ours could have existed, yet we're completely unable to find any trace of them?
For the sake of argument: let's say the human race collapses completely. We suffer a massive population drop to the point where a return to subsistence agriculture is required, and continuity of knowledge is lost --let's say a superbug did this, so all our structures stay behind.
Which things on our planet do you imagine would still be around, from today, in the year 7009? And how would they prove we've got a technologically advanced civilization?
As I've already explained, trade secrets and techniques advanced compared to other in common use in Ancient times were commonly lost. But there was no advanced civilization comparable to ours in any way, shape or form. Just look around you. Look at the concrete gigantic cities, the road and electrical and sewage networks, the non-bio-degradable products and garbage, the consumption of resources and the massive footprint we're leaving on the planet. Do you really thing another civilization like ours could have existed, yet we're completely unable to find any trace of them?
For the sake of argument: let's say the human race collapses completely. We suffer a massive population drop to the point where a return to subsistence agriculture is required, and continuity of knowledge is lost --let's say a superbug did this, so all our structures stay behind.
Which things on our planet do you imagine would still be around, from today, in the year 7009? And how would they prove we've got a technologically advanced civilization?
Buildings are unlikely to survive in an immediately recognisable state, but I would expect them to remain obvious to a hypothetical archaeologist well in the hundreds of thousands of years. The technology will be seen in carbon dioxide levels, strange collections of extremely rare elements, and large-scale metal constructions. Tunnels in mountains and the Suez Canal may leave discernable evidence.
And, of course...
I want to say one word to you. Just one word. [...] Plastics.
And most mysterious of all the mysteries, the end of the world calender of the Mayans. Could it be the most accurate of all calenders? Predicting the motion of unknown and unseen worlds. Could its strange accounting system indicate a deeper tie to reality than our own? Did they predict the end of days in 2012? Could their science have been in advance of ours? Or, in fact is our calender and almost all calenders from after theirs such as the chinese or Persian calender far more accurate in every way than theirs. And could what seems to be an epic mystery, in fact simply be that their king liked the idea of 4 days at work to 1 day off.
You missed the best bit of this comic:
"t-rex is supposed to be extending his "r" sound in the last panel, not trilling it. but whatever, if he's trilling it that's awesome too and brings to the comic some much-needed latin flair"
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
edited August 2009
I'm impressed that there has been interesting discussion here without resorting to the whole "obviously it was all done by aliens" as it's far more impressive to actually ackowledge things like the Antikythera mechanism for what they are: Amazing pieces of engineering performed with limited tools. Amazing feats of human ingenuity.
Also:
Mojo_Jojo on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
As I've already explained, trade secrets and techniques advanced compared to other in common use in Ancient times were commonly lost. But there was no advanced civilization comparable to ours in any way, shape or form. Just look around you. Look at the concrete gigantic cities, the road and electrical and sewage networks, the non-bio-degradable products and garbage, the consumption of resources and the massive footprint we're leaving on the planet. Do you really thing another civilization like ours could have existed, yet we're completely unable to find any trace of them?
For the sake of argument: let's say the human race collapses completely. We suffer a massive population drop to the point where a return to subsistence agriculture is required, and continuity of knowledge is lost --let's say a superbug did this, so all our structures stay behind.
Which things on our planet do you imagine would still be around, from today, in the year 7009? And how would they prove we've got a technologically advanced civilization?
If you believe Life After People, there will be at least two things from the 20th Century that would survive that long, and possibly longer: The Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore.
OK. But how do those things prove the presence of a high technology civilization?
Buildings are unlikely to survive in an immediately recognisable state, but I would expect them to remain obvious to a hypothetical archaeologist well in the hundreds of thousands of years.
I'm just going to ignore the idea of things indicative of high technology sticking around for hundreds of thousands of years in the ruins of a city. That's just plain silly. On that time scale, things like steel and glass are liquids and shit gets ground to dust by wind, or glaciers.
At which point: how does finding a site and saying 'this was a city' indicate high technology in any form? Again, an archeologist has to find proof of that high technology.
he technology will be seen in carbon dioxide levels
We haven't influenced carbon dioxide levels long enough to be more than a curious blip to a hypothetical future civilization. There are already curious blips in the CO2 record, but those probably aren't indicative of space faring dinosaurs.
strange collections of extremely rare elements,
We find collections of extremely rare elements already in sites that are thousands of years old. Do they indicate high technology? Are you talking about things like spent uranium? That happens in nature, so it's not a sign of a high-technology civilization either (or rather it's just as plausibly a natural occurence.)
and large-scale metal constructions.
What... like the collosus of rhodes? Capable architecture and engineering is not a sign of high technology. If it is, we're missing evidence for high-tech ancient civilizations all over the place.
Tunnels in mountains and the Suez Canal may leave discernable evidence.
Not evidence of high technology. Canals are not new ideas. A big canal might strike a future civilization as impressive --in the same way people muscleing stones into place for stonehenge strikes us as impressive. Which is to say, not in a way that makes you point and go 'I bet those guys had space shuttles and microwaves!'
Ancient tunnels, amazingly engineered, are all over.
Plastics.
Definitely what would last the longest. Even then, in 5000 years it's just going to be particulate matter. Could come from an ancient grove of chicle-trees, for all you know. Or maybe you'd just figure 'the ancients knew how to make simple plastic, the way some ancient cultures could do fancy astronomical calculations, or make damascene steel, or glass, or steam engines.
About all I can think of that would last 5000 years while indicating high technology is the stuff we've left on the moon (I'll assume the stuff on mars will be buried in 5000 years.) But of course that's why I originally specified 'planet': there aren't a whole lot of good reasons to go to the moon, and a future high technology civilization might not bother to go there or look for evidence of people going there. If they did, they might even miss it. It IS a big place.
What I'm getting at is: in 5000 years, our ruins wouldn't look much different to a future high tech civilization than 5000 year old ruins look to us right now.
If you believe Life After People, there will be at least two things from the 20th Century that would survive that long, and possibly longer: The Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore.
Again, has to be proof of high technology. Mount Rushmore isn't that, it's just some faces carved on a mountain. Impressive but not 'look honey, they had space shuttles' impressive.
Hoover dam could be very well be considered proof of high technology. I'm not sure it'd last 5000 years (I didn't see this life after people thing, but it sounds neat) as dams have a pretty poor track record (see: China) once maintenance is abandoned, but I could see it as it's so damned big and solid. That said, I think the general thrust of my supposition stands: what we build is pretty damned transient, and if we vanished, it wouldn't take long for evidence of our high technology to vanish with us.
I'm not sure if Life After People dealt with this, but maybe it did. How long would the numerous satellites in orbit above the planet stay aloft in space after people cease to exist? How long until the ravages of the cosmos disable them and send them hurtling into a fiery oblivion.
Also, let's not forget all the garbage we would leave behind. Some of our garbage is buried so compactly that it can't decompose, there's not even room for the bacteria needed to destroy it.
The casing stones of the some of the pyramids are cut so precisely you can't get a knife blade between them - we're talking machine shop tolerances, not just regular building tolerances. So the comments that people built pyramids because they were "obviously" easy should do a little more research.
It is obviously easy. Nothing you wrote discounts easy. You just need patience. Grinding stuff flat/round was a mainstay of every single dam civilization.
On the topic of losing ancient knowledge, the Islamic world suffered a replay of what happened at the Library of Alexandria. They had their own massive library, the House of Wisdom at Bagdad. For centuries it was a center of learning and translation of foreign texts. The library contained documents and translations of the works of the greatest philosophers going from Ancient Greece to Ancient India.
Then in the 13th Century the Mongols invaded, took Bagdad, and sacked it. They destroyed the library and threw all the books in the Tigris river that ran through the city. It is said that the river ran black with ink for six months.
I teach high school math. I always find it amusing and depressing when I find how many of them are shocked to hear that the Arabic world used to be the center of knowledge and learning in the world. It usually comes up because of the word "algebra"; some already figured it out, but there are many who didn't realize that it comes from Arabic, along with alchemy and algorithm.
What of the mysterious alignments between historical sites. Could it be a sign of powerful leylines buzzing beneath the crust of the earth, resonating secret messages of power which only our ancestors could read? Could tapping into them solve our energy crisis! Or perhaps, evidence of the fact that nearly every square inch of this planet is sacred to someone and thus it's easy to make some of the sites line up, espescially when people like to build things halfway between other major things.
The no-FTL thread discussion about this prompted me to Google this idea, and see what was up.
There's entirely too much math there, and it's all wayyy over my head. But I think it's a decent summary of the major sites that people claim "line up". As mentioned, it's probably not indicative of anything at all.
But to go along with the Atlantis stuff in this thread, the guy on that site talks about this map: http://home.hiwaay.net/~jalison/Reis.htm , claiming it shows where Atlantis was.
I said this in the last of these threads and nearly got lynched for it, but I really like Graham Hancock's books. At least the ones that I've read.
They start out as kind of a "What If?" travelogue, then start with the mildly contentious interviews with scientists about halfway through, and the final third is usually unabashed tinfoilhattery. They're also huge; the shortest one I own is 800 pages. Makes for great airplane reading.
He does put forward some interesting ideas, though they're usually best treated as thought experiments rather than legitimate concepts. I do appreciate him pushing boundaries within the archeological community, though, as inane as those chosen boundaries may be.
I will never understand why some people insist on believing in a past "technologically advanced" civilization (almost always implying long-distance air travel or whatever other such silliness). Do these people not understand anything about the science of archaeology at all?
If this past civilization had existed they would have left artifacts. We have stone tools that we've found used by early human ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years old. We have fossils which trace the biological record all the way back to the dawn of life. And yet people continue to believe that some vast and powerful "ancient" civilization existed sometime before the dawn of the rest of history and didn't leave a single artifact as record of it? No writings, no monumental public architecture, no nothing? If egyptians and mayans were in contact with each other, why the hell were they doing "the same things" (which they weren't) several thousand years apart? Why has not a single egyptian artifact been found in mexico or a single mayan artifact found in egypt? Why is there no record whatsoever of either civilization knowing that the other continents of the world even existed?
GAAH
Ancient people were able to build magnificent things because they were a) smart and b) dedicated. It had nothing to do with overseers traipsing around the planet in airships telling them what to do. Give our ancestors some credit, people.
EDIT: And yes, I realize that the vast majority of the people in this thread aren't saying anything remotely resembling this in a serious way. But I'm an archaeologist myself and I have to hear it all the time from people who don't have any idea what they're talking about but act like it's so clear that anyone should see it. It's a major pet peeve of mine.
The casing stones of the some of the pyramids are cut so precisely you can't get a knife blade between them - we're talking machine shop tolerances, not just regular building tolerances. So the comments that people built pyramids because they were "obviously" easy should do a little more research.
I think the point went totally over your head. The reason why so many ancient civilizations had pyramids is not because they were all linked by alien communication networks, or ancient super freeways, but because when it comes to easy to build, long lasting architecture, you really can't beat a pyramid. They're 'easy' only in as much they're much simpler to construct than say, those beautifully pillared ancient greek buildings of which so few exist today, but also much stabler and more durable.
I think you missed the point.
Saying "when it comes to easy to build, long lasting architecture, you really can't beat a pyramid" doesn't make any sense. These aren't giant legos we're dealing with.
Tell me the easy part of building a pyramid?
Tell me the "simpler" way to construct them?
Regardless of why so many cultures built pyramids they were most definitely NOT easy or simple to construct.
I agree with you on one point however: for "long lasting architecture, you really CAN'T beat a pyramid" and maybe thats why they were built in the first place.
I will never understand why some people insist on believing in a past "technologically advanced" civilization (almost always implying long-distance air travel or whatever other such silliness). Do these people not understand anything about the science of archaeology at all?
If this past civilization had existed they would have left artifacts. We have stone tools that we've found used by early human ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years old. We have fossils which trace the biological record all the way back to the dawn of life. And yet people continue to believe that some vast and powerful "ancient" civilization existed sometime before the dawn of the rest of history and didn't leave a single artifact as record of it? No writings, no monumental public architecture, no nothing? If egyptians and mayans were in contact with each other, why the hell were they doing "the same things" (which they weren't) several thousand years apart? Why has not a single egyptian artifact been found in mexico or a single mayan artifact found in egypt? Why is there no record whatsoever of either civilization knowing that the other continents of the world even existed?
But you miss the most fundamentally important warped logic of that theory:
"Gosh, if they didn't leave anything behind, at all - who could have done such a thing? They must have been so advanced!"
Suddenly absence of evidence becomes the most compelling evidence in itself.
I will never understand why some people insist on believing in a past "technologically advanced" civilization (almost always implying long-distance air travel or whatever other such silliness). Do these people not understand anything about the science of archaeology at all?
If this past civilization had existed they would have left artifacts. We have stone tools that we've found used by early human ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years old. We have fossils which trace the biological record all the way back to the dawn of life. And yet people continue to believe that some vast and powerful "ancient" civilization existed sometime before the dawn of the rest of history and didn't leave a single artifact as record of it? No writings, no monumental public architecture, no nothing? If egyptians and mayans were in contact with each other, why the hell were they doing "the same things" (which they weren't) several thousand years apart? Why has not a single egyptian artifact been found in mexico or a single mayan artifact found in egypt? Why is there no record whatsoever of either civilization knowing that the other continents of the world even existed?
GAAH
Ancient people were able to build magnificent things because they were a) smart and b) dedicated. It had nothing to do with overseers traipsing around the planet in airships telling them what to do. Give our ancestors some credit, people.
EDIT: And yes, I realize that the vast majority of the people in this thread aren't saying anything remotely resembling this in a serious way. But I'm an archaeologist myself and I have to hear it all the time from people who don't have any idea what they're talking about but act like it's so clear that anyone should see it. It's a major pet peeve of mine.
Maybe because it's buried under ice.....
Oh and if you're someone who is responsible for finding out about our past, then I would recommend you do it with an open mind and not with what's academically accepted in the world of science and archeology.
I think the scientific community is almost as closed minded as some religions and tell me where that gets us?
Oh and if you're someone who is responsible for finding out about our past, then I would recommend you do it with an open mind and not with what's academically accepted in the world of science and archeology.
I think the scientific community is almost as closed minded as some religions and tell me where that gets us?
In the scientific community, every time you prove someone wrong, you get RICH AND FAMOUS.
Yeah, that really encourages a close-minded attitude.
This would be in reference to Hancock, among others, claiming that there are the remains of a great civilisation buried under Antarctica, right? Except that dating the age of the ice down to however many feet shows that the cap is thousands upon thousands of years too old for that. Even Hancock admitted that dating the ice cap made that part of his 'theory' impossible, even though he weaselled out of it afterwards by saying that his ideas didn't depend on that piece of the theory.
As I've already explained, trade secrets and techniques advanced compared to other in common use in Ancient times were commonly lost. But there was no advanced civilization comparable to ours in any way, shape or form. Just look around you. Look at the concrete gigantic cities, the road and electrical and sewage networks, the non-bio-degradable products and garbage, the consumption of resources and the massive footprint we're leaving on the planet. Do you really thing another civilization like ours could have existed, yet we're completely unable to find any trace of them?
For the sake of argument: let's say the human race collapses completely. We suffer a massive population drop to the point where a return to subsistence agriculture is required, and continuity of knowledge is lost --let's say a superbug did this, so all our structures stay behind.
Which things on our planet do you imagine would still be around, from today, in the year 7009? And how would they prove we've got a technologically advanced civilization?
Cities. Sure, the buildings will collapse by then, but that just means you'll have a massive quantity of non-naturally-occurring elements like concrete, enough for people to realize we used it to build buildings 50 stories high. That, by itself, is evidence of an advanced civilization: the manufacturing process to mix and mass-produce concrete and other substances, and the architectural technology to build skyscrapers.
Then, if they continue to explore the city, they will find remnants of our electrical systems. Most of it might not survive, but they will find a piece of wall that survived with some wiring here, one artefact with wiring there, some buried wires over there, lots of stuff with small holes like there could have been similar wires going through, and eventually they'll connect the pieces together. Sure, they need to have electricity first before they realize why we had copper wires going all over the place, but once they do, they'll realize that we were such a technologically-advanced civilization that electricity was fundamental for us.
If they hold their noses and look through the massive stockpiles of non-bio-degradable waste we've left behind, they'll realize that most of it was not manufactured locally. Rather, it's an indiscriminate mix of stuff that originated from all over the world. Evidence of such widespread international (and especially intercontinental) trade is another sign of an advanced civilization.
As for large-scale projects, I agree that Mount Rushmore and the Suez Canal are not giveaways, and that the Hoover Dam will collapse before then. I'm crossing my fingers for them discovering the CERN's Large Hadron Collider. If even part of it survives in good enough shape and they are advanced enough to figure out what it was (never mind what it does), that's a dead giveaway of how awesome we were.
They have a much larger base than top. This makes them naturally very stable structures.
Say you build something, say cubic, and it collapses, what shape does it become? A pyramid. Say you look at wind blowing sand and it piles up in a dune, what shape does it have? A pyramid. Very irregular pyramids, to be sure, but still, it's a naturally-occurring, naturally-stable shape. From there, it's a small leap to even out the sides and build a staircase on it or a tunnel inside it.
Drag the stones to where you want to build it, then pile them up using ramps or pulley systems, being careful to put a little less on each successive level. Basic geometry and measuring skills allow you to make them surprisingly regular, too.
Regardless of the fact they were very different in appearance, size, purpose, origin, construction... really, the only thing an Egyptian pyramid and a Mayan ziggurat have in common is basic geometric shape.
Oh and if you're someone who is responsible for finding out about our past, then I would recommend you do it with an open mind and not with what's academically accepted in the world of science and archeology.
I think the scientific community is almost as closed minded as some religions and tell me where that gets us?
In the scientific community, every time you prove someone wrong, you get RICH AND FAMOUS.
Yeah, that really encourages a close-minded attitude.
It's more accurate to say that whenever you posit a new theory that goes against popular theory you are ridiculed and scorned and not published. This happens WAY, WAY more than someone getting rich and famous for proving something wrong.
Your grants come from how highly regarded you are in the scientific community and guess what? If you get ridiculed and scorned and aren't published then you aren't highly regarded in that community.
So no money for you. It's hard to fund research to prove someone wrong when you have no money.
I will never understand why some people insist on believing in a past "technologically advanced" civilization (almost always implying long-distance air travel or whatever other such silliness). Do these people not understand anything about the science of archaeology at all?
If this past civilization had existed they would have left artifacts. We have stone tools that we've found used by early human ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years old. We have fossils which trace the biological record all the way back to the dawn of life. And yet people continue to believe that some vast and powerful "ancient" civilization existed sometime before the dawn of the rest of history and didn't leave a single artifact as record of it?
To play devil's advocate, our modern creations are a lot more fragile than those of ancient civilizations.
For example, roman concrete buildings have lasted thousands of years and will probably last several thousand more. Modern iron rebar reinforced concrete buildings probably won't last a single thousand years because of iron corrosion.
A lot of our modern construction and technology is dependent on electricity and constant maintenance to stay in tact. Once those things go away, they deteriorate rather quickly. So several thousands years later, it could be very, very difficult for anyone to find enough artifacts to piece together the true extent of our civilization.
The best you could hope for is that some bits would get buried in mud or sand and thus preserved mostly in tact. Or that someone would find our moon rovers. Without that, it would be very easy for future archaeologists to just overlook it.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
No, "a scientific invention [to] discover a divine truth lurking in the laws of the heavens" - a scientific toy - does not count as an experimental steam engine developed toward a practical use, which is fairly obviously what we're discussing here.
So they invented the steam engine. They just didn't invent the steam engine.
Oh and if you're someone who is responsible for finding out about our past, then I would recommend you do it with an open mind and not with what's academically accepted in the world of science and archeology.
There's a major difference between having an open mind and going with a baseless theory because it sounds cool.
No, "a scientific invention [to] discover a divine truth lurking in the laws of the heavens" - a scientific toy - does not count as an experimental steam engine developed toward a practical use, which is fairly obviously what we're discussing here.
So they invented the steam engine. They just didn't invent the steam engine.
The conversation was about why the steam engine was never developed into a more industrial use. I'm saying it was simply overlooked. Kipling and Gabriel Pitt were proposing more practical reasons.
Unless you're about to argue that we missed a Roman steam age, I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this.
The casing stones of the some of the pyramids are cut so precisely you can't get a knife blade between them - we're talking machine shop tolerances, not just regular building tolerances. So the comments that people built pyramids because they were "obviously" easy should do a little more research.
There was more knowledge in the past than we often give credit for. The Americas were mapped thousands of years before Columbus "discovered" them. Antarctica was mapped thousands of years ago, and we have just now in the past hundred years found out what the land mass looks like under all that ice. (Check the Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings or the Piri Reis map)
Gold artifacts have been found in Mesopatamia whose purity was thought only to be a modern ability, with the temperatures needed for that level of purity of 2000 degrees F. It isn't even believed that those people had the means to create that level of heat.
Atlantis may or may not have ever existed, but I definitely believe we once had technologically advanced civilasation that for one reason or another was lost.
The problem is that as soon as people realize that ancient cultures were smarter and more capable than seems immediately obvious (2000 BC? They had to be stupid! It's so long ago! They didn't even have cellphones yet!), they make this ridiculous leap to conspiracy theory level BS.
Yes, the Egyptians were really good at cutting and positioning very large blocks of stone. They did a whole hell of a lot over a span of centuries so I'd really hope that they would be good at it. The pyramids were monumental construction projects dedicated to living god-kings, so obviously those are going to be some of their best work. The problem is when someone jumps in and says, "But they're too good. It must be aliens!"
Same deal with Atlantis, or whatever advanced ancient civilization. Sure, there probably were cultures with technology leaps and bounds beyond what their neighbors had which were destroyed by one thing or another and their knowledge largely lost. But 'leaps and bounds beyond their neighbors' in the Bronze Age does not equal electric lights and flying cars, which people seem intent on putting in Atlantis. Another poster said it very well earlier: modern people got interested in the whole 'lost ancient knowledge' deal around the 19th century and updated the sorts of knowledge they expected to match their own. Here we are 3 centuries later and people are still updating what counts as 'lost ancient knowledge'. The Antikythera is pretty amazing and certainly counts as 'lost ancient knowledge', but unless the thing ran on lithium batteries and had a holographic display system people don't want to be impressed.
It's the same exact thing that happens with lunar landing hoax conspiracy nuts. Obviously we couldn't have gone to the moon in the 60's. The computers onboard the Apollo command module were less powerful than the calculators I used in middle school. How could they possibly have made it to the moon with such outdated technology? The problem with this line of thought is that it neglects to consider the genius and ingenuity of people alive at the time. Yeah, their computers sucked...which is why they very carefully prepared hundreds of contingencies before hand and then trained obsessively to complete every one of them flawlessly. They didn't need computer controls. Just because you or I couldn't go out today and cut a stone as perfectly as a master Egyptian mason using the same tools doesn't mean that he must have had better tools. He trained most of his life to do the job using techniques and skills learned from generations of people who used those tools for that job before him. I couldn't walk into a modern carpenter's shop and knock out a cabinet that looks like it was poured from a mold instead of pieced together from wood but that hardly makes it impossible.
No, "a scientific invention [to] discover a divine truth lurking in the laws of the heavens" - a scientific toy - does not count as an experimental steam engine developed toward a practical use, which is fairly obviously what we're discussing here.
So they invented the steam engine. They just didn't invent the steam engine.
The conversation was about why the steam engine was never developed into a more practical use. I'm saying it was simply overlooked. Kipling and Gabriel Pitt were proposing more practical reasons.
Unless you're about to argue that we missed a Roman steam age, I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this.
Ah, misunderstood the intent of what you said. Thought you were saying it didn't count because it never saw practical use.
I think reading Chariots of the Gods as a child has warped me. I now have an urge to believe in the secret powers of the ancients. Is he still writing this stuff?
I think reading Chariots of the Gods as a child has warped me. I now have an urge to believe in the secret powers of the ancients. Is he still writing this stuff?
Though we're barely ever in contact these days, my father is totally into it - and when I was a kid, he used to give me the alien magazines he subscribed to. Crazy, crazy shit man. I'm similarly warped by the whole thing. I still remember all about the glass domes on the moon, and the photos of the alien construction vehicles which roam around on Mars, and the spacecraft NASA secretly detected orbiting Saturn...
Honestly, the worst thing you can give to a child, since it presents itself as fact, and worse, feels all persecuted about it; which is of all attitudes the most contagious.
I think reading Chariots of the Gods as a child has warped me. I now have an urge to believe in the secret powers of the ancients. Is he still writing this stuff?
Though we're barely ever in contact these days, my father is totally into it - and when I was a kid, he used to give me the alien magazines he subscribed to. Crazy, crazy shit man. I'm similarly warped by the whole thing. I still remember all about the glass domes on the moon, and the photos of the alien construction vehicles which roam around on Mars, and the spacecraft NASA secretly detected orbiting Saturn...
Honestly, the worst thing you can give to a child, since it presents itself as fact, and worse, feels all persecuted about it; which is of all attitudes the most contagious.
You sound like you got a worse dose than me. Although my father is now into 1421/ Gavin Menzies aka "China has been and done everything before anyone else, hurrah!"
I will never understand why some people insist on believing in a past "technologically advanced" civilization (almost always implying long-distance air travel or whatever other such silliness). Do these people not understand anything about the science of archaeology at all?
If this past civilization had existed they would have left artifacts. We have stone tools that we've found used by early human ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years old. We have fossils which trace the biological record all the way back to the dawn of life. And yet people continue to believe that some vast and powerful "ancient" civilization existed sometime before the dawn of the rest of history and didn't leave a single artifact as record of it? No writings, no monumental public architecture, no nothing? If egyptians and mayans were in contact with each other, why the hell were they doing "the same things" (which they weren't) several thousand years apart? Why has not a single egyptian artifact been found in mexico or a single mayan artifact found in egypt? Why is there no record whatsoever of either civilization knowing that the other continents of the world even existed?
GAAH
Ancient people were able to build magnificent things because they were a) smart and b) dedicated. It had nothing to do with overseers traipsing around the planet in airships telling them what to do. Give our ancestors some credit, people.
EDIT: And yes, I realize that the vast majority of the people in this thread aren't saying anything remotely resembling this in a serious way. But I'm an archaeologist myself and I have to hear it all the time from people who don't have any idea what they're talking about but act like it's so clear that anyone should see it. It's a major pet peeve of mine.
Maybe because it's buried under ice.....
Oh and if you're someone who is responsible for finding out about our past, then I would recommend you do it with an open mind and not with what's academically accepted in the world of science and archeology.
I think the scientific community is almost as closed minded as some religions and tell me where that gets us?
Let me explain to you something about archaeology.
Like most sciences, any potential theory in archaeology is based upon observable data. You don't get to create something out of the depths of your imagination with no physical evidence whatsoever for it and expect somebody to give you a grant to study it. I can come up with a really nifty theory about how aliens from the moon are actually responsible for the rise of early civilization and I will rightly be refused any sort of funding because nobody wants to blow money humoring some moron who's pulling idiotic theories out of his ass.
Now, if the Apollo astronauts had discovered a miraculously-intact stone tablet on the moon written in some form of Proto-Indo-European language describing passing across the chasm of space and teaching hunting-gathering tribes the secrets of agriculture and settlement you would be awash in grant money. Every archaeologist on the face of the planet would by dying to get it and every university with an anthropology department would be dying to fund it.
That's not the situation we're dealing with in regard to the idea that there was once an ancient civilization on the earth. As Richy so aptly pointed out, even if it was 50,000 years ago and their cities have long since been ground to dust, evidence of such a civilization would be everywhere. If a farmer plowed a field 200 years ago an archaeologist can tell by observable markings found in the soil layers. We can find tent posts in an overhanging rockshelter from thousands of years ago based on disturbances and discolorations in the soil. We see artifacts from ancient groups of people who are practically untraceable societies (hunting-gathering societies who use only stone and organic tools) on a daily basis at my entry-level, barely-above-minimum-wage job. The archaeological record left behind by an advanced ancient civilization would be larger by several orders of magnitude. Unless you're willing to say that this civilization used technology and architecture which somehow disappeared into the aether like dead enemies in an FPS, it is simply not possible for such a civilization to have existed.
They were environmentalists and so built their civilization on things that were biodegradable.
While I know you're just being facetious, this wouldn't work either. Even biodegradable objects leave traces in the soil as they decompose. There are times when excavating, say, a burial in which the skeleton itself barely exists anymore but the general outline of where it laid will be readily apparent due to discoloration that manifests as the body decomposes into the soil around it.
Oh and if you're someone who is responsible for finding out about our past, then I would recommend you do it with an open mind and not with what's academically accepted in the world of science and archeology.
There's a major difference between having an open mind and going with a baseless theory because it sounds cool.
If cool sounding theories is what you got out of what I said, then I apologize for not being more clear.
Or maybe you just proved my point.
Having an open mind means listening to a theory that goes against current dogma and not dismissing it out of hand.
You just classified having an open mind as baseless theories that sound cool.
At Capt and Duffel...where in GeekMagnets post did they mention anything about Aliens?
If people are jumping to the proposterous or pulling idiotic theories out their ass...well, I submit all those who attribute an "advanced society" to people who were flying in Millenium Falcons thousands of years ago.
Advanced civilisations means more advanced than we are giving them credit for.
There's zero evidence of a highly advanced civilization existing before the stone age. So it's necessary to approach that with as much an open mind as a highly advanced civilization existed in the depths of the ocean.
At Capt and Duffel...where in GeekMagnets post did they mention anything about Aliens?
If people are jumping to the proposterous or pulling idiotic theories out their ass...well, I submit all those who attribute an "advanced society" to people who were flying in Millenium Falcons thousands of years ago.
Advanced civilisations means more advanced than we are giving them credit for.
What exactly did you have in mind, then? Are you saying that there was a society advanced as, say, the Romans (or whoever) in the Pleistocene (or whenever) and it has somehow escaped the notice of anyone up to this point?
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For the sake of argument: let's say the human race collapses completely. We suffer a massive population drop to the point where a return to subsistence agriculture is required, and continuity of knowledge is lost --let's say a superbug did this, so all our structures stay behind.
Which things on our planet do you imagine would still be around, from today, in the year 7009? And how would they prove we've got a technologically advanced civilization?
Buildings are unlikely to survive in an immediately recognisable state, but I would expect them to remain obvious to a hypothetical archaeologist well in the hundreds of thousands of years. The technology will be seen in carbon dioxide levels, strange collections of extremely rare elements, and large-scale metal constructions. Tunnels in mountains and the Suez Canal may leave discernable evidence.
And, of course...
You missed the best bit of this comic:
"t-rex is supposed to be extending his "r" sound in the last panel, not trilling it. but whatever, if he's trilling it that's awesome too and brings to the comic some much-needed latin flair"
I'm surprised ACSIS hasn't posted in here yet...
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Also:
If you believe Life After People, there will be at least two things from the 20th Century that would survive that long, and possibly longer: The Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore.
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I'm just going to ignore the idea of things indicative of high technology sticking around for hundreds of thousands of years in the ruins of a city. That's just plain silly. On that time scale, things like steel and glass are liquids and shit gets ground to dust by wind, or glaciers.
At which point: how does finding a site and saying 'this was a city' indicate high technology in any form? Again, an archeologist has to find proof of that high technology.
We haven't influenced carbon dioxide levels long enough to be more than a curious blip to a hypothetical future civilization. There are already curious blips in the CO2 record, but those probably aren't indicative of space faring dinosaurs.
We find collections of extremely rare elements already in sites that are thousands of years old. Do they indicate high technology? Are you talking about things like spent uranium? That happens in nature, so it's not a sign of a high-technology civilization either (or rather it's just as plausibly a natural occurence.)
What... like the collosus of rhodes? Capable architecture and engineering is not a sign of high technology. If it is, we're missing evidence for high-tech ancient civilizations all over the place.
Not evidence of high technology. Canals are not new ideas. A big canal might strike a future civilization as impressive --in the same way people muscleing stones into place for stonehenge strikes us as impressive. Which is to say, not in a way that makes you point and go 'I bet those guys had space shuttles and microwaves!'
Ancient tunnels, amazingly engineered, are all over.
Definitely what would last the longest. Even then, in 5000 years it's just going to be particulate matter. Could come from an ancient grove of chicle-trees, for all you know. Or maybe you'd just figure 'the ancients knew how to make simple plastic, the way some ancient cultures could do fancy astronomical calculations, or make damascene steel, or glass, or steam engines.
About all I can think of that would last 5000 years while indicating high technology is the stuff we've left on the moon (I'll assume the stuff on mars will be buried in 5000 years.) But of course that's why I originally specified 'planet': there aren't a whole lot of good reasons to go to the moon, and a future high technology civilization might not bother to go there or look for evidence of people going there. If they did, they might even miss it. It IS a big place.
What I'm getting at is: in 5000 years, our ruins wouldn't look much different to a future high tech civilization than 5000 year old ruins look to us right now.
Again, has to be proof of high technology. Mount Rushmore isn't that, it's just some faces carved on a mountain. Impressive but not 'look honey, they had space shuttles' impressive.
Hoover dam could be very well be considered proof of high technology. I'm not sure it'd last 5000 years (I didn't see this life after people thing, but it sounds neat) as dams have a pretty poor track record (see: China) once maintenance is abandoned, but I could see it as it's so damned big and solid. That said, I think the general thrust of my supposition stands: what we build is pretty damned transient, and if we vanished, it wouldn't take long for evidence of our high technology to vanish with us.
I'm not sure if Life After People dealt with this, but maybe it did. How long would the numerous satellites in orbit above the planet stay aloft in space after people cease to exist? How long until the ravages of the cosmos disable them and send them hurtling into a fiery oblivion.
Also, let's not forget all the garbage we would leave behind. Some of our garbage is buried so compactly that it can't decompose, there's not even room for the bacteria needed to destroy it.
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I teach high school math. I always find it amusing and depressing when I find how many of them are shocked to hear that the Arabic world used to be the center of knowledge and learning in the world. It usually comes up because of the word "algebra"; some already figured it out, but there are many who didn't realize that it comes from Arabic, along with alchemy and algorithm.
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The no-FTL thread discussion about this prompted me to Google this idea, and see what was up.
I found this site: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/AlisonJ1-p1.htm
There's entirely too much math there, and it's all wayyy over my head. But I think it's a decent summary of the major sites that people claim "line up". As mentioned, it's probably not indicative of anything at all.
But to go along with the Atlantis stuff in this thread, the guy on that site talks about this map:
http://home.hiwaay.net/~jalison/Reis.htm , claiming it shows where Atlantis was.
They start out as kind of a "What If?" travelogue, then start with the mildly contentious interviews with scientists about halfway through, and the final third is usually unabashed tinfoilhattery. They're also huge; the shortest one I own is 800 pages. Makes for great airplane reading.
He does put forward some interesting ideas, though they're usually best treated as thought experiments rather than legitimate concepts. I do appreciate him pushing boundaries within the archeological community, though, as inane as those chosen boundaries may be.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
If this past civilization had existed they would have left artifacts. We have stone tools that we've found used by early human ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years old. We have fossils which trace the biological record all the way back to the dawn of life. And yet people continue to believe that some vast and powerful "ancient" civilization existed sometime before the dawn of the rest of history and didn't leave a single artifact as record of it? No writings, no monumental public architecture, no nothing? If egyptians and mayans were in contact with each other, why the hell were they doing "the same things" (which they weren't) several thousand years apart? Why has not a single egyptian artifact been found in mexico or a single mayan artifact found in egypt? Why is there no record whatsoever of either civilization knowing that the other continents of the world even existed?
GAAH
Ancient people were able to build magnificent things because they were a) smart and b) dedicated. It had nothing to do with overseers traipsing around the planet in airships telling them what to do. Give our ancestors some credit, people.
EDIT: And yes, I realize that the vast majority of the people in this thread aren't saying anything remotely resembling this in a serious way. But I'm an archaeologist myself and I have to hear it all the time from people who don't have any idea what they're talking about but act like it's so clear that anyone should see it. It's a major pet peeve of mine.
I think that looking at the moon through a decent enough telescope and noticing that theres a flag on it might help....
I think you missed the point.
Saying "when it comes to easy to build, long lasting architecture, you really can't beat a pyramid" doesn't make any sense. These aren't giant legos we're dealing with.
Tell me the easy part of building a pyramid?
Tell me the "simpler" way to construct them?
Regardless of why so many cultures built pyramids they were most definitely NOT easy or simple to construct.
I agree with you on one point however: for "long lasting architecture, you really CAN'T beat a pyramid" and maybe thats why they were built in the first place.
But you miss the most fundamentally important warped logic of that theory:
"Gosh, if they didn't leave anything behind, at all - who could have done such a thing? They must have been so advanced!"
Suddenly absence of evidence becomes the most compelling evidence in itself.
Maybe because it's buried under ice.....
Oh and if you're someone who is responsible for finding out about our past, then I would recommend you do it with an open mind and not with what's academically accepted in the world of science and archeology.
I think the scientific community is almost as closed minded as some religions and tell me where that gets us?
In the scientific community, every time you prove someone wrong, you get RICH AND FAMOUS.
Yeah, that really encourages a close-minded attitude.
Or maybe Stargate had it right and the city just left
And maybe they just had really advanced garbe collection systems, heh.
There are all kinds of games you can play by guessing what could have happened. It makes for good sci-fi and fantasy novels.
But in terms of actually proving it, we need something physical. Something written down, or a monument.
Lacking any real physical proof, we then start looking for connections (no matter how slim) between things.
This would be in reference to Hancock, among others, claiming that there are the remains of a great civilisation buried under Antarctica, right? Except that dating the age of the ice down to however many feet shows that the cap is thousands upon thousands of years too old for that. Even Hancock admitted that dating the ice cap made that part of his 'theory' impossible, even though he weaselled out of it afterwards by saying that his ideas didn't depend on that piece of the theory.
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Then, if they continue to explore the city, they will find remnants of our electrical systems. Most of it might not survive, but they will find a piece of wall that survived with some wiring here, one artefact with wiring there, some buried wires over there, lots of stuff with small holes like there could have been similar wires going through, and eventually they'll connect the pieces together. Sure, they need to have electricity first before they realize why we had copper wires going all over the place, but once they do, they'll realize that we were such a technologically-advanced civilization that electricity was fundamental for us.
If they hold their noses and look through the massive stockpiles of non-bio-degradable waste we've left behind, they'll realize that most of it was not manufactured locally. Rather, it's an indiscriminate mix of stuff that originated from all over the world. Evidence of such widespread international (and especially intercontinental) trade is another sign of an advanced civilization.
As for large-scale projects, I agree that Mount Rushmore and the Suez Canal are not giveaways, and that the Hoover Dam will collapse before then. I'm crossing my fingers for them discovering the CERN's Large Hadron Collider. If even part of it survives in good enough shape and they are advanced enough to figure out what it was (never mind what it does), that's a dead giveaway of how awesome we were.
Say you build something, say cubic, and it collapses, what shape does it become? A pyramid. Say you look at wind blowing sand and it piles up in a dune, what shape does it have? A pyramid. Very irregular pyramids, to be sure, but still, it's a naturally-occurring, naturally-stable shape. From there, it's a small leap to even out the sides and build a staircase on it or a tunnel inside it.
Drag the stones to where you want to build it, then pile them up using ramps or pulley systems, being careful to put a little less on each successive level. Basic geometry and measuring skills allow you to make them surprisingly regular, too.
Regardless of the fact they were very different in appearance, size, purpose, origin, construction... really, the only thing an Egyptian pyramid and a Mayan ziggurat have in common is basic geometric shape.
It's more accurate to say that whenever you posit a new theory that goes against popular theory you are ridiculed and scorned and not published. This happens WAY, WAY more than someone getting rich and famous for proving something wrong.
Your grants come from how highly regarded you are in the scientific community and guess what? If you get ridiculed and scorned and aren't published then you aren't highly regarded in that community.
So no money for you. It's hard to fund research to prove someone wrong when you have no money.
To play devil's advocate, our modern creations are a lot more fragile than those of ancient civilizations.
For example, roman concrete buildings have lasted thousands of years and will probably last several thousand more. Modern iron rebar reinforced concrete buildings probably won't last a single thousand years because of iron corrosion.
A lot of our modern construction and technology is dependent on electricity and constant maintenance to stay in tact. Once those things go away, they deteriorate rather quickly. So several thousands years later, it could be very, very difficult for anyone to find enough artifacts to piece together the true extent of our civilization.
The best you could hope for is that some bits would get buried in mud or sand and thus preserved mostly in tact. Or that someone would find our moon rovers. Without that, it would be very easy for future archaeologists to just overlook it.
The conversation was about why the steam engine was never developed into a more industrial use. I'm saying it was simply overlooked. Kipling and Gabriel Pitt were proposing more practical reasons.
Unless you're about to argue that we missed a Roman steam age, I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this.
The problem is that as soon as people realize that ancient cultures were smarter and more capable than seems immediately obvious (2000 BC? They had to be stupid! It's so long ago! They didn't even have cellphones yet!), they make this ridiculous leap to conspiracy theory level BS.
Yes, the Egyptians were really good at cutting and positioning very large blocks of stone. They did a whole hell of a lot over a span of centuries so I'd really hope that they would be good at it. The pyramids were monumental construction projects dedicated to living god-kings, so obviously those are going to be some of their best work. The problem is when someone jumps in and says, "But they're too good. It must be aliens!"
Same deal with Atlantis, or whatever advanced ancient civilization. Sure, there probably were cultures with technology leaps and bounds beyond what their neighbors had which were destroyed by one thing or another and their knowledge largely lost. But 'leaps and bounds beyond their neighbors' in the Bronze Age does not equal electric lights and flying cars, which people seem intent on putting in Atlantis. Another poster said it very well earlier: modern people got interested in the whole 'lost ancient knowledge' deal around the 19th century and updated the sorts of knowledge they expected to match their own. Here we are 3 centuries later and people are still updating what counts as 'lost ancient knowledge'. The Antikythera is pretty amazing and certainly counts as 'lost ancient knowledge', but unless the thing ran on lithium batteries and had a holographic display system people don't want to be impressed.
It's the same exact thing that happens with lunar landing hoax conspiracy nuts. Obviously we couldn't have gone to the moon in the 60's. The computers onboard the Apollo command module were less powerful than the calculators I used in middle school. How could they possibly have made it to the moon with such outdated technology? The problem with this line of thought is that it neglects to consider the genius and ingenuity of people alive at the time. Yeah, their computers sucked...which is why they very carefully prepared hundreds of contingencies before hand and then trained obsessively to complete every one of them flawlessly. They didn't need computer controls. Just because you or I couldn't go out today and cut a stone as perfectly as a master Egyptian mason using the same tools doesn't mean that he must have had better tools. He trained most of his life to do the job using techniques and skills learned from generations of people who used those tools for that job before him. I couldn't walk into a modern carpenter's shop and knock out a cabinet that looks like it was poured from a mold instead of pieced together from wood but that hardly makes it impossible.
Fair enough.
Though actually now I'm kind of disappointed that there's no Secret Roman Steam Age conspiracies out there.
Though we're barely ever in contact these days, my father is totally into it - and when I was a kid, he used to give me the alien magazines he subscribed to. Crazy, crazy shit man. I'm similarly warped by the whole thing. I still remember all about the glass domes on the moon, and the photos of the alien construction vehicles which roam around on Mars, and the spacecraft NASA secretly detected orbiting Saturn...
Honestly, the worst thing you can give to a child, since it presents itself as fact, and worse, feels all persecuted about it; which is of all attitudes the most contagious.
You sound like you got a worse dose than me. Although my father is now into 1421/ Gavin Menzies aka "China has been and done everything before anyone else, hurrah!"
Let me explain to you something about archaeology.
Like most sciences, any potential theory in archaeology is based upon observable data. You don't get to create something out of the depths of your imagination with no physical evidence whatsoever for it and expect somebody to give you a grant to study it. I can come up with a really nifty theory about how aliens from the moon are actually responsible for the rise of early civilization and I will rightly be refused any sort of funding because nobody wants to blow money humoring some moron who's pulling idiotic theories out of his ass.
Now, if the Apollo astronauts had discovered a miraculously-intact stone tablet on the moon written in some form of Proto-Indo-European language describing passing across the chasm of space and teaching hunting-gathering tribes the secrets of agriculture and settlement you would be awash in grant money. Every archaeologist on the face of the planet would by dying to get it and every university with an anthropology department would be dying to fund it.
That's not the situation we're dealing with in regard to the idea that there was once an ancient civilization on the earth. As Richy so aptly pointed out, even if it was 50,000 years ago and their cities have long since been ground to dust, evidence of such a civilization would be everywhere. If a farmer plowed a field 200 years ago an archaeologist can tell by observable markings found in the soil layers. We can find tent posts in an overhanging rockshelter from thousands of years ago based on disturbances and discolorations in the soil. We see artifacts from ancient groups of people who are practically untraceable societies (hunting-gathering societies who use only stone and organic tools) on a daily basis at my entry-level, barely-above-minimum-wage job. The archaeological record left behind by an advanced ancient civilization would be larger by several orders of magnitude. Unless you're willing to say that this civilization used technology and architecture which somehow disappeared into the aether like dead enemies in an FPS, it is simply not possible for such a civilization to have existed.
Which is to say that it is simply not possible.
While I know you're just being facetious, this wouldn't work either. Even biodegradable objects leave traces in the soil as they decompose. There are times when excavating, say, a burial in which the skeleton itself barely exists anymore but the general outline of where it laid will be readily apparent due to discoloration that manifests as the body decomposes into the soil around it.
If cool sounding theories is what you got out of what I said, then I apologize for not being more clear.
Or maybe you just proved my point.
Having an open mind means listening to a theory that goes against current dogma and not dismissing it out of hand.
You just classified having an open mind as baseless theories that sound cool.
If people are jumping to the proposterous or pulling idiotic theories out their ass...well, I submit all those who attribute an "advanced society" to people who were flying in Millenium Falcons thousands of years ago.
Advanced civilisations means more advanced than we are giving them credit for.
What exactly did you have in mind, then? Are you saying that there was a society advanced as, say, the Romans (or whoever) in the Pleistocene (or whenever) and it has somehow escaped the notice of anyone up to this point?