An arctic ice video I like

[Aggers]

Suff. - Your last posting does not surprise me at all.

The information you give, and lots of similar information, is given in the book I am currently reading, "The Magicians Of The Gods" by Graham Hancock. It is, without doubt, the most interesting non-fiction book I have ever read. As well as some of the amazing engineering and construction feats achieved by those builders all those thousands of years ago, when supposedly our ancestors were merely hunter/gatherers, Hancock reveals that some of these ancient structures, such as the pyramids. were aligned with the position of certain stars at the time with an accuracy that would be almost impossible to achieve today.

I am about halfway though this fascinating book. There is so much to absorb and wonder at, that one needs to read slowly.

[Suff]

It's funny really when you think about it, what a civilisation with, perhaps, the technological knowledge of the early 20th century would make of our current civilisation if it suddenly ended and laid dormant for, say, 10,000 years.

They would not have DNA technology or carbon dating. Would they make assumptions about our population and demographics from the more durable remains. They certainly wouldn't be able to fathom all the cremated bodies, they'd base our population size on the skeletons they dug up.

So I do wonder, looking through the wrong end of the telescope, just exactly how far advanced a society could become in, perhaps, 5,000 years if they did not war with each other, lived in the same region and were almost totally wiped out by a cataclysmic event they had not anticipated.

Would we see the evidence of their declining civilisation carried through our own history until we eventually started to ascend back to the levels they had reached?

It's all an interesting exercise. The only thing I know for a fact is that many of the theories put out by church and archaeologists (often the same), from centuries past, have no actual base in fact and were simply put out there as the most likely theory by people who didn't have the technology at the time to recognise a different possibility.

If we think Occam's razor, what is the more likely?

That all over this planet dozens of different cultures produced spectacular examples of technology far and beyond their known level of skill and then, miraculously, lost that knowledge without ever recording it in a way which could be discovered later?

Or that one society reached a spectacular level of technology long enough ago that when it fell (for whatever reason), the knowledge that it held fell with it. But not entirely and that knowledge eroded over thousands of years where the next generation was simply unable to retain the educational standards to even understand what they had been given.

Once society drops into the dark ages of mysticism and cult religion, knowledge suddenly vanishes. Leaving the spectacular results of that knowledge but not the reason for being or technology which created it.

For me the latter is more likely. We have already seen a small instance of knowledge loss with the fall of the Roman empire. Our civilisation dropped into more than 500 years of barbarism before it dragged itself out again and began advancing. The knowledge was encapsulated in Rome, when Rome fell it leaked out of the cracks and was lost just like a broken water bottle.

Roman civilisation was not that far above stone age, in comparison to what we have today. Our fall would be much further, much faster and much, much, more complete.

[Aggers]

Roman civilisation was not that far above stone age, in comparison to what we have today. Our fall would be much further, much faster and much, much, more complete.

That's a sobering thought, Suff.

[Suff]

It's a game Mrs S and I like to play. How would you survive.

If you think of Roman times, pretty much every town and village had a tanner, a cobbler, a smith and a stonemason. Regardless of just feeding yourself, how would you make a pair of shoes when your own disintegrated?

Yes if, for instance, only 100m people survived some catastrophe, we would have vast stores of goods but how would you get to them before they started to degrade. We have vast stores of fuel but modern petrol has gas dissolved in it which evaporates and even diesel degrades after 10 years making it quite hard to start modern engines.

Who would know how to make those vital pieces of metal needed to survive and how many would be left who know how to run those huge power stations.

There would be pockets, the least developed areas of the world would be impacted least. But our world as we know it would vanish within a decade and our fall would be significantly faster than the fall after the Roman Empire. After all you can live without running water and sewage. Romans were Iron age, they did not have steel and a lot of their stuff was Stone, wood and bronze. Which is why much of it endures to this day.

The most likely parts of our civilisation to survive our fall, so long, would be the mega structures, London Underground, the Channel Tunnel, these kinds of things. Although they would likely flood with water and be covered in 100ft of earth over 10,000 years. Where would you start looking? Recently a large obelisk was found in the Med in a place that has been inundated in water for 10,000 years. I wonder what else we would find if we were to do serious side scan sonar mapping of the entire Med basin at that water mark????

We are looking back in time at our world based on areas accessible today. Areas which were accessible, say, 15,000 years ago are extremely difficult for us to access today and if you look at our civilisation, it is mainly coastal based.

Which is why I keep my mind open.

[Workingman]

Last night I was watching a programme, Secrets of the Bible, (Yesterday 8 pm) regarding the Great Flood of Genesis.

The science indicated that sea levels started to rise some 120m to the level they are today. At some point, date not certain, the Atlantic broke through the Straits of Gibraltar and began to refill the Med, which had begun the shrink during the last Ice-age. As the Med rose it began to push against the land bridge we now know as the Bosporus. Beyond the Bosporus, in an area below sea level, was a huge lake we now know as the Black Sea. This lake was fed by four main rivers, as the Black Sea is to this day.

Everything above has been covered before and is generally accepted as factual, to a point. Archaeological and geological studies tend to agree on the basics.

Now enter the Bible - Genesis. From this we get Adam and Eve, The Garden of Eden, the Great Flood and Noah's Arc.

The story speculated that the Black Sea lake was, in fact, the Garden of Eden. The rising sea levels broke through the land bridge of the Bosporus at an estimated rate of between 9,000 to 18,000 cu/km of water per year. The rising water levels became the Great Flood, and this happened some 5,300 years BC. The conclusion was that the farmers of the region, who had invested generations of effort into domesticating animals, knew that they needed to take a male and female of each one to survive as they tried to escape. This action became a "code" for Noah's Arc.

It was an interesting exercise in that the science loosely fits the story, what it does not do, through speculation and conjecture, is make Genesis factual. That is how I view these other stories. World-Mysteries is a blog written by like-minded people who want all these things to be true. Wanting them to be true is not the same as proving them to be true.

[Suff]

Every civilisation in the world has a flood story. The Bible is just another one of many.

If you look at Central America Tarascan (northern Michoacan, Mexico): if that first paragraph is not almost exactly what we are facing today, then it's the closest thing that could be remembered through thousands and thousands of years of retelling.

If you look at them all it's almost inconceivable that they do not come from the same source and if they come from the same source, then the whole Bible and it's Med bias is wrong.

Last time I looked, the med re-flooded 5.3m years ago and there is anecdotal evidence that it had periods of cut off and re-flooding up to about 230,000 years ago. But nobody seems to think that the last ice age actually cut off the Med, so it would have been 120m lower than it is today, but not separate from the Atlantic.

What is more likely is that a civilisation grew, flourished and vanished in the (relatively sudden), 90m sea level rise about 11,000 - 12,000 years ago. Given the totally global nature of the flood stories, it's quite likely that occurred because of the global nature of the flooding. I wonder how a 90m sea level rise over the next 100 years would play out in the verbal memory of our ancestors, say, 5,000 years from now? Because our current society can't survive a 90M sea level rise, if the sea level didn't get us or the storms, the wars would.

Then, of course, finally, we have the histories of virginal birth, healing and walking on water. Take your pick of the millennium.... Jesus is hardly unique except in one way. The faith of Jesus and the Church are in the order the most organised and ruthlessly defended religions on the planet. Only Islam comes second to it.

So when it comes to believing the Bible over a potential forerunner civilisation? All the evidence, once gathered in one place instead of being spread from horizon to horizon, tends to negate the former and support the latter.

Well it's my view anyway.

[Workingman]

You would have noticed that speculation and conjecture came up with the Bible story.

This always happens with these hypotheses where the observable world is made to fit with "could haves", "what ifs?" and "maybes". No real proof is ever offered, but items from the wish list is somehow presented as proof.

As for the collapse of today's civilization and its rediscovery 5,000 years hence. We have absolutely no idea what will be left to find, though my take is that there will be quite a lot. We do not know how advanced our future discoverers will have become. And we do not know the mind-set of them nor how they will interpret what they find.

Nice exercise though.

[Suff]

You would have noticed that speculation and conjecture came up with the Bible story.

<snip>

Nice exercise though.

Of course it would. I've known for decades that the Bible is nothing more than a narration of stories gathered together by a tribe on the run (old testament), followed by a huge chunk of common sense and good reasoning wrapped in mumbo jumbo and rules to create a hugely stratified class society which could be controlled.

It's always a good exercise to look back with a very broad view. We've had enough of the narrow views. My absolute favourite on the narrow view stuff was the scientist who said that "because of texting we would grow longer thumbs in the next 5,000 years". Really? Before this decade ends, the ability to talk to your phone instead of texting will be firmly cemented. By the end of the next decade anyone who actually uses a keypad to send a text message will be in a place where talking is banned.

Narrow minded thinking.

Talking about narrow minded thinking. Whilst looking up references for the plethora of virgin birth, walking on water and resurrection stories, I came across someone who thundered in caps PLASPHEMY.

Really? What I wanted to say to that was "Well the Moslems call the observance of Christianity Apostasy and if I put you and a Moslem of your ilk into a room the two of you can scream your bigotry at each other until one tries to kill the other. As a good Christian I expect you to turn the other cheek and let the Moslem kill you, just like the Romans, Christians and Lions"!!!!!

I would deny no man, woman or child their faith. Just don't put it on me and don't ask me to believe fairy stories because it's the only way they can align their faith with the world at large....

It is a very good exercise though. The more I dig, the more compelling the evidence is... However it is very clear that if a very advanced society did rise some 15,000 years ago, it was very localised and had no interest in space or visiting the solar system or the stars.... Whilst it is quite possible to lose a whole society over 10,000 years of shifting sands of the earth, it would take much, much more time to eradicate the floating junkyard we currently have in orbit around our planet.

Whilst it is undeniable that our current civilisation has reached peaks which are higher than any before seen on the planet, I do believe that we had a civilisation before us who understood more about the fundamental nature of the universe around them and how to manipulate it.....

But that's just a belief. Some day we may know. Or maybe not. In 200 years it won't matter, we will have finally broken down the barriers to that knowledge and will be masters of gravity and space flight. Or gone. The other is an option too....

[Workingman]

I read a cracking short story in Omni, a magazine, some time ago.

The survivors of a post-apocalypse world put their efforts into working with the Universe rather than the physical world.

They worked on ESP and 'thought communication' rather than verbal. They learned how to 'travel' to other places only using their minds. They were able to 'live' in strange lands without actually being there because they could transport themselves there and back again at will.

They could sit on the veranda and Go!

For them there were no such things as time, distance and space.

Imagine that.

[Suff]

Imagine that.

Sadly I have...