An arctic ice video I like

[Suff]

Theoretically absolute zero is a method or a cosequence in stasis. In theory resonant harmonics would impede movement at room temperature. Because the atoms were unable to move they would become an almost perfect insulator. Neither able to absorb or emit energy.

[Workingman]

Stasis is more about equilibrium than lack of movement.

Take two objects, diametrically opposed, orbiting a point in space - they never get closer, nor do the fly apart: stasis.

The furthest object, mass1, is travelling faster than its opposite, mass2, because its orbital path is longer. Two things keep them apart: centrifugal and centripetal forces. Remove or stop one object and the other will fly off at a tangent due to centrifugal force: stasis is broken.

Stop both and the centripetal force, due to gravity, will take over; both objects will move towards each other and meet at the point in space they were previously orbiting. They could remain still or continue to orbit the point in space, and stasis will, once again, be achieved.

[Suff]

True, it has more than one form. But the type I'm interested in is the total lack of motion. Who would need a freezer then???

Food for thought. Our world is not quite the same place that the historians would like us to believe and I'm totally sure there is a huge religious unwillingness to open up our history to the correct kind of scrutiny.

It's clear that the Mayans did not develop their calendars and their star maps on their own. They inherited a large chunk of it from earlier cultures. Many things which have simply been "labelled" can have very different connotations when examined as a whole across the entire planet.

Almost every culture has it's flood story, walking on water story etc... There is a common root there somewhere but we are expected to believe that word of mouth places it in a specific time range and a specific subset of the world people; which can't move or be changed...

Also and here is the really fun part. If there were a truly advanced culture all those thousands of years ago, did it really die out? Or did they just keep themselves hidden from us and keep moving alongside us. They really would have appeared to be Magicians thousands of years ago. Today they would simply be mildly advanced...

Or did they regress over the centuries because their population was simply incapable of retaining the high technological levels required.

Second guessing the status quo can be quite fun without having to go into any real bizarre scenarios.

[Workingman]

We are dying out.
What?
We are dying out. Gather everything up and put it on the ship.
Why?
We don't want them to know we existed. We must remain hidden from them.
Who
The dipsticks in the 21st Century
Can I keep my smartphone?
Absolutely not! Get it on the ship NOW!
And 3. 2. 1. Blast off
Now what?
We disappear.
But some of them are using that calendar thing, and they have paintings of those fictional spacemen we told them about.
Well there's nothing like a good puzzle for the dipsticks to solve. Which do you fancy, Acapulco or Las Vegas?

Seriously. In the early days, out of Africa, most humans would have lived by the sea. Floods and tidal waves would have been a regular thing and with no writing the warnings would be word of mouth and, as we all know, a story told over and over gets changed and embellished.

When farming took hold, apparently in Eastern Turkey, a calendar then becomes essential and many examples are found all over the world. Stonehenge is one such. A rudimentary calendar needs nothing more than observations taken in one place over time. After the first appears more nuanced versions can be made. As farming spreads so does the calendar idea.

Many ancient wisdoms can be explained logically. They do not need spacemen or superhumans, especially when there is no physical evidence whatsoever for their existences.

[Suff]

I never said aliens.... That's for others to point at.

Look at it simply. Our current civilisation has only lifted itself above the level of pottery and Iron in the last 500 years. Our truly modern civilisation has only lasted for around 200 years and the current level of advancement is only just over 100 years.

Contrast the fact that fossilised remains of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, with the same physical characteristics, brain size etc, have been around for at least 130,000 years and I must admit we have to ask ourselves "who's kidding whom"? Even in the 6,000 years from the end of the last ice age to the "dawn of modern civilisation", there is such a large gap that literally dozens of civilisations could have risen and fallen in that 6,000 years. Each, possibly, of incredible technological advancement.

In fact it is more likely that this did happen than that this did not.

If you actually go and look into all of the amazing things lying around our planet, align them on a planetary scale and not a purely local or regional one, things make much more sense.

I hadn't read about Mohenjo Daro before but it is, again, one of those totally inexplicable things which are just "swept under the carpet".

My mind is open and I don't find closed arguments and closed thinking as a viable solution to the questions these ancient relics leave behind.

[Workingman]

Even in the 6,000 years from the end of the last ice age to the "dawn of modern civilisation", there is such a large gap that literally dozens of civilisations could have risen and fallen in that 6,000 years. Each, possibly, of incredible technological advancement.

In fact it is more likely that this did happen than that this did not.

Why? Where is the evidence for their existence? There is none.

Everything we have done is a progression from what went before. We did bronze, then we did iron/steel. We went from hunter gatherers to farmers. We remembered what went before and improved on it. We follow the same process today.

There is absolutely no need for a prehistoric advanced civilization passing on its supreme intelligence in order for humans to advance. We are good enough to get there on our own, and then some.

[Suff]

Actually we didn't. There are several instances of civilisations which had calendars that are more accurate that ours today and also knowledge of stars and celestial bodies which require modern optics.

Where did they come from? In the linear knowledge model they can't exist. Therefore the linear knowledge model is wrong.

The next question is why? That is the point most of these books and investigations try to find out. The most interesting point is this. The harder you look and the broader the scope of your investigation, the more tenuous the linear model is.

If our society was to crash in war, famine or climate, in the next two decades, then 12,000 years later the main relics would be those which have already stood the test of time of the last 12,000 years. Steel, concrete, small stone, wood, plastic, they would pretty much all be gone or be buried under meters of earth. The main sites which would be discernible would be the remains of the nuclear reactors which would have gone china syndrome and melted out, the buildings would be long gone....

Except for the junk we have left all over the orbit of the planet and on the moon and mars, we might never have been. Which means that any pre civilisation either did not have the technology to reach the solar system or couldn't be bothered.

Either way there are a LOT of unexplained things which just do not fit into the linear model. Occam's razor.

[Workingman]

Astronomy and Calendars fit well, don't you think?

I have not found an ancient calendar that is more accurate than what we use today, but I have found some oddities with 19 months, 10 months, equal day months. Unfortunately none of them fit the observable year on Earth - they all had to be tweaked.

There is, however, a lot of progression to try to accommodate the lunar/solar cycles with Earth's seasons till we eventually get the English version of the Gregorian calendar - the de facto one used today.

As for astronomy. The view of the skies on a clear night from a desert in the tropics is phenomenal. All of the solar system planets, except Pluto, can be seen with the naked eye, as can a few galaxies. The apparent retrograde motion of the planets against the cosmic background can also be seen.

There are hieroglyphs from ancient Egypt apparently showing astronomers observing the heavens. There are also finds of optical lenses, as opposed to naturally occurring ones, dating back thousands of years, long before Copernicus and Galileo. It is not inconceivable for rudimentary telescopes to have been made.

However, if our current civilization crashed there would be plenty of evidence of our existence. We find plenty of evidence for communities existing tens of thousands of years ago, when the human population of the planet could be measures in millions, from their buildings of stones held together by gravity and their tools and weapons. It would be harder for the archaeologists of the future not to find us than to find us.

[Suff]

Astronomy and Calendars fit well, don't you think?

I have not found an ancient calendar that is more accurate than what we use today, but I have found some oddities with 19 months, 10 months, equal day months. Unfortunately none of them fit the observable year on Earth - they all had to be tweaked.

Well you only have to look in one direction to invalidate that.

The Mayan Long Count calendar just exceeded 5,000 years. There is clear evidence that the Long Count was inherited by the Mayans from the Olmecs and that the Mayans did not invent it themselves.

So what do we know about the Long Count? Well actually the most significant thing we know about the Long Count is that it is slightly _more_ accurate than the Gregorian calendar we use today.

Even more interesting is that the Long Count has stayed accurate throughout that 5,000 years.

Why is this incredibly unusual? Because in order for us to keep our calendar accurate, we have to add leap seconds. We only know about leap seconds since the advent of the Atomic Clock in the 60's. Since the first atomic clock we have adjusted by 36 seconds but, more importantly, we have adjusted by exactly 26 seconds since 1972.

So if you adjust that back to 5,000 years ago, that makes 137.8 leap minutes that our Gregorian calendar would have to have been adjusted in order for it to remain correct over that time.

This is circa 1.6 seconds in a YEAR. It's not possible to measure that 1.6 seconds in a year with normal physical measuring tools. Simply put, the expansion and contraction of physical measuring tools made of metal or other materials, simply by temperature and humidity from the different times of the year, would make it virtually impossible. Those aincients would have had to measure for multiple lifetimes, on exactly the same day of the year, with the same temperature and atmospheric pressure, with their "supposed" mechanical instruments.

In fact there are records which show that the Spanish destroyed a pair of Gold and Silver calendar measurers which they melted down for the metal. Totally destroying something which would probably have amazed scientists today. Because it's almost certain that those calendars came with instructions as to how to tell the temperature and atmospheric fluctuations by the differing expansion rates of the two metals. Apparently these Calendar "wheels" were of sufficient size to show the difference.

This is maths which would have taken a team of advanced scientists a few weeks to do before the advent of computers.

We are asked to believe that the Olmec's and Mayan's had this knowledge and technology of heat, atmospheric pressure, metallurgic expansion properties down to the atomic measurement level and also knew how to apply it to the Long Count calendar in order to adjust it for the slowing of the rotation of the earth which could not be measured by any means at their technology level????

I'm pretty willing to bet that if we were to subject to the Long Count calendar to analysis of when the Spanish stopped raping and destroying the knowledge of South America, that the Long Count calendar would be absolutely correct to the exact microsecond at that time (some 500 odd years ago).

Yet we are expected to blithely accept that knowledge which has only become ours with the advent of powerful computers, micro circuitry and micro engineering and atomic time keeping; was common place to a low level of society which was still "learning" and "progressing" to our current pinnacle of ability.

Sorry but I absolutely refuse to accept that. There is and must be, another explanation and just because senior fellows and academics don't want to open that can of worms, does not mean that it is not so.

[Aggers]

What an interesting and fascinating discussion.

I must admit, however, that I am inclined to go along with Suff's line of reasoning.