Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
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Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#2I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia.
I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#3I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
This is a pretty old idea that was recently rebranded as the "Silurian Hypothesis". If you put in a bit of thought, it'll be obvious that it essentially boils down to one of two things:
Either every paleoanthropologist, archaeologist, and geologist out there is in a massive conspiracy to hide the truth, or all of the people in those disciplines are complete idiots. An event like that would leave strong genetic, palynological, and archaeological evidence, yet nothing of that sort exists. Any explanation purporting to wipe out the evidence and replace it with the consensus story we do would be better called magic than science.
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#4I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
> we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically
When I saw a video recently that mentioned the Antikythera mechanism, we definitely have had high points and low points that we've forgotten.
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#5I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
There are a few ancient techniques that got lost along the way as we moved to differing mathematics and languages but there is nothing significant high technology found so far.It is a bunch of trenches, hardly high technology.
If you talk to a doctor about diagnosis 100 years ago they would tell you about touch and listening to the body in various ways to do a diagnosis that a modern Doctor doesn't know because they just order an Xray. Listening to the heart is a bit old fashioned already as cardiograms have become part of the kit in your average ambulance. So the techniques will be lost in time.
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#6I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
So maybe the simulation was reset?
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#7I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
I don't know about being far advanced in the past, but we've certainly lost knowledge along the way.
- Scientists still debate exactly how the pyramids were built. They have a pretty good idea, but don't know exactly.
- More recently, we're not sure we could even recreate the engines that powered Apollo and took us to the moon. It appears that some of the critical knowledge was institutional, passed from one to the next, and all the engineers are gone.
And look at any tech company now. Sometimes when one person leaves, stuff has to be rewritten because no one knows how it works. My favorite example of this, which I experienced personally, was that no one knew how the "send money" code at PayPal worked for the longest time. It was written in a language that the lead engineer made up (and then he subsequently left). Everyone knew it worked, but no one knew how. They had to eventually rewrite the whole thing from scratch, but not after creating a fleet of emulators to keep it running.
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#8I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
I don't know about being far advanced in the past, but we've certainly lost knowledge along the way. - Scientists still debate exactly how the pyramids were built. They have a pretty good idea, but don't know exactly. - More recently, we're not sure we could even recreate the engines that powered Apollo and took us to the moon. It appears that some of the critical knowledge was institutional, passed from one to the n…
That’s a silly argument, we could build pyramids 100 times bigger than the Egyptian ones if we wanted to today, and we can build engines that are far more efficient and powerful than the Apollo ones.
Just because the specific methodology became obsolete doesn’t mean we lost anything along the way
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#9I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
This is a tantalizing idea ripe for nerd sniping, but there are practical limits to how advanced previous civilizations could have become. If all of humanity were catastrophically wiped out right now, and 50 million years from now, another species was investigating the planet, they'd find microplastics in rock and ice strata around the world, all at approximately the same age. There's no natural explanation for this material, so it would be strong evidence for a global species capable of extracting and processing hydrocarbons.
Although many people don't believe it, the fact also remains that there would be similar evidence of atmospheric changes due to our activities.
There might be no written record of our passing, all of our steel structures would be long gone, even Mount Rushmore long erased, and our efforts at interplanetary exploration could all be lost, but our plastics would remain.
Some further reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...
FWIW, I do think some prehistorical civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for, and ongoing discoveries seem to support this. But we're almost certainly the most technologically advanced civilization the Earth has fostered to date.
Re: Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site
#10I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia. I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
This is a tantalizing idea ripe for nerd sniping, but there are practical limits to how advanced previous civilizations could have become. If all of humanity were catastrophically wiped out right now, and 50 million years from now, another species was investigating the planet, they'd find microplastics in rock and ice strata around the world, all at approximately the same age. There's no natural explanation for this…
You don't present an argument for an upper limit on how advanced past civilizations can have been without detection but for an excluded middle, because, sure, a civilization at our level would be easily detectable, but one that developed to where it could operate without environmental pollution and which could clean up the pollution that it made on the way to it's advanced state would not be so detectable.