7 ms·

I'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 rem

I'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.

AlotOfReading 6y ago
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.
- stareatgoats 6y ago
  You could be right. It is certainly a compelling argument; "either scientists are in a conspiracy or complete idiots" (paraphrased). The answer is however unequivocally: we don't know. And it behooves to be a bit more humble when it comes to these things, and investigate each claim individually instead of making blanket statements about everything such. There are several aspects one can take into account that can inspire a more nuanced approach: one is that these kind of theories is an "entry-drug" for interest in archaeology and related sciences. To get on a high horse and nip such interest in its bud is counterproductive from a scientific perspective and is reminiscent of the defensive position that many professions are taking in the open data age that has opened for masses of amateur researchers doing much better work than a tiny cadre of elite professionals could do on their own. Another aspect of this dismissive attitude is that the notion a petrified and fact-resistant "establishment" is opening the field for all sorts of nut case Youtube channels that exploit this types of interests instead. Including the age-old nazis with their Atlantis and similar theories. So no, let's assume that we don't know, that anything is possible. But let's also inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim with best of our knowledge.
  - technothrasher 6y ago
    So no, let's assume that we don't know, that anything is possible. But let's also inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim with best of our knowledge. Well, first of all, you don't know that anything is possible. To assert something is possible without actually showing it is possible is meaningless. That doesn't mean we can conclude it isn't possible, just that we don't know if it's possible. Second, while 'we don't know' is a perfectly acceptable position, it does not lead to,'therefore my pet idea is worthy'. You are, of course, entirely within your right to explore any idea you'd like, but to claim the scientific community is unfair or defensive to dismiss your idea because it either has no evidence to back it up, or frequently because it has been proposed over and over and has already been picked to death, is intellectually lazy. If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence. There's too much to study to be able to take every currently baseless idea and run with it.
    - danans 6y ago
      > If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence. That really depends on what "people" you are talking about. There is a considerable market for fantastical misinformation about history, especially when the fantasy reinforces things we want to believe about ourselves today. I have personally been led down a few story paths purporting to be historical but turning out to be nothing more recently constructed and idealized fantasies of the distant past.
    - stareatgoats 6y ago
      > Well, first of all, you don't know that anything is possible I said "let's assume (...) that anything is possible", a completely different thing, so your argument that " we don't know if it's possible" is moot, and a classic case of a straw man argument. > "while 'we don't know' is a perfectly acceptable position, it does not lead to,'therefore my pet idea is worthy'" Again, you are mostly having an argument with yourself, as this is somewhat a misrepresentation of what I'm saying. My main point is that it behooves to be a bit humble when it comes to dismissing ideas that are possible albeit without firm evidence and that offhanded dismissal should be discouraged, unless one can actually disprove the claim. It is after all the stuff from which new knowledge is made. That doesn't mean that every scientist must engage and clamor to inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim (but I do believe that an active interest from the scientific community would help cleanse the scene of some of the more outrageous theories). > "If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence." Really? so all scientific endeavors must produce evidence before they are allowed to posit something? I think you will agree that this is an untenable position hold as a general principle, and you probably mean that any layman should not be allowed to posit anything without having the proper education and academic standing. Be that as it may, such ivory towers of academic snobbishness will fall, eventually.
- drran 6y ago
  The answer is simple: concrete is very simple technology, which was discovered and forgotten multiple times, but archeologists are not specialists in concrete making technology, so they label kilns as temples. If somebody will sponsor two sits from Ukraine to Peru, I will just demonstrate that using ancient temple, which is already filled with stones, waiting for fire.
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  You know Graham Hancock? "Archeologists hate him, this one weird trick to discover ancient civilizations". He recently said in an interview that younger archeologists have read his work and are subversively challenging the orthodoxy. Also Randall Carlson mentioned that mainstream Geology has already come round to the idea of a catalysmic event around the time of The Younger Dryas. Now I don't know how much of what either of these men claim to be true is true but it seems to me that it's not only stupidity or conspiracy that holds a field back. The real problem is when a fundamental mistake is made and then built on, ego gets involved and confirmation bias is abound. For example Geologists at some point all decided that everything happens gradually, the earth is stable and there are no catalysmic events. In the last 20 years that has been reversed, yet cataclysmic theories of The Younger Dryas have existed since the early 20th century. It is certainly true that people like Graham Hancock and other fringe theorists play up the story of how much they oppressed by the mainstream as if it is evidence to support their claims. This is to be ignored as evidence and their arguments looked at on their own merit. We should however admit that mistakes are made in all fields, they gain momentum over time and require huge amounts of evidence to overturn.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    I was thinking of Hancock when I wrote the post. One of the major problems with this particular idea is that the number of things that would have to be wrong is so large, we're essentially talking about rewriting everything from scratch. It's on roughly the same level as geocentrism at this point. The advocates rarely if ever point out real evidence and instead claim things like gobekli tepe (or worse, yonaguni) support their argument based on very deep misunderstandings.
m463 6y ago
> 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. https://youtu.be/IT0gXa1ZrnA https://youtu.be/IT0gXa1ZrnA
PaulKeeble 6y ago
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.
sixothree 6y ago
So maybe the simulation was reset?
- fit2rule 6y ago
  Mass Corona Ejection is the one theory that I find sticks in my mind most, when the question "what could possibly have reset things so drastically that none of the survivors would remember ancient civilisation?" is asked. Its like the Degauss'ing of our planet. I can imagine even we wouldn't survive such an event unscathed.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Why not a super volcano?
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      We'd have seen the magma layers covering Earth already. Mass corona ejection has the benefit of erasing the top layers of things (including civilisation), while leaving very little behind to indicate how it happened ..
jedberg 6y ago
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.
- crispyporkbites 6y ago
  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
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > and we can build engines that are far more efficient and powerful than the Apollo ones The F-1 (the engine in the Saturn V, used in the Apollo missions) remains the most powerful rocket engine ever built. [0] So no, we can't build them bigger, or even as well as, we used to. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_rocket_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_rocket_e...
    - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
      "because that was the biggest, we therefore we can't make them bigger" doesn't follow.
thaumaturgy 6y ago
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-earths-only-civilization/557180/ 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.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  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.
  - thaumaturgy 6y ago
    This is a line of thinking that wanders away from intellectual curiosity and into intellectual madness. You're describing a process that would somehow "undo" micro- and macro-scopic effects and chemistry in rock and ice records around the world -- including those on the ocean floor -- without, itself, leaving any trace. It would be like peeling the skin off an onion, running that layer through a food processor, and then delicately gluing it all back on, and not being able to tell the difference under a microscope. That's wizard wand technology, not fusion.

AlotOfReading 6y ago

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.

stareatgoats 6y ago
You could be right. It is certainly a compelling argument; "either scientists are in a conspiracy or complete idiots" (paraphrased). The answer is however unequivocally: we don't know. And it behooves to be a bit more humble when it comes to these things, and investigate each claim individually instead of making blanket statements about everything such. There are several aspects one can take into account that can inspire a more nuanced approach: one is that these kind of theories is an "entry-drug" for interest in archaeology and related sciences. To get on a high horse and nip such interest in its bud is counterproductive from a scientific perspective and is reminiscent of the defensive position that many professions are taking in the open data age that has opened for masses of amateur researchers doing much better work than a tiny cadre of elite professionals could do on their own. Another aspect of this dismissive attitude is that the notion a petrified and fact-resistant "establishment" is opening the field for all sorts of nut case Youtube channels that exploit this types of interests instead. Including the age-old nazis with their Atlantis and similar theories. So no, let's assume that we don't know, that anything is possible. But let's also inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim with best of our knowledge.
- technothrasher 6y ago
  So no, let's assume that we don't know, that anything is possible. But let's also inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim with best of our knowledge. Well, first of all, you don't know that anything is possible. To assert something is possible without actually showing it is possible is meaningless. That doesn't mean we can conclude it isn't possible, just that we don't know if it's possible. Second, while 'we don't know' is a perfectly acceptable position, it does not lead to,'therefore my pet idea is worthy'. You are, of course, entirely within your right to explore any idea you'd like, but to claim the scientific community is unfair or defensive to dismiss your idea because it either has no evidence to back it up, or frequently because it has been proposed over and over and has already been picked to death, is intellectually lazy. If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence. There's too much to study to be able to take every currently baseless idea and run with it.
  - danans 6y ago
    > If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence. That really depends on what "people" you are talking about. There is a considerable market for fantastical misinformation about history, especially when the fantasy reinforces things we want to believe about ourselves today. I have personally been led down a few story paths purporting to be historical but turning out to be nothing more recently constructed and idealized fantasies of the distant past.
  - stareatgoats 6y ago
    > Well, first of all, you don't know that anything is possible I said "let's assume (...) that anything is possible", a completely different thing, so your argument that " we don't know if it's possible" is moot, and a classic case of a straw man argument. > "while 'we don't know' is a perfectly acceptable position, it does not lead to,'therefore my pet idea is worthy'" Again, you are mostly having an argument with yourself, as this is somewhat a misrepresentation of what I'm saying. My main point is that it behooves to be a bit humble when it comes to dismissing ideas that are possible albeit without firm evidence and that offhanded dismissal should be discouraged, unless one can actually disprove the claim. It is after all the stuff from which new knowledge is made. That doesn't mean that every scientist must engage and clamor to inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim (but I do believe that an active interest from the scientific community would help cleanse the scene of some of the more outrageous theories). > "If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence." Really? so all scientific endeavors must produce evidence before they are allowed to posit something? I think you will agree that this is an untenable position hold as a general principle, and you probably mean that any layman should not be allowed to posit anything without having the proper education and academic standing. Be that as it may, such ivory towers of academic snobbishness will fall, eventually.
drran 6y ago
The answer is simple: concrete is very simple technology, which was discovered and forgotten multiple times, but archeologists are not specialists in concrete making technology, so they label kilns as temples. If somebody will sponsor two sits from Ukraine to Peru, I will just demonstrate that using ancient temple, which is already filled with stones, waiting for fire.
partyboat1586 6y ago
You know Graham Hancock? "Archeologists hate him, this one weird trick to discover ancient civilizations". He recently said in an interview that younger archeologists have read his work and are subversively challenging the orthodoxy. Also Randall Carlson mentioned that mainstream Geology has already come round to the idea of a catalysmic event around the time of The Younger Dryas. Now I don't know how much of what either of these men claim to be true is true but it seems to me that it's not only stupidity or conspiracy that holds a field back. The real problem is when a fundamental mistake is made and then built on, ego gets involved and confirmation bias is abound. For example Geologists at some point all decided that everything happens gradually, the earth is stable and there are no catalysmic events. In the last 20 years that has been reversed, yet cataclysmic theories of The Younger Dryas have existed since the early 20th century. It is certainly true that people like Graham Hancock and other fringe theorists play up the story of how much they oppressed by the mainstream as if it is evidence to support their claims. This is to be ignored as evidence and their arguments looked at on their own merit. We should however admit that mistakes are made in all fields, they gain momentum over time and require huge amounts of evidence to overturn.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  I was thinking of Hancock when I wrote the post. One of the major problems with this particular idea is that the number of things that would have to be wrong is so large, we're essentially talking about rewriting everything from scratch. It's on roughly the same level as geocentrism at this point. The advocates rarely if ever point out real evidence and instead claim things like gobekli tepe (or worse, yonaguni) support their argument based on very deep misunderstandings.

m463 6y ago

> 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. https://youtu.be/IT0gXa1ZrnA https://youtu.be/IT0gXa1ZrnA

PaulKeeble 6y ago

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.

sixothree 6y ago

So maybe the simulation was reset?

fit2rule 6y ago
Mass Corona Ejection is the one theory that I find sticks in my mind most, when the question "what could possibly have reset things so drastically that none of the survivors would remember ancient civilisation?" is asked. Its like the Degauss'ing of our planet. I can imagine even we wouldn't survive such an event unscathed.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Why not a super volcano?
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    We'd have seen the magma layers covering Earth already. Mass corona ejection has the benefit of erasing the top layers of things (including civilisation), while leaving very little behind to indicate how it happened ..

jedberg 6y ago

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.

crispyporkbites 6y ago
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
- jedberg 6y ago
  > and we can build engines that are far more efficient and powerful than the Apollo ones The F-1 (the engine in the Saturn V, used in the Apollo missions) remains the most powerful rocket engine ever built. [0] So no, we can't build them bigger, or even as well as, we used to. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_rocket_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_rocket_e...
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    "because that was the biggest, we therefore we can't make them bigger" doesn't follow.

thaumaturgy 6y ago

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-earths-only-civilization/557180/ 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.

dragonwriter 6y ago
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.
- thaumaturgy 6y ago
  This is a line of thinking that wanders away from intellectual curiosity and into intellectual madness. You're describing a process that would somehow "undo" micro- and macro-scopic effects and chemistry in rock and ice records around the world -- including those on the ocean floor -- without, itself, leaving any trace. It would be like peeling the skin off an onion, running that layer through a food processor, and then delicately gluing it all back on, and not being able to tell the difference under a microscope. That's wizard wand technology, not fusion.