4 ms·

He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. His dating of the Sphinx seems solely based on certain erosion patterns and are not supported

by varenc 6y ago

He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. His dating of the Sphinx seems solely based on certain erosion patterns and are not supported by other evidence. If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. So it’s more plausible to me that if there’s unknown civilizations, then they lacked meaningful use of writing.

seebetter 6y ago
Wish I had time to refute your comment.
cbozeman 6y ago
> If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. This only works if you actually find the things they wrote. If those works are still trapped in ice or ground somewhere, potentially thousands of feet or more underground, we may never find them. That's even assuming they used writing materials that would be preserved.
- rmah 6y ago
  Well sure. And there may have been a dino civilization. But without evidence, what's the point of speculating?
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Okay Dr. Grant, I'm pretty sure the velociraptors didn't have an advanced civilization...
- wl 6y ago
  And their writings have to survive. Look at Mesopotamia, where writing began with cuneiform impressions in clay. We've got lots of clay tablets because those survive well when buried. When Imperial Aramaic written on parchment began to supplant Akkadian cuneiform, we lose a lot of the written record. It's created an odd situation where the written documentation of the second millennium BCE is often better than the first millennium BCE.
cbozeman 6y ago
> He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. I forgot that I wanted to mention this... I can't find the video on YouTube - its probably been lost to time, but there was a video where Michael Crichton was speaking to a crowd about scientific truth. I'm going to do my best to recall exactly what Dr. Crichton said, but it was something along the lines of, "The story of plate tectonics really is the story of a single person having it right and everyone else having it wrong." He's referring to Alfred Wegener, of course, who theorized continental drift back in 1912 or so. He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. Sadly, Wegener died long before he would have his theory confirmed.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  > He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. It is hyperbole. It is accurate to say the geological establishment was solidly against Wegener, but it was far from the case that all geologists were against Wegener; he had quite a few supporters (and even more in adjacent scientific communities such as meteorology and climatology). In fact it was a contemporary geologist supporter of the day (the oft-underappreciated Arthur Holmes) that eventually would supply the missing piece of the puzzle, namely the mechanism by which continents would drift. In general I've never really liked the simplified story of continental drift that gets passed around because it ignores the really big stumbling block that Wegener was never able to get around which is that while he was very diligent about noticing similarities between continents he kept proposing wildly impractical mechanisms (e.g. tidal forces) that had implausible empirical predictions (Wegener's estimate of continental drift speed was eventually found to be off by several orders of magnitude). It implicitly peddles the story that Wegener's theory was essentially in complete agreement with empirical observations, but was just blindly rejected by the scientific establishment, which is not true in this case. (There are other more plausible cases where this has happened, but they are usually a tad more subtle.) That is while Wegener's observations were first rate, his theory was deeply flawed, and not just in the way that "all theories are wrong" flawed; it had deep flaws that directly impacted its ability to make useful empirical predictions in the realm it claimed to be applicable. He proposed continental drift but never discovered plate tectonics. Regardless, even though Wegener had an incomplete theory, his preponderance of other evidence is what kept his theory alive and eventually led to the acceptance of continental drift with the rise of plate tectonics in the 50s and 60s.

by varenc 6y ago

seebetter 6y ago

Wish I had time to refute your comment.

cbozeman 6y ago

> If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. This only works if you actually find the things they wrote. If those works are still trapped in ice or ground somewhere, potentially thousands of feet or more underground, we may never find them. That's even assuming they used writing materials that would be preserved.

rmah 6y ago
Well sure. And there may have been a dino civilization. But without evidence, what's the point of speculating?
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Okay Dr. Grant, I'm pretty sure the velociraptors didn't have an advanced civilization...
wl 6y ago
And their writings have to survive. Look at Mesopotamia, where writing began with cuneiform impressions in clay. We've got lots of clay tablets because those survive well when buried. When Imperial Aramaic written on parchment began to supplant Akkadian cuneiform, we lose a lot of the written record. It's created an odd situation where the written documentation of the second millennium BCE is often better than the first millennium BCE.

cbozeman 6y ago

> He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. I forgot that I wanted to mention this... I can't find the video on YouTube - its probably been lost to time, but there was a video where Michael Crichton was speaking to a crowd about scientific truth. I'm going to do my best to recall exactly what Dr. Crichton said, but it was something along the lines of, "The story of plate tectonics really is the story of a single person having it right and everyone else having it wrong." He's referring to Alfred Wegener, of course, who theorized continental drift back in 1912 or so. He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. Sadly, Wegener died long before he would have his theory confirmed.

dwohnitmok 6y ago
> He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. It is hyperbole. It is accurate to say the geological establishment was solidly against Wegener, but it was far from the case that all geologists were against Wegener; he had quite a few supporters (and even more in adjacent scientific communities such as meteorology and climatology). In fact it was a contemporary geologist supporter of the day (the oft-underappreciated Arthur Holmes) that eventually would supply the missing piece of the puzzle, namely the mechanism by which continents would drift. In general I've never really liked the simplified story of continental drift that gets passed around because it ignores the really big stumbling block that Wegener was never able to get around which is that while he was very diligent about noticing similarities between continents he kept proposing wildly impractical mechanisms (e.g. tidal forces) that had implausible empirical predictions (Wegener's estimate of continental drift speed was eventually found to be off by several orders of magnitude). It implicitly peddles the story that Wegener's theory was essentially in complete agreement with empirical observations, but was just blindly rejected by the scientific establishment, which is not true in this case. (There are other more plausible cases where this has happened, but they are usually a tad more subtle.) That is while Wegener's observations were first rate, his theory was deeply flawed, and not just in the way that "all theories are wrong" flawed; it had deep flaws that directly impacted its ability to make useful empirical predictions in the realm it claimed to be applicable. He proposed continental drift but never discovered plate tectonics. Regardless, even though Wegener had an incomplete theory, his preponderance of other evidence is what kept his theory alive and eventually led to the acceptance of continental drift with the rise of plate tectonics in the 50s and 60s.