cycles of civilizations

Printable View

05-09-2013, 05:16 AM
shadowofwind

cycles of civilizations

Some thoughts relating to pre-history, in a separate thread to avoid hijacking anyone else's....

If our civilization were to end, would there still be clear evidence of it having existed, 10,000, 100,000, a million, ten million, or a hundred million years in the future? Yes definitely:

1. List of man-made objects on the Moon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. There will still be a lot of junk in orbit indefinitely also.
2. Quarries, mines, roads, and home foundations cut into rock will still be obvious. There are millions of such features all over the world, and it doesn't go away even in hundreds of millions of years except where it gets scoured away or buried. Such features don't scour away easily or everywhere, and they don't get buried indefinitely everywhere, they get buried in some places and exposed in others. And they can be dated with a fair degree of accuracy using a variety of techniques.
3. Its not as if we built our whole society on a single island or small continent, while somehow never affecting the rest of the globe. And its not as if it makes geologic sense for anything that big to disappear quickly, as if Newton's laws of force, friction, and inertia don't apply to rock.
4. We exist in a biological context, and not in some other context. The ecosystem we are a part of will still be preserved in fossils. This contrasts, for instance, with the 400 million year old rock that was dug up when my house was built in Ohio. Theose rocks were packed with coral and various shelled animals, so well preserved that at first I thouht I was looking at something only a few thousand years old. But the types of that age are all primative, with the highest animal being a nautilus that doesn't have a modern equivalent. So we can say with some confidence that there were no civilizations when those rocks were formed.

In regards to past civilizations, the first point doesn't say much, other than that it appears that previous civilizations didn't launch satellites into high orbits. The second and third points pretty much completely eliminate the possibility of past technological civilizations, in my opinion, aside from relatively recent ones such as recognized by mainstream archeologists and paleontologists. The fourth point is more problematic I think, and is what is driving so much of this speculation to start with.

A dynamical system tends to stay in one characteristic region for a long time before bifurcating and moving quickly into a very different region. Biological forms must be like this also - they stay mostly the same for tens of millions of years, accumulating small changes, then appear to change a lot very quickly once they cross a threshold after where further changes become more advantageous. Then they reach a relatively optimal design where additional changes become less advantageous, and don't appear to change much for a while. With a sparse random sampling of fossils, you mostly only see the long, steady states of species that survive. The other more temporary states go by too fast, hundreds of thousands of years instead of tens of millions.

Man seems to be an enigma. There are differences between other animals, but the gap between any other animal and a man is huge in some regards. People often make a big deal, for instance, over the intelligence of dogs or dolphins. But it appears to me that in many ways a dolphin is much more like a dog than a man. Both animals learn, can be conditioned though rewards, and can understand dozens or even hundreds of words, in whatever language. Both have emotional qualities which are similar to those of men, like empathy for instance. And both animals are sentimentally appealing to men. Dogs are compassionate to men and suck up to men as alpha leaders, while dolphins have that permanent friendly smile-like face shape even when they're angry. But a man's capacity to learn is orders of magnitude greater. A man can learn hundreds of thousands of patterns and ideas, and logically coordinate abstractions in a manner that other animals do not even remotely approach. With this ability, technology changes rapidly, in contrast to the situation with other animals, where technology changes almost not at all and culture changes little. And man seems to have acquired this distinguishing characteristic a mere tens of thousands of years ago, with nothing before that.

Does this make sense in terms of what I said about dynamical systems? A chimpanzee has some man-like characteristics. Is it close enough to a man, does the picture make sense? Or is man just too different from anything else, and some part of the picture must be missing? It seems that many people feel that there is a piece missing, which is a big part of where the 'ancient astronauts' and other ideas come from. My view is that if there is a piece missing, its another piece that we haven't thought of yet. Maybe it has something in common with other ideas, such as cycles of earth, water, air and fire ages for instance. But none of those ideas work in their present form, they don't actually match the evidence that we have, and believing in them requires ignorance, misunderstanding, or outright denial of much of that evidence. On top of that, for an average person the real evidence is buried in a mountain of fabrication, brought to us for the sake of History or Discovery Channel ad revenue. Or Disney before that. It amazes me that people who have so little regard for big corporations or capitalism in general will also put so much faith in the output of profit-seeking media organizations. I guess it all depends on what they're selling.

But I do share a big part of the motivation, that it seems there is a piece missing.

Based on my own experience, its clear to me that there is 'synchronicity' in life which has some kind of supernatural or paranormal nature. This must apply to biology as much as to anything else. If anything, in my experience, such forces are stronger in relation to reproductive direction than almost anything else. And so evolution is directed, it isn't blind. That must be at least a part of the missing piece. Things really do evolve faster and more abruptly than they would otherwise, and they do so according to some kind of plan. Though who knows what that plan is, how it works, or what its aim is.

In addition to this, I think we also feel conditions in other civilizations, and we try to make sense of those feelings. For the first half of my life, I could fly or levitate in all of my dreams. (The primary reason I don't fly in dreams now is I rarely dream of having a body. And I think part of the reason for that is I'm more aware of my sleeping body, which limits the freedom of my dream body.) I think that part of the reason for dreams of levitation and flying, is that my sense of weight, buoyancy, and inertia is no longer being driven by my senses when I'm asleep, and so it just floats. And I think part of it is an instinct for swimming, which I imagine as flying, since I don't spend a lot of time under water. But I think there's somehow more to it than that. Other people feel this too, and it appears to me that this motivates a lot of the speculation about other times where various forms of flying are possible. Likewise for other powers like mind reading or manifesting objects. We feel these to be real, and compelling, so we try to build those feelings into a picture that makes sense.
05-10-2013, 05:38 PM
Sageous

As usual, Shadowofwind, your logic is impeccable, your perception clear, and in my most instinctive opinion you are absolutely right.

But, just for yucks, and perhaps to point out that sometimes what we don’t know is our own fault as well as a natural given, let me respond to some of this:

Before I start, it should be noted that your post seems to carry a sort of geologic theory of mind: your proofs confirming that civilizations could not have existed before known history all assume that those civilizations would be just like ours in terms of technology and our human need to alter our environment. This could be true, but it seems a bit limiting.

Now:

Quote:

If our civilization were to end, would there still be clear evidence of it having existed, 10,000, 100,000, a million, ten million, or a hundred million years in the future? Yes definitely:

Not so much definitely, I think… we have enough trouble identifying cultures that disappeared just a couple thousand years ago, much less 10,000; I think even our stone structures would be long buried, along with any “genetic” memory or alterations to the landscape, or any other signs of us after a million years, much less 100 million. Don’t put too much stock in the works of men -- they may have been built to last, but in the end everything is ephemeral. Even stone.

Quote:

1. List of man-made objects on the Moon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. There will still be a lot of junk in orbit indefinitely also.

Assuming no celestial archeologist came along and helped himself to those objects! ;) Seriously, even the Moon undergoes changes, and one or two asteroid hits would very likely obliterate all the objects we left behind -- not to mention that those objects are very small, and could be overlooked by future cultures.

Quote:

2. Quarries, mines, roads, and home foundations cut into rock will still be obvious. There are millions of such features all over the world, and it doesn't go away even in hundreds of millions of years except where it gets scoured away or buried. Such features don't scour away easily or everywhere, and they don't get buried indefinitely everywhere, they get buried in some places and exposed in others. And they can be dated with a fair degree of accuracy using a variety of techniques.

But, when unearthed, would they be recognized as artifacts, rather than just so much natural formation? There is a theory that the Amazon basin was once vast tracts of farmland, replete with irrigation and mounds separating the fields, and these fields were tended by a very large population of prehistoric men. The theory is in great dispute, though, both because science doesn’t seem to care to admit that human actions may have obliterated an entire race, but also because the evidence doesn’t conform with our expectations of what should have been left behind. That, and it seems real important to us to think of the Amazon rain forest as eternal, virgin land.

Quote:

3. Its not as if we built our whole society on a single island or small continent, while somehow never affecting the rest of the globe. And its not as if it makes geologic sense for anything that big to disappear quickly, as if Newton's laws of force, friction, and inertia don't apply to rock.

That would, after tens of thousands of years, only make the human-caused scars ubiquitous, almost natural. Who knows? Some well-intentioned future geologist might simply attach a name to the strange right-angled rock formations than form patterns of indentations across great swaths of land, thus making “natural” the foundational remains of all those subdivisions. The same sort of misidentification could happen to the remains of cities as well, though their structures might also be attributed (correctly, I suppose) to mysterious prehistoric tribes -- sort of like we do with places like Stonehenge.

Quote:

4. We exist in a biological context, and not in some other context. The ecosystem we are a part of will still be preserved in fossils. This contrasts, for instance, with the 400 million year old rock that was dug up when my house was built in Ohio. Those rocks were packed with coral and various shelled animals, so well preserved that at first I thouht I was looking at something only a few thousand years old. But the types of that age are all primative, with the highest animal being a nautilus that doesn't have a modern equivalent. So we can say with some confidence that there were no civilizations when those rocks were formed.

I have a lot of trouble believing that all life gets fossilized. Indeed, who is to say that the burial practices of previous civilizations didn't render fossilization impossible? In other words, that small quantity of primitive life on earth that was fossilized should not be deemed all life on earth, or even an accurate representation of that life.

Quote:

In regards to past civilizations, the first point doesn't say much, other than that it appears that previous civilizations didn't launch satellites into high orbits. The second and third points pretty much completely eliminate the possibility of past technological civilizations, in my opinion, aside from relatively recent ones such as recognized by mainstream archeologists and paleontologists. The fourth point is more problematic I think, and is what is driving so much of this speculation to start with.

You’re assuming here that past civilizations would have developed the same sort of technologies that we did, or even that past civilizations even cared about technology. On both sides of that spectrum: what if a civilization developed a completely organically based technology, growing not only their food, but their shelter, vehicles, and energy sources? That may sound absurd, but humankind could well be doing that in a few generations, as nanotechnology and biosciences develop. And yes, being humans, we would likely, over time, erase all vestiges of the structures that predated the new technology -- it's what we do. Though this may fall into the realm of proving a negative, I really don’t think that it must behave just like humans is a fair assessment of sentient life.

Quote:

A dynamical system …My view is that if there is a piece missing, its another piece that we haven't thought of yet. Maybe it has something in common with other ideas, such as cycles of earth, water, air and fire ages for instance. But none of those ideas work in their present form, they don't actually match the evidence that we have, and believing in them requires ignorance, misunderstanding, or outright denial of much of that evidence. On top of that, for an average person the real evidence is buried in a mountain of fabrication, brought to us for the sake of History or Discovery Channel ad revenue. Or Disney before that. It amazes me that people who have so little regard for big corporations or capitalism in general will also put so much faith in the output of profit-seeking media organizations. I guess it all depends on what they're selling.

I tend to agree with all that, except for one idea that seems to run through it: Yes, imaginative humans have a nasty habit of filling in missing spaces with something that makes sense to them, and, because those fill-ins are based on little more than breathless conjecture centered on our current historical context, they are likely invariably and fantastically wrong (i.e., I thought about writing a short story once about the building of Stonehenge, positing that it was a gazebo constructed by a wealthy landowner/amateur astronomer who got sick of his wooden pavilions burning down; why not?). Just because we’re really bad at attaching or even identifying the truth behind prehistoric civilizations doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist -- only that we can’t know about them. Also, for what it’s worth, you sort of make my point for me when you note that human civilization has existed for an extremely short amount of time, and our development is downright unnatural… why couldn’t this have happened previously?

Quote:

But I do share a big part of the motivation, that it seems there is a piece missing.

Based on my own experience, its clear to me that there is 'synchronicity' in life which has some kind of supernatural or paranormal nature. This must apply to biology as much as to anything else. If anything, in my experience, such forces are stronger in relation to reproductive direction than almost anything else. And so evolution is directed, it isn't blind. That must be at least a part of the missing piece. Things really do evolve faster and more abruptly than they would otherwise, and they do so according to some kind of plan. Though who knows what that plan is, how it works, or what its aim is.

Agreed. Also, for that matter, who knows how many times that plan has unfolded? How many times might it have been revised, reinstituted, or scrapped altogether in the name of some new design? There was certainly enough time on earth for lots of separate -- and thoroughly erased -- attempts. Who knows? The current chaotic state of human existence could mark our entry into the first throes of erasure. [This BTW is the place where I think Creationists truly err when arguing against evolution: if there were a higher plan or force overseeing our existence, there’s no reason to argue against any evidence -- God could have created the entire universe yesterday, but made it appear old for aesthetic reasons.]

Quote:

In addition to this, I think we also feel conditions in other civilizations, and we try to make sense of those feelings. For the first half of my life, I could fly or levitate in all of my dreams. (The primary reason I don't fly in dreams now is I rarely dream of having a body. And I think part of the reason for that is I'm more aware of my sleeping body, which limits the freedom of my dream body.) I think that part of the reason for dreams of levitation and flying, is that my sense of weight, buoyancy, and inertia is no longer being driven by my senses when I'm asleep, and so it just floats. And I think part of it is an instinct for swimming, which I imagine as flying, since I don't spend a lot of time under water. But I think there's somehow more to it than that. Other people feel this too, and it appears to me that this motivates a lot of the speculation about other times where various forms of flying are possible. Likewise for other powers like mind reading or manifesting objects. We feel these to be real, and compelling, so we try to build those feelings into a picture that makes sense.

I think I agree with that, and I think it nicely portrays the theory of mind that may attach a bit too much of our own, understood, context to things about which we are incapable of knowing
05-12-2013, 07:34 AM
shadowofwind

Thanks for your kind thoughts Sageous. I'll hit a few of what I think are the most significant points.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sageous

Quote:

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

If our civilization were to end, would there still be clear evidence of it having existed, 10,000, 100,000, a million, ten million, or a hundred million years in the future? Yes definitely

Not so much definitely, I think… we have enough trouble identifying cultures that disappeared just a couple thousand years ago, much less 10,000;

We have trouble identifying the existence of cultures that didn't carve huge gouges all over the earth with dynamite and bulldozers. Of those that did alter their rock landscape even partially to the extent that we do, we have no trouble identifying their existence. And the reason we have more trouble identifying cultures 10,000 years ago is they weren't doing that then. We know this because we do have a lot of evidence of what they were doing, and it wasn't gigantic civil engineering projects.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sageous

I think even our stone structures would be long buried, along with any “genetic” memory or alterations to the landscape, or any other signs of us after a million years, much less 100 million.

The surface gets eroded, and selected areas of it get buried in lava or vulcanic ash, or under debris accumulated by erosion or in some cases human activity. But areas get exposed again also. Accumulation of biological material doesn't bury history: the crust is only 0.02% carbon, and what dies mostly goes back into the atmosphere, new plants, or gets dissolved in the ocean. A small amount of material gets deposited from space, but this happens at a very low rate. Likewise crust material slowly gets subducted under other plates, but this happens on a much slower time scale also. A million years is a fantastically long time only for things that happen on a much shorter time scale. For other things it is not long at all. I agree that most evidence of our having been here will be gone long before a hundred million years. But it only takes discovery of one mine shaft or tunnel to prove the existence of a civilization that makes mine shafts or tunnels, and so far we haven't found anything like that older than a few thousand years. Certainly the stone artifact aspect of my argument is much, much stronger if applied on the scale of 10,000 or 100,000 years than it is on the scale of 10 million or 100 million. But most speculation about past civilizations includes speculation on the shorter time scale.

I am not assuming that other cultures would be like ours and would make the same kinds of things that ours does. In my earlier posts I said that I do recognize that some past cultures exceeded ours in accomplishment in many regards. My point is about past civilizations that have advanced technologies such as are described by most people who speculate about cycles of ages, Atlantis, Lemuria and that sort of thing. If your belief is in past civilizations that aren't like that, then I'm not arguing against that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sageous

Assuming no celestial archeologist came along and helped himself to those objects!

Then there would be evidence of his space-faring civilization too, unless his civilization was so grand that he went to the trouble of comprehensively removing evidence of it. More on this later.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sageous

Seriously, even the Moon undergoes changes, and one or two asteroid hits would very likely obliterate all the objects we left behind

Obliterated by one or two asteroid hits? This is not merely possible but "very likely"? There were six Apollo landings at remote locations, plus numerous other unmanned objects landed or crashed. Since its not very geologically active, the moon has a pretty good record of asteroid hits, and there isn't anything recent that's even remotely that big. Accumulation of dust and asteroid debris on the moon is extraordinarily slow, we can tell because its all still there, and samples from numerous sites have been brought back and dated.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sageous

not to mention that those objects are very small, and could be overlooked by future cultures.

Corner reflectors were left at numerous locations, and those are very easy to see with radar. Sure they could be overlooked, a future culture might not even be interested in looking around their environment much at all. As it happens, a large minority of our own culture doesn't believe in the moon landings, even though those artifacts are visible to any amateur astronomer right now. So I should qualify my statement by saying that there would be clear evidence of the existence of our culture to any culture that knows as much about its environment as we know about ours. [Amendment: my claim about being able to easily see such artifacts from earth is wrong. They are too small. Your claim that they could be overlooked is right. Satellites would be a lot easier to see because they're much closer: I've seen them with naked eye many times. Off hand I don't know how high they have to be for their orbits to be suitably stable though.]

This is the point where I start making what WakingNomad would call ad hominem attacks, but only for the sake of trying to speak as directly as possible to the real heart of the discussion, not because I'm mad at anyone, or trying to avoid defending a weak argument on its merits. It seems to me that people's perspectives on the topic are to a large extent not being driven by the merits of the arguments being made, they're motivated by something else. Most New Age and 'alternative' thoughts in past civilizations, from where I sit, involve a lot of speculation about the characteristics of things that aren't even objectively real. Of course we can't disprove the possible existence of large Atlantean and Lemurian civilizations, for instance. But conjectures about their existence is based on almost no evidence at all. Would knowledge of our civilization be lost to future civilizations [on account of] a present day continent sinking into the ocean, if that were possible? No, it doesn't even make any sense. Theosophists and other assorted New Agers just made all of that stuff up, and constructed bogus arguments to support it. Every such argument I have ever seen [for the positive existence of such civilizations] can be decisively debunked, but it doesn't matter, because each one is just one argument. To use an analogy I've used before, its like fighting a hydra, but in this case a hydra with a whole lot more than three heads. Or to use another analogy, its like arguing with someone who has an imaginary romance with an attractive female colleague. How can one prove that she doesn't really love him? It is not provable. And yet, the romance is still a fantasy. Likewise for claims of Original Poster and others about the motivations and forms of government of aliens. The subject isn't even real, not for us, with the information we have.

To make the matter that much more difficult, a person can use their weakly developed psychic abilities to construct evidence for almost anything they want. Its not very strong evidence, but it supports the desired narrative. This is why I care about the topic, even while I've also pretty much given up in despair. Every psychically inclined person I've ever encountered or even seen evidence of gets lost in this or some similar sort of nonsense. If there is some kind of conspiracy of gods or rich overlords to keep humanity in ignorance, then truly this is one of their weapons, and its a very effective one.

****

I've probably mentioned that a year ago I had a couple of lucid dreams of what seemed to be alien worlds. One of them was mountainous with red soil, and a dry, somewhat cold climate. It felt real. That sequence of dreams had three different appearances of a truck-sized metal cylinder with a man-eating monster inside. Its rare for me to dream something more than once like that. My best theory was that it represents a heroin needle, but I don't know if that's a very good theory. Maybe it represents a cigar. (I'm joking.) Or maybe it could be a pipe, I was talking to a couple of different people with remarkably heavy marijuana habits at that time.

My other dream was of a city with neatly arranged adobe-like houses with rounded corners. With retrospect, I have a hard time believing the image was realistic. The heights of the single story dwellings seem out of proportion to their diameters, and the construction and open windows wouldn't do much to keep the weather out. (And if there's no weather, how can the trees live, and why have houses with roofs at all?) It seemed more like a stylistic impression of the feeling of a city, or like an image from a children's fantasy book. But it was very vivid, this was one of those short dreams that's as visually detailed as waking life.

After these dreams, it occurred to me that if several people could ask the question together, maybe we could get more information about alien worlds that way than I can get individually. My analogy was that our minds are like a big synthetic aperture antenna. In response to this thought, I received a very strong impression, "we will block you". (I'm not very mediumistic when I'm awake, and rarely get such impressions.) Who is "we"? Humanity subconsciously trying to protect itself from something? A conspiracy of psychically powerful oppressor? Maybe the aliens have us in some kind of psychic quarantine, lest we infest the rest of our arm of the Galaxy with our blood lust or our Beatles music? Maybe there is no such obstruction, but this was my impression of other people's belief that there is such an obstruction? Maybe some combination of all of these? I don't really have a point here. I'm just trying to offer a potentially interesting experience or idea to think about, as an opening after the other stuff I said.
05-12-2013, 05:58 PM
Sageous

^^ I guess I should have read that other thread, because, honestly, I really was trying to say that past civilizations based on technology and cultures completely alien to our own certainly had time to appear, rise, and disappear during the eons of available prehistory that exist on earth. I have little interest in the "mysteries" of Atlantean or Lemurian civilizations because, as you said, even if they did exist, far too much has simply been made up about them to make any conversation about their true nature just plain silly. I also like to believe that sentient beings on earth are struggling always to "get it right," so it makes no sense to me that we would keep doing the same things over and over.

This, I believe, is very important:

Quote:

To make the matter that much more difficult, a person can use their weakly developed psychic abilities to construct evidence for almost anything they want. Its not very strong evidence, but it supports the desired narrative. This is why I care about the topic, even while I've also pretty much given up in despair. Every psychically inclined person I've ever encountered or even seen evidence of gets lost in this or some similar sort of nonsense. If there is some kind of conspiracy of gods or rich overlords to keep humanity in ignorance, then truly this is one of their weapons, and its a very effective one.

I think it all might just boil down to human imagination, and our curious need to have all knowledge gaps filled, even if we have to mix the putty ourselves. It's not just Chariots of the Gods we draw upon to fill those gaps, but the Gods themselves: religion, I think, can be sourced in our need to imagine our way through those gaps.

I also think that addressing this topic in the manner that you do, ad homina and all, might at its surface seem a bit sisyphean, but in truth it is extremely useful. Historically, questioning the bullshit is a relatively new practice, and we might not have had enough generations of practitioners yet to thoroughly draw into check the bullshitters. But someone has to keep it up until we can finally fill those gaps with actual knowledge, or have the maturity to leave them be. So, though better you than me keeping up the struggle, it is a noble one. Maybe someday someone will listen.

I too have had many, many dreams, transcendental moments, and even deep meditational experiences that seemed to have been stymied by some outside force -- or at least that's what I initially fancied happened. It seems we need to blame someone else for our failings or weaknesses, even when there's no one else in the room.

That's all I got for now; hopefully more later, as this is an interesting topic!