We are a doomed species. We are condemned to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, except that, as I see it, we have one of two choices in how we go down. We can now, with the misuse of technology, so effectively obliterate ourselves and our environment, that it will take millenia for any survivors to recover from the devastation. On an astronomical scale, Mother Nature will restore itself, but we, like many of our distant cousins (e.g. Neanderthals) will disappear from the living. On the other hand, we may not be so stupid as to destroy our ability to continue through the coming conflagration, but we certainly will leave nothing of our civilization, and more importantly, an understanding of our errors, to those who do survive to their advantage.
See here, you say, this is a very pessimistic attitude to take! One that is dark and hopeless. I’m sorry, but I’m trying desperately to read the signs of our past in terms of what it says, not from what I would like it to say. The old worn out aphorism by George Santayana still applies: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In looking at man’s history there is a sketchy picture coming forward. It is one thankfully many are starting to examine. What I suspect is that we are so close to our own Day of Reckoning that we will not figure it out before we have totally messed ourselves up—again!
Again? You mean—Yes, there was another civilization that preceded ours, and it was a world-wide civilization with a single language. That part of the myth in the Bible seems to be correct, according to what researchers are finding. Where there is a uniform language, there is also a uniform culture, and you can count on it (since man seems to fail at learning from his own mistakes) that whatever form of religion existed then was fairly universal. The artifacts, the megalithic structures, the Vedas, the technology behind the megalithic building, the measurement systems (all of our present-day units of measure converge in the megalithic era), the astronomical knowledge, all point to one conclusion: Man had done it all before the time we label as written history.
How does a civilization retain what it has achieved? Tell me, do you honestly believe all these monuments from the past around the world were put there to celebrate how great the builders were? Is the human race that vain? Apparently, for in these “modern” times there are still those who believe we are the greatest achievement, perhaps in the Galaxy for lack of finding evidence otherwise. Those monuments don’t exist because they were vain, they exist to remind us of who and what we are. And there comes those terrible W’s: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.
In all our great accomplishments since the last Ice Age, Man has been unable to answer the Five Terrible Questions about itself! Religions seek to supply answers to them, but fail miserably. All of the world’s major religions trace their ideologies and theologies back to the period following the last Great Cataclysm.
There are no exceptions despite what some of the Christians try to assert. It’s in the fine print in every document scholars have examined as far back as records can afford. All Man has done since that time is spin variations on a theme, as they have done with language and culture.
Answering these questions I would hazard is more difficult than any of the frontier scientific questions occupying man’s most skilled minds today. Bryan Sykes, et. al. have only been able to show a genetic link back some 30,000 to 40,000 years to the “first woman”. Cremo and Thompson if they are right about the suppressed archeological evidence (and there are other contemporary researchers with supportive claims), indicate man in his present form has existed on this earth at least one and a half million years. But we know nothing of any civilizations prior to 12,000 years ago. Whatever was there long ago became part of the seabeds that now are the world’s largest deserts.
Some scientists postulate that many species were destroyed through time by way of geological/astronomical cataclysm. And they may well be right, since the earth reveals under modern satellite imaging many locations of large astronomical bombardment, as well as electrical discharge machining—a phenomenon that happens in Nature when two planetary bodies come sufficiently close to each other to cause arcing between them. The evidence for this is not only all over the solar system, but right in our own backyard.
Klaus Dona has shown with his work that a world-wide culture with a single language existed about this period. What we don’t know is how far back the Megalithic period extends. Was it contemporary or prior to the civilization Klaus is documenting with artifacts? One thing we know for greater surety than any of these previous speculations is there was a world-wide cataclysm that destroyed the majority of man’s culture and population. Firestone, West and Smith have shown with almost undeniable conclusion that a large meteor came over the north pole, split into multiple large fragments and caused wide scale flooding and fire damage, destroying Flora, Fauna, and Man on virtually every continent of the earth. Not even the devastation of the wars apparently carried on in India back then can compare. The end result was a near complete loss of the technology and knowledge these civilizations hint at in their writings inscribed in granite. We are fortunate they had the foresight to realize stone is the only material on earth that withstands the entropy of Nature. They were able to leave something to the survivors besides the mythologies handed down and corrupted in what few written documents exist.
Will our fate be that of our predecessors? Not likely. We have run out of resources to sustain any further population growth, and even if we were able to hold the world’s population at zero growth, that would only give the human species another 200-400 years, depending on the scenarios one comes up with to manage the food production, fresh water, and energy needs for so many people. We won’t need to worry about the next asteroid or meteor. We’re already there. Bill Geide has an excellent graphical presentation of the problem, which one may want to argue, except for the supportive applied mathematical analysis which professors Al Bartlett and Fred Hoyle laid down long before Bill created his website. Al shows with the precision of applied mathematics we are at the cusp of collapse in terms of population versus available resources. Forty years ago Fred showed the problems associated with resources, energy, and population and offered some interim solution. Nuclear fuel is the only high energy density material Man has. But he was not allowed to pursue the research required to make it a world-wide alternative. Too many people out there screaming about saving the planet, when the real problem has always been through millenia, saving Man’s cultural and knowledge achievements to jump start the next cycle. Fred estimated the coming collapse at about 2250AD. My take of the sequence of events transpiring since he published his analysis is that we will probably have to push that closer a hundred years or more.
Professor Hawking some years ago asserted that Man’s only hope was getting off planet. First off, if there is anything we have learned out of our combined space program efforts, it is that man cannot survive for any length of time in an environment much different than on the surface of the earth. The body starts to fall apart. It is too early in the space research phase to know if we can come up with compensatory mechanisms. Second, we don’t really know the first thing about large-scale terraforming. So where are we going to go in the solar system? There is no place like home that can offer the level of advanced culture and technology we presently live with in the solar system. To create that kind of environment will take centuries. We don’t have centuries. Hawking’s solution, for all his professorship, is too late.
To give Man an extra one hundred years relief from the resource/population dilemma would require no less than boosting out of earth’s gravity well one fourth of the world’s population, and more likely half, depending on how one models the options available. Our present space program is based on high tech fossil fuels, the kind that requires a fairly complex society to produce. But there’s not enough resources available to boost even one percent of the world’s population off planet—just to the Moon! The best we can do is send out space seed, a select group of people armed to the teeth for survival. But then they would have to have a place to go and the means of surviving a much harsher environment than we have here. The rest of us will have to take our chances with a rapidly declining standard of living.
Any which way one looks at the evidence, and manipulates the data toward survival of our present civilization, the conclusion is inescapable. If we don’t kill ourselves off through massive war, we will most certainly not survive in our present circumstances. The best we can do is the one thing few people are focused on—handing on our knowledge, skill, understanding, and history to the generation that survives in a form they will recognize and be able to employ. They will have to have the motivation to learn from our mistakes, or Man will continue to repeat the catastrophes of his past.
Do the math. Work on the scenarios. The greatest technological problem we face today is not getting a colony on Mars. It is not figuring out how to beat the population/energy/food resource problem. It is preserving our heritage to our descendants come what cataclysm may. So far we can’t even duplicate the skill of the last civilization which put it in stone. And we still don’t have any answers to those Terrible questions to bequeath to our posterity.
Oct 2010
~SethSmee
References
Einstein’s Idiots #14,15,16 Bill Geide
Arithmetic, Population, and Energy Dr Albert Bartlett U of CO; www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html
Encounter with the Future Sir Fred Hoyle
Energy or Extinction Sir Fred Hoyle
Civilization One Christopher Knight & Alan Butler
The Hidden History of the Human Race Klaus Dona
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes Firestone/West/Smith
Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race Cremo/Thompson
Discovering the Mysteries of Ancient America Joseph et al
Uriel’s Machine Christopher Knight/Robert Lomas
Before the Pharoahs Malkowski
The Older Testament Margaret Barker
The Controversy of Zion Douglas Reed
