Oolite Bulletins

Greyth wrote:

Industrial pollution is a sign of technology development such as ours but even now research into biological processing is beginning to yield results that hopefully and ultimately will make industrial pollution obsolete. So a possible signs of high technology are large works lacking signs of pollution? To call our level of achievement high tech is a misnoma except by comparison to earlier civilisations. Even there there are some oddities that should give pause for thought. For instance Sumerians were able to describe the colours of Neptune and Uranus but are not credited with use of lens.

But a technology so high that it leaves no trace of pollution has to develop out of something. Any ancient technological civilisation would have had to first develop basic metalworking in its own prehistory. We can see the traces of pollution from Iron Age (~1200BCE) ironworking, but no trace of any previous Iron Age (let alone any previous Industrial Revolution or fossil-fuel period) preceding this supposed brilliant super-clean high-tech civilisation. And there are still no traces of mines, cities, roads, railways, power and communications networks, etc. The idea of ancient human super-civilisations is dead in the water: they did not exist.

The Sumerian theories I haven't heard of but a quick google check shows some presence on a few (frankly crank) websites, and nothing on anything with any credibility. If the Sumerians could see Uranus and Neptune, then why did they not have (say) a heliocentric model of the solar system, or know that Jupiter has four large moons or that Saturn has rings? We can state quite categorically that the Sumerians – who were kicking about with their bronze, their pottery and their mud bricks some 4000 years ago – were not a high-tech civilisation. Skilful, yes; intelligent, absolutely. But possessing technology capable of accurately determining not only the colour but the composition of the outer planets, while simultaneously missing Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings, which Galileo managed to see with a basic telescope? No. And the idea that they had been given this isolated nugget of abstruse knowledge (but not, say, knowledge about ironworking, or antibiotics) by some passing astronomy geek from a hidden super-civilisation runs into the same old problem about the lack of any evidence for any prehistoric technologies we don't already know about.

Greyth wrote:

Is there any evidence? Yes, thousands of tons of masonry in accessible places. Puma Punka may be cast but for the foundations and lower levels at Machu Picchu there is, as far as I'm aware, no convincing explanation or plausible theory.
http://recyclingtheworld.us/wordpress/w ... tambo2.jpg [burp] So, to say there is no evidence is fallacious. Precisely of what it is evidence of I am far less sure.

That's evidence of stone-age/early metalworking civilisations from the last few thousand years. This is not evidence of anything other than human skill and ingenuity. It's amazing what people can do. These are not the products of high technology, but of highly skilled craftsmen.

Edit: some engineering perspective on the foundations of Machu Picchu:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/wr ... ering.html

What is supposed to be "unconvincing" or "implausible" about Machu Picchu's foundations? It's not like there's any ferroconcrete in there, or high-grade steel support rods driven into the bedrock ... just lots and lots of very hard work done by intelligent, skilful people using basic tools and materials.

Greyth wrote:

The same bipedal descendants of primates that manned fighters and bombers 60 years ago have mapped the solar system, theorised faster than light (a neuron fizzles - anyone remember FTL's sundog?) travel and sent craft to neighbouring celestial bodies. I can give credence to their observations, to do otherwise is, I feel, an injustice.

They did see something, although their observations are necessarily limited because they were only using their eyes to make sense of something, and language to describe something, which they had never previously experienced. It's not quantifiable data. Operating in places and under circumstances which exceeded previous experience, they saw something odd. That's about all we can say. Later research has turned up other odd stuff that we didn't know about before, e.g. high-atmosphere electromagnetic phenomena. These, and perhaps other phenomena yet to be discovered, may be responsible for the odd reports. It's vastly more likely than super-high-tech craft from an ancient (but undiscovered, coy, and traceless) civilisation.

And where do we look for evidence of industrial pollution? The ice cores. 750 millennia max. Then there is the possibility of planetfall. The idea of advanced civilisation is not dead but requires some lateral thought. To dismiss is premature at this stage.

The seminal work on Sumerian culture is by Zachariah Sitchin. Of all the cranks he is the most seemingly reputable. He did earn a considerable amount of money from a book called 'Twelfth Planet' which has spawned a considerable number of von dunnykin like supporters. He was a translation buff, considered the foremost expert on Sumerian language. In support of his assertion that Sumerians had knowledge of astronomy rivalling our own a lens like artefact was excavated from ancient ruins although it is categorised as 'jewellery'.

Evidence exists of medicine in medieval times not in Europe but in Arabia. It now seems likely that our own medical advance stems from interaction there. There are other indicators of advanced medicinal achievements in more ancient cultures. But.. that's the thing with forgotten knowledge.. nobody knows!
http://www.namibiadent.com/History/Hist ... istry.html

The lower courses of stonework at Machu Picchu go beyond any known form of masonry found elsewhere to date. That includes modern works. The stones seem to be individually cut. The mystery gets deeper the more deep the examination. Not only to they fit together perfectly as though designed in 3D modelling software - each mating face of each stone is cut with a positive of negative radii. To write that off as the result of 'nifty' techniques is reckless.

I cannot get my head around the notion that a natural phenomena would mimic guided flight as has been observed but have to concede that it is at least a possibility. Measurement of probability... I think the first is more likely in that if a flying thing appears to be guided then it's more likely to be guided than not but it's not the sort of thing one can do a graph of.

Coy... hmm. If they viewed us as violent mutant survivors of some ancient holocaust that might explain a certain amount of reticence to interact. It begs the question why they would reveal themselves to the crews of airplanes... perhaps a warning? 'We are here watching you closely, and what you are doing we might yet do to you' a sort of 'Day the Earth stood still' scenario.

Greyth wrote:

And where do we look for evidence of industrial pollution? The ice cores. 750 millennia max. Then there is the possibility of planetfall. The idea of advanced civilisation is not dead but requires some lateral thought. To dismiss is premature at this stage.

750,000 years is a long time in human, even hominid, evolution – plus you have to add on an unspecified amount of time for the rise of this supposed technological civilisation from polluting beginnings to a hypothetical, non-polluting and otherwise traceless level. Then there's still the lack of mining, or of cities, or of any form of processed remnants in the geology. All these objections can of course be waved away by suggesting mining by Star Trek transporter, or floating cities made of self-disposing materials, or any other imaginative reason as to why there is not a single particle of physical evidence anywhere to support the existence of an ancient advanced civilisation. Given the total absence of evidence, I would say that to even begin to suppose an ancient super-civilisation's existence is premature. What reason is there to propose their existence?

Greyth wrote:

The seminal work on Sumerian culture is by Zachariah Sitchin. Of all the cranks he is the most seemingly reputable. He did earn a considerable amount of money from a book called 'Twelfth Planet' which has spawned a considerable number of von dunnykin like supporters. He was a translation buff, considered the foremost expert on Sumerian language.

Was he considered this by anyone other than himself? Because a quick check on his entry on Wikipedia brings up quotes from other experts along the lines of "Sitchin's assignment of meanings to ancient words is tendentious and frequently strained", or "When critics have checked Sitchin's references, they have found that he frequently quotes out of context or truncates his quotes in a way that distorts evidence in order to prove his contentions. Evidence is presented selectively and contradictory evidence is ignored." Perhaps most telling is this:

In a 1979 review of The Twelfth Planet, Roger W. Wescott, Prof. of Anthropology and Linguistics at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, noted Sitchin's amateurishness with respect to the primacy of the Sumerian language:

'Sitchin's linguistics seems at least as amateurish as his anthropology, biology, and astronomy. On p. 370, for example, he maintains that "all the ancient languages . . . including early Chinese . . . stemmed from one primeval source -- Sumerian". Sumerian, of course, is the virtual archetype of what linguistic taxonomists call a language-isolate, meaning a language that does not fall into any of the well-known language-families or exhibit clear cognation with any known language. Even if Sitchin is referring to written rather than to spoken language, it is unlikely that his contention can be persuasively defended, since Sumerian ideograms were preceded by the Azilian and Tartarian signaries of Europe as well as by a variety of script-like notational systems between the Nile and Indus rivers.'

Greyth wrote:

In support of his assertion that Sumerians had knowledge of astronomy rivalling our own a lens like artefact was excavated from ancient ruins although it is categorised as 'jewellery'.

My (admittedly brief) overview of Stitchin and his work leads me to believe he was probably at best a fantasist and at worst a fraud, very much in the mould of Von Daniken. Maybe it's just a piece of jewellery that looks a bit lens-like. Does it actually act as a lens? An optical-quality lens? A lens capable of seeing, and analysing the composition of, Neptune? Or is it just a bit of translucent stone that someone has polished into a sort of convex shape?

If any of these claims are true, why does mainstream science ignore it all? When the world is full of actual scientists and real archaeologists desperate to make their mark, why does this stuff only appear in excitable books sold in airports?

Greyth wrote:

Evidence exists of medicine in medieval times not in Europe but in Arabia. It now seems likely that our own medical advance stems from interaction there. There are other indicators of advanced medicinal achievements in more ancient cultures. But.. that's the thing with forgotten knowledge.. nobody knows!
http://www.namibiadent.com/History/Hist ... istry.html

We do know quite a lot. All cultures have practised medicine. The Egyptians – who we can date quite well – had some surgical techniques that were quite advanced given the available materials, but nothing that defies explanation. No ancient culture appears to have been able to do anything medically which we can't do just as well, if not several thousand times better.

Greyth wrote:

The lower courses of stonework at Machu Picchu go beyond any known form of masonry found elsewhere to date. That includes modern works. The stones seem to be individually cut. The mystery gets deeper the more deep the examination. Not only to they fit together perfectly as though designed in 3D modelling software - each mating face of each stone is cut with a positive of negative radii. To write that off as the result of 'nifty' techniques is reckless.

The article I linked to was an interview with a hydrologist and engineer who has been working on the engineering of Machu Picchu since the mid 1990s ... he didn't seem to think it was inexplicable. Impressive, yes, but not beyond the capabilities of some very clever stone-age artisans. Again, if this stuff does indeed defy explanation, why the peculiar absence of interest from the scientific community? And if the stone-cutting is the product of super-science from some advanced civilisation, why did this advanced civilisation, who was so keen to leave no trace of their passing, build in cut stone?

Greyth wrote:

I cannot get my head around the notion that a natural phenomena would mimic guided flight as has been observed but have to concede that it is at least a possibility. Measurement of probability... I think the first is more likely in that if a flying thing appears to be guided then it's more likely to be guided than not but it's not the sort of thing one can do a graph of.

It depends what you mean by "mimic guided flight", and if the reports of things mimicking guided flight are accurate. Ball lightning – an as-yet unexplained natural atmospheric phenomenon (assuming it exists at all) – may be drawn to follow metallic objects, like aeroplanes. Ball lightning (if it exists) is of course strange and mysterious, but it doesn't require aliens or ancient super-civilisations to "explain" it (or kick it into the "you're not allowed to explain this" box).

Greyth wrote:

Coy... hmm. If they viewed us as violent mutant survivors of some ancient holocaust that might explain a certain amount of reticence to interact. It begs the question why they would reveal themselves to the crews of airplanes... perhaps a warning? 'We are here watching you closely, and what you are doing we might yet do to you' a sort of 'Day the Earth stood still' scenario.

It's a very loose and vague warning. "We must warn these people! How about we use our super-science to project giant pictures on the surface of the moon, or broadcast stern predictions of impending doom from the walls of every building in their capital cities?" "No, that's too much. Let's just buzz some odd lights around a few of their planes, to no purpose, at random, at night and at very high altitude ... I'm sure they'll understand."

just for being devils advocate here :

Disembodied wrote:

If any of these claims are true, why does mainstream science ignore it all? When the world is full of actual scientists and real archaeologists desperate to make their mark, why does this stuff only appear in excitable books sold in airports?

What or why scientists do or don't is irrelevant here, imo. . Or rather, it does not proove or counter-proove anything.
SandJ already gave a possible answer to that question. It was about astronauts, but I trust you can do the transfer.

SandJ wrote:

A story that did amuse me was when one of the astronauts confessed to another about seeing flashes before his eyes and the other admitting the same. They had been seeing occasional flashes of light when in space, but never reported them for fear of being rated as medically unfit. When they confessed to NASA, it turned out all astronauts had been seeing these and none of them had owned up for fear of being taken off the space programme. [...]

Edit: found a link: "BIOMEDICAL RESULTS OF APOLLO, SECTION IV, CHAPTER 2, APOLLO LIGHT FLASH INVESTIGATIONS"

But I mainly write here to thank SandJ for the stories with them Einfottadthingy stones and even better the cow's butt-scratchers.

Priceless;
and will come in soo handy to fool some other folks somewhere else.

Thanks.

snork wrote:

just for being devils advocate here :

Disembodied wrote:

If any of these claims are true, why does mainstream science ignore it all? When the world is full of actual scientists and real archaeologists desperate to make their mark, why does this stuff only appear in excitable books sold in airports?

What or why scientists do or don't is irrelevant here, imo. . Or rather, it does not proove or counter-proove anything.
SandJ already gave a possible answer to that question. It was about astronauts, but I trust you can do the transfer.

SandJ wrote:

A story that did amuse me was when one of the astronauts confessed to another about seeing flashes before his eyes and the other admitting the same. They had been seeing occasional flashes of light when in space, but never reported them for fear of being rated as medically unfit. When they confessed to NASA, it turned out all astronauts had been seeing these and none of them had owned up for fear of being taken off the space programme. [...]

Edit: found a link: "BIOMEDICAL RESULTS OF APOLLO, SECTION IV, CHAPTER 2, APOLLO LIGHT FLASH INVESTIGATIONS"

That's different, I think. Astronauts were very much in an environment which valued mental stability and if anything a lack of imagination: astronaut candidates who waxed poetical or let their imaginations run away with them would be seen as potential hazards in a crisis. What NASA wanted was hard, cool, level heads, the "right stuff". So astronauts were under pressure not to see anything abnormal. Seeing weird stuff meant that you were weird, and weirdos didn't get to fly – so they tended to keep their mouths shut. Whereas a scientist dreams of seeing something abnormal and unexplained. If it's unexplained it means it's not covered by current theory, and if a scientist can demonstrate there's a hole in current theory, then that means grant money, research papers, and room for new theories.

Look how excited the physics community got when it looked like those neutrinos might have been going faster than light. The original researchers checked and checked but couldn't find anything wrong, then they went public and asked for help. Nobody lost their jobs, nobody was disgraced, or called an idiot, or got yelled at for daring to question Einstein and thrown out of CERN. Most physicists thought it would turn out to be experimental error, but they were all still interested to see what had happened. Eventually, they tracked down what was causing the anomalous results and it all quietened down again.

So when someone says "Look how weird this is!", and the scientific community ignores them en masse, I think it's a pretty strong indication that the "weird" thing only exists inside that person's imagination.

With apologies to Snoopers!

On ancient lenses, it seems that the Greeks, at least, did use rock-crystal lenses to start fires. There's a quote in Aristophanes' The Clouds (423BCE):

STREPSIADES: Have you ever seen a beautiful, transparent stone at the druggists', with which you may kindle fire?
SOCRATES: You mean a crystal lens.
STREPSIADES: That's right. Well, now if I placed myself with this stone in the sun and a long way off from the clerk, while he was writing out the conviction, I could make all the wax, upon which the words were written, melt.
SOCRATES: Well thought out, by the Graces!
STREPSIADES: Ah! I am delighted to have annulled the decree that was to cost me five talents.

So ancient peoples could have had crystal lenses, and used some of the optical effects. But to go from here to "therefore they had telescopes" is a huge leap. As I've already said, "could have" and "did" are different things. There's a long way to go between having some rock-crystal that can focus the sun to start a fire, and optical quality lenses mounted convex-to-concave in such a way as to produce a telescope – and no written or physical evidence of telescopes or of astronomical discoveries that would require telescopes (like the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter) which, you have to think, an astronomically obsessed people might have written down or carved pictures of somewhere.

Disembodied wrote:

Ball lightning – an as-yet unexplained natural atmospheric phenomenon (assuming it exists at all) – may be drawn to follow metallic objects, like aeroplanes. Ball lightning (if it exists) is of course strange and mysterious, but it doesn't require aliens or ancient super-civilisations to "explain" it (or kick it into the "you're not allowed to explain this" box).

I think we may be able to cross off ball lightning from the unexplained list too: Ball Lightning Mystery Solved? Electrical Phenomenon Created in Lab.

Research grants are given usually to prove an ends. For instance if I want to do research that proves global warming then I'd have far less problems getting funding than trying to prove otherwise. (I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening (although the warmest year was 1998 and temperatures have been cooling since)) and if I wanted to write a report about increased glacial melt then funding is far more likely than for reporting on glaciers advancing (yes, its true - some glaciers are advancing but we tend not to hear about them).

Ancient mines? Difficult to date a hole but the planet is littered with holes. Deep mines are under enormous pressures and will close if not maintained.

But, there are people out there making claims. Why are claims that run contrary to extant edict ignored? I suppose it's inertia. Once science is happy with it's understanding things that overturn that understanding are initially unwelcome. Take for example Edison who absolutely refused to believe that alternating current was a safer and more efficient power source for a city than direct current. Edison was not an idiot but it took Tesla to sort him out.

I found a couple of links that are somewhat amusing in their nature... but it proves there are people out there making these claims... not just me!
http://hiddenarchaeology.com/2011/06/35 ... -on-earth/
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=16109

Sitchen was a very odd guy, but the selective presentation of evidence and the dismissal of contradictory evidence is not unusual at all. Certainly in political terms it can be considered normal. If one thinks of his books as odd then know they are nothing to a video presented by him. Note though that his detractors are fairly general rather than specific when they decry his assertions.

"it is unlikely that his contention can be persuasively defended"

I've never known two experts agree on anything they were truly expert in, let alone a room full of them.

The lens in question functioned as a lens otherwise it wouldn't be called a lens. It might have been worn as jewellery I suppose by someone that did not understand it's function. There is some mystery revolving around the manner in which it was crafted.

By mimic guided flight I mean changing vector and velocity in such a way as to make detailed observation. Ball lightning does exist in the laboratory at least and is known to be able to pass thru a fine mesh unhindered.

I'm really just guessing about their motives, but buzzing a city would have drawn ackack fire and caused general panic with people thinking it was a new enemy weapon. If it was a warning then to an extent it worked as reports of it went to Churchill. The culture of secrecy really starts with that as he decided it was not information fit for public consumption.

Thanks SandJ for researching ball lightning.

Found a picture of the much vaunted lens but it won't post, some error about assaying the dimensions...

http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Images/ ... 20lens.JPG

Greyth wrote:

Found a picture of the much vaunted lens but it won't post, some error about assaying the dimensions...

http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Images/ ... 20lens.JPG

The Nimrud Lens: You wouldn't be able to see the moon through that cloudy bit of rock. http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/optics.htm

The Viking Lens: you can't make a lens using a lathe. They were buttons.

Babylonian Lenses: that's just a load of weasel-word-waffle.

The Layard (Nineveh) Lens: that's the Nimrun Lens again!

That entire "Ancient Wisdom" web site is poorly researched and does not quote its sources. There is little point trying to use it to learn anything since its purpose is to create doubt and mis-information as an aid to selling stuff from the web shop.

Bear in mind that the artefact was excavated after >5000 years. It's condition when new could only have been better than it is now.

[The dubious nature of the site is well known but the artefact is real and that's why only the picture was posted]

Last week's New Scientist has a lot of dates for human evolution. It puts the origin of modern human beings at about 200,000 years ago – well within the ice-core record. Modern humans eventually left Africa at around 125,000 years ago. An analysis of the genetics of the human body louse suggests that we didn't start wearing clothing until somewhere around 72,000 ± 42,000 years ago. We reached Australia around 45,000 years ago, and the Americas around 15,000 years ago. The last Ice Age lasted from around 100,000 years ago to around 10,000 years ago, when sudden warming and global climate change helped trigger the dawn of stone-age agriculture in the Near East, possibly by trapping pockets of hunter-gatherers in increasingly arid areas and forcing them, however reluctantly, to farm or starve. Genetic analysis of arable plants and domesticated animals broadly agree with this timeline. There isn't any room in this record for ancient human super-civilisations to develop undetectable technologies. We're left with aliens, I'm afraid.

Although perhaps ... one science-fictional getout remains: good old time travel. The ancient human super-civilisation you seek develops in the future, and travels back to the past!

Science fictionally, it's (just about) justifiable. There's as much evidence for this as there is for any other ancient super-tech.

Greyth wrote:

Research grants are given usually to prove an ends.

They're not. CERN, for example, was built at pretty huge expense to see what happens. Nobody knows what they'll find. They have theories, but if the theories don't match the data, then they'll need to make new ones.

Greyth wrote:

Ancient mines? Difficult to date a hole but the planet is littered with holes. Deep mines are under enormous pressures and will close if not maintained.

Difficult though to hide the evidence of huge excavations, heaps of mine tailings, worked-out seams, processing residue, etc.

Greyth wrote:

Why are claims that run contrary to extant edict ignored? I suppose it's inertia. Once science is happy with it's understanding things that overturn that understanding are initially unwelcome. Take for example Edison who absolutely refused to believe that alternating current was a safer and more efficient power source for a city than direct current. Edison was not an idiot but it took Tesla to sort him out.

Again, see the recent, very public, FTL-neutrino affair. That ran very contrary to a fundamental part of physics, and it wasn't covered up, or ignored.

Edison had a large, personal financial stake in promoting DC over AC, as his power-plants were DC. This was economics and marketing, not science.

Greyth wrote:

Sitchen was a very odd guy, but the selective presentation of evidence and the dismissal of contradictory evidence is not unusual at all. Certainly in political terms it can be considered normal.

It's not unusual in political terms, where truth is endlessly flexible, but in science – in history, too – it's called "fraud".

The Niniveh lens is dealt with on the bad archeology site the was already linked to: http://www.badarchaeology.com/?page_id=279

Greyth wrote:

But, there are people out there making claims. Why are claims that run contrary to extant edict ignored? ...

I found a couple of links that are somewhat amusing in their nature... but it proves there are people out there making these claims... not just me!

What kind of idiotic argument is that? There are people out there that make (unsupported by evidence) claims, and for this reason alone these claims must be true?

Just to show the absurdity of this argument from a different example than Nikola Tesla: there are a bunch of people "out there" who claim that the Holocaust never happened. So, just because someone makes this claim (however unfounded), it automatically becomes true, or even however remotely likely?

Okay, let me see what I can claim (out of thin air, and without any evidence whatsoever) and thereby magically make into a fact. Oh, I know: Oolite was created and written solely by myself, back in the 4th century BC. There, I claimed it. Therefore it must be true. Or at least it cannot be dismissed ever again.