# 2012 Prophecy



## RJM Corbet

Does anyone have any thoughts on the subject?


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## Vertigo

I presume you are referring to the "Mayan prophecy". As I understand it the prophecy that the world would end in 2012 is an invention of the media. What the Maya believed is that it will be the end of a "cycle" of which we are in (or coming to the end of) the fourth. They did not see this as an apocalyptic thing but rather something to be celebrated:



> "For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle," says Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies


 
It seems to me it is more like the zodiac ages, as in the age of Aquarius and so on.

If you search around I think there has already been a thread or two discussing this, or maybe it might have been some topic drift on the 2012 film thread, I'm not too sure.


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## J Riff

No idea. I don't know how much credence to give any of the astrolgy-based theories.
The Great Pyramid illustrates this well: - was it a grain silo, or a magical place aimed at certain stars, so that the spirit of the Pharoah (or alien) could connect with the homeworld, or the gods, or something.
 It's one or the other and I lean toward practicality. So 2012 is interesting, but will probably pass with no great disaster or polar-reversal or whatever is predicted- much like other predicted disasters, like all the computers breaking down in the year 2000.


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## Cayal

RJM Corbet said:


> Does anyone have any thoughts on the subject?



The ink ran dry. End of thought.


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## Dave

The will be another Royal celebration, and possibly two. It will be a summer of sport in Europe. There will be disruptions in the world food supply. In the U.S. houses and businesses will go without electricity for a day. Governments will attempt to destroy freedom on the internet. A premier footballer will have an affair. 

Did you mean that kind of thing? Keep it deliberately vague and ambiguous. The more vague and ambiguous the better; the more things you can then claim came true later. No one remembers those you got wrong anyhow.


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## TheEndIsNigh

It's all true I tell you, every word.

For it is foretold of the great nothingness to come. A darkness that will last for eternity and beyond. A time where time will not exist; an end of time.



> "And there will come a time when darkness will descend to envelope the heavens and the Earth.
> A time when the universe will shrink to nothing and be as though it never was.
> A time when the universe is not.
> A time of normality."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> the TEIN Prophesies


 
Go: make peace with *yourselves*, in the short time we all have left.


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## Dave

TheEndIsNigh said:


> For it is foretold of the great nothingness to come. A darkness that will last for eternity and beyond. A time where time will not exist; an end of time.


But that's what you told us last year!


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## clovis-man

All I know is that the "Rapture" didn't happen this month. So now I have to wait until after my next birthday in October.

Oh, wait. Maybe I was thinking of the "Raptor". That would be different. And much better.


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## mosaix

J Riff said:


> So 2012 is interesting, but will probably pass with no great disaster or polar-reversal or whatever is predicted- much like other predicted disasters, like all the computers breaking down in the year 2000.



The computers didn't break down in 2000, Riff _because they were fixed in advance._

I was one of a team of 36 who spent the years 1997 to 1999 identifying and fixing over 800 priority A millennium-related bugs in a major telecom operators switch data collection system (there were over 1200 priority B and over 2000 priority C bugs).

The fact that 2000 passed without incident and that people believe that the whole thing was some kind of weirdo-related prediction is credit to thousands of computer professionals.


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## Vertigo

Yes I get a bit annoyed with that one too, Mosaix. Everyone says it was all hot air and "look nothing happened". And I just think, yeah, nothing happened because so many people (myself included as well) put so much effort in beforehand to make sure it didn't. It just belittles all the work that people put in to make sure it *was* an anti-climax!

The problem is if the mission is for nothing to happen then no credits anyone with the effort taken to ensure nothing happens 

And, please... as I said in the second post of this thread, the 2012 prediction is *not* a prediction and never was one. It is a sensationalist myth created by the media. It is merely the end of a *cycle* in their mythology no more Armageddon than the end of the so called Age of Aquarius is/was/will be. There is *nothing* in the archeological evidenced to suggest they saw the end of a cycle like this as anything other than something to celebrate.


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## Starbeast

Some people still believe the mysterious tenth planet that orbits a dwarf star is still headed our way. They back this up with two things:​ 
1. The tenth planet that was discovered and made world news quite a while back (even I remembering reading about that in the newspaper and saw it on CNN), is surprisingly never mentioned again, anywhere (which has me wondering as well).​ 
2. The hugh (it is pretty big) observering station that was built in the anarctic to watch the southern sky (a perfect position to watch the approaching X planet).​ 






 

Checking on Planet X​


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## RJM Corbet

Now that one IS checkable, and I did check -- and its true! Very impressive, SB


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## Chaoticheart

In regards to the Y2K thing. The problem was only so widespread to begin with because the problem was ignored until the last minute. If they had swapped over to 4-digit dates back in the 70's there wouldn't have been any issue.

Granted they needed to conserve more space 'back in the day', but still, with even a little bit of common sense, they should've realized that down the road using the 2-digit system would bite them in the ass.

And @*Vertigo*, we can't say it isn't a prediction of the end of the world either. In Mayan belief, we live in the fourth world. So the assumption is, that at the end of the cycle the gods will create a new world. Whether this actually means the end of this one or not is unknown. 

All we know is that it was time to be celebrated, which in no way eliminates the possibility that they believed the world would end. The fact is: we don't know what they genuinely believed, and we never will. As for 2012, we just have to wait and see.


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## RJM Corbet

No. It's a hoax. It was made by someone named 'nibirushock' and he admitted that it was a fake. 

www.abovetopsecret.com 

There are blank squares like that all over the place on Google Sky. 

Another one bites the dust ...


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## Dave

RJM Corbet said:


> There are blank squares like that all over the place on Google Sky.


Astronomers have a name for them, they are known as Clouds.


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## Metryq

Chaoticheart said:


> In regards to the Y2K thing. The problem was only so widespread to begin with because the problem was ignored until the last minute.



My thoughts exactly, CH. I fully understand all the work that was done in a "panicked" last few months, but database admins had a couple decades, at least, to see this one coming.

I had to laugh at some of the absurd claims in the media—such as the property damage that might happen from lawn sprinklers turning on in the middle of the night (e.g. ice damage in northern states). Seriously, how many people have computer controlled lawn sprinklers? I've also heard the jokes about Linux or Java-based toasters, but again: how many toasters need an OS? The media really hyped Y2K into the Skynet judgment day and the coming of the terminators. "Your doorbell will try to kill you!" To think that the media actually pushed this kind of BS and, worse yet, there were masses of mouth-breathers who believed it.


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## mosaix

Chaoticheart said:


> In regards to the Y2K thing. The problem was only so widespread to begin with because the problem was ignored until the last minute. If they had swapped over to 4-digit dates back in the 70's there wouldn't have been any issue.
> 
> Granted they needed to conserve more space 'back in the day', but still, with even a little bit of common sense, they should've realized that down the road using the 2-digit system would bite them in the ass.



Whilst the two digit year was a major problem, Chaotic it was by no means the only one associated with the millennium.

Should the year 2000 have been a leap year for instance?

_Leap years occur in years exactly divisible by four, except for years ending in 00.
_
So far so good and many systems were set up on this basis i.e. 2000 _not_ being a leap year but completely forgetting:

_unless they are divisible by 400 in which case they are leap years._


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## J Riff

Oh well, the Y2K patch was a free download, and it kept techies employed, a good pseudo-hoax, there.
 Meanwhile, the tenth planet story has been around a long time, and it was told to me as a story, not as SF.
 There was a tenth planet, like this one. Humans came from there originally, managed to blow it up or wreck it. Now, Earth is doing the exact same things, all over again. This time, however... TBC.
 Maybe this was originally simply somebody's plotline for a novel, back in ancient times.


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## RJM Corbet

Dave said:


> Astronomers have a name for them, they are known as Clouds.



You get those blank 'uncharted' squares on Google Earth too, in some places. It does make you wonder what's there.

But you wouldn't be able to see some 'Planet X' on Google Sky anyway, if telescopes battle to. As mentioned in another thread there's no way of knowing anything about what you pick up on the web. You can't take anyone to court -- even if you can find out who it is. Anyone can register a username, open an e mail address.

The fakes are becoming a competition, a bit like the viruses -- and some of them are pretty good. But then, some folks are easily taken in by them, like me, for example, in the small hours of night 

METRYQ: There's nothing more ridiculous than a toaster with a microchip, and they're everywhere ...


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## Chaoticheart

J Riff said:


> Oh well, the Y2K patch was a free download, and it kept techies employed, a good pseudo-hoax, there.
> Meanwhile, the tenth planet story has been around a long time, and it was told to me as a story, not as SF.
> There was a tenth planet, like this one. Humans came from there originally, managed to blow it up or wreck it. Now, Earth is doing the exact same things, all over again. This time, however... TBC.
> Maybe this was originally simply somebody's plotline for a novel, back in ancient times.



Sounds like the plot to that Mission to Mars film (I think that's what it was called? - had Gary Sinese and Don Cheedle)


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## mosaix

RJM Corbet said:


> METRYQ: There's nothing more ridiculous than a toaster with a microchip, and they're everywhere ...



I think a coffee maker with an internet connection (seen a couple of weeks ago) wins the ridiculous award.


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## RJM Corbet

mosaix said:


> I think a coffee maker with an internet connection (seen a couple of weeks ago) wins the ridiculous award.



Ha! Can you believe it! Atlantis had nothing on us ...


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## Starbeast

RJM Corbet said:


> You get those blank 'uncharted' squares on Google Earth too, in some places. It does make you wonder what's there.
> 
> But you wouldn't be able to see some 'Planet X' on Google Sky anyway, if telescopes battle to. The fakes are becoming a competition, a bit like the viruses -- and some of them are pretty good. But then, some folks are easily taken in by them, like me, for example, in the small hours of night


 
That's for sure, telescopes can see much clearer into outer space. That's why the South Pole Telescope was built (completed in February 2007). The SPT began it's first task in March 2007 scanning deep space for galaxy clusters.

Here is a magnificent photo it.


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## RJM Corbet

Starbeast said:


> ... Here is a magnificent photo of it...



Truly is


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## Cayal

Looks like the standard background of Apple computers.


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## Metryq

J Riff said:


> There was a tenth planet, like this one... Maybe this was originally simply somebody's plotline for a novel, back in ancient times.



Sounds more like one of Heinlein's lesser-known short stories, "Beyond Doubt," originally published under the pseudonyms Lyle Monroe and Elma Wentz. The punchline of the story is that the "heads" of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) were really PR for a political campaign in the colonies of old Atlantis.



> *Mosaix wrote:* I think a coffee maker with an internet connection (seen a couple of weeks ago) wins the ridiculous award.



Yet you don't find any coffee machine manufacturers being called onto the carpet by pinhead politicians to explain this harvesting of personal breakfast drink data. But in all seriousness, the coffee machine needs the internet connection for Java updates. <rimshot>

Although there was this time a fellow technician was having some problems with a video switcher in a TV studio. He called up the manufacturer, and the support tech asked, "What's the IP address on that switcher?" I'm not kidding. The support tech did a firmware upgrade, or something like that, and the image problem was cured.

Now you know why we desperately need IPv6.


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## RJM Corbet

Cayal said:


> Looks like the standard background of Apple computers.



Really? I thought it would be a nice wallpaper ...


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## Cayal

RJM Corbet said:


> Really? I thought it would be a nice wallpaper ...



The top half does


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## Starbeast

RJM Corbet said:


> I thought it would be a nice wallpaper ...


 
I was thinking that too.


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## J Riff

Well. What is it all about then, 2012?
I have a question for everyone, before I go off and do this...2012 business, my part of it anyway.

 Do you believe that UFO evidence and a lot more, was found 60ish years ago, and covered ever since, and - will the truth emerge by 2012? Or not.

 Because, unfortunately, I have to go add my bit... to the horde of scientists and military and security people who have 'come forward', each of whom know part of the story.
I don't want to start an argument in here, because it's like a 2nd home...
but that's my lot, and it's no fun at all.
Bloody aliens. You allus knew it was true. Bloody Mars. Hell. Just forget I said anything, OK?


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## RJM Corbet

J Riff said:


> Well. What is it all about then, 2012?
> I have a question for everyone, before I go off and do this...2012 business, my part of it anyway.
> 
> Do you believe that UFO evidence and a lot more, was found 60ish years ago, and covered ever since, and - will the truth emerge by 2012? Or not.
> 
> Because, unfortunately, I have to go add my bit... to the horde of scientists and military and security people who have 'come forward', each of whom know part of the story.
> I don't want to start an argument in here, because it's like a 2nd home...
> but that's my lot, and it's no fun at all.
> Bloody aliens. You allus knew it was true. Bloody Mars. Hell. Just forget I said anything, OK?



It's all tied up with dating of the pyramids and sphinx and with exinoxal precession, with ancient maps accurately charting the Continent of Antartica as it was before the southern ice sheet buried it -- and with the messages left for us in the above monuments and numerous others spread around the world in significant locations, that all seem to point in a single direction and of which there is no better all round explanation than Graham Hancock's 'Fingerprints of the Gods'.

UFOs don't come into the picture, I'm afraid. Or let's say they don't HAVE to.

That the lunatic fringe and all the funny fakers and the charlatans have taken up the idea and run with it is to be expected, but Graham Hancock's work is not at all esoteric or mysterioso, in spite of the loonies and the nutbars attempts to tie their own colours to his mast.

That it is all coming to light now is because it was DESIGNED to come to light now, when we needed it and are able to understand it. I think. 

Of course there are always going to be those so mentally atrophied against new ideas in conflict with the 'models' they have spent their lives supporting, that they will use their power and positions in their own various disciplines and organisations to make the new ideas look so ridiculous that it becomes an embarrassment for serious people to even read them -- especially after all the nutbars have muddied up the water real good.

Le plus ce change, le plus il sont meme chose ...


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## J Riff

Leave the UFOs out of the story? Hardly possible, but then people are crazy, I keep forgetting that, they might try that angle.
Bugs me, because most SF becomes redundant overnight.
The Mars mission will come out 1st, then.... I'm not sure how it will go.
Yea, did go there. Sorry.Not my idea to lie to everyone, but you will see why it had to be that way.
 Serious. No fun, though, really quite painful, like being tortured to have anything to do with it.
Craziness. But... truth will out.


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## RJM Corbet

J Riff said:


> Leave the UFOs out of the story? Hardly possible, but then people are crazy, I keep forgetting that, they might try that angle.
> Bugs me, because most SF becomes redundant overnight.
> The Mars mission will come out 1st, then.... I'm not sure how it will go.
> Yea, did go there. Sorry.Not my idea to lie to everyone, but you will see why it had to be that way.
> Serious. No fun, though, really quite painful, like being tortured to have anything to do with it.
> Craziness. But... truth will out.



Riff, you keep hinting at this Mars thing, and I keep thinking you're going to explain more, but you never do.

C'mon! PLEASE??


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## Anthony G Williams

Remember what Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

In other words, if someone claims anything which does not comply with generally-accepted knowledge, they have to provide rock-solid evidence before their claim is worth taking seriously (let alone believing).

And a bunch of conspiracy theorists yattering on the internet doesn't even begin to come remotely close...

On the 2012 farrago, I posted this on my blog some time ago:



> I have only recently stumbled across the Mayan 2012 cataclysm belief, which I gather is very popular in some quarters. For those as yet unexposed to this wonder, it concerns the fact that the Mayan "long count" calendar (they were fond of grouping years into various different cycles) comes to an end on 21 December 2012, when some terrible event is predicted to happen. It is also claimed by one Terence McKenna, who invented something called "Timewave Zero" which "purports to calculate the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time", that "the novelty [is] progressing towards the infinity on 21st December 2012". (see THIS item). Wow! With modern mathematical theory backing up ancient Mayan beliefs, there must really be something in this, right?
> 
> Just a couple of problems with this: the Mayans did not predict catastrophe at the end of the long count – in fact, they had celebrations at the end of their year cycles to welcome in the next cycle, just as we did at the end of the Millennium. The predictions of doom were the recent invention of a New Age theorist, José Argüelles, whose ideas have been dismissed by all professional Mayan scholars. As for McKenna, it turns out that no serious mathematician has accepted his ideas: they are just numerology (which is in the same category of scientific validity as astrology). Even more damning, McKenna (an advocate of "magic mushrooms" as the key to understanding), deliberately changed his initial calculations to match up his critical date with the end of the Mayan long count, so it is hardly surprising that they are the same.


 
I fact, I was subsequently informed that Mayan calendars have been discovered which run beyond 2012...


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## RJM Corbet

No, The Mayans did NOT predict celebration! Where on earth did you get that idea?

I'm not talking about conspiracy theorists yattering on the internet. Like I say, the nutbars and loonies leap in and muddy the water, making anyone who is interested in proper investigation look like one of them. 

That's the whole damn problem with the internet. The fact that so much really useful information, books and science papers, latest NASA findings and photos, etc. are available on the internet, is outweighed by the fakes and viruses and nutbars spreading their crazy garbage.

No-one's asking anyone to believe anything, but please allow people who are prepared to take the trouble to seriously investigate something -- to the point of even going beyond the Wikipaedia and You Tube 'soundbites' and trying to find and READ actual (copy) documents, believe it or not -- to at least discuss the subject if they wish to? We're not all internet dilletantes and mindless doomsday freaks, mate. 


Anyway, Graham Hancock's book was published before the internet was a consideration, when researchers actually WENT to see the places they were researching and actually TALKED to their sources face-to-face, not to faceless internet usernames.

Mayan calendar or not, you can leave the Mayan calendar completely out of the equation, it still comes to the same thing. The only thing the Mayan calendar has done is to produce a very precise prediction, to the day -- and of course, probably nothing's going to happen on that exact day. But its a time period, and that is in our lifetime, which means we are the only ones who may be able do something about it  -- even if there's the slightest possibility that it IS going to come to that.

And no, the Mayans did NOT predict celebration. I don't know where on earth you got that? From the spoutings of some new age guru? Nassim Haramein perhaps? The Mayans predicted untold catastrophe, the end of civilization as we know it. Nothing to celebrate.  

That the final end result, a thousand years or more later, might be an improvement on the overpopulation and destruction of rain forests, and so on, that we and our children are forced to live with now -- may be an eventual good result of very bad events. The grass grows green again after the fire.

That is where they saw cause for celebration.

Terrance McKenna? Sure. But no-one has to buy everything everything Terrance McKenna has to say. And 'timewave zero' is not all he has to say. One hears what Terrance McKenna has to say, with a open mind, whether he takes magic mushrooms or not, and later one finds that some of his observations may or may not tie in with parts of what others have to say, from random observations, and draw your own conclusions.

To quote a Wiki article stating with a straight face that: "The present day Maya attach no signifcance to b'ak'tun" says all that needs to be said. The present day Maya have only recently discovered the blooming wheel.

As far as 'scholars have rejected the possibility of such events happening in 2012' -- vintage Wiki. The fact that 'scholars' reject the possibility of crustal displacement doesn't mean it can't happen.



Sorry ...


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## Anthony G Williams

I never said that the Mayans "predicted" celebration - I said that they celebrated the end of their calender cycles, just as we celebrate the New Year, the New Century and, of course, the New Millennium.

Believe it or not, the fact that someone has published a book claiming something is worth precisely...zero. In my younger days I read all sorts of books claiming weird things, which quoted all sorts of impressive-sounding evidence in support - but the "evidence" had no credible independent confirmation. It was therefore worthless.

If any unconventional ideas are backed up by enough hard evidence to support them, then serious researchers - scientists and other academics - will look at them. However, even that stage is a long way short of proving that the ideas are valid.

"Check the evidence" should always be the principle. If the Mayans were so brilliant at predicting events (and by what mechanism - other than being deluded by hallucinogenic drugs, of course - could they _possibly_ do that many centuries ahead?) how come they didn't realise that their empire was about to collapse so all their long-term calendars were pointless?


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## Chaoticheart

RJM Corbet said:


> No, The Mayans did NOT predict celebration! Where on earth did you get that idea?
> 
> I'm not talking about conspiracy theorists yattering on the internet. Like I say, the nutbars and loonies leap in and muddy the water, making anyone who is interested in proper investigation look like one of them.
> 
> That's the whole damn problem with the internet. The fact that so much really useful information, books and science papers, latest NASA findings and photos, etc. are available on the internet, is outweighed by the fakes and viruses and nutbars spreading their crazy garbage.
> 
> No-one's asking anyone to believe anything, but please allow people who are prepared to take the trouble to seriously investigate something -- to the point of even going beyond Wikipaedia and You Tube and trying to find and READ actual (copy) documents, believe it or not -- to at least discuss the subject if they wish to? We're not all internet dilletantes and mindless doomsday freaks, mate.
> 
> 
> Anyway, Graham Hancock's book was published before the internet was a consideration, when researchers actually WENT to see the places they were researching and actually TALKED to their sources face-to-face, not to faceless internet usernames.
> 
> Mayan calendar or not, you can leave the Mayan calendar completely out of the equation, it still comes to the same thing.
> 
> And no, the Mayans did NOT predict celebration. I don't know where on earth you got THAT information, Anthony. They predicted catastrophe, nothing to celebrate at all.
> 
> That the final end result, a thousand years or more later, might be an improvement on the overpopulation and destruction of rain forests, and so on, that we and our children are forced to live with now -- may be an eventual good result of very bad events. The grass grows green again after the fire.
> 
> That is where they saw cause for celebration.
> 
> Terrance McKenna, sure. No-one's buying everything everything Terrance McKenna has to say, but parts of what he has to say, tie in with parts of what others have to say, coming from completely random directions ...



The Mayans predicted a celebration just as much as they did a catastrophe.

The belief that 2012 would be a catastrophe stemmed entirely from the fact that the calender seemed to end there, and because the Mayans believed a new world would be born with the new age. There is nothing to suggest this world would end though, especially since in Mayan belief this was the first successful world, and, as mentioned in an earlier post, there have been multiple Mayan finds that indicating predicted dates following the supposed end (many quite a bit closer than the "thousand years you suggest"). The Mayans believed it would be the end of an age, a time of rebirth. 

I have read three of Hancock's books: Sign and the Seal, Fingerprint of the Gods and the Message of the Sphinx. Of which I found each to be an utter crock. All he does is dismiss the current theories and evidence which oppose him off hand and construct a brand new theory with no real evidence using claims such as the pole-shift hypothesis and orion correlation theory. Both of these theories have been disproved since they were put forth.(though polar shift was proved to happen it is only about 1 degree per million years). Hancock, like everyone else who puts forth a similar theory is NOT an archaeologist, hell he's NOT even a historian. And after reading his books I can conclusively say he has no idea what he's talking about.

If a theory is actually sound, there will be some evidence to support it. Whether the researcher seeks to disprove something or not, most scientists will put forth the honest conclusions they find. And thus far, the research done has opposed any of Hancock's ideas AND the idea that the Mayan's thought the world was going to end.


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## RJM Corbet

Yes, but the scientists who have access to the money and technology to check these things are busy people, involved in their careers within the 'model'. 

It is a constant refrain from Graham Hancock and others, pleading with the scientific 'establishment' to at least hear what they are trying to say. There would be no-one happier than Gerald Hancock to have access to proper scientific proof or disproof of the fact, for example, that the sphinx is not 4000 but 14000 years old.

Take the sunken 'pyramids' off Japan. For a start, few scientists are prepared to learn scuba diving and then take time off from their busy lives defending the 'model' and their careers. And then, when they find a geologist who does have half and hour to spare, he fins around for a few minutes and surfaces with the conclusion, and I paraphrase, that although it's rather unlikely, there is nevertheless just the shred of a possibility that they ARE natural formations -- and that goes into Wikipaedia as: recent scientific findings have proved, etc. Someone wants to know about something quickly, he skims Wiki, and then he knows all about it. But any kid can see at first glance that they're man made.

Then you get the Prof. de Grasse Tysons of this world, taking the stage like Michael Jackson, with all the moves, and saying (again paraphrased) that 'what the 2012 freaks don't bother to mention is that the Earth and the sun line up with the center of the galaxy EVERY year on 21st Dec'. Laughter and applause from the paying audience. Of course, what HE omits to mention, is that ALL the planets don't line up every year -- they only line up every I don't know how many thousands of years.

Global crustal displacement is the real issue in question, the whole 30mile thick crust of the earth slipping around over the lower mantle on which it floats, like the skin of an orange slipping around over the orange, if that were possible? Not 'continental drift' not tectonic plates. And, talking about scientists, Albert Einstein came out in support of possible crustal displacement to explain certain events, and did so in writing ...

EDIT: Chaotic, your post landed while I was typing this reply to Anthony. Will read it now.


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## RJM Corbet

Chaoticheart said:


> The Mayans predicted a celebration just as much as they did a catastrophe.
> 
> The belief that 2012 would be a catastrophe stemmed entirely from the fact that the calender seemed to end there, and because the Mayans believed a new world would be born with the new age. There is nothing to suggest this world would end though, especially since in Mayan belief this was the first successful world, and, as mentioned in an earlier post, there have been multiple Mayan finds that indicating predicted dates following the supposed end (many quite a bit closer than the "thousand years you suggest"). The Mayans believed it would be the end of an age, a time of rebirth.
> 
> I have read three of Hancock's books: Sign and the Seal, Fingerprint of the Gods and the Message of the Sphinx. Of which I found each to be an utter crock. All he does is dismiss the current theories and evidence which oppose him off hand and construct a brand new theory with no real evidence using claims such as the pole-shift hypothesis and orion correlation theory. Both of these theories have been disproved since they were put forth.(though polar shift was proved to happen it is only about 1 degree per million years). Hancock, like everyone else who puts forth a similar theory is NOT an archaeologist, hell he's NOT even a historian. And after reading his books I can conclusively say he has no idea what he's talking about.
> 
> If a theory is actually sound, there will be some evidence to support it. Whether the researcher seeks to disprove something or not, most scientists will put forth the honest conclusions they find. And thus far, the research done has opposed any of Hancock's ideas AND the idea that the Mayan's thought the world was going to end.



Well everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'm surprised that you read all three books if you thought he was such a crock?

You don't mention the accurate map of the Anartica continent, precision charted before the southern icecap covered it?

No-one said he was an archaelogist or an historian, and no-one said he had to be. Best he's not, no position, job, family to support -- means he can say what he likes.

Magnetic pole shifting has nothing to do with equinoxal precession or crustal displacement, both of which are central to understanding what he has to say. That geologists are now accepting the idea of crustal displacement, even 1deg a million years, is new to me. Thanks. The 'thousand years' I suggest, is the recovery period afterward, by the way.

And birth may indeed be something to celebrate, but it's preceded by death. The grass grows green again after the fire, old Chinese wisdom. Also 'Mayan' calendar is a misnomer. The issue is that the Maya, who were busy cutting out hearts with stone knives and hadn't invented the wheel, inherited their calendar, along with their buildings from an earlier, much more advanced civilization who were destroyed as a result of crustal displacement.

And the 'Orion' orientation? Since when was that disproved?


----------



## HareBrain

I was a fan of the Antarctic-Atlantis theory back in the day, largely thanks to Colin Wilson's extremely readable "From Atlantis to the Sphinx". I even used it as the backstory for a novel. (Did you know that the Babylonian base-12 numbering system, by which we have 360 degrees etc, was derived from the fact that the fallen angels who built Atlantis had six fingers on each hand, a mutation until recently taken to mean "faery blood", thanks to cross-breeds entering the human gene-pool? No? Well, you do now.)

The trouble with Hancock etc is that they're fond of tossing around phrases like "uncanny accuracy", without quantifying what they mean. When you do find out the precise data for some alignment or cross-culture comparison, they're often not at all impressive. For example, if you try to actually compare the Piri-Reis (was that the name?) map of supposed ancient pre-ice Antarctica with current mapping, it's extremely disappointing, and in no way, in my opinion, justifies the extravagant claims for it. (I believe recognition of this kind of disparity has caused Graham Hancock to distance himself from the Pyramids = Orion idea since he wrote Fingerprints of the Gods.)

It has now been demonstrated (to my satisfaction at least) that Plato's Atlantis was Santorini/Thera in the Mediterranean (along with elements of Minoan Crete), destroyed by a volcanic eruption in about 1500 BC. I wonder, if Plato hadn't come up with the figure of 10,000 years and placed Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules, would there ever have arisen any theories of worldwide progenitor civilisations to trouble us now?


----------



## Anthony G Williams

Wikipedia, like any source, isn't faultless but since it has many independent people constantly checking the contents, it's vastly more likely to be accurate than the publications of those individuals who believe in the weird and wonderful. This is what it says about the Piri Reis map:



> Amateur historian Gavin Menzies claims in his book _1421: The Year China Discovered America_ that the southern landmass is indeed the Antarctic coastline and was based on earlier Chinese maps. According to Menzies, Admiral Hong Bao charted the coast over 70 years before Columbus as part of a larger expedition under the famous Chinese explorer and admiral Zheng He to bring the world under China's tribute system.
> 
> Gregory McIntosh and other cartographers and historians who have examined the map in detail believe the resemblance of the coastline to the actual coast of Antarctica to be tenuous. For centuries before the actual discovery of Antarctica, cartographers had been depicting a massive southern landmass on global maps based on the theoretical assumption by some that one must exist, if only to balance the landmass of the North. It was widely believed that South America and, once its northern coastline was discovered, Australia, must be joined to this land mass, which was thought to be very much bigger than the real Antarctica. This theoretical southern continent, the Great Southern Land or Terra Australis Incognita (literally Unknown Southern Land), in various configurations, was usually shown on maps until the eighteenth century. An alternate view is that the "Antarctic" coast is simply the eastern coastline of South America skewed to align east-west due to the inaccurate measurement of longitude or to fit it on the page.[36]
> 
> Hapgood suggests that the Antarctic section of the map was copied at an incorrect scale to the rest of the map and resulted in the distortion and enlargement of the continent on several ancient maps. This would explain why there is no waterway between South America and Antarctica. He suggests several points of continuity between the Piri Reis Map and modern maps of the continent below the ice caps. Since the Antarctic continent was not officially sighted until 1820[37][38] and its full coastline was not known until much later; this claim, if true, would require major revisions to the history of exploration, settlement, evolution, and technological advancements of the time.[39]
> 
> There are many difficulties in the map of South America, including duplication of rivers. Close examination of the coastline supports the alternative theory that the "extra" landmass is simply the South American coast, probably explored in secret by Portuguese navigators, and bent round to fit the parchment. There are features resembling the basins at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan, and the Falkland Islands.


 
Another little saying to be borne in mind: "The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so" - Louis Pasteur


----------



## RJM Corbet

HareBrain said:


> I was a fan of the Antarctic-Atlantis theory back in the day, largely thanks to Colin Wilson's extremely readable "From Atlantis to the Sphinx". I even used it as the backstory for a novel. (Did you know that the Babylonian base-12 numbering system, by which we have 360 degrees etc, was derived from the fact that the fallen angels who built Atlantis had six fingers on each hand, a mutation until recently taken to mean "faery blood", thanks to cross-breeds entering the human gene-pool? No? Well, you do now.)
> 
> The trouble with Hancock etc is that they're fond of tossing around phrases like "uncanny accuracy", without quantifying what they mean. When you do find out the precise data for some alignment or cross-culture comparison, they're often not at all impressive. For example, if you try to actually compare the Piri-Reis (was that the name?) map of supposed ancient pre-ice Antarctica with current mapping, it's extremely disappointing, and in no way, in my opinion, justifies the extravagant claims for it. (I believe recognition of this kind of disparity has caused Graham Hancock to distance himself from the Pyramids = Orion idea since he wrote Fingerprints of the Gods.)
> 
> It has now been demonstrated (to my satisfaction at least) that Plato's Atlantis was Santorini/Thera in the Mediterranean (along with elements of Minoan Crete), destroyed by a volcanic eruption in about 1500 BC. I wonder, if Plato hadn't come up with the figure of 10,000 years and placed Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules, would there ever have arisen any theories of worldwide progenitor civilisations to trouble us now?



Sure. And of course one must keep an open mind, or one ends up defending the 'alternative' model as blindly as those with mouths to feed defend the 'establishment' model.

However, Orion becomes a bit of a quibble. The 'Aztec' stonework and other 'pre-civilization' monuments clearly required stone cutting and construction techniques that we don't even have today.

The piri-reis map is also an oddity, remarkable more for its evident overall accuracy than its lack of accuracy, and considering the effects of I don't know how many millions or billions of tons of ice in the meantime.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> Wikipedia, like any source, isn't faultless but since it has many independent people constantly checking the contents, it's vastly more likely to be accurate than the publications of those individuals who believe in the weird and wonderful. This is what it says about the Piri Reis map:
> 
> 
> 
> Another little saying to be borne in mind: "The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so" - Louis Pasteur



But why would someone go to all the trouble of making a map of the earth as accurately as humanly possible at the time, and then make the elementary mistake of drafting in a whole continent to the wrong scale?

It reads to me like people tying themselves up in knots to avoid the 'impossible' conclusion that the continent of Antartica WAS  charted 14000 years ago (give or take) BEFORE the ice-cap grew to cover it?


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> Sure. And of course one must keep an open mind, or one ends up defending the 'alternative' model as blindly as those with mouths to feed defend the 'establishment' model.


 
"It's important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."



> The piri-reis map is also an oddity, remarkable more for its evident overall accuracy than its lack of accuracy, and considering the effects of I don't know how many millions or billions of tons of ice in the meantime.


 
Wiki again: "Gregory McIntosh, a historian of cartography, has examined the Piri Reis map in depth and published his research in the book _The Piri Reis Map of 1513_ (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

McIntosh, in comparing the Piri Reis map to several other portolan-style maps of the era, found that
The Piri Reis map is not the most accurate map of the sixteenth century, as has been claimed, there being many, many world maps produced in the remaining eighty-seven years of that century that far surpass it in accuracy. The Ribero maps of the 1520s and 1530s, the Ortelius map of 1570, and the Wright-Molyneux map of 1599 (‘the best map of the sixteenth century’) are only a few better-known examples."​So your "evident overall accuracy" doesn't seem to be all that evident after all...



> It reads to me like people tying themselves up in knots to avoid the 'impossible' conclusion that the continent of Antartica WAS charted 14000 years ago (give or take) BEFORE the ice-cap grew to cover it?


 
At last, we agree on something - "impossible" is exactly the right word!

As usual, the simplest explanation is the true one: that such early cartographers had very little accurate information to go on outside the well-explored areas, and their maps were mixtures of the good, bad and indifferent, involving more and more speculation, hearsay, legend and myth the further out they went.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> "It's important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
> 
> 
> 
> Wiki again: "Gregory McIntosh, a historian of cartography, has examined the Piri Reis map in depth and published his research in the book _The Piri Reis Map of 1513_ (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
> 
> McIntosh, in comparing the Piri Reis map to several other portolan-style maps of the era, found that
> The Piri Reis map is not the most accurate map of the sixteenth century, as has been claimed, there being many, many world maps produced in the remaining eighty-seven years of that century that far surpass it in accuracy. The Ribero maps of the 1520s and 1530s, the Ortelius map of 1570, and the Wright-Molyneux map of 1599 (‘the best map of the sixteenth century’) are only a few better-known examples."​So your "evident overall accuracy" doesn't seem to be all that evident after all...
> 
> 
> 
> At last, we agree on something - "impossible" is exactly the right word!
> 
> As usual, the simplest explanation is the true one: that such early cartographers had very little accurate information to go on outside the well-explored areas, and their maps were mixtures of the good, bad and indifferent, involving more and more speculation, hearsay, legend and myth the further out they went.



But that's exactly the point. The piri-reis map was far from accurate, given that the chronometer to fix longitude did not come in until Captain Cook -- it had two Amazon rivers. Yet the piri-reis map drew a surprisingly accurate continental outline for Anartica -- to scale -- that was only recently confirmed by sonar mapping (within reason, considering the time gap and the effects of shifting weight of ice during that time) ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> But that's exactly the point. The piri-reis map was far from accurate, given that the chronometer to fix longitude did not come in until Captain Cook -- yet the piri-reis map drew a surprisingly accurate continental outline for Anartica ...


 
You missed this bit in Post #41:

"Gregory McIntosh and other cartographers and historians who have examined the map in detail believe the resemblance of the coastline to the actual coast of Antarctica to be tenuous." 

and:

"Close examination of the coastline supports the alternative theory that the "extra" landmass is simply the South American coast, probably explored in secret by Portuguese navigators, and bent round to fit the parchment. There are features resembling the basins at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan, and the Falkland Islands."

So not so "surprisingly accurate", it seems.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> You missed this bit in Post #41:
> 
> "Gregory McIntosh and other cartographers and historians who have examined the map in detail believe the resemblance of the coastline to the actual coast of Antarctica to be tenuous."
> 
> and:
> 
> "Close examination of the coastline supports the alternative theory that the "extra" landmass is simply the South American coast, probably explored in secret by Portuguese navigators, and bent round to fit the parchment. There are features resembling the basins at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan, and the Falkland Islands."
> 
> So not so "surprisingly accurate", it seems.



I wish I could get a picture up on here. I'm still trying to find out how to do it.

I'll try later, meantime FORGET about piri-reis. 

Google search: 'Ancient maps of Anartica' go to the 'images' entry, and tell me they're inaccurate ...


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## Ursa major

Anthony G Williams said:


> "...and the Wright-Molyneux map of 1599 (‘the best map of the sixteenth century’) are only a few better-known examples."


Your links are not to Wikipedia but to non-existent pages of the Chrons. However, I'll still assume "Wright" isn't Billy Wright and "Molyneux" isn't an older spelling of the name of the ground where he played professional soccer.... 


As to the prediction, we can all have a chat on the Chrons about its validity on, say, December 22 2012....


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## RJM Corbet

Ok, no picture yet, but here's a link, to the 'Oronoteus Fineaus' Map of Antarctica, pre-ice:

www.altarcheologie.nl/geoarchaeology/ancient_maps_files/ancient_maps_oron.htm

Inaccurate??


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> Google search: 'Ancient maps of Anartica' go to the 'images' entry, and tell me they're inaccurate ...


 
You mean this one? http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Old_maps_of_Antarctica

The trouble is there are scores of maps there, varying from 70 years ago backwards. Which ones did you have in mind?

Of course, the basic problem is what to compare the old maps with. The ice cover today? Or without any ice cover as shown below (only the green and yellow are above present-day sea level) - in which case, what sea level do you assume?


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## RJM Corbet

How do you DO that? I get a message saying my file's too large. 178 Kb?

No, not Wiki. Just click on the link below. I mean an accurate map of the land continent of Antarctica as it was BEFORE covered by the southern ice cap


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> Ok, no picture yet, but here's a link, to the 'Oronoteus Fineaus' Map of Antarctica, pre-ice:
> 
> www.altarcheologie.nl/geoarchaeology/ancient_maps_files/ancient_maps_oron.htm
> 
> Inaccurate??


 
Yep. See: http://www.badarchaeology.net/data/orontius.php



> Although there are fairly obvious similarities between the general depiction of the southern continent by Orontius Finaeus and modern maps of Antarctica, they do not stand up to close scrutiny; indeed, there are more differences than similarities, much as one would expect from a map drawn without genuine knowledge of the southern continent! To show that Orontius’s _Terra Australis_ corresponds to the outline of Antarctica, it was necessary for Hapgood to rotate the depiction by about twenty degrees, move the South Pole by 7½° (1,600 km) and alter the scale, as _Terra Australis_ is 230% the size of Antarctica. Hapgood used this change in scale to explain the absence of the Antarctic Peninsula (Palmer Land), which he believed Orontius Finaeus had to omit from his map as it would have overlapped with South America at that scale; he explained that Finaeus confused latitude 80° south with the Antarctic Circle. Just as with his treatment of Piri’s map, Hapgood also had to shuffle whole sections of coastline to make them fit. It is unclear how the hypothesised original map had become fragmented and wrongly recombined; it is even more unclear how the fringe writers can go on to claim that various geographical features are shown in their correct places and at the correct scale.


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## Ursa major

And, of course, if the land were to appear it would be because the ice had melted, which would raise the sea level and submerge some of the land coloured dark green in that image.


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> How do you DO that? I get a message saying my file's too large. 178 Kb?


The image needs to be already on-line somewhere. Right-click on it, then click on Properties, then copy the URL, click on "Insert Image" on the forum post box and paste in the URL.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> Yep. See: http://www.badarchaeology.net/data/orontius.php



I'm sorry, but that's entirely in the eye of the beholder. Even I can see that it's pretty damn close to the real thing. Ok, I'll try again for the image, thanks Anthony


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## RJM Corbet

http://www.altarcheologie.nl/geoarchaeology/ancient_maps_files/Oronteus_large_550.jpg

Ooops, didn't work. Well never mind, url link's ok for now. Sorry for double post ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> I'm sorry, but that's entirely in the eye of the beholder.


 
Quite so... 

Please note that the site I quoted points out that the Orontius Finaeus map was considerably "massaged" by Hapgood to make it fit his theory, and had been reconstructed from fragments anyway.

Also bear in mind that determining credibility is not simply a matter of comparing two maps, which are so complex that it's equivalent to claims that significant patterns can be found in the wording of the Bible (apply the same techniques and you'll find equally significant patterns in any book of that length). There is also the matter of determining the source of the "information" used by Orontius - how credible is that?


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## Anthony G Williams




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## Anthony G Williams

This is the current view with the ice in place - I don't see that the Orontius map resembles either of the images I've posted (with or without ice).


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## RJM Corbet

I do. It's actually pretty good, for something drawn 14000 years ago, wouldn't you say? That deep bay, and the rounded sort of nub part, with the bigger main section? Not too bad at all.

There are two sides to every story, and for some supportive correlation of that Fineaus map, with modern ones, here's another link:

www.atlantismaps.com/chapter_2.html

... and maybe that's enough maps for the time being, guys?


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> I do. It's actually pretty good, for something drawn 14000 years ago, wouldn't you say? That deep bay, and the rounded sort of nub part, with the bigger main section? Not too bad at all.


Where is your evidence for "14,000 years?"

Humanity was in the Old Stone Age at that time, with a hollowed-out log being about the best they could do in terms of sea-going craft. They didn't have anything which could even be used to draw maps on (or even to draw with, other than a charcoal stick), let alone any surveying equipment, and they had no concept of latitude and longitude. There is not a shred of validated evidence to suggest otherwise.

So if you believe that humanity was mapping Antartica 14,000 years ago, you are essentially saying that everything we have learned about early civilisation is wrong, all of the evidence accumulated is false, and there is a huge international conspiracy of scientists to cover up the "truth". And your evidence for this? A reconstructed old map, massaged to fit, which at the most only resembles Antarctica in being an irregular blob shape!

I remind you of the maxim: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." To say that humanity was capable of mapping Antarctica 14,000 years ago is, to put it very mildly, an extremely extraordinary claim. The "proof" is frankly laughable.


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## RJM Corbet

The Phillipe Buache map 1737

www.goldenageproject.org.uk/142antarctica.php

No of course that's not all the 'evidence'. There is 'evidence' all over the place, the 'Aztec' stonework, etc. Puma Punchu. The great pyramid. For people who had no tools and didn't know how to calculate longitude, they managed some extraordinary stuff ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> The Phillipe Buache map 1737
> 
> www.goldenageproject.org.uk/142antarctica.php


 
Nope. If you compare that with the ice-free map I posted earlier, there is no resemblance except to those afflicted by desperate wishful thinking. As I pointed out in an earlier post, there was a general belief that there _ought_ to be a southern continent to balance the northern ones, centuries before Antarctica was actually discovered, so all sorts of odd-shaped land masses were imaginatively included on early maps. That proves nothing.

Incidentally, I love that "_Evidently_ copied from maps surviving from ancient times" on that site. That's typical of the flannel used by promoters of such nonsense (along with "as everyone knows"): it's just an assertion backed by no evidence whatsoever.



> No of course that's not all the 'evidence'. There is 'evidence' all over the place, the 'Aztec' stonework, etc. Puma Punchu. The great pyramid. For people who had no tools and didn't know how to calculate longitude, they managed some extraordinary stuff ...


 
This has what, exactly, to do with mapping Antarctica 14,000 years ago? You seem to be trying to change the subject rather rapidly. The Great Pyramid (about which there is nothing magical, except for the bizarre religious beliefs which prompted it) was built 4,500 years ago, while the Aztecs were around only 400 to 600 years ago.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> ... This has what, exactly, to do with mapping Antarctica 14,000 years ago? You seem to be trying to change the subject rather rapidly. The Great Pyramid (about which there is nothing magical, except for the bizarre religious beliefs which prompted it) was built 4,500 years ago, while the Aztecs were around only 400 to 600 years ago.



Each to his own, Anthony, each to his own.

You can see evidence that the Aztecs built the stonework they're supposed to have built, and that the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid, if you want.

And I can see evidence for a pre-civilization if I want ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> Each to his own, Anthony, each to his own.
> 
> You can see evidence that the Aztecs built the stonework they're supposed to have built, and that the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid, if you want.
> 
> And I can see evidence for a pre-civilization if I want ...


 
I don't doubt for one moment that the Aztecs built their stonework, and that the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. There is no question of that, the evidence for it is massive.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. But not all opinions are equal. Some are based on hard evidence, others are just fantasies.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> I don't doubt for one moment that the Aztecs built their stonework, and that the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. There is no question of that, the evidence for it is massive ...


 
Uh huh ...


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## Dave

Conspiracy theories are interesting but always disappointingly wrong. Thanks, I'd never heard of that map before, but this might bring a little more perspective to it:

http://www.badarchaeology.net/data/buache.php

Why do you think that the Aztecs and Egyptians could not have built their stone works? Is it because we couldn't? Given the knowledge and skills of working in stone that we have lost, an total absence of health and safety, and an endless supply of cheap slave power, I have no doubt that we could. There are Scottish cairns that we would have difficulty reproducing today, that doesn't mean that we automatically assume aliens built them.


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## RJM Corbet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfxcOwMQL0o&feature=player_detailpage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIxRXmRFtYQ&feature=player_detailpage


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## RJM Corbet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4veXYJElBs&feature=player_detailpage


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## Vertigo

I've been offline for a few days so missed most of this discussion. But I have to say I can see very little correlation between any of those maps. In fact I would go on to say that I could find some maps in fantasy stories that match the Antartic continent more closely.


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## Vertigo

I have done a bit of browsing around and your first and third videos (the second only seems to have music and no commentary) both claim that Puma Punku was made from diorite and that it is the hardest substance after diamond. Now firstly whilst diorite is a very hard rock, 2.5 to 7 on the Mohs scale, it is not nearly, even at its hardest, as hard as diamond (10 on the Mohs scale). In fact because of its hardness it was very popular amongst most ancient civilisations for working other rocks. Secondly and more tellingly, the only references to diorite being used in Puma Punku that I can find are on sites claiming that aliens must have helped cut them. All other sites that I can find (and I searched quite extensively) state that the very large paving slabs are made from sandstone (very soft and easy to work) and the only other rock used is andesite (very common in that area, it is named after the Andes after all) which is also quite hard but nowhere near as hard (3 to 4 on the Mohs scale). Also I have climbed on diorite and sandstone and I have to say in the videos the rock that I'm seeing looks very much like sandstone to me. Not a very scientific observation that one I know, but just saying 

Some of the South American stone work from various civilisations is quite remarkable, I would certainly agree with that, and the tightness of the joints between blocks achieved by them is also quite extraordinary. But modern experimental archaeologists have frequently demonstrated techniques using tools available at the time of construction that can produce results equally as good. I can't describe these here as I have long since forgotten them, but I assure you I have seen them demonstrated on various documentaries.

Finally this is not exactly in the same scale of the previous discussion, the following comment refers to the radiocarbon dating of infill material:



> This layer was deposited during the first of three construction epochs and dates the initial construction of the Pumapunku at 1510 ±25 B.P. C14 (AD 440; calibrated, AD 536–600). Since the radiocarbon date came from the lowermost and oldest layer of mound fill underlying the andesite and sandstone stonework, the stonework must have been constructed sometime after 1510 ±25 B.P. C14.


 
This is only around 1500 years ago.


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## Dave

I'd agree with all that, Vertigo, but I couldn't be bothered to do your research. I also tended to switch off after I heard "this could only be the result of a nuclear explosion." I saw some red staining on one slab of rock which you might get in sandstone but not in an igneous rock. 

I've done some drystone walling myself. Given enough pieces of rock to choose from you can always find pieces that fit together neatly. There are Scottish megaliths built that way that are 10,000 years old and still standing. Given that before man came along the plateau of Puma Punku would have been covered in such rocks, I don't see any supernatural or out of this world explanation is required.

I have also seen the documentaries on the the very fine tolerances of the stones (it may have been Inca not Aztec - and may have been BBC 'Horizon') but that could still be achieved by careful, skilled cutting and plenty of time. These stonemasons were very skilful, but they were humans.


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## Ursa major

And that skill was passed from parent to child, meaning that there were always a few chips off the old block around....


Which, to be serious, allows all sorts of things to be achieved. We're so used to things being done in months that we can't comprehend that some projects required decades, or even centuries, to be completed. (Which is where the faith of these folk comes into play, I suppose: they weren't necessarily personal projects, but ones for the community and/or their god(s).)


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## RJM Corbet

Oh, I'm not implying 'aliens'. 

Mohs scale:
1) Talc
2) Gypsum
3) Calcite
4) Fluorite
5) Apatite
6) Feldspar (othoclase variety)
7) Quartz
8) Topaz
9) Corundum
10) Diamond

Those are minerals, which combine to form rocks.

Limestone comes in around 3, diorite, andesite and granite around 7. The harder rock will scratch the softer. Some sandstone, such as the Table Mountain quartzarite sandstone is very hard -- 6.5 to 7 -- beneath the crumbly surface weathering.

Also, diamond is so MUCH harder in relation to corundum than corundum is to topaz, or topaz to quartz.

As I repeatedly have said, unfortunately the loonies and nutbars and fakes and charlatans are quick to muddy the water for anyone trying to have a reasonable discussion. Just because some nitwit proposes an atomic explosion (which would vapourize the bloody place anyway) or states incorrectly that diorite is 'almost as hard as diamond' does not mean one should not recognize the fact that to cut diorite, or even limestone to those tolerances is pretty tricky to say the least.

If someone doesn't even want to consider the fact that there might have been a pre-civilization, that's their right.

The geologist who proposed the 'theory' of 'continental drift' in the 1920s (sorry I can't be bothered to look up his name, but it'll be there) was laughed out of the geological establishment and called a 'madman' -- and by 1960 they were teaching tectonic geology in schools.

Crustal displacement is a geological 'theory' that Albert Einstein endorsed as possible.

I'm not trying to make people believe anything, but if people don't even want to consider alternatives to the impossible 'model' that's up to them. I know you can't cut and drill diorite, or whatever it is, to that precision with stone age or copper tools. The Maya and Inca didn't even have the wheel. They ran around the jungle with flint knives. And we're supposed to buy the idea that they worked stone like that? Or designed a calendar as precise as that? 

Why is the 'alternative' theory of 'pre-civilization' less believable than the 'model' theory that the stone-age Inca were capable of that degree of precision stone cutting and building?


----------



## Dave

Ursa major said:


> We're so used to things being done in months that we can't comprehend that some projects required decades, or even centuries, to be completed.


If anyone doubts that, just do a quick search for some comments about (The Church of the Sacred Family) Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona which was started in 1882 and is not yet completed. Invariably the first comment expressed is disbelief that Antoni Gaudi spent all his life on it knowing that he would never see it finished.


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## RJM Corbet

Dave said:


> If anyone doubts that, just do a quick search for some comments about (The Church of the Sacred Family) Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona which was started in 1882 and is not yet completed. Invariably the first comment expressed is disbelief that Antoni Gaudi spent all his life on it knowing that he would never see it finished.



Yes, but then they built the Great Pyramid in 20 years?

The Phillipe Buache map is actually pretty close to the modern survey map posted below, if you look for similarities, not differences, after 14000 years or whatever of ice erosion etc.


----------



## Dave

RJM Corbet said:


> Oh, I'm not implying 'aliens'.
> 
> Just because some nitwit proposes an atomic explosion (which would vapourize the bloody place anyway) or states incorrectly that diorite is 'almost as hard as diamond' does not mean one should not recognize the fact that to cut diorite, or even limestone to those tolerances is pretty tricky to say the least.



Sorry, you've lost me totally now, you were the one who posted the "nitwit"'s proposals in answer to my question. If you don't agree with them what exactly is it that you propose? An ancient agricultural based civilisation with power tools and tungsten-carbide drills? I think Andesite chisels and sandpaper is a much more ordinary explanation.


----------



## RJM Corbet

Dave said:


> Sorry, you've lost me totally now, you were the one who posted the "nitwit"'s proposals in answer to my question. If you don't agree with them what exactly is it that you propose? An ancient agricultural based civilisation with power tools and tungsten-carbide drills? I think Andesite chisels and sandpaper is a much more ordinary explanation.



I don't agree with ancient atomic explosions or aliens, but I look at the pictures and know a stone age culture that did not even have the technological mentality to invent the wheel was not capable of that stone cutting, that's all. Even their knives were crudely chipped flint. There's no way.

So who did it?

That's the question, isn't it?


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## Dave

Are we still talking about Aztec's here? They did have the wheel, though only as a toy. They had obsidian tools that are harder than most metals. They had clubs with embedded volcanic glass. They had reed and bone drills. 

The Inca had complex hydraulic engineering, freeze-dried foods, and performed medical surgery. While it isn't clear to us how they could transport rocks, cut them precisely and polish them, they did have the "technological mentality", as you call it, to do so.


----------



## RJM Corbet

Dave said:


> Are we still talking about Aztec's here? They did have the wheel, though only as a toy. They had obsidian tools that are harder than most metals. They had clubs with embedded volcanic glass. They had reed and bone drills.
> 
> The Inca had complex hydraulic engineering, freeze-dried foods, and performed medical surgery. While it isn't clear to us how they could transport rocks, cut them precisely and polish them, they did have the "technological mentality", as you call it, to do so.



Yes, perhaps. Quibble: obsidian varies in hardness between apatite and feldspar, but, being glass, it's brittle, which is a separate quality. Mohs hardness measures only the ability of one mineral to scratch another. A diamond, for instance, is hard but quite brittle.

The most impressive 'evidence' from this discussion so far to me, is Vertigo's observation about the carbon dating of the foundation fill, which I confess I glossed past, but which is worth checking and, if true, can certainly be classed as 'evidence'.

EDIT: Googling quickly around I'm getting 'carbon dating' but nothing about how it was done -- no 'fill' yet. Possible to post the link please Vertigo? Not that I doubt you. For my own satisfaction. One should be open to the truth, however strange?


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## Vertigo

There's also the fact that the hardness measurement is hardness of minerals and not the actual rock, there is no accurate or meaningful way of measuring the hardness of rock as it will likely have a mixture of minerals, and if they are conglomerate or sedimentary then the bonding between the grains may be very weak even though the mineral hardness is very high. A good example is sandstone, whose constiutent minerals give a Mohs scale of around 7 but the rock is typically so soft you can rub it away with your hand. This is actually a big problem for climbers as ropes continually running over the rock wear grooves in it and protection placed in the rock is as likely to pull out with a load of rock as it is to hold. Guess what? I don't like climbing on sandstone! Now back to my original point, the very large slabs mentioned in the video as being diorite are almost certainly the flooring slabs described elsewhere as sandstone, and getting a smooth finished and sharp edges on that is really not very difficult or even very time consuming.

Another point; don't forget that the twenty years on the pyramids was with a workforce orders of magnitude higher than those that would have been available on the Bolivian Altiplano. Incidentally as far as I am aware the Inca were never in the Bolivian area where Puma Punku is until after they conquered the native Aymarans around 1500AD, around 1000 years after the earliest contruction at Puma Punku.

On a side issue much is made of the lack of wheels in the Inca civilisation, but believe me if you take a walk around Peru in the area where the Inca were strongest you will quickly realise that wheeled vehicles were of little use in that terrain.

On the scientist bit. Yes the original plate tectonic theory was laughed out, however incidences of the established scientific community getting things that wrong have steadily been declining as our science develops and the possibilities for such large errors diminishes. Alfred Wegener first proposed Plate Tectonics (calling it continental drift) around 1912; 100 years ago. To compare our understanding of science then and now is almost meaningless. This is particularly so with sciences dealing with the huge timescales of geology and really needing forensic techniques that simply weren't available then. You have to remember that back then about the only evidence for Wegner's theory was how neatly many of the continents seemed to fit together. I know that's a bit of a simplification but it is also reasonably accurate.

On the other hand all the concrete evidence available to us today describes a steady growth of human culture from the mesolithic (around 12000 BC) through to today. Whilst there are relatively few gaps in this body of evidence, there are some (it would be truly extraordinary if there were none) but there are none big enough to allow an unknown ancient civilisation to develop and collapse without leaving any concrete evidence itself. And I'm afraid there is no such concrete evidence. Stating that we don't believe the Egyptians or Incas or Aztecs or whoever could have done what they have clearly managed to do, does not constitute evidence. The lack of documentation also tells us nothing; for example there are loads of things the Romans achieved that are not documented (or at least we haven't found the documents) and they were a people extraordinarily good at documenting stuff. For example Julius Caesar documented the building of his two bridges of the Rhein but even with his writings there is dispute over exactly how the bridges were constructed. Note the second bridge was (according to his writings) built in just two days. Now you try building a bridge over the Rhein in just two days using the tools available to the Romans, however that doesn't mean he couldn't have done it.

There will always be holes in our knowledge of the past, it cannot be otherwise, but to try and turn those holes into concrete evidence for ancient civilisations that every other piece of concrete evidence disputes is just silly.

(Crikey didn't realise how long that post had gotten; apologies for the wall of text )


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## RJM Corbet

Sorry for double posting. Here's the link to the carbon dating:

www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Boliviatiahuanaco.htm

Ok, now check Wikipaedia Prof. W.H. Isbell. This is the only reference to him and no doubt the reference which the above link quotes as fact? There is a a sentence in Wiki, and then a footnote reference to the above professor. The footnote link takes you to a book: 'Palaces of the Ancient New World' by Susan Toby and Joanne Pillsbury. Not to the relevant page. It's buried somewhere in the book.

Prof. Isbell is stated to have received his carbon dating information from 'Vranich'.

The Wiki 'Vranich' footnote link takes you to one of the pages of a 500 page doctoral dissertation 'Interpreting the Meaning of Ritual Spaces: The Temple Complex of Pumapunku' by Alexei N. Vranich, University of Pennsylvania 1999 -- but not to the relevant page about the carbon dating.

Somewhere in there, Vranich obviously states that: 'carbon dating of the ... etc.' Perhaps he even gives more detailed information. But as other carbon dating references differ between 200BC and 14000BC, I'd say the jury's still out on that one?


----------



## Vertigo

I haven't seen any mention of radio carbon dating to 200-14000BC anywhere (at least not substantiated in any way). Could you direct me to such references.

I have just done a bit of searching and I can only find one bit of "evidence" for a date of 15000BC:



> By studying a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, we can determine where the sunrise, and solar events, such as the solstices, occurred in given eras of time. The Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku is precisely aligned to the solar events around 15,000 BC, corroborating the legends


 
Now I'm sorry but that is not evidence; you will probably find if you go back far enough you could have it pointing almost anywhere in the heavens. It probably also aligned perfectly 30,000 years ago but that doens't make it 30,000 years old. We don't even know if it was meant to align with anything in the first place. That's like saying the Pyramids almost match the constellation of Orion and if I go back 10,000 years it matches perfectly so the pyramids must be 10,000 years old. It is simply a circular argument that has no real concrete evidence as a starting point.

Incidentally the same place I picked that one up discusses how it is possible that a cross symbol (clearly Christian apparently!) should appear on those structures so long before the first Christians arrived there. I'm sorry but anyone who thinks the cross is only a christian symbol has already lost any credibility.


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## RJM Corbet

No, its not substantiated, there are hundreds of entries and they all have their own opinion and the only (without further real research)  'substianted' one is the Vranich one ... if you want to read through a 500 page doctorate to look for it? Assuming Vranich does quote a carbon dating expert, one still needs to know who, and what methods he used, and peer review of his work for it to be substantiated? But its out there as fact. As I said -- vintage _Wiki_

Agreed about the cross. Stupid, isn't it?

And yes, you're right, it could be made to point anywhere you want it to, if you go far back enough.


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## Vertigo

OK I have just turned up some supporting facts (by no means proof) for the later AD date. Many of the blocks were tied together by metal clamps, a not uncomon practice, however the metal used for these clamps was an extremely unusual bronze alloy:



> 95.15% copper, 2.05% arsenic, 1.70% nickel, 0.84% silicon and 0.26% iron


 
And it seems this very unusual alloy was also used elsewhere:



> The unique copper-arsenic-nickel bronze alloy is also found in metal artifacts within the region between Tiwanaku and San Pedro de Atacama during the late Middle Horizon around A.D. 600-900.


 
Which would appear to offer at least some coroboration of the much later date.


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## RJM Corbet

Vertigo said:


> OK I have just turned up some supporting facts (by no means proof) for the later AD date. Many of the blocks were tied together by metal clamps, a not uncomon practice, however the metal used for these clamps was an extremely unusual bronze alloy:
> 
> 
> 
> And it seems this very unusual alloy was also used elsewhere:
> 
> 
> 
> Which would appear to offer at least some coroboration of the much later date.



Yes, although the assay of the alloy could be due to the copper ore used. Goodnight, Vertigo.


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## J Riff

Neat stuff.
Well, looks like they built those stone fortresses for protection and nothing else.
Dang, turns out there was an Alien flying around since biblical times. 
Drat, there were giant people, too. 
I remember the reason for all this now, the coverup... and have changed my tune.
Humans still come off looking good, they built all that stuff, but the Earth is not the issue, it's whether Mars becomes public or not.
If it doesn't, fine, longs I get paid. )


----------



## william b

Stellar collisions are a very real threat though.  
If it were possible to conceal such a thing from the public, I wouldn't be surprised at the thought.  
   But I think that would require a lot of compliant astronomers in many countries.  I think people would have noticed a planet sneaking up on us, even if it approached at a weird angle to the South Pole.  
   Still, as I get older and I see how Congress and politicians work, I wonder if they are all just stooges meant to distract us from where the real power is.  Yes, I'm becoming that guy.


----------



## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> I'm not trying to make people believe anything, but if people don't even want to consider alternatives to the impossible 'model' that's up to them. I know you can't cut and drill diorite, or whatever it is, to that precision with stone age or copper tools. The Maya and Inca didn't even have the wheel. They ran around the jungle with flint knives. And we're supposed to buy the idea that they worked stone like that? Or designed a calendar as precise as that?
> 
> Why is the 'alternative' theory of 'pre-civilization' less believable than the 'model' theory that the stone-age Inca were capable of that degree of precision stone cutting and building?


 
You seem to be assuming that just because an ancient civilisation was very primitive in some respects, it was equally primitive in all respects. There's lots of evidence that this wasn't true. 

Astronomical knowledge was often very advanced (well, they had dark night skies and lots of time to lie back and look at them!). Even technologically, there were some surprising developments. For instance, the Anglo-Saxons in "Dark Age" Britain lived very simple lives, largely at subsistence level, in homes made of wood, wattle and daub, and thatch. They made very little which survives today - it nearly all rotted away. However, they did leave behind some gold jewellery - broaches, arm-bands and the like - which is simply exquisite, both in its overall conception and in the amazingly fine detail of its construction. Even given the entire range of modern technology and techniques, there is no way that I would have the skill - or the patience - to make anything like it. 

As others have observed, it is easy to understimate what could have been achieved given enormous manpower (as was used in making the Egyptian pyramids - there were whole towns full of workers built on site, and quite a lot is known about their lives through recent excavations), great patience, lots of time and nothing much else to do.


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## Anthony G Williams

Vertigo said:


> On the scientist bit. Yes the original plate tectonic theory was laughed out, however incidences of the established scientific community getting things that wrong have steadily been declining as our science develops and the possibilities for such large errors diminishes. Alfred Wegener first proposed Plate Tectonics (calling it continental drift) around 1912; 100 years ago. To compare our understanding of science then and now is almost meaningless. This is particularly so with sciences dealing with the huge timescales of geology and really needing forensic techniques that simply weren't available then. You have to remember that back then about the only evidence for Wegner's theory was how neatly many of the continents seemed to fit together. I know that's a bit of a simplification but it is also reasonably accurate.


 
Yes, it is. Wegener's key problem was that he failed to propose any mechanism to explain how Plate Tectonics might work. Without such a mechanism, there was no scientific theory which would support his proposal. Therefore, his contemporary scientists were quite right not to take his idea seriously.

It was decades later before geophysical knowledge had developed sufficiently for the existence of flows and hot plumes in the semi-molten mantle rocks to be determined. As soon as this was identified, "Continental Drift" was re-examined and found to be explained by these new discoveries. But that couldn't have happened any earlier.


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## TheEndIsNigh

Just throwing in a thing or two about the close fitting rock.

There was an television (Horizon I think) program on them a few years back.

First, I believe it said that rocks only fit closely on the 'dressed' surface.

Second, they reproduced the effect in a very short time by just bashing the surface of one rock with a piece of granite until it allowed the close fitting of another. Then polished with a similar rock to get it smooth.

I think the program pointed out that although the rock is hard, it is very brittle. Just like diamond. Hit it right, and it breaks. So the process is very similar (and probably where the skill came from) to making arrow heads from flint.

If we think about it, if there was anything special or alien about the rocks, why wouldn't they be regular in size.

Why would aliens mess about building a protection against the local peasants in the first place. Not to mention why they wouldn't use modern building techniques say concrete or stainless steel. They travel millions of light years and populate half the galaxy using only a hammer and chisel?

I'm sure when we move to the stars 'the masons' will be the driving force too.


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## RJM Corbet

J Riff said:


> Neat stuff.
> Well, looks like they built those stone fortresses for protection and nothing else.
> Dang, turns out there was an Alien flying around since biblical times.
> Drat, there were giant people, too.
> I remember the reason for all this now, the coverup... and have changed my tune.
> Humans still come off looking good, they built all that stuff, but the Earth is not the issue, it's whether Mars becomes public or not.
> If it doesn't, fine, longs I get paid. )



C'mon, Riff? Out with it ...


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## Dave

TheEndIsNigh said:


> I'm sure when we move to the stars 'the masons' will be the driving force too.


http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/spacemason/


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## RJM Corbet

This 15 minute video, which explains the Inca stone cutting, as done with ropes, is convincing and logical and involves no aliens, lasers, conspiracy, or pre-civilization. The Puma punku stonework though, more difficult to explain than what is shown here: 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG5URJx1V08&feature=player_detailpage

It's part 7 in a series of 9 videos. What's truly surprising is that so few people have watched it. Only 318 views, all over the world, compared to 50 thousand or more for many You Tube videos. So, you got it here first ...


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## Vertigo

Well I wouldn't say *far* more advanced but it was probably superior in some ways. The inca were pretty good at flat surfaces and right angles and such like as well. However it is not too surprising; they were a different culture with relatively little contact prior to the Inca conquest. Their techniques would have been different and so their results different. There is still nothing at the PUma Punku site that cannot be as easily explained as the work of those people around 500AD.

Ultimately with all of these things I'm afraid I fall back on Occam's Razor.

We appear to have three theories:

1. The established community of scientists are more or less correct (no one can ever get history perfect). There are a number of things they don't yet understand and may never do. However this theory believes that lost techniques were used to build the structures in question at (at least approximately) the proposed dates.

2. The established community of scientist have got it all wrong (or are covering it all up) and aliens helped these stone structures, using none of the modern materials that they must have had to be able to come here in the first place and leaving no advanced construction tools for anyone to find later (not even a single dropped screwdriver or diamond cutting blade).

3. The established community of scientist have got it all wrong (or are covering it all up) and there was an advanced early civilisation around 10,000 to 15,000 BC that left no trace at all of their existence except a handful of slightly mysterious monuments that provide no concrete evidence for such an early date; no advanced tools, no boats, nothing else.

When I apply that razor I'm afraid all I'm left with is option 1.

By the way re that last video; I suspect it hasn't had a large number of views because is it simply too mundane (a good thing), it is a simple practical explanation of how the work might have been achieved. Without any sensationalism (undiscovered ancient civilisation, aliens, whatever) it simply will not generated the same level of interest (which is also probably a good thing )


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## RJM Corbet

Yep. If you take time to watch the whole series of videos he explains it step by step, the ropes, etc. I'm satisfied with it. All these scientists baffled, and this guy solves it in his garage at home, and so far only 300 people know about it. The pumu punku stuff is very different though, the same explanation could not be applied?


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## Vertigo

No I suspect not; I don't think those blocks at Puma Punku could have been cut so regularly in place as the Inca ones are likely to have been. Also not all Inca masonry was built in the way desribed in the videos. They also did some construction with flat faced blocks that would likely have used similar techniques to Puma Punku.

Here are a couple of photos I took at Machu Picchu showing some examples. Although the front of the blocks have not been finished smooth, that may have been an aesthetic thing, the Incas generally seemed to leave the faces of their blocks rough although clearly, looking at the joins between these regular shaped blocks, they were fully capable of creating a flat smooth finish. There is also a third shot (actually appears to be the first the way the attachments have been done) that shows both "styles" with the top blocks appearing to have very much the same regular shaping as those at Puma Punku:

Sorry about the photo quality these are scans made from trannies back in 2001 and the technology was not quite as good back then


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## RJM Corbet

Nothing wrong with those photos. I like transparencies. Lovely shots ...


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## Vertigo

Why thank you ! I seem to recall the tranny scanner I had back then was something like 400dpi (which doesn't come to an awful lot of pixels on a 35mm negative. I now have a 4000dpi scanner and I keep meaning to go back and re-scan a lot of my old trannies but never seem to get around to it (it is a tedious task to say the least!).


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## J Riff

The answer is going to be tragically simple of course, like primitive people were.
You've seen stones cut through by water, laying on the ground in intricate patterns. There's tons like that on Mars, too.
 So they picked them up off the ground (Giants!) and stood them up into a fortress, protection from the elements, wild animals, other people and aliens. They fit perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle because that's what they looked like before they stood them up.
 Apparently the alien ship had trouble lifting stones above a certain weight, so whoever thought it up probably saved us all from extinction.
No, really.
2012 -  April 21st or earlier.


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## Ursa major

To save a lot of time, I think I ought to post what J Riff's explanation will eventually morph into (due to accumulating misunderstandings as it is passed between the more credulous visitors to the Web): "They used rock brought all the way from Mars."


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## Anthony G Williams

Ursa major said:


> To save a lot of time, I think I ought to post what J Riff's explanation will eventually morph into (due to accumulating misunderstandings as it is passed between the more credulous visitors to the Web): "They used rock brought all the way from Mars."


Naturally. The stuff is so rare here on Earth, after all...


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## Dave

Yes it was all done with "Heat Rays" and if you look carefully you can the marks left by "Red Weed"!


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## Anthony G Williams

Dave said:


> Yes it was all done with "Heat Rays" and if you look carefully you can the marks left by "Red Weed"!


 
Is that a particularly potent form of cannabis? Enquiring minds want to know...


----------



## Dave

Anthony G Williams said:


> Is that a particularly potent form of cannabis? Enquiring minds want to know...


Really Anthony, I can't believe you're asking me that. Red Weed is what makes Mars that dull red colour. It is the only Martian plant species that adapts to grow on Earth and it competes against our native Earth species.


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## Anthony G Williams

Dave said:


> Really Anthony, I can't believe you're asking me that. Red Weed is what makes Mars that dull red colour. It is the only Martian plant species that adapts to grow on Earth and it competes against our native Earth species.


 
Oh, of course...silly me. Xenobotany is not one of my strong points.


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## mosaix

TheEndIsNigh said:


> First, I believe it said that rocks only fit closely on the 'dressed' surface.



Exactly. When viewed from above only a thin edge of the front face of the rock fits well with its neighbour. The 'interior' faces have hardly been worked at all. 

BTW just spent a few days close to Hadrian's wall. Twenty four million stone blocks cut and built into a wall in just over 6 years. More volume of cut stone than in all the pyramids put together. I'm sure that if there had been any alien help then the Romans would have told us about it.

Let's not forget that human beings are an incredible race capable of incredible things.


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## RJM Corbet

mosaix said:


> Exactly. When viewed from above only a thin edge of the front face of the rock fits well with its neighbour. The 'interior' faces have hardly been worked at all.



What happens if that's not true though, Mosaix? Because it's not, you know ... at least not in the case of those Inca/Aztec blocks


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## J Riff

One thing that's never been reported, in thousands of UFO cases, is any record of aliens working stone. In no culture do we find depicted a saucer dragging bricks around to make a playhouse for the humans. 
 But back to 2012...and the people who are supposedly waiting to be heard from. The exact words they heard were  'You are off the hook - except for disclosure.'
Not one of them has any official status, or ever did. Hide in plain sight.
What seems to have happened to bollix the whole thing, is that the Govt. initially sent people up there, based on what they had around...human 'material' so to speak... rather than sending their own valuable, visible people up. 
 So now, none of them, the ones afraid to take the risk but happy to take the glory and the paycheck... are having real difficulty with the fact that they aren't in control of anything at all, and most certainly have been seen through by any superior intelligence that may be around. 
 IF anything happens re: disclosure... watch for the human Govt/Military types to try and scramble back on top, assign credit to their own people in the ranks, who did zip. 
Too dangerous, you see? We can't risk a trained astronaut, one of our own boys, on a mission that... oh-oh.
 So it's possible that Aliens have contacted 'normal' people first, as opposed to anyone visible in any Govt. program, though indeed they were in said program, minus any and all paperwork including paycheques.
 Would you be willing to claim credit for a space mission you never went on? 
Nobody wants to think the military would outright lie, but of course they did, especially after the UFO issue became the highest priority in the world, overiding the freedom of information act and anything else.
 Like G. Cooper said after they turfed his UFO vid: "How can I find out anything?
The converse is true as well,  'How can I disclose anything?" 
I'm all for the lie as far as neccessary, but then it goes much too far.

'Doesn''t exist.' when applied to such a person, should mean 'is kept secret, but is valued.'
But then...hey! This guy _really _doesn't exist! Let's see how hard we can squash him, get rid of him, bury, incriminate, discredit etc. etc. etc.
 Would having Aliens arrive change this system? One would hope so.

I'm fairly sure the average person never thinks about stuff like this when considering UFOs. They probably think there is a crack Govt. team somewhere who takes care of this stuff. Highly-paid professionals who live in active intelligence communities of decent people. 
There isn't any such thing. They were afraid to send their golden boys into danger, but now will try to stick them back up on any new pedestal that shows up.
That's the only downside to 2012, if it turns out to be anything, the depressing egomania of certain groups of people.


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## RJM Corbet

Being the very materialistic society that we are, with government and military at the head of things -- we assume that a superior alien culture will be like us, just more advanced technologically.

I don't think that's necessarily true at all. Jesus walked on water ... they say ...


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## RJM Corbet

Contact?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KoR2t-iM9k&feature=player_detailpage


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## Dave

RJM Corbet said:


> ...we assume that a superior alien culture will be like us, just more advanced technologically...


If aliens exist and they have Carbon/Water chemistries, I think it is safe to assume that intelligent life would have binocular vision, bipedal motion and be human sized. These things have biological, chemical and physical reasons for being at an optimum when human-like. So, I think Pierson's Puppeteers will be unlikely, and Star Trek's 'nose and forehead' aliens might not be so far off the mark. If they have other chemistries, Silicon/Ammonia or live in Helium clouds, well then who knows what they would be like. Would that mean that they had the same human values because they looked vaguely humanoid? Almost probably not, but still, because we have descended from Herbivores that became Carnivores we have certain pre-set hard-wired values. A Carnivore like a Kzin, or Herbivore like a Puppeteer would act very differently. Would the Aliens believe in Truth, Capitalism, Democracy and the 'American Way'? No, that is only in the movies! Would they be more advanced technologically? Well, if they have come to us they would have to be. If they have come to us and have remained undetected for as long as you claim they have, they they would have to be very much superior!


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## J Riff

I don't know how much superior, but if Saucers have been around for a long time, at what point did they begin hiding from people, and why? Maybe they just like hanging in clouds all day, it's nice and fresh in there.
 Insect lifeforms with warm blood... that's a lot of evolution, as if the Silurian era never ended, and they extended their natural flight abilities to an interplanetary level. 
 We're told that spider webs are stronger than steel. Could one make a spaceship out of it? With 8 arms an octopus can do 3 things at once. Never hire a human typist again!


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## Dave

J Riff said:


> Insect lifeforms with warm blood... that's a lot of evolution, as if the Silurian era never ended, and they extended their natural flight abilities to an interplanetary level.


Exoskeletons... so inefficient and yesterday! All that shedding of skins!

But, I could believe your idea of an ancient terrestrial species leaving Earth far more readily than an extra-terrestrial one. I think there is a SF story there to be written. 

Explains why they hide from us too. We have been at War with insects longer than we have with ourselves. They probably began hiding around the time of the invention of DDT.


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## Ursa major

Dave said:


> But, I could believe your idea of an ancient terrestrial species leaving Earth far more readily than an extra-terrestrial one. I think there is a SF story there to be written.


This was the premise of _The Event_, as revealed in what will probably prove to be the last episode to be made.


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## RJM Corbet

Sometimes I see a tiny little snail or something, going about its own business and concerns, which are just as important to it as my own are to me.

What right has man to assume that he has all the knowledge and all the answers?


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> What right has man to assume that he has all the knowledge and all the answers?


Whoever suggested that we have?

I visualise knowledge about life, the universe and all that as being like a vast jigsaw puzzle, which mankind is slowly piecing together. We have a lot of the outer frame in place (with some major reservations to do with the relationships between the various forces and subatomic particles) and the simpler parts of the puzzle have been fitted together quite thoroughly. We still have a long way to go before the puzzle is complete, however, and we may never get there - our civilisation may collapse first.

The important point is that we have gradually developed a reasonable understanding of the overall nature of the puzzle, so we can see what is likely to fit and what is not. We know what we don't know, so to speak. Which means that although we don't know everything (not by a long way) we know enough to make informed judgments about what might feasibly exist and what might not.


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## RJM Corbet

Yes but all our science ends where our skin does. It's all about the body.

We can't think about 'life' as what animates the form, and not as a product of the form. To our scientific western culture, thought is a product of the the brain's activity. How conceited we little humans must appear to be, in our scientific knowledge.

Are vast, inter-dimensional beings going to cross space in metal tin cans just because that's the only way we can conceive of doing it?

Are beings to whom time/space is no more than a door is to us, going to be anything we can even begin to imagine? We perceive with our five natural senses. Other forms of life may be invisible to our natural senses, or choose to make themselves visible. They might not be limited by time/space at all.


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> Yes but all our science ends where our skin does. It's all about the body.


 
Eh? Where did you get that notion from? Science is simply a methodology - it's a way of making sense of the world through observation, collecting and testing evidence, and devising theories to account for the observations. It can be applied to any phenomena, and is well proven as not just the best, but the only effective, way of making sense of life, the universe and all that.



> We can't think about 'life' as what animates the form, and not as a product of the form. To our world, the brain produces thought. How conceited we little humans really are ...


 
The question of consciousness is one of the most difficult areas to understand. But there is a steadily growing body of evidence that links aspects of consciousness with types of brain function. By conducting scans of brain activity while asking people to concentrate on particular things, researchers are already beginning to be able to identify what kind of thoughts are associated with different kinds of brain activity. 

I am not aware of any evidence for thought taking place in the absence of a brain...what do you think the brain has developed _for_?


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## RJM Corbet

Sorry Anthony, I edited and added to my post while you were writing yours. It's a bad habit I have to get out of ... 

EDIT: Doing it again! What does a cat see through those eyes? Does it see what we see? Does it see into other dimensions? Does a cat see me as pure energy, or as a bundle of light fibers? I do not know. But I certainly do not assume that because I can't see or measure something ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> What does a cat see through those eyes? Does it see what we see? Does it see into other dimensions? Does a cat see me as pure energy, or as a bundle of light fibers? I do not know. But I certainly do not assume that because I can't see or measure something ...


 
Vision is pretty well understood. The eyes of animals differ from human ones (and from each other) in various ways, resulting in rather different images. While all see the same visible light that we do (for logical evolutionary reasons, since there's more of such light around than other wavelengths) some see a slightly different spectrum (into the ultra-violet or infra-red, for instance). Some have no colour receptors so only see monochrome. Some can see in much dimmer light. Some (predatory birds, for instance) have a central magnified part for spotting prey at long range.

In principle I don't think it would be difficult to devise a viewer which provides the same image as any particular animal's eyes. Probably the only thing preventing it is the lack of any reason to incur the R&D cost.

There are plenty of real mysteries around without trying to make a mystery out of that which is relatively straightforward!


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## Dave

Anthony G Williams said:


> I am not aware of any evidence for thought taking place in the absence of a brain...what do you think the brain has developed _for_?


No, but a lot of 50's & 60's SF seemed to envisage that we would eventually evolve in to disembodied brains, or brains in jars, or 'beings of pure energy.' I never got that 'beings of pure energy' idea either. Even _Stargate_ had people 'ascending'. It has a lot to do with if we have 'Soul' and what in actual fact a soul is. Once it was thought that all living things were special; organic rather than inorganic. Now we know of all sorts of inorganic processes that mimic organic ones. It is surely a religious and philosophical argument rather than a scientific one.

But, transferring oneself; one's being, into an AI (like backing-up in the _Culture_) now that I can accept as being perfectly possible one day.


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## J Riff

A June Bug can fly into a brick wall at 50 MPH and get up and fly away. There's a whole other vibratory state... or something... going on, plus, the development of armor that makes chitin or steel look like cardboard. 
 The Philadelphia experiment may have been an attempt to duplicate something like the vibrational state that would allow these creatures to travel between planets in mere hours. A way of, not actually teleporting, but shortening distance so that, that... but it apparently doesn't work for human beings. They go gibbering mad, and their electomagnetic field is scrambled badly.
 Superior means superior, it means we virtually can't quite grasp it, or shouldn't yet. How could we ever possibly understand an insect lifeform that had a miilion years more evolution than us?
 There's no way to jump to such an exalted state, or even a way to build machines that could duplicate it.


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## Anthony G Williams

Dave said:


> But, transferring oneself; one's being, into an AI (like backing-up in the _Culture_) now that I can accept as being perfectly possible one day.


I have serious doubts about that. This is what I wrote in this article: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/OnImmortality.htm

_More recently, futurologists and SF authors have explored the possibility of a different form of virtual survival – by having one's personality uploaded into a computer. This would be no simple matter as the human brain is vastly more complex than any computer yet devised or on the horizon, but let's assume that it becomes possible to create such a computer and to find a way of exactly duplicating all of the neural connections and electrochemical conditions which make up an individual's personality. What would result? Only a copy of ourselves, a kind of twin sibling, whose personality would immediately begin to diverge from our own. For ourselves to be "uploaded" would require the identification of a unique and fundamental aspect of our mind which was our true self, separate from the brain and capable of being transferred from one brain to another but not capable of being copied (otherwise it wouldn't be unique). In other words, a "soul". There is no evidence that this exists, and this notion puts such virtual immortality into the same camp as religious afterlife._


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## Anthony G Williams

J Riff said:


> A June Bug can fly into a brick wall at 50 MPH and get up and fly away. There's a whole other vibratory state... or something... going on, plus, the development of armor that makes chitin or steel look like cardboard.


 
It's a physical scale effect: the bigger living beings become, the heavier they are relative to their size. That's why elephants make poor high-jumpers. The smaller insects become, the better is their power-to-weight ratio and the higher/further they can jump relative to their size. That also means that the exoskeletons of small insects can be amazingly tough. A simple concept, no magic required.



> Superior means superior, it means we virtually can't quite grasp it, or shouldn't yet. How could we ever possibly understand an insect lifeform that had a miilion years more evolution than us?


 
I have news for you - every living thing on this planet, including ourselves, is the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.


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## RJM Corbet

It's strange then that the Egyptians, who created buildings that we cannot duplicate today, were so interested in the 'soul' and 'out of body' existence. But there's no empirical proof ...


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## J Riff

So, add a few hundred million more, on a low-gravity planet with heavy radiation. Can handle any amount of radiation, eats it up. Nature scoffs at earth science. (Hey, I like that line!)
 We can't duplicate the flight ability of insects on our own young planet, let alone the abilities of creatures millions or billions of years beyond us in age, who do, in actual fact, exist.
 The creatures that lived on Mars make Earth critters look like midgets. Imagine what is out there in the older neighborhoods of space, where they grow 'em big.
I swear, even hard SF writers aren't ready for what could show up in our Solar System at any moment, let alone what's already here. 
Nature-scoffs-at-Earth-science! So do various aliens, I reckon.
 The disclosure project, which I didn't track closely until recently, states they have now categorized over 50 alien 'types'. They state they have evidence of technology duplicating the antigrav system, apparently around since Tesla or earlier, but... This stuff I am not particularly aware of, how true it is, but an exhorbitant claim it is. 
Plenty aliens now huh? Are they counting the ones on Mars? 
Bases on the moon? Don't think I've been there, so no comment.
HAs the antigrav tech been removed from our ken, and they are just hot air on that one? Shame. Bloody military types, trust them to bollix it if possible.


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> It's strange then that the Egyptians, who created buildings that we cannot duplicate today, were so interested in the 'soul' and 'out of body' existence. But there's no empirical proof ...


Nonsense. We could easily duplicate the Egyptian buildings if we put our minds to it - there's simply been no need to produce the machinery which we would use to move such large stone blocks, since we use other ways of building these days. Experimental archaeologists have demonstrated how the pyramids could be built using the technology available at the time (what you principally need is a vast quantity of manpower at your disposal, with no concerns about Health & Safety) and excavations in the ruins of the towns specifically built just for the builders clearly reveal how they lived and did their work. The only mystery is in the minds of those who are desperate to believe that there must be some exotic explanation, rather than the simple (and true) one of a hell of a lot of blood, sweat and tears over a long period.

It is a characteristic of humanity throughout the ages to emotionally reject the idea of death being the end of existence - just too nasty to contemplate - leading to a vast range of mythologies and religions concerning the afterlife. Obviously, to experience such an afterlife the essential part of you must not die, therefore the concept of the "soul" (or similar) was invented. It's a great notion for comforting people which accounts for its everlasting popularity, but "opium for the masses" is all that it is.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> ... It is a characteristic of humanity throughout the ages to emotionally reject the idea of death being the end of existence - just too nasty to contemplate - leading to a vast range of mythologies and religions concerning the afterlife. Obviously, to experience such an afterlife the essential part of you must not die, therefore the concept of the "soul" (or similar) was invented. It's a great notion for comforting people which accounts for its everlasting popularity, but "opium for the masses" is all that it is.



There are kings and emperors and great teachers who would dispute that -- but all the same ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> There are kings and emperors and great teachers who would dispute that -- but all the same ...


Oh sure, but Occam's razor indicates that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.

Just think on this: there have been thousands of different religions and sects in recorded history, spread around the world. They all have one thing in common - the followers of each one firmly believed that they were right, and that all the others were wrong. In fact, so wrong that they have eagerly killed those of a different faith (and in some cases still do so). 

Yet logically only one (at most) of these can be right - the rest have to be wrong. Given that there is no evidence to indicate which might be right and which wrong, the only rational conclusion is that they're *all* wrong.


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## HareBrain

Anthony G Williams said:


> Yet logically only one (at most) of these can be right - the rest have to be wrong. Given that there is no evidence to indicate which might be right and which wrong, the only rational conclusion is that they're *all* wrong.


 
Logically only one (at most) can be _wholly_ right - the rest have to be _at least partially_ wrong. But if it's true that there's no evidence to indicate which might be right and which wrong, there are other rational conclusions one can draw. One of these is that you can follow which of them you like, but with the qualifier that you have no right to assert the superiority of your belief over that of anyone else (including aetheists).

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be a conclusion many arrive at.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> Oh sure, but Occam's razor indicates that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.



Do you recall the quantum two-slit experiment?
Cut one slot in a plate and send an electron through it, it makes a mark on a screen?
Cut two slots in the plate and the same electron passes through both of them. (Simplified) But anyway: the same electron is in two places at once.
Strange, isn't it?
Something can be in two different places?

And there's more, because that electron isn't actually a 'thing' at all. It's a _lepton_ -- pure energy -- as are the quarks that make up nucleons. Ok, quarks have mass, via Higgs, etc. But they're still essentially pure energy. Hiroshima made the point.
All that energy makes up all the matter that 'we' can measure, which is 4% of the visible and invisible universe.

The other 96% is dark matter and dark energy. 'We' can't perceive it or measure it in any way -- it just has to be there to account for gravity, according to 'the model'.

Or perhaps you prefer 'brane' theory -- which places us within a four dimensional 'membrane' within -- what? Infinite other dimensions? 

It still doesn't tell us very much ...


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## Dave

Just because we don't understand something fully, doesn't mean that the simplest solution that fits all the facts won't be the answer. 

Someone mentioned earlier about the need to be "open" to new ideas. You are correct that is important. The intricate and increasingly complex models required to explain planetary motion come to mind, necessary simply because no one was open to the much more simple idea of a heliocentric model. 

However, a few of you here seem to be "open" to any and every idea going, however wacky or complicated, just because you cannot be open to the fact that there is in fact no conspiracy.


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## RJM Corbet

Dave said:


> Just because we don't understand something fully, doesn't mean that the simplest solution that fits all the facts won't be the answer ... However, a few of you here seem to be "open" to any and every idea going, however wacky or complicated, just because you cannot be open to the fact that there is in fact no conspiracy.



If you mean a single global conspiracy, the plain truth is I just don't know. But probably not.

There are obviously thousands of minor conspiracies going on everywhere all the time.


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## Anthony G Williams

HareBrain said:


> Logically only one (at most) can be _wholly_ right - the rest have to be _at least partially_ wrong.


 
Fair point.



> But if it's true that there's no evidence to indicate which might be right and which wrong, there are other rational conclusions one can draw. One of these is that you can follow which of them you like, but with the qualifier that you have no right to assert the superiority of your belief over that of anyone else (including aetheists).


 
It is a common argument of the religious that atheism is a belief which is in the same category as religious belief, and is therefore no different. However, my position is that I have _no_ religious or superstitious beliefs. As far as I'm concerned, atheism is a _lack_ of belief. I believe only in those things for which there is good and sufficient evidence, which excludes all religions. 

I therefore disagree with the notion that there is anything "rational" about religious belief. In my judgment, firmly believing in something for which there is no objective evidence is fundamentally irrational.


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> All that energy makes up all the matter that 'we' can measure, which is 4% of the visible and invisible universe.
> 
> The other 96% is dark matter and dark energy. 'We' can't perceive it or measure it in any way -- it just has to be there to account for gravity, according to 'the model'.
> 
> Or perhaps you prefer 'brane' theory -- which places us within a four dimensional 'membrane' within -- what? Infinite other dimensions?
> 
> It still doesn't tell us very much ...


 
Very little, in my opinion. The problem with the current state of cosmology is that there are too many really important, basic pieces of information which are still missing: the nature of dark matter and dark energy being the most glaring examples. This has permitted a vast range of exotic theories to be developed on frankly very shaky evidential foundations. I hope that CERN manages to produce some of the answers as the LHC gets up to speed.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> ... I hope that CERN manages to produce some of the answers as the LHC gets up to speed.



Ditto that


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## HareBrain

Anthony G Williams said:


> It is a common argument of the religious that atheism is a belief which is in the same category as religious belief, and is therefore no different. However, my position is that I have _no_ religious or superstitious beliefs. As far as I'm concerned, atheism is a _lack_ of belief. I believe only in those things for which there is good and sufficient evidence, which excludes all religions.
> 
> I therefore disagree with the notion that there is anything "rational" about religious belief. In my judgment, firmly believing in something for which there is no objective evidence is fundamentally irrational.


 
I didn't mean it was rational to follow a religion; I tried to say (but perhaps worded it imperfectly) that where there is a lack of evidence, it is rational to conclude that one can follow any religion as long as one does not assert that it has any more factual or objective basis than any other (including none).

To which most people would probably say "huh?". But if a spiritual or religious belief were shown to have, say, psychological benefits, to some people, it would be rational for those people to follow it as long as they didn't ascribe to it any objective reality (which would make it irrational).


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## Anthony G Williams

HareBrain said:


> But if a spiritual or religious belief were shown to have, say, psychological benefits, to some people, it would be rational for those people to follow it as long as they didn't ascribe to it any objective reality (which would make it irrational).


 
That's true in principle, but if people don't believe it's real, will they get any benefits from it? Having said that, I have to acknowledge that many CofE churches seem to have become "old people's social clubs", so maybe bring benefits even if no-one (including the vicar) believes it's real - they all just pretend, as the price of admission.

The most logical reason for subscribing to a religion I know of is 
Pascal's Wager: the argument that states that you should believe in God even if there's a strong chance that he might not be real, because the penalty for not believing, namely going to hell, is so undesirable that it is more prudent to take our chances with belief. 

The problem with this is, of course, that you could go to hell anyway for having chosen the wrong religion to follow...the alternative of following all religions "just in case", apart from being exhausting, seems unlikely to impress an hypothetical god!


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## RJM Corbet

There are drug addicts, alcoholics, people with physical illnesses, 'cured' by religion. It works for them -- the power of the _mind_.

There is much we don't understand.

On the subject of mass conspiracies: those 'terrorist weapons of mass destruction' that were used as an excuse to occupy (Bush's words, not mine) a sovereign nation, depose the -- admittedly unpleasant -- government, and install one more sympathetic to western (read: oil) interests?


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> There are drug addicts, alcoholics, people with physical illnesses, 'cured' by religion. It works for them -- the power of the _mind_.
> 
> There is much we don't understand.


 
True - but we understand a lot more than you appear to think. Yes, the mind can be deluded into believing in religion (or fairies, or crystal healing, or even - in extreme cases - the existence of giant insects controlling mankind). And the state of our minds has a big influence on our happiness, our determination to kick bad habits like alcoholism, or even, to some degree, our health (although it will make no difference to something serious, like heart trouble or cancer). But as George Bernard Shaw put it: 

_"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."_



> On the subject of mass conspiracies: those 'terrorist weapons of mass destruction' that were used as an excuse to occupy (Bush's words, not mine) a sovereign nation, depose the -- admittedly unpleasant -- government, and install one more sympathetic to western (read: oil) interests?


 
Yes, that could certainly be described as a conspiracy among Bush and his close political associates, aided by Blair, to twist and extrapolate all available evidence to find an excuse to invade Iraq, for which no solid case existed. 

I wouldn't call it a "mass conspiracy" though - and it wasn't a very clever one either, because it was pretty obvious what they were doing even at the time, as many observers (including me) pointed out.

Such shenanigans go on all the time, among politicians and trade union leaders especially, to try to manipulate public opinion in their favour. It could also be argued that the entire marketing and advertising industry is engaged in the same sort of business. But where does "putting the best argument to influence public opinion" (legitimate) end and "conspiracy" (illegimate) begin?

In any case, this kind of activity is a long way from the grand long-term international conspiracies favoured by those who are so enthusiastic about seeing conspiracies everywhere that they find it very hard to accept the simple, boring, truth that when things go wrong, 99% of the time it will be as a result of a ****-up rather than a conspiracy.


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## RJM Corbet

Well actually, if we're throwing Occam's about: it's simpler to believe in fairies and little green men than to believe that the global oil/military powers aren't capable of trying the pull the wool over anyone's eyes


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> Well actually, if we're throwing Occam's about: it's simpler to believe in fairies and little green men than to believe that the global oil/military powers aren't capable of trying the pull the wool over anyone's eyes


 
Well, of course big companies and countries will try to influence public opinion by putting the best possible spin on their case (lawyers do that in court all the time). But that isn't a "conspiracy", which implies (to me at any rate) a deliberate, long-term and (above all) secret attempt by a large organisation to promote and sustain a major lie.

Come to think of it, if it weren't for the "secret" bit, the major churches could be regarded as conspiracies...


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## RJM Corbet

Oh, certainly churches too. There's a vast amount of worldly cash involved ...


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## HareBrain

Anthony G Williams said:


> That's true in principle, but if people don't believe it's real, will they get any benefits from it?


 
That's the big question. I was thinking not so much in terms of social clubs or even healing drug addicts, but of satisfying a need that I believe to be inherent in a lot of people. It might be that by practitioners understanding "religion" to be a purely subjective practice, it could provide richness to such people's lives without coming into conflict with objective rationality (which it inevitably does at present because they try to occupy the same space). I suppose I see it like Jungian active imagination. But separating religion into a subjective category, without seeming to rob it of value, is a huge step from where we are at the moment.



Anthony G Williams said:


> _"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."_


 
Isn't happiness what we all want? GBS just sounds resentful of the happiness others have found that he can't join in with. Like me moaning about people enjoying Twilight.

BTW, I would apologise for taking this thread off-topic, but anyone reading up to this point will probably think "what topic?"


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## Starbeast

RJM Corbet said:


> On the subject of mass conspiracies: those 'terrorist weapons of mass destruction' that were used as an excuse to occupy (Bush's words, not mine) a sovereign nation, depose the -- admittedly unpleasant -- government, and install one more sympathetic to western (read: oil) interests?


 
People thought I was crazy when said it was a bunch horse plop at the very beginning. The U.S. government said the Twin Towers incident was caused by Saddam H. who had weapons of mass destruction. FINALLY people are beginning to see the real truth about the whole thing.


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## Anthony G Williams

HareBrain said:


> Isn't happiness what we all want? GBS just sounds resentful of the happiness others have found that he can't join in with.


 
I'm not so sure about happiness. If that was our sole aim, then we'd all be on Prozac, alcohol or something else (I recall Niven's SF stories concerning people addicted to having a wire implanted in their brains to provide direct stimulation of their pleasure centres - very few had the willpower to turn it off). 

I suspect that true happiness has to be achieved _within_ reality, rather than by stepping outside it, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. From my perspective, gaining happiness from religion is not much different from booze or drugs, except that it does you less physical harm - unless you're recruited as a suicide bomber, of course.


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## RJM Corbet

You left out the best one, though, SB:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5skcF6Kljtw&feature=player_detailpage


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## Anthony G Williams

Starbeast said:


> People thought I was crazy when said it was a bunch horse plop at the very beginning. The U.S. government said the Twin Towers incident was caused by Saddam H. who had weapons of mass destruction. FINALLY people are beginning to see the real truth about the whole thing.



 ??? The truth, or something close to it, was pretty evident to a lot of us at the time.

I admit that I did assume that Saddam had WMDs - he'd certainly had them in the past (in the form of poison gas), and used them against Iran and his own people. However, I didn't believe that he posed any serious threat - too tied down by US+coalition air power which would stomp on him if he stepped out of line. And in any case the UN investigators hadn't finished looking for the WMDs. The notion that Saddam had been responsible in some way for 9/11 was self-evidently nonsense; he was an atheist and he and Al Q'aeda were enemies. 

What with all that, plus the entirely predictable consequences of an Iraq invasion in terms of taking the eye off the ball in Afghanistan and boosting recruitment to Muslim extremist groups, I was totally opposed to the Iraq invasion long before it was launched. But I gather that Bush+Co's relentless snow job fooled a lot of Americans.


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## RJM Corbet

Well, as this thread is going all over the place anyway, here's a list of current nuclear arsenals (2010):

_Dr Pavel Podvig
Center for International Security and Co-operation, Stanford University
_
*Russia:  5200 (deployed) 14 000 (total)
USA:     4200 (deployed) 10 700 (total)   
France:  350
China:    240
UK:        200
India:     110
Israel:    60 - 80
Pakistan:40-60
North Korea: material for some
*
So we shouldn't forget about them just yet?
The _total_ figures for Russia and the US include weapons scheduled to be dismantled but still operational, in storage.


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## HareBrain

Anthony G Williams said:


> I suspect that true happiness has to be achieved _within_ reality, rather than by stepping outside it, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.


 
I think that's true. But I would say "within reality as you genuinely understand it to be".

Actually, I would suggest that one can derive happiness from an activity if one believes it to be meaningful.

If I take some kind of drug and experience a stream of random hallucinations, it's unlikely I'd derive any genuine happiness from it. But if I understand that those hallucinations aren't random, but derive from my subconscious mind and have some (albeit hidden) meaning to me personally, then this "increase in meaning" might result in happiness. I don't think it necessarily depends on shared or objective reality.

Similarly, I think the happiness experienced by a believer within a religious context is just as genuine as that experienced by a non-believer in a secular context, even though the non-believer would gain no happiness from the same activity. To the believer, reality has not been stepped outside of.


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## RJM Corbet

HareBrain said:


> I think that's true. But I would say "within reality as you genuinely understand it to be".
> 
> Actually, I would suggest that one can derive happiness from an activity if one believes it to be meaningful.
> 
> If I take some kind of drug and experience a stream of random hallucinations, it's unlikely I'd derive any genuine happiness from it. But if I understand that those hallucinations aren't random, but derive from my subconscious mind and have some (albeit hidden) meaning to me personally, then this "increase in meaning" might result in happiness. I don't think it necessarily depends on shared or objective reality.
> 
> Similarly, I think the happiness experienced by a believer within a religious context is just as genuine as that experienced by a non-believer in a secular context, even though the non-believer would gain no happiness from the same activity. To the believer, reality has not been stepped outside of.



Drugs are fine, it's when the money runs out. Then you have to steal for your addiction. People wouldn't take them if they didn't feel good. When you're used to feeling like that, the everyday world doesn't cut it for you anymore. In fact it's worse than that -- there's a rebound effect. The drug doesn't affect the brain directly, it stimulates brain chemistry, and yoga and religious states can have the same effect, but for free. Drugs are a lot easier.

But somewhere outside and above and beyond all that stuff -- beyond brain chemistry and states of happiness and misery ...


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## Anthony G Williams

HareBrain said:


> I think the happiness experienced by a believer within a religious context is just as genuine as that experienced by a non-believer in a secular context, even though the non-believer would gain no happiness from the same activity. To the believer, reality has not been stepped outside of.


 
Yes, I'm sure that's right. Which may help explain why the attitude of the religious and non-religious towards each other tends to be one of mutual incomprehension. 

I can see the appeal of religion; it must be great if you can convince yourself that there is some supernatural being looking after your interests even after death, particularly if you're in the company of similar believers. But I literally cannot imagine myself surrendering my critical faculties, my independence of thought, to the degree required to accept what is, from my viewpoint, a preposterous and rather infantile notion.


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## HareBrain

Anthony G Williams said:


> I can see the appeal of religion; it must be great if you can convince yourself that there is some supernatural being looking after your interests even after death, particularly if you're in the company of similar believers.


 
I don't think that's all there is to religion (in its widest sense), though. I don't even think it's the main part of it. I think of myself as being of a religious cast of mind (though there is no actual religion that appeals to me) but I don't believe we survive death. This probably sounds horribly vague and wishy-washy, but there is some part of me that seeks expression, and can only do so via the concept of an underlying spiritual dimension and purpose to existence, even if that purpose is so vast that we as individuals are effectively no more than atoms.

Most religions are a mix of esoteric and exoteric, i.e. the mystical and the socio-political. The exoteric stuff is all about interpretation, power and control, but I think the esoteric elements at the heart of all religions have their basis in that previously mentioned sense of the world as having an underlying meaning other than the material. Maybe that's nothing more than a genetic quirk, but even if so, it doesn't make it less part of reality to those who experience it.

So, yes, mutual incomprehension is probably inevitable. But hopefully we'll eventually evolve out of the mutual intolerance that comes from conflicting worldviews mistakenly fighting over the same space.


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## Starbeast

RJM Corbet said:


> Well, as this thread is going all over the place.


 
That's true, we've got to hurry up and speak our minds before the solar flares in 2012 knock out our communication with each other.


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## Dave

RJM Corbet said:


> On the subject of mass conspiracies: those 'terrorist weapons of mass destruction' that were used as an excuse to occupy (Bush's words, not mine) a sovereign nation, depose the -- admittedly unpleasant -- government, and install one more sympathetic to western (read: oil) interests?


That wasn't a conspiracy, that was just politics:


> You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
> Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)


 I believed Tony Blair and his reasons why he couldn't give any evidence (because it would harm the intelligence officers who had found it) but to trust him that it was perfectly true. Unfortunately, beneath his smile and his apparent good nature he also lied. But in the UK we never believed Sadam attacked the twin towers. That was always attributed to the Saudi national, Osama Bin Laden. 

What I meant instead, for I think it was I that spun this thread off tangent, was this conspiracy to keep quiet about space aliens living on Mars, building cities in ancient Earth, buzzing Buzz Aldrin, making Crop Circles, and bringing about the end of us all sometime next year. If any of that were true, why are senior politicians even bothered about student fees, pensions, Olympic Games tickets, the fate of Greece, the Euro, or fat cat bankers? 

They should instead just give us all free banking shares, extra paid Bank Holidays, and let all the prisoners out of jail early. 

Hold on a minute...


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## J Riff

The idea that anything like this could happen, and fit into anyones idea of reality, is a basic error. 
It's not good. It is, in fact, extremely horrible and disturbing. 

Imagine what's been going on in even the last few years while people 'wait for proof.' 
 So there's this protoplasmic lifeform, a mere side issue, that... woop, maybe we shouldn't have brought that to the Earth. It's WHAT? It did what? How? How can we stop that? What...strings of serial killings in it's vicinity? We better tell the public!
Meanwhile, human-eating insects, that... aieeee!
OK? It starts there and gets worse, to the point where full disclosure will not be possible, it will have to be sanitized heavily, and too many questions appear that will not allow that to work either.
 BTW... re: crop circles. Has anyone thought that maybe these creatures are mute? Blind? Are trying and can't get through? If this is true, we must look like complete and utter morons, who can't be contacted, even if the aliens try their best! 

 Someone like me should be lined up and prepared for this, at the end, to yak away. 
 Nope. It's a free-for-all, and if you think guys like Aldrin or Cooper are annoyed, you ain't seen nothing.
 Police and military are being used to repress the whole thing, though they probably don't even know why or what they are doing. 
That's whos hands the whole thing will end up in, the wrong people, again!

 Why? People wait to be told what to do, and things happen at lightning speed while we all sit and say: Gee, I can't wait for the Govt. to tell me about the most important event in human history.
 They can't deal with it, other than in a military way, a primitive way.
The military/police/media state - SUCKS, and should no longer be allowed to sit on this, no matter how hideous.
 I agreed, long ago, that it was indeed too much to reveal, but no, it isn't going to work out.
 Ya gotta think a little harder about this... it's not good in any way. 
If there's even one race here, and things are happening, and you don't know about it - then there is big, big trouble already, and some kind of announcement from the largely imaginary Govt. that we were an insect food planet or whatever, is not going to make much nevermind.


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## RJM Corbet

HareBrain said:


> I don't think that's all there is to religion (in its widest sense), though ... Most religions are a mix of esoteric and exoteric, i.e. the mystical and the socio-political. The exoteric stuff is all about interpretation, power and control, but I think the esoteric elements at the heart of all religions have their basis in that previously mentioned sense of the world as having an underlying meaning other than the material. Maybe that's nothing more than a genetic quirk, but even if so, it doesn't make it less part of reality to those who experience it.



Taoism (studied by Carl Jung) is a mystical science of personal alchemy, which I think is at the heart of most religions. Newton, who is 2nd on Wiki's list of most influential people in history, below Mohammed and above Jesus and then Confucius, was deeply into alchemy.

The core teachings of the 'masters' are for a select few, who are truly able to devote their lives to seeking this 'enlightenment'.

The essence of their teachings then becomes diluted by lesser teachers as a moral code for families and society in general, fracturing into sects, which then unify into religions. Confucius taught a moral code. Most religions do. Man has eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, etc. Man has a 'conscience' -- an inbuilt instinct 'knowledge' of right and wrong -- that goes beyond social behavior? Or not?

An animal cannot 'sin' ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> Taoism (studied by Carl Jung) is a mystical science of personal alchemy, which I think is at the heart of most religions. Newton, who is 2nd on Wiki's list of most influential people in history, below Mohammed and above Jesus and then Confucius, was deeply into alchemy.


 
That's silly - all you have to do is look at the number of Christians in the world to realise that Jesus is more influential than anyone else - and I say that as someone who isn't religious.



> The core teachings of the 'masters' are for a select few, who are truly able to devote their lives to seeking this 'enlightenment'.


 
The only genuinely effective religious/philosophical discipline I'm aware of is meditation, as typically practiced by Buddhists. This has a measurable and it seems beneficial effect on the practitioner's state of mind. However, I don't have the patience or self-discipline for that.



> The essence of their teachings then becomes diluted by lesser teachers as a moral code for families and society in general, fracturing into sects, which then unify into religions. Confucius taught a moral code. Most religions do. Man has eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, etc. Man has a 'conscience' -- an inbuilt instinct 'knowledge' of right and wrong -- that goes beyond social behavior? Or not?


 
Our species has spent 95% of its c.200,000 year existence living in small stone-age groups of hunter-gatherers, during which time our instincts were programmed (the last 10,000 years of civilisation has been something of an aberration). There are still a few remnants of such groups left in the most remote areas of tropical rainforest. People in such groups co-operated to hunt and gather food, shared what they gathered, helped each other when they needed it, and even kept alive members of the group who had been crippled and were no longer useful. In other words, their behaviour met the basic standards we would apply today to assess moral behaviour.

Many intelligent social animals behave in similar ways. Chimpanzees obviously, baboons, wolves, hyenas and many more. They are all killers, but they rarely kill each other - they cooperate and work together. At least some of them even have behavioural rules to prevent the loser being killed if there is a fight (wolves, I believe, expose their throats to show submission, and the victor then leaves them alone).

The reason, in the case of both humans and animals, is simple: the survival chance of each member of the group is enhanced by being a part of a functioning, efficient group, rather than by acting alone. So natural selection works to weed out those who don't cooperate - we have basically been bred to cooperate for millennia.

The onset of civilisation c.10,000 years ago brought a raft of new social problems. People gathered in such large urban groups that it was no longer possible for everyone to know each other - it became possible for individuals to cheat the system without being caught. It also led to complex leadership structures with powerful rulers, and to battles over who became ruler, and which groups controlled which resources. So laws were established to govern human behaviour. These were generally based on logic (many of them have survived).

So where does religion come into this? I have studied the Bible (in the dim and distant past) and found it an interesting document for what it reveals about the way people thought in the past. It is clearly a mixture of folk tales, mythology, instruction and some genuine history all mixed together, written by many hands over a long period of time. Separating which elements are mythological and which are historic is where believers and non-believers will always disagree. 

To my mind, the sequence of development of religion (which IMO is likely to apply to any intelligent race which is remotely like humanity) goes like this: 

1. Intelligent beings become self-aware, start to wonder where they come from. 

2. In the absence of any knowledge, they make up stories about where they came from in order to try to explain the existence of life, the universe and all that (you see this in almost *all *cultures - the stories are, of course, all different). 

3. The best storytellers obtain status and influence in their societies because people like to listen to them, and find their 'explanations' comforting - it gives them a place (usually a central place) in the world. 

4. The storytellers start to build up a whole structure of belief, laws etc which helps to establish them as the leaders - the 'priest' class is born. 

5. The stories and laws are written down, and obtain the status of 'holy books' which must be believed and obeyed - this happens in many religions (but the books are, of course, different). 

6. Successors to the original storytellers - the prophets - start to add more and more laws onto the structure in order to increase their power (a simple example: the Bible says nothing about priests being celibate, or that a Pope will be infallible – or even that we need a Pope at all). 

Secular rulers in ancient civilisations found religion to be a useful control mechanism, so usually co-opted religious leaders as a part of the leadership structure.

In most of today's world, selfish and anti-social tendencies such as murder, violence, and theft are controlled by secular laws and punished by secular authorities, except in the few fundamentalist Islamic states under Sharia law. 

Can you show *any* evidence that religion plays a significant part in controlling anti-social behaviour in modern western societies? I can't see any; I'm not aware of any evidence that behaviour in the most overtly religious western country - the USA - is any better than in a mostly secular one like the UK (if anything, the reverse seems to be true). 

People obey laws partly because the natural instinct of most people is still to cooperate rather than cheat; and secondly from fear of the consequences if they get caught. Where people can get away with behaving badly in a corrupt state, it's because secular law and order have broken down, not because of a lack of religion.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony G Williams said:


> That's silly - all you have to do is look at the number of Christians in the world to realise that Jesus is more influential than anyone else - and I say that as someone who isn't religious.



No, _that's_ silly. The world consists of more than America, Britain and Europe. If you're so sure it's 'silly' go make a new citation on Wikipaedia then.

You will notice that I put after a question mark after: "Man has an inbuilt social conscience, etc." It is the teachers, like Confucius, who 'civilized' society with purely 'moral' observations. So it's not just don't kill, because you may get caught and hanged-drawn-and-quartered -- but don't kill because it causes suffering to other individuals, not just to society in general?


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## HareBrain

Anthony G Williams said:


> 1. Intelligent beings become self-aware, start to wonder where they come from.
> 
> 2. In the absence of any knowledge, they make up stories about where they came from in order to try to explain the existence of life, the universe and all that (you see this in almost *all *cultures - the stories are, of course, all different).
> 
> 3. The best storytellers obtain status and influence in their societies because people like to listen to them, and find their 'explanations' comforting - it gives them a place (usually a central place) in the world.
> 
> 4. The storytellers start to build up a whole structure of belief, laws etc which helps to establish them as the leaders - the 'priest' class is born.


 
The formulation of laws is part of the very first process of becoming self-aware (which took several thousand, maybe tens of thousands, of years). Magical taboos belong to very early stages of society, and were a way of trying to assert control over a natural world early man was starting to differentiate himself from and, as a consequence, was very fearful of.

I don't see anything comforting in the explanations of very early religion. Although you're right in saying it puts humans at the centre, it surrounds them with things to be afraid of. E.g. the spirits of the dead were not the souls of loved ones who had gone to a better life, but angry, vengeful monsters. In this sense of giving shape to their fears, religion acted in much the same way as the Daily Mail, and people listened for much the same reason.


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## RJM Corbet

HareBrain said:


> The formulation of laws is part of the very first process of becoming self-aware (which took several thousand, maybe tens of thousands, of years). Magical taboos belong to very early stages of society, and were a way of trying to assert control over a natural world early man was starting to differentiate himself from and, as a consequence, was very fearful of.
> 
> I don't see anything comforting in the explanations of very early religion. Although you're right in saying it puts humans at the centre, it surrounds them with things to be afraid of. E.g. the spirits of the dead were not the souls of loved ones who had gone to a better life, but angry, vengeful monsters. In this sense of giving shape to their fears, religion acted in much the same way as the Daily Mail, and people listened for much the same reason.



Too true. And a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> No, _that's_ silly. The world consists of more than America, Britain and Europe.


 
Who said anything about "America, Britain and Europe"? I was talking about Christianity, which spreads more widely than that. See another bit of Wiki on the sizes of the major religions: http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

Christianity comes top with 2.1 billion adherents, Islam second with 1.5 billion. So in what way is Mohammed more influential than Christ?



> If you're so sure it's 'silly' go make a new citation on Wikipaedia then.


 
I can't be bothered: I decided long ago that I wasn't going to be drawn in to editing Wiki, I don't have the time.



> You will notice that I put after a question mark after: "Man has an inbuilt social conscience, etc." It is the teachers, like Confucius, who 'civilized' society with purely 'moral' observations. So it's not just don't kill, because you may get caught and hanged-drawn-and-quartered -- but don't kill because it causes suffering to other individuals, not just to society in general?


 
You missed the point I was making: humanity has been hard-wired not to kill within their social groups (although in some people the wiring is obviously faulty) because it is bad for both group and individual chances of survival. Our natural instincts, developed over a very long period, are to co-operate and help group members rather than cheat or kill them. Laws and punishment were only brought in to reinforce these instincts when the formation of larger population groups weakened social bonds.

I don't think it is possible to draw a distinction between our natural inclination to behave in a moral fashion and any formal moral teaching: the two complement and reinforce each other - but the natural instinct came first.


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## RJM Corbet

I'm sorry Anthony, it's not really important. The point I was making is that Isaac Newton is second on the list.

One is entitled to believe there's no mystery to human existence; one is entitled to believe there is a mystery to being a human-being.

No-one, including the Catholic Church, Al Qaeda, the 'Western way' or Josef Stalin has a monopoly over truth. History is written in blood, we all know that. The Danes used to raid up and down the coast of Britain, taking what they wanted, because they could. Tribal and international warfare is the backbone of history everywhere. Animals form pecking orders and propagation of the species is the first law of nature.

All this is true.

But it does not mean that there is not, within the human spirit something finer and higher. That is _my_ belief. It doesn't make me a 'silly' person or a religious dreamer.

Hospitals, schools and so on are a product of the higher human impulse to 'good' -- beyond simple survival of the species. I don't know what 'good' is, but I know it will still be there long after I am gone ...


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## Anthony G Williams

RJM Corbet said:


> I'm sorry Anthony, it's not really important. The point I was making is that Isaac Newton is second on the list.


 
I don't think it's sensible to try to compare the direct influence of religious leaders with the indirect influence of scientific discoveries - they are very different. 



> One is entitled to believe there's no mystery to human existence; one is entitled to believe there is a mystery to being a human-being.


 
Which means what, exactly?



> No-one, including the Catholic Church, Al Qaeda, the 'Western way' or Josef Stalin has a monopoly over truth.


 
I'm not aware that anyone has suggested otherwise. 



> History is written in blood, we all know that. The Danes used to raid up and down the coast of Britain, taking what they wanted, because they could. Tribal and international warfare is the backbone of history everywhere.


 
Sure - that's fighting *between* groups. I was talking about natural social development having encouraged cooperation and "moral" behaviour *within* groups. For most of human history, people lived in small groups which only occasionally met each other. They might have fought then, but they might have just traded. Mutual benefit again. 



> Animals form pecking orders and propagation of the species is the first law of nature.


 
Sure, but what's that got to do with what we're discussing?



> But it does not mean that there is not, within the human spirit something finer and higher. That is _my_ belief. It doesn't make me a 'silly' person or a religious dreamer.


 
We do have something finer and higher than animals - it's the human brain. This developed for complex social reasons (probably mainly to do with improving communication and therefore cooperation - a major aid to survival for beings which couldn't outfight or outrun many predators) but its complexity enables us to do all sorts of marvellous things which no animal can match. As well as inventing technology, it enables us to create art, music, literature, philosophies - and religions!



> Hospitals, schools and so on are a product of the higher human impulse to 'good' -- beyond simple survival of the species. I don't know what 'good' is, but I know it will still be there long after I am gone ...


 
There is evidence that even Stone Age people helped their aged and injured fellows - and some of the most advanced social animals do the same. It may be a simple quid pro quo ("if I help him, he may help me when I need it") or an outcome of the strong cooperative instinct which creates bonds between group members. A hospital is just an extension of that impulse to help others. Many animals teach their offspring things - a school is an extension of that.

Some ("good") people have particularly strong cooperative and helpful instincts, some ("bad") have none (the psychopaths), most are somewhere in between. The reasons for such differences probably lie in a mixture of genetics and upbringing, as do so many other aspects of human behaviour. 

One thing is sure: society would be unable to hold together if the great majority didn't have a basic bias towards cooperation.


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## RJM Corbet

Anthony, I would have sent a personal message, but your profile doesn't seem to include personal messages: I've just posted an outlook on the 'crop circles' thread (science/nature forum) post 112. Rather than cut and paste it here, perhaps you'd like to read it there? Sparks are bound to fly! I look forward to a spirited response ...


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## Dave

Anthony G Williams said:


> Sure, but what's that got to do with what we're discussing?


That should be the motto of this thread.

But, one thing I'd add. Natural Selection works on populations not individuals. So, it is in an individuals interest for other individuals with similar genes to survive. Therefore, individuals help their extended families, tribes or clans or whatever you prefer. I think that is the reason that we are innately tribal. And we are antagonistic to those who differ from us.

But what this has to do with a 2012 Prophecy is beyond me now.


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## J Riff

EEk! You are talking, in a 2012 thread, as if there haven't been Aliens around for millenia.
It was always their show, always. They tinkered with different colors of people, started wars, and all of it. ALL of it.
People were mute wandering animals until they organized to fight this thing, recorded _steadily_ since biblical times. 
All theory has to be based on this, and not the crackpot notion that this planet was owned and operated by humans.
The very best part of 'disclosure' if it happens - will be watching the history books thrown into the fireplace.
Arrogant little buggers, humans.


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## Starbeast

RJM Corbet said:


> I've just posted an outlook on the '*crop circles*' thread (science/nature forum) *post 112*. Sparks are bound to fly! I look forward to a spirited response ...


 


J Riff said:


> *Aliens*, it's was always their show, always. They tinkered with different colors of people, started wars, and all of it. ALL of it. The very best part of 'disclosure' if it happens - will be watching the history books thrown into the fireplace.
> Arrogant little buggers, humans.


 
I've felt the same, I believe outworlders (where ever they're from), will play their part in after (if not before) the upheaval of 2012. The aliens always seem to show up after great disasters destroy the planet and help us to rebuild, to stay alive. The Sumarians have mentioned people from the sky coming here to help us reorganize just like the ancient people thousands of years after them mentioned beings from the sky coming here. The strange paintings, cravings and statues from around the world give us hints at what these outworlder beings look like, some look human, and some don't.

But it won't hurt my feelings if I'm wrong.



> "Roughly every 4000 years the aliens have returned to Earth, it's been roughly 4000 years since their last visit." - anonymous


 


> "The reason why the governments are uncaring to their people is because they believe over 90% of will die by something they are keeping a secret from us. They don't want to tell us because they are trying to save themselves from what's going to happen." - anonymous


 


> "The end of the world will not happen at the end of 2012, there will be great destruction, most of humankind will be dead, a new world will arise, and a thousand years later the anitchrist will appear and then it will be the end." - anonymous


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## Anthony G Williams

J Riff said:


> EEk! You are talking, in a 2012 thread, as if there haven't been Aliens around for millenia.
> It was always their show, always. They tinkered with different colors of people, started wars, and all of it. ALL of it.


 


Starbeast said:


> I've felt the same, I believe outworlders (where ever they're from), will play their part in after (if not before) the upheaval of 2012. The aliens always seem to show up after great disasters destroy the planet and help us to rebuild, to stay alive.


 
Gentlemen, I will leave you to enjoy your bizarre fantasies in peace


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## RJM Corbet

*Starbeast:* _The reason why the governments are uncaring to their people is because they believe over 90% of will die by something they are keeping a secret from us. They don't want to tell us because they are trying to save themselves from what's going to happen." - anonymous_

And that's the big one.

It's shocking and terrible, and people naturally think: Oh no, we're a western democracy, our rulers would never do something like that. We elect them, don't we?
*
We elect governments, but not necessarily the true powers that be.*

The Iraq 'weapons of mass destruction' lie is a case in point: they are capable of doing something like that, and they have ...


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## Starbeast

Anthony G Williams said:


> Gentlemen, I will leave you to enjoy your bizarre fantasies in peace


It's just a theory. But really, aliens, coming here? It makes for a good sci-fi movie.

But what really does make sense is what is happening now. The U.S. government has been quoted many times in saying that we should not go to our government for help, globalization is far more important then jobless, homeless and starving citizens. THAT in a nutshell says what's only really important to those bigshots who want us to fight for them.



RJM Corbet said:


> *Starbeast:* _The reason why the governments are uncaring to their people is because they believe over 90% of will die by something they are keeping a secret from us. They don't want to tell us because they are trying to save themselves from what's going to happen." - anonymous_
> 
> And that's the big one.


 
Yeah, that one says it all.


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## Dave

The vault is looking a little empty! 

If I was a Government and going to fill a vault with seeds to survive Doomsday, and if I knew I had only a matter of months, I'd think I would be under way by now. "Getting your finger out" is a phrase comes readily to mind. Obviously, either:
1) they don't know about the end of the world in 2012.
2) it is a typical over-running, over-spent public sector project.

But do we need a seed bank anyway? Seeds survive most events on their own, that is the whole point of them. Spores survive even more environmental extremes. How many are you actually going to store - a packet of grass seed is hardly going to re-vegetate the whole world. It sounds as futile as 'Noah's Ark' with two of everything.

But also, that vault looks like it has been built as a very long-term project, and I just think that with the huge and accelerating advances in mapping DNA genomes, the 'Jurassic Park' scenario might be possible one day, and storage like this would be rendered obsolete. You would then only need to store the genetic codes electronically.


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## Dave

pyan said:


> If this thread doesn't go back on topic, it will be closed.
> 
> First and only warning, gentlemen...


To be fair, this thread was always about Mayan Prophecies and I accept that some people think they were visited by Aliens (mainly due to those ridiculous Erich Anton Paul von Däniken  books.) What I am tired of is taking every thread (Crop Circles) in the same direction.


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## Pyan

If this thread doesn't go back on topic, it will be closed. 

First and only warning, gentlemen...


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## J Riff

2012 was supposed to be, I think... as I recall... disclosure?
Disclosure of fifty+ years of coverup of UFOs and the history of our Solar System.
The other thing, may have been the return of the Aliens who were ousted back at the time of the 1st Mars mission. Maybe that was 2010?
I've never heard anything about End of the World, that's just convenient cover, utter bollocks.
Partial disclosure. There's still the issue of Mars, not something we can hide  from, but judged to be too much for young humans.
I just remembered recently that the Philadelphia Experiment was an attempt to reveal, disclose a bunch of stuff. It was tested on a group in Philly apparently, and no, it was too much for them, so it was all re-buried.
But, that was 50 years ago. Since then, we have seen _Alien, Predator, Men in Black, Starship Troopers_ et al. Video games have gotten spectularly graphically violent. Bloody vampires are the rage of the pre-teen set.
All conditioning towards alien reality, but still not enough, apparently, yet.
Quite.
The problem here on Earth is, of course, people.
If this comes true, _all _the lies, a mountain of them, not just UFOs, go down. That's the Govt. and all the wealthy bigshot families.
They did things no decent human would stand for, and now they will try, aliens or not, to coverup, and make it go their way again.
In case anyone thinks this is some kind of intellectual issue... it isn't.
People who may be opposing this, making noise- _will be and have been tortured over it._ Some quite publically.
That's their own people!
Don't expect much from this bunch, except that they will stay on top of their ill-begotten cash pile and think up some new lies for the cows.
Sorry, that's what they do, I wish it were otherwise.
2012 - disclosure of Earthly criminal gangs making our lives hell...


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## RJM Corbet

*Nothing else matters, really ...*


*1)*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOWWIDT910I&feature=related

*2)*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73dAikiXoOM&feature=related

*3)*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFuGBKcyEQw&feature=related

*4)*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h3dx9baiwE&feature=related

*5)*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQHxm9gWkNo&feature=related

*6)*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP7kMdLHc98&feature=related


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## Starbeast

2012​ 
*Sanctuary for the few.*​ 

The was excellent *RJM Corbet*, it confirms what I believed for years. Quite a creepy collection of disturbing art depicting the end of the world, nice touch for an airport. And then there's the demon in the open suit case, they sure make it clear what their faith is about.

Those occult loving government bigshots who are planning to hide in those underground bunkers, believe that if the natural disasters don't kill us, the enemies they've made in other countries will come here while our nation (the U.S.) is vulnerable and kill us. Then they'll wait until enough of us are dead so they can have a reason to retaliate with destructive weapons. Afterwhich, they'll have wiped out who they don't like and plunder the reasources. Quite a plan for these pagan leaders, I'm not surprised.

However, if our planet really gets clobbered by gargantuan natural disasters, there will be no place to take shelter. Those underground safehouses may get buried by tons of debris or damaged by tremendous earthquakes, they could become tombs instead of sanctuaries.

The bright side is, we can start a new beginning without them.


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## clovis-man

Ah, yes. Brings to mind the script of *The Abyss*:

Virgil: Hippy, you think everything is a conspiracy. 
Hippy: Everything is.


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## J Riff

Alrighty. I've backed way off in here, I don't want to forget who I'm trying to be, a writer of fun stuff.
 I've posted ridiclous amounts of fact over on a UFO board, and there are intelligent people there too, of course, so now I waitwaitwait some more, like I've been doing for long years.
 13 years ago this started, and it ended on Mars of all places.
Who'd a thunk it?

 Here's a twist. People think the 'illuminati' are trying to take over the world. 
 Fact is, they did, always had a death grip on it, the little devils. 
What could really, seriously mess up the plans of our little earthly demi-gods?
 Aliens. Nobody, but nobody knew they were coming to dinner.


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