[ummester]

The male sexuality thread has caused me tho think alot on interactions and theorys that I dedicated much thought to whilst backpacking. I also unearthed some photos when cleaning out the shed recently, so my mind is ripe with it. It was late 90s - I guess I partnered up and spoke with a bunch of generally open and explorative people during that time, which makes sense as they were probably travelling to find experience and themselves.

Other than sexual exploration and meaning, when sobre, I thought a lot about this other topic. Is our planet in a pattern that always leads to a massive upheaval, with increasing natural disaster en-route?

I had this basic idea that humanity had reached quite a high level of development at least once in our history and that it had been globally wiped out. I considerred that some of the ancient empires like Egypt and Maya and even those individuals that built pyramids on the Orkney Isles were perhaps connected and shared a level of tech and economics. I wondered if we only viewed them as more primitive because that offered the most order to our senses of our own achievements since. Not claiming they had computers or anything but just that they may have had some level of development that was far beyond what we gave them credit for.

Like - the Mayans experimenting with genetics. Why? What was the point of a primitive culture doing that? The Egyptians building comlicated working unmbrellas and the like. The similarity in door sizes and decorative colours used on all pyramids around the globe (all too short for modern man BTW). Perhaps they used and globally transported elephants as beasts of burden or something like that.

It also got me thinking about what happened to all of the technology. Why are the pyramids and stonework of the earlier Egyptian kingdoms more complicated than the latter? Why are older Mayan cities larger? Why did the picts supercede whoever build the pyramids in Scotland?

I reasoned at the time that something may have happened to wipe it all out. And I started reading stuff about polar shifts and orbital paterns in the galaxy and stuff.

I can't remember all of it but the question pops up in my head every now and then. Is our planet, by way of its galaxy, locked in some kind of repeating destructive patern. Not a patern that will wipe out our species but one that would make it very hard to keep all of our knowledge and tech.

We always build cities around waterways that sit at the edges of continents. If something happened that caused them to go under, how hard would it be to maintain an accurate collection of our knowledge as a species. The recent lots of natural disasters around the world have caused me to think on this again. Difference now is I am not ready to offer nay absolute suggestion as to what is going on but just wonder if any others think there is the possibilty of a building kind of global disaster?

[wim]

I believe it may be due to polar bears in the tropics or the submarine hatch. But I may be wrong.

On a slightly different note. Does anyone know if the NZ and Japan earthquake are related?

unmester: for my version of a conspiracy theory watch Waco rules of engagement. It shows that a good conspiracy theory is a series of f*ck up's by individuals who weren't conspiring.

[ummester]

wim, on 13 March 2011 - 02:20 PM, said:

unmester: for my version of a conspiracy theory watch Waco rules of engagement. It shows that a good conspiracy theory is a series of f*ck up's by individuals who weren't conspiring.

doesn't a conspiracy require conspirators?

[savagegoose]

the last tsunami reminded me of a bowl of cornflakes on a table that gets accidentally nudged. and we are the flakes. there is a hell of a lot that can go wrong to upset the bowl and get the milk splashing around, and when u look at the globe, there is a crap load of salty milk , and not very much fresh stuff.
yeah i think theres been major extinctions. and will be again.
i think the major difference is in how information is transferred , back then it was secretive and guild based. religion or gov controlled. now it is very much open to masses of people. so more likely any disaster will have a fair amount of info survive. as long as people can read books., ummm read zeros and ones off of storage media. i should say.
maybe maybe not a lot of the info will survive.

[ummester]

savagegoose, on 13 March 2011 - 06:45 PM, said:

i think the major difference is in how information is transferred , back then it was secretive and guild based. religion or gov controlled. now it is very much open to masses of people. so more likely any disaster will have a fair amount of info survive. as long as people can read books., ummm read zeros and ones off of storage media. i should say.
maybe maybe not a lot of the info will survive.

yea, I considerred that the information centric age we are in may allow more information to be kept also.

It would depend on how big the fallout is, I guess. How long it takes to establish a social hierarcy afterward and stuff.

[savagegoose]

well on thinking about it some more, i can see how the information owners could kind of set themselves up. i mean high tec stuff wont be manufactured anymore, but salvage and restoreing computers and the devices that read the data will be the new elite class, if the info is actually worth that much. i imaghine it will be one day. i mean chips and memory are a dime a dozen now, but once the industry collapses, even if there are people who know how to make the stuff. like cd/dvd drives. the components wont be easily manufactured again till a massive infrastructure and market is available.

so elite holders of the knowledge , to get ahold of the lost wisdom , will rize to the top.
and think about what operating systems will they use, imagine a bunch of windows CD hardly useful with no microsoft website to authenticate the software. basically built to collapse the moment society collapses.

well assuming that people dont get all open source, and start wireless networks to share information on a need it take sort of basis.

[staringclown]

On disasters

Disasters such as earthquakes are random and don't have build up as far as I know. (Well obviously they do build up over time but we are unable to measure the build up so they appear random) I think they are connected as one pressure point is unwound it could conceivably place more pressure on another zone. I don't know this for sure just theorising.

On tech being lost

The egyptians had stone masonry technology but nowhere near as much as say a medieval cathedral or a roman arch. They just piled a whole bunch of rocks on top each other to make a pyramid. Compared to flying buttresses and gothic stone carving they were "primitive", although no doubt their knowledge was passed down to the medieval masons as their knowledge has come to us and we are able to build extraordinary structures that have no parallel in any of history. I think that tech can and has been "lost" during various periods of history. The dark ages being a fair example. If you look at what the romans had compared to the saxons that followed (Hypocausts, running water and interior decoration) The saxons went back to round houses after the romans as in the neolithic period. I think that this was due to troubled times in comparison to the relative peace and order that characterised the roman period.

Could we lose our tech in the future? I believe it is possible if unlikely. No electricity, no computers. Less passed on knowledge. There are books of course but these too are fragile and would be useless in the case where survival was the key aim. Technology has played a key role in human evolution. I would recommend a book called "Guns, germs and steel" by Jared Diamond if you want a plausible explanation of how we ended up where we are Umm.

I think the reason that we build in areas that are prone to disaster is because these areas are generally more fertile. They are either

volcanic (eruptions, earthquakes)
alluvial plains (floods)
coastal (tsunamis) but they have seafood
tropics (cyclones)
mountains (avalanches and land slides)

You're not safe anywhere really. Except Canberra. Hang on, I forgot bushfires.

[ummester]

staringclown, on 14 March 2011 - 12:29 AM, said:

You're not safe anywhere really. Except Canberra. Hang on, I forgot bushfires.

Canberra does flood also - just hasn't in a while.

There does seem to be a loosing of tech from the older ancient cultures to the more modern, similar to what you describe with some of the Roman tech being lost in the Dark Ages.

[savagegoose]

dark ages where an environmental decline. as well as social. infact it was prob the lower food production that caused the population loss. and loss of tech. as wealth was from land and land production was reduced.
then there is the great plauge, a massive loss of population, caused another regression to meaner times , intellectually and for standards of living.
no idea what brought about the decline of agriculture after roman times but i dont think it was carbon emmisions

[staringclown]

ummester, on 14 March 2011 - 12:52 AM, said:

Canberra does flood also - just hasn't in a while.

There does seem to be a loosing of tech from the older ancient cultures to the more modern, similar to what you describe with some of the Roman tech being lost in the Dark Ages.

Absolutely. I couldn't make you a decent flint axe for example. Some lost technology is redundant technology I guess (but could be valuable again in a malthusian scenario)

Then again there's the example of native knowledge of plant species that have healing qualities or can be eaten that gets lost over time as cultures have modernised. This knowledge is valuable but is still being lost regardless. Pharmaceutical companies might keep some of it alive I suppose but not all.

[staringclown]

savagegoose, on 14 March 2011 - 01:17 AM, said:

dark ages where an environmental decline. as well as social. infact it was prob the lower food production that caused the population loss. and loss of tech. as wealth was from land and land production was reduced.
then there is the great plauge, a massive loss of population, caused another regression to meaner times , intellectually and for standards of living.
no idea what brought about the decline of agriculture after roman times but i dont think it was carbon emmisions

Actually the use of the term "dark ages" is a bit outdated. There were parts of the world that flourished during various periods during the dark ages. Arab culture was thriving and further developing the work of the greeks in mathematics during the period. Algebra is from the arabic Al-jabr by all accounts.

I'm not sure either why the britons declined post roman. I always thought it was the power vacuum created and the subsequent squabbling. Ironically the plague while devastating broke the hold of feudalism. Less workers were able to demand better conditions.

There was a medieval warm period (950-1250AD) preceded by a little ice age but this was a regional rather than global phenomena. Europe was one of these regions so it must have had some impact.