Now imagine a more horrible situation. Imagine a world like today being completely alien to a teenage generation. Imagine that every last bit of cultural and scientific achievement were utterly pulverized into brown muck and mud and dust and burned completely beyond recognition. Imagine the World practically upside-down and phenominally different: No flowers, no colors other than green and brown and grey and the occasional fruit like banana or mango; no electricity or hint of battery power; no mass media, just story-tellers like you and me who might have to explain how the only relic we have, a simple coin, came to be produced by the millions, when smithing metal is a lost art.
Now imagine that you were the victim of celestial timing; a solar season of sorts. Imagine that you witnessed what only one generation in thirty-thousand will ever witness: A Solar Storm capable of persuading Earth’s own behavior to jolt ever so slightly, but catastrophically for mankind. Just as I can’t describe bunny-ears to a fifteen year old today, I wonder how I would describe life today to a fifteen year old who was born and raised in a potential 2028. If 2012 prooves catastrophic to everything we know, religion will naturally survive. But what of the warnings to that generation 11,000 years from now?
Other cultures have bridged the gap over Solar Storms so fantastic that advanced societies were reduced to new eons of story-telling by firelight. There are old Egyptians and New Egyptians. Did you ever notice how obsessed with the heavens the New Egyptians were? The Mayans founded everything on astronomical values and events. Their calendar was 13 cycles of the Moon. Hopi indians center cultural knowledge around Ages of Man and even deep in the knowledge of Modern China is the idea that WE are the TENTH cycle of man.
To any problem-set, when you know the answer, you can often reverse-engineer the problem. One great amazement to modern man is the existence and advanced knowledge behind the most confusing discovery made off the coast of Greece in 1901. Antikythera. Many hundreds of years before metal smithing was popular or commonplace, a shoe-box sized ‘computer’ was made with complexity exceeding some clocks made more than a thousand years later.
One hundred and five years later with the assistance of x-rays and computer modeling and deciphering ancient scripts, scientists pieced together smaller gears hidden within the mechanism and found the computer to ‘compute’ phases of the moon, eclipses and identify ancient wonders of the World including the Lighthouse at Alexandria.
François Charette, a science historian at Germany’s University of Munich, believes more devices like the Antikythera mechanism must exist. “There has to have been a chain of development behind it,” Charette said. “Otherwise it is like finding a high-speed 20th-century train without any of the earlier trains.” Source.
Even the Greek foundation responsible for all the current research, the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, has picked THIS ‘essence of,’ reconstruction as extremely impressive. There’s a video in the link which illustrates how absolutely complex the gears must be to create such behavior.
What if the mentioned chain of develpment behind the Antikythera Mechanism were a story about a cycle so long that entire cultures could spring up, thrive, die and be forgotton between events? What if the computer were made to illustrate and calculate a natural event with a cycle so long, no known language has ever managed to stand against it in duration? How would we get the message across to that generation 11,000 years from now? I posed this question to modern masters of the Antikytheran device at the rist of looking like a lunatic.
Now I’ll wait and see….
ED. I heard back from the creator of the mechanism that the Research Project holds in such high regard:
Contrary to popular phrasing, the Antikythera Mechanism is not a computer. It is a mechanical calendar, sort of. It does certainly not apply to the problems that you describe.
Sharing your worries about our beautiful planet,
With best regards,
Tatja
Bummer.
| DINARIUS Bryan's old Digital Interest blog |
