Something smelled for me regarding the history of humanity as it's been agreed upon by the establishment. Every piece of evidence against that status Something smelled for me regarding the history of humanity as it's been agreed upon by the establishment. Every piece of evidence against that status quo, and there are many that by themselves would destroy the entire picture, was discarded, if considered at all, as an exception. How could the Sphinx have been made by dynastic Egyptians, if the bedrock its blocks belonged to shows signs of water erosion that put the construction at at least 10,000 years old? How (and when) were the Giza pyramids built if, by the timeframe given by the establishment, a block weighing a couple dozen tons would have to have been put in place every couple of minutes? How were the insides built in terms of logistics (not to mention the actual physical construction), when there's no sign of any of the soot that would have resulted from the only supposed methods of illumination that they would have? Does the relief at the temple of Hathor actually depict a lightbulb as it does seem, with all that it implies about their level of technology? Why are the interiors of the great pyramids lacking in any hieroglyphs, given that the dynastic Egyptians graffitied everything? Why are they considered tombs when no mummies have ever found inside? How does it make sense that all the civilizations of the era (Sumeria and Egypt as the biggest ones, but also the South American cultures) started out, out of thin air, building extremely complex structures, but as the years passed they weren't even able to imitate properly what they used to do? Why does the establishment maintain that many of those early cultures worked granite, basalt and even corundum to those levels of sophistication and with copper tools, which would be impossible given the hardness of those minerals? Why did the Egyptians, who were obsessed with keeping records of everything, say that their civilization had rulers up to 30,000 years ago, and that their origin comes from a land that sank suddenly? What are the odds that all the complex societies of those times said that their civilizations were legacies, and the forefathers practically identical across all those cultures separated by oceans? Why are the Easter Island Moais supposed to have been carved and put in place just about 700 years ago, when some are buried in sedimentation that would have taken at least ten thousand years to build up? Who were the people that were able to build the lower levels of Gunung Padang, in modern Indonesia, around 20,000 years ago? How and why were underground cities like Derinkuyu built, when according to established history those people were supposed to be able to live aboveground without specific complications? And the sunken structures and cities in places that were only aboveground before the last Ice Age ended, such as the couple of hundred towns in the Mediterranean, or Dwarka near the coast of India, or the Yonagumi monument? And how can there be an actual complex with clearly man made structures off the coast of Cuba at depths between 2,000 feet and 2,460 feet, which is even more than the levels raised after the last Ice Age?
Not to mention the out of place artifacts. How does the Antikythera mechanism, an analog computer found in a sunken Greek ship, fit in the picture, when Greeks weren't supposed to be able to build something remotely as complex? Why were batteries found in modern Iraq two thousand years ago, if they weren't supposed to know about electricity? How could walls have been found buried under soil that would date them as far back as 200,000 to 400,000 years? Who made the Baigong pipes, actual pipes found in Chinese caves that go down to a nearby lake, about 150,000 years ago, when metallurgy shouldn't have existed for more than 140,000 years? How does the Piri Reis map, done by a Turkish mariner in the 16th century, show lands that have been sunken for about 11,000 years, and even the correct outline of Antarctica as it is under the ice caps, which have been in place likely for millions of years? Why and how are artifacts like drill bits, hammers and even statues found encapsulated in minerals that would have taken millions of years to form? Who made the artificially shaped spheres found in mines in South Africa, spheres that are supposed to be around 2,8 billion years old?
Any of those "exceptions" would throw out the current established history, that says that Sumeria (from 6,000 BC) was the first civilization, and that it somehow invented agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, complex masonry, writing, etc., even when they themselves said that their culture was a legacy from people that came before. To a certain degree, along with a tremendous dose of self-deception, archeologists built this narrative using carbon dating. The issue is that you can't carbon date stone, and people tend to flock to places that are built, where they leave remains that can be carbon dated, which throws off the actual dating of the building. But suddenly comes Göbekli Tepe, a complex found in the nineties under an artificial hill in what is now Southern Turkey. About ten thousand years ago, some people, for an unknown reason, decided to bury an extremely sophisticated megalithic complex that dwarfs Stonehenge (probably wrongly dated as well). That it was buried allowed the scientists to date it without doubts to so far back in time, and with the additional knowledge that it must have been in operation for at least a thousand years. That means it was built when humanity was coming out of the Ice Age. The pillars are carved with an absurd proficiency, showing even animals in three dimensions (meaning that the blocks were carved around them). One of the statues linked to Göbekli Tepe, the so called Urfa man, an eerie guy that for some reason is holding his dick and balls, is officially recognized as the first carved depiction of a human being (although there are likely many earlier ones). Another problem with Göbekli Tepe, apart from the sophistication of the masonry, is that it's astronomically aligned. Nobody was supposed to have this knowledge for thousands of years after that. There are additional controversial issues with it; some of the animals depicted were supposed to have gone extinct during the last Ice Age, and some people suggest that the pillars even show constellations as they would be in the future, as if warning of something. Are we supposed to believe now that like the Sumerians, these people just decided one day to stop hunter-gathering and with no prior knowledge produced such a site?
When one looks even closer at Göbekli Tepe, that place throws a wrench into the entire history of humanity. How is the masonry there almost identical to that found in South America, Egypt and even as far East as Indonesia and China? How is it possible that the Urfa man, the pillars of the complex, the Moais and a lot of statues found in South America and Indonesia are making the same gestures? Why are the same strange bags depicted, often held in the same way? Then you have to consider the obvious: that the myths of those peoples, myths that talk about "civilizing heroes", called by different names in the different cultures (Osiris and Thoth in Egypt, Viracocha and Quetzalcoatl in the Americas, Enki and Oannes in Mesopotamia, Vishnu in India) reference the same band of people that brought their knowledge to the hunter-gatherers of those areas, intending to restart the world they had lost. They were described as tall, pale, bearded and in some cases redheaded (particularly important in places like South America, where the natives were dark skinned and couldn't grow beards; also, they weren't supposed to have met other races).
Along with the revelation of Göbekli Tepe comes the solid science, studying the soil from 12,800 years ago from as far West as North America and as far East as Syria, that shows impact proxies that only happen when a cosmic object hits the planet. This goes along with the fossil evidence of megafauna like mastodons found killed suddenly, some even as they were eating, with their legs and hips crushed as by a tremendous force that in some cases dismembered them, leaving the feet lodged in the ground. The impact has been traced back to the North American ice caps, which during the Ice Age covered the entirety of Canada and some of the United States. This means a catastrophic melting of two miles thick sheets of ice, causing floods that reached heights of 700-1000 feet; for some reason geologists disputed which seems like rather evident evidence in the geology of northern states, like Washington. That water also poured into the oceans, stopping the currents that heat this planet, plunging it into a deep freeze that took around a thousand years to rebound from. The oceans raised about 400 feet, sinking as much exposed landmass as Europe and China put together. Look at a map of how the Earth was during the Ice Age and see how the continents have changed. So we have the planet as cold as it had been for a long, long time, showers of black rain, wildfires that spanned entire continents, the sky covered for years, and when things start heating up, out of nowhere appears Göbekli Tepe, a place requiring knowledge that would have taken hundreds, thousands of years for a civilization to produce. By the way, the comet or whatever it was seemingly belonged to the Taurid meteor stream we pass every year, a source of annual shooting stars; it was likely an object from that stream that caused the devastation in Tunguska back in 1908. There are still there miles wide stones that could destroy the world any year.
The rather obvious conclusion from all this is that there were complex civilizations that lived as ours have done during the current era, until a comet strike fucked them up, basically destroying the entire world. A brave band of survivors, or several of them, approached isolated hunter-gatherer tribes that had been in the business of surviving and not of building cities on the coast (with as much foresight as Romans lining their aqueducts with lead). The survivors tried to show those hunter-gatherers their knowledge, and some of it stuck, but as they didn't earn the knowledge themselves, over the generations they just got worse and worse, resorting to imitating the works of people that were far more successful (and likely more attractive) than they were. And in a predictable fashion, the relationship between those different groups of people, with an abyss of scientific progress between them, sparked prototypical cargo cults. The less advanced peoples ended considering those forefathers as gods, and the places they built for other purposes they used as temples for veneration. Those survivors were consistently depicted as therianthropes (meaning half person, half animal). More often than not, half flying creature or half fish. The myths say that they were able to come out of the sea as if they lived there, or traveled on it "walking", or in ships that didn't require rowing and didn't have sails. They are also said to have been able to fly in machines. They had to be expert navigators if their travels led them across the oceans, but is it possible also that they were as sophisticated as having invented engines and airplanes? There are ancient models in South America that clearly depict planes (the models were even built in the present and were found to be aerodynamic), but it's not like much or any evidence of that machinery would have survived; in places like Ollantaytambo and Tiahuanaco, with sophisticated megaliths now supposed to be from the post-Ice Age era, the molded metals keeping some blocks together were scavenged except in blocks that they couldn't lift at the time. Inside the older pyramids there are also strange grooves that suggest complex machinery to lift stuff, but none of it has survived after thousands of years of looting. Metal has always been far too valuable to just leave lying around as you would blocks of stone (but still, in sites like Baalbek's temple of Jupiter, the site ended as a hodgepodge of scavenged blocks from previous cultures).
If you go even deeper down the rabbit hole, consider that the Abrahamic religions use myths that were copied, fanfiction style, from earlier civilizations; the story of Noah is a "semitization" of identical stories found in the Babylonian and Sumerian civilizations, although the flood "myth" is one of the most common ones, found in about two hundred cultures. The story of Moses, a baby put on a river who then did great things, is the story of Sargon of Akkad. And then we have Jesus, a tall, bearded guy associated with fishes who went around telling people how to behave and who walked on water and flew to the heavens.
I like the author, Graham Hancock. He's a likable guy, even if he can get quite heated during confrontations. I'm not entirely on board with how he involves psychodelic drugs into this whole deal, but I agree that they likely allow you to access a different kind of knowledge that could further humanity. It did make me want to try DMT. Too bad it doesn't seem to be legal in my country.
There is a sinister issue here regarding the establishment: the idea of "gradualism" won out, even if it really doesn't make sense. They seem to argue that civilizations just progress and nothing really breaks that thread in a catastrophic way. When you hear the academicians still defending the established timeline of human history, it's like children grasping at straws. It contradicts the fact that ancient civilizations just got progressively worse, and also that they clearly had knowledge that we have had to rediscover even as recently as the 20th century. The comet impact evidence apparently received a pushback from NASA, not on the grounds of faulty evidence, but because they don't want to scare people (a similar argument is made regarding the alien presence on this planet; keeping shit hidden from us because we might get scared is something you do with children, and I hope one day everyone involved pays for it). Gradualism seems more of an ideology than anything; the evidence that a cosmic impact could, and did, restart humanity doesn't fit, and also hurts the current pseudo-religion of progressivism that grips Western Civilization: no matter how insane the changes (like never before seen mass migrations or the deliberate dissolution of cultures and states), they will always result in a better world, because so goes the arrow of history. But the history of humanity shows that it is tremendously fragile, that all that was gained through insanely hard work could be lost in a couple of generations and maybe never rediscovered again. Entire civilizations could fall to the sands of time as if those millions of intelligent beings had never existed. That is something to keep in mind....more
Goes through how scientists have ended up with the current theories about chaos, matter, quantum physics, the universe, time, consciousness and infiniGoes through how scientists have ended up with the current theories about chaos, matter, quantum physics, the universe, time, consciousness and infinity. On the aspects we remain ignorant about, which are plenty, he explains some possibilities, along with whether or not we might be able to fill the gaps. Fascinating. The author is a mathematician and goes through the logic of some of it; I appreciate mathematics as a tool but I find it rather irritating by itself. However, that's a problem with me and my limited brain. ...more
At first, I thought I wouldn't like it much. The information was framed in a sort of narrative which initially took too much space. Although it did diAt first, I thought I wouldn't like it much. The information was framed in a sort of narrative which initially took too much space. Although it did distract at times, astronomy, and many of the natural forces, are very visual and easier to understand that way. Still, I probably could have done without most/all of the references to the "great-auntie" character.
I thought this book did an exceptional job making you understand why scientists thought there were holes in the theories of that time and what would fill them. It clarified aspects of quantum field theory that were muddled for me, such as how did the particles pop up to life and which were related to which forces. It earned extra points for showing how the universe would look when travelling at near light speed, and the temporal distortion related to general relativity.
It reminded me that there's so much to find out yet. Dark matter and energy are out there according to the current theories, but they might be imaginary placeholders for whole aspects of reality we don't understand. General relativity and quantum field theory don't speak to each other, meaning there's likely an underlying theory that would connect both but that scientists can barely hypothesize about. Although black holes probably hold the key, no information seems to survive falling in. There was a bit about string theory at the end; given that it hasn't produced any proof, I became disillusioned about it years ago.
Always nice to read about quantum mechanics, although I wish it could have gone deeper into its weirdness: nonlocality and entanglement, the observer effect, quantum tunnelling and the wave-particle duality, for example, but there are plenty of books focusing on that particular subject out there.
In general, a fantastic book lacking in formulas (thankfully, because I'm abysmal in math) that shows how science can explain the universe in 2017 and what remains to be understood....more
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