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Topic: The dangers of Pattern Matching and Anti-mystic Astronomy (Read 989 times) |
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Hermit
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The dangers of Pattern Matching and Anti-mystic Astronomy
« on: 2008-06-14 15:10:22 » |
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Neither Science nor Fiction
[ Hermit : I recently found this letter by the most erudite and wisest man I have had the privilege to know, love and admire. He is not on the Internet, I infer that it costs too much and takes more computer than he has, so this article is an exception offering a peek into the vast breadth of his knowledge which allows the construction of seamless, multiply buttressed, organic hypothesis, arguments and deductions such as we see here. The original speech to which the article is a response is not available to us, but can be inferred from the reply. We have seen similar travesties on the CoV and I have attempted to rebut them as I have seen them. I wish, even with the Internet resources available to me, that I had done as well as this.
I have left the British spelling intact, but have taken the liberty of providing some minor editing (principally normalized date formats) and formatting for this medium.]
Source: Cape Observer, April 2007 (PDF)
Long-time Cape Centre member Bernard Wagener comments on the 7 March [Hermit: 2007] talk by Wayne Herschel, author of The Hidden Records on “Exploring ancient civilisations' star knowledge"
I found the Herschel talk on Archaeo-astronomy disappointing. And I am sorry about that, for it is a topic on which much remains to be learnt.
The epic tales told to us were neither as gripping nor as self-consistent as Tolkien's Middle Earth, or LeGuin's Earth Sea. It would seem, if I heard aright, that travellers from a planet in a stellar system within the close-range bubble of naked-eye stars - close in Galactic terms that is - visited this planet and Mars during the last 100,000th of earth's history and brought our kind to live on it, for unlike the Neanderthals, we did not evolve here. At the time claimed for their probable arrival, some 30,000 years ago, they appear to have been illiterate and ignorant of metals and machinery, but apparently retained a vivid and precise memory of the location of their home star. So time and again, in Egypt, Britain, Central America and elsewhere they built monuments whose individual parts reflected the positions of that star and its near neighbours as seen from the earth. I don't think we were told quite why they did this. The same pattern was detected on Mars, on a far grander scale, though to be fair it was not directly claimed as the work of inter-stellar humans.
This far-fetched opinion, buttressed by any amount of diligent Internet trawling, and relying heavily on pattern recognition, is neither science nor history. Pattern recognition has to be supported by other evidence, if it is to carry weight. By itself it is dangerously subjective and frighteningly vulnerable to coincidence. The cloud that is very like a whale to one man, may be backed like a weasel to another. In area after area, I ended up looking at major difficulties:Perhaps most far-fetched of all was the notion of an 'alien' origin for our own kind, Homo sapiens. The whole evolutionary history of this planet shows us our place among its children. It is easy enough to see that life could arise elsewhere in the cosmos, but to demand that it would involve the identical selection of organic sugars, the identical development of RNA and DNA, is to clamp it in a strait-jacket, at present we haven't the knowledge to justify that step. And that is only the beginning. We have to go on through single-celled creatures and their capture of mitochondria that enabled them to use organically produced oxygen to provide the energy for multi-celled life. Then comes the whole history of multi-cellular life and the long chapter of successive accidents that have led to our own vertebrate species' present, and probably transient, dominance. To demand that on another planet circling another star either everything - like the asteroid impact that put an end to the dinosaurs, and the opening of the African Rift Valley which appears to have forced hominids to adapt to the savannahs that replaced their jungles - would have happened in the same sequence over a similar time span, or that a totally different sequence could have produced creatures like ourselves - William of Occam save us!
As for the differences between ourselves and our closest relatives, 98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees, and the Neanderthals also fit into that 2% gap. So far research has shown no signs that Neanderthals and our kind ever interbred successfully, but that does nothing to invalidate our common ancestry.
Also, and very much to the point, South Africa has provided convincing fossil evidence for the existence of Homo sapiens going back to close on 200,000 years ago, with no sign of a sudden 35,000 year old arrival or calamity. Maybe we are living on a different planet. The mention of Noah's flood as a worldwide happening, was enough to raise any geologist or geographer or pre-historian's hackles.
Every early civilization whose records or legends we can access has a story of a massive flood. River valleys suffered when glacial lakes were breached, or major flows were captured, the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly, suffered a tsunami when Thera/Santorini blew its top. The Nile delta suffered repeated swamping when the vast mud deposits that form it slumped to the sea floor. In prehistoric times the Mediterranean basin dried out and flooded several times over when the Atlantic was held back or broke through at the Straits of Gibraltar, while the Black Sea basin was drowned when the Bosphorus opened.
However the sound geological and archaeological evidence for these calamities also demonstrates that they did not all occur together, even though the legends rooted in them tempted their tellers to conflate them. There is no geological evidence whatever for a worldwide flood at any time, or for the earth's surface ever having been so flat as to have allowed one. Here is a list of some pyramids, and other early monuments, with their probable dates:
| 2850 BCE | Mastabas 1st - 2nd Dynasty of Egypt | | 2660 BCE | Step Pyramid - Saqqara 3rd Dynasty | | Broken Pyramid - Meidum 4th Dynasty | | Bent Pyramid - Dahshur | | 2600 BCE - 2500 BCE | Giza pyramids 4th Dynasty | | 2500 BCE - 2190 BCE | 5th and 6th Dynasties | | 2100 BCE | Ziggurat at Ur | | 1900 BCE - 1306 BCE | Stonehenge | | 600 BCE- 400 BCE | Pyramids at Kush, Northern Sudan | | 1300 BCE - 500 BCE | Pyramid at Olmica - coastal Peru | | ca 250 BCE - 650 CE | Teotihuacan Mexico | | 200 CE | Temple Pyramid at Moche - coastal Peru | | 700 CE - 800 CE | 1st Maya Temple pyramids | | 1000 CE - 1100 CE | Mayan Revival - Chichen Itza, Yucatan | | 1325 CE - 1488 CE | Aztec Pyramids at Tenochtitlan now under Mexico City |
In the 460 years, between the Step Pyramid at Saqqara and the end of the 6th Dynasty, at least 84 pyramids were built in Egypt along the Western edge of the Nile valley from Abu Roash in the north to Meidum in the south. Thanks to the climate, the location and the materials, we know rather more about Egypt than about most of the others. Before the 3rd Dynasty sun-dried mud bricks were the Egyptians' standard building material for sacred as well as secular construction. Mastaba tombs were oblong flat-roofed box-like structures. The Step Pyramid began as a stone mastaba, which still stands incorporated within its base. While it was being built, the plan was changed into a majestic stepped set of 6 large mastabas one above the other. Its successors retained the tapering height, but abandoned the stepped pattern for a smooth sided pyramid.
The broken pyramid at Meidum gave its builders a lesson in the strength of materials, when its packed rubble core gave way. The Bent-Pyramid, built about the same time, shows that the lesson was quickly learnt, as the slope of its sides was reduced before its upper section was completed. No later pyramid had such steep sides, and from then on solid masonry took the place of the earlier rubble cores.
The Mesopotamians did not have ready access to building stone. Their great ziggurats were built of mud brick and continued to be built, probably from a time earlier than the first pyramids in Egypt until the fall of Babylon to the Persians in 650 BC. There, too, the remains of earlier buildings remain encased within larger later ones. This pattern repeats in the mud brick pyramids of coastal Peru - whose construction method differs from the Middle Eastern one - and similarly, the stone temple pyramids of Central America are built around and over earlier ones.
All this points to humans learning from their earlier efforts. What exactly, in the light of this history, are the off-planet visitors supposed to have done? Did they visit all Pyramid fields or only a few? Why did they select Stonehenge among thousands of Megalithic monuments in Western Eurasia? They left the builders to choose their own materials and improve on their own techniques. Even the purposes to which pyramids were put vary: in Egypt they served as tombs, in Mesopotamia as temples, in Tenochtitlan as altars for human sacrifice. One must presume that interstellar travellers have access to technology more advanced than ours. They left nothing of it. We have no tangible trace of artefact, inscription or influence. The Egyptian pyramid builders, like the American Indians knew nothing of iron or bronze before or after their purported visits. When did the visitors do whatever it was they are supposed to have done? Did they hover over the Nile Valley for nearly 500 years to get the pyramids located as dots in a rather inaccurate map of an arbitrary section of the Milky Way? On desolate Mars our speaker could detect the same familiar pattern, conveying as much information as a solitary Braille character, with its largest dot the size of Table Mountain. What does it say, and to whom? 'Kilroy was here' perhaps? Why did they select a smaller scale on Earth? (This could be re-phrased: why on earth did they select the scales they did?) Maybe our planet is some sort of interstellar nature reserve where they mustn't interact with the fauna. In any case, if they have been trying contact our kind, then as communicators they've still - to coin a phrase - got a long way to go, no matter how far they've come.
Addendum: 2009-05-15 I was delighted to discover that he has Internet access and have forwarded this link and invited him to visit. Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Walter Watts
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Re:The dangers of Pattern Matching and Anti-mystic Astronomy
« Reply #1 on: 2008-06-14 20:56:17 » |
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Thanks Hermit...
much enjoyed.
Walter
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Walter Watts
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Fritz
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Re:The dangers of Pattern Matching and Anti-mystic Astronomy
« Reply #2 on: 2008-06-14 21:37:43 » |
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Thx Hermit
I would sarcastically add, that earth was as likely setup as a refueling and provisioning station for folks from away and since we've contaminated it so badly they have lost interest.
A favourite kick at
Quote:| [hermit]The dangers of Pattern Matching and Anti-mystic Astronomy |
is Kurt Vonnetugut's 'Siren of the Titans' which left me with a more plausible and satisfying resolution to 'Intelligent Design'; plus a good kick in the groin reminder to keep looking and understanding rather then believing the phantasmagorical'.
Cheers
Fritz "aka now .... less messy buttercup" 
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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