Visitations From Outer Space

 

Visitations From Outer Space

OK, maybe it’s just ockdown getting to me but…………………….

 Like most people, I’m sceptical about UFOs and visits from aliens (as well as ghosts, poltergeists, the devil and God in my case). But again……………….

I’m becoming obsessed (oh,oh, lockdown) with recent archaelogical findings relating to 10,000 – 12,000BC that imply the existence of advanced machine tools during that era, and also a map (an actual map, not an implied one. The unexplained phenomena are how rocks weighing up to 150 tons got moved over significant distances and how they were cut/carved with extreme precision, like down to less than a millimetre of variance, showing no signs of having been worked by primitive tools. There are still some puzzles about how the Ehyptian pyramids were built but nothing on this scale. The map from the period has a very accurate depiction of the coastline of Antartica. It’s possible that Antartica wasn’t totally covered in ice then but, even given that, who at the time knew how to draw scale maps of large distances very accurately?

Some of these discoveries are quite recent so archaeologits haven’t had a lot of time to thiink about them. Anyway they would be wary of compromising their credibility in any explanation suggested; my credibility is always in doubt, even with myself. What is needed is a hypothesis that fits the known facts. Is it possible that a human society had reached such an advanced state of sophistication at the time and subsequently disappeared without trace along with its tools? In my view it hardly seems possible so we need an alternative hypothesis. Here is my crazy(?) one. Around 12,000BC or maybe before there was a visitation from outer space. The visitors might have been sentient beings but almost certainly included robots, maybe only robots. They pissed around the planet for a bit doing whatever took their fancy but also precision cutting stones in Europe, South America and Asia, and then got homesick or were recalled. Human beings were around at the time and must almost certainly have bumped into them. So how would these human beings have reacted? Most probably (in my view) they would have created god myths to explain them. There’s something about god and other myths that corroborates this; they nearly all contain a germ of truth (with a lot of doubtful elaboration around that).

There could be questions of accurate dating of these artefacts but archaeologists don’t seem to be raising any and they know more about dating methods than I do (no jokes about dating methods, please). Anyway, even given a millenium or so of variance in dating accuracy the anomalies still hold. Implications for current UFO sightings? Yes, why not? Maybe they just want to know what we did with their stones.

OK, it could just be lockdown and I’m going off my trolley but…….come up with a better hypothesis. And it’s got to conform to Occam’s razor.

What To Do In Lockdown

 

What To Do During Lockdown

This seems to have become the most common conversational topic recently, along with how your morale is doing. So this is a personal take on the questions.

Most of my time has been spent in front of my PC. You can find everything from the sublime to the ridiculous on the Internet and I have been wandering through the offerings, mostly via YouTube. Once I’ve woken up, drunk a coffee, done my wake-up-brain sudoku, looked at emails and perused the news via the news aggregator site I use, newsnow, I go to YouTube; hence my newly found interest in mankind’s early development. That apart I can’t say I have found any new interests. I bounce around between cooking, football, music, some science and linguistics, archaeology/anthropolgy of course, and watching steam trains. I can’t say I have found anything earth-shattering but I have, for instance, got some good new ideas on recipes and also been amazed at the singing abilities of some kids of tender age, 10-14.

What about TV and films, obvious possibilities? I’m not used to watching much on TV other than football and Channel 4 news and, for some reason, that hasn’t changed. French TV, the Arte channel apart, is more trivial even than British TV. Because of football crowd restrictions in the UK, more matches are televised which means I make less use of the dodgy Russian Internet site which tries to sell me Indian brides on which I watch matches I can’t get on TV. I suspect the site is run by the Russian mafia, so they do have their uses, and who cares if the commentary is in Serbo-Croat? I’ve got a second-hand subscription to Netflix but don’t seem to be driven to explore that very much. I haven’t got many DVDs I haven’t already watched but I do have loads that I’d quite like to watch again. But, mostly, I don’t watch them again. And for some reason I can’t get down to reading.

What about the world outside, the bit we are permitted to visit? My exercise has been more limited than it probably should be. Gardening is on hold. I walk frequently to the baker’s to get bread, since I love fresh bread, but the weekly or twice-weekly excursions for shopping don’t really count. And the weather hasn’t yet been conducive to long walks. My excuse is that there are 36 stairs in my house and that helps a bit. I can still invite friends to come to eat and I get invited usually a couple of times a week. That’s about it.

The news is generally depressing so I don’t spend a lot of time on it although I can get hooked on the evolving Brexit situation in Britain and its Teflon government. Whatever happens there with COVID the government can’t be blamed, as a recent survey showed; a quite large majority blame other people rather than the government for any failings. It’s people lacking common sense who are to blame. And neither can the government be blamed for any adverse effects of Brexit; people (lacking common sense?) voted for it. So who determines events, what happens next; who is in charge? It has to be the people lacking common sense. No wonder the country is f*****d.

So how is my morale? I’m not depressed but hardly full of the joys of life either. I feel I’m getting along OK, putting life on hold a bit but looking forward to the spring and, hopefully, less risk to life and fewer restrictions. What puzzles me slightly is that I seem to be feeling some kind of restlessness that shortens my attention span. Is that because life is on hold, lockdown or just advancing age? Maybe I’ll find out later on.

History: A New Perspective For Me

 

History

I’m not a history buff but through watching too much YouTube during lockdown I have become intrigued by some recent archaeological discoveries. There’s an analogy now between archaeology and fishing. Fishing boats no longer go out hoping they will find some fish; they go out, turn the radar on and locate the fish. Similarly, archaelogists no longer rely on a chance find as an indicator of what might be an interesting site; they peruse satellite images and know in advance what sites could be interesting. This greatly speeds the rate at which discoveries are made and there have been some intriguing ones recently. They pose some intriguing questions..

There’s an historical theory that around 3000BC human beings stopped being hunter-gatherers and became farmers, the dawn of agriculture. However, recent finds have shown agriculture being practised in some places around 11,000BC. Even more intruigingly, ruins originating around 3000BC recently investigated in different parts of the world show that a standard measurement was used in their construction that is a precise fraction of the world’s circumference. So somebody before that time had worked out the circumference of Earth. Moreover, this was in several geographically distant regions so it seems likely that this information was shared rather than being calculated separately and simultaneously in different places. So there must have been much more widespread travelling at the time than previously thought. There is evidence, for example, that the Chinese were in north America around 10,000BC There’s also evidence of some relatively sophisticated tools, such as powerful drills, used on hard stones well before 3000BC.

What does all this do to our understanding of humans’ early history? Well, it demolishes the idea of the neolithic revolution for a start. It also demolishes any general idea of stone ages, iron ages, etc. That all varies over time depending on what region and society you are talking about. It’s also clear that very primitive and quite sophisticated societies co-existed in different parts of the world many thousands of years ago, long before we realised. And that poses numerous intriguig questions. For instance, if superior knowledge was sometimes shared across large distances, why didn’t it become generally accepted and used? What happened when a relatively sophisticted society rubbed shoulders with a relatively primitive one? Most interesting for me is what a map of knowledge per century BC would look like. You would likely find, at any one time, a high degree of understanding of maths and engineering and probably town life similar in many aspects to what we know now in odd places in India, Europe and elsewhere, with people in other places living in caves and just learning to create stone tools.

Whatever this does, it smashes any idea of people across the globe progressing uniformly from cavemen hunter-gatherers to agriculture and then some form of more sophisticated society. It just couldn’t have happened like that. It must have been very much a stop-start rocess. It also smashes the notion I was given at school that knowledge discovered by the Greeks and Romans built the foundation of modern European society. Newton said that if he had seen farther than others it was because he had been able to stand on the shoulders of giants. The same must have been true of the Greeks and Romans. And, oh boy, wasn’t the history education I received at school blinkered by European eyes. So…….what exactly was happening and what had (some) people worked out thirteen centuries ago or even before? I guess we’ll have to wait for more archaeological finds.