Could be Impossible to find Ancient Advanced Civilizations

I've been thinking about this for a while. If a civilization reaches a point in their development where they make use of total convertion of matter, then it would be highly likely to assume that they would leave no evidence that they ever existed, unless of course they wished to be later discovered after their extinction. (its also possible that they never became extinct, and just left). This is because if a race could use total convertion of matter, then all materials that they ever use would be 100% recylable and 100% efficent. Which means anything that they don't convert into something else would be biodegradable, and thus we would never find evidence of it. Even their dead could be converted into anything, cups, cars, building materials, anything!

Even though this is hypothetical, imagine the possibility that such a race existed before us on earth, constructed huge cities made out of an infinitely strong material that when was no longer needed, got absorbed back into the land. Then when the time was right, or they had to because of climate change or meteor threat or whatever, they just up and left.

Just a thought, pretty cool though.

Sorry was going to say, its a possible explanaition of atlantis.

Well according to legend, atlantis sunk didn't it? Also something my mom always considered mentioned in the bible (which she thinks was a weapon) there was this great crystal maybe the use of this weapon sank atlantis. I'm not sure where Atlantis is soposedly located only that Edger Casey said it would rise again. She also hypothises that this great crystal could be the cause for Disappearances in the Bramuda Triangle. Don't know but I think that there would be some kind of proof, some kind of library if you will if the cizilization was that effiecient would you want to hand that knowledge down? And if they were that advanced they would know of a way of doing so... I don't know just my thoughts.

Where in the bible does it talk about this crystal weapon that you're referring to? I've never heard of such a thing, though I sure haven't read the whole bible.

Total conversion of matter? I suppose it would take massive amounts of energy to reorganize the atoms in a body into a computer monitor. This energy could potentially come from a fusion process used on the same types of materials.

I dunno, I find this unlikely. I think that there are tons of other explanations for the absence of evidence of ancient civilizations. I think that a global natural catastrophe is the most plausible. The pyramids and whatnot would still stand if the earth froze or burned, probably.

Zip

If thats at all possible the matter conversion thing i mean. There is always some body who wants there legacy remembered on Earth so they would leave something maybe thats what the hall of records could be.

Hall of records... Hmph.

There is more information in the extant tombs and structures of ancient Egypt than could be contained in a secret little 6'x9' chamber... Hall of records... We have their religious and political records, what more do we need? Same thing with the Mayans (before the massive book burning took place in the 1800's or whatever).

Why seek hidden legends when there is so much reality in plain sight? After consuming all of the available knowledge on Egypt and other ancient cultures, then, if yer bored and have time to kill, ya can waste time hunting the alleged informational treasures guessed at in some rackpot's "psychic" prediction.

IMO.

Zip

Originally posted by superduperman
I've been thinking about this for a while. If a civilization reaches a point in their development where they make use of total convertion of matter, then it would be highly likely to assume that they would leave no evidence that they ever existed, unless of course they wished to be later discovered after their extinction. (its also possible that they never became extinct, and just left). This is because if a race could use total convertion of matter, then all materials that they ever use would be 100% recylable and 100% efficent. Which means anything that they don't convert into something else would be biodegradable, and thus we would never find evidence of it

There would still be areas with anomolous isotope ratios for some products. But, if you are saying that no one could find evidence of a civilization that can magically or otherwise erase all evidence of its, existance, well, sure, that kind of civ wouldn't have any evidence.

Even their dead could be converted into anything, cups, cars, building materials, anything!

Even though this is hypothetical, imagine the possibility that such a race
How can one hypothesise on any of the characteristics of such a society? Other than supposing that its possible that they could've existed, what else can possibly be said about them?

its a possible explanaition of atlantis.

So you are proposing that atlantis, which plato said lived on a continent that sunk and had colonies throughout europe and engaged in wars and occupied cities and traded extensively, you are saying that no one can find the evidence for it because the atlanteans got rid of all the evidence? There should still be what they traded with other nations, and there should still be historical records from them indicatin its existence, or patterns in the archaeological records that show their influence, even on nations that they don't directly control.

mistyrain
Also something my mom always considered mentioned in the bible (which she thinks was a weapon) there was this great crystal maybe the use of this weapon sank atlantis.

What does the bible have to do with atlantis?

I'll hunt it down I know my mom knows where it's at. I'll let you know as soon as i talk to her.

We are a fairly advanced society and the buildings we put up today are not designed to last forever. maybe a few decades, but that's it. When a group of people become "advanced" they really only change their survival rate. Developements in medicine, tool craft, weaponry, all that stuff is designed to aid (to the point of replacement in some cases), our original hunt and gather instinct . As a group becomes more assured of it's survival the next highest prioritized drive becomes most important. In our case it would be procreation. This new agenda would spark a population explosion that would require city planners ( or whatever they were called ) to divert the massive workforce needed for building huge monuments to projects catering to an expanding population. I dunno - it's just a thought.

Just what ARE "Ancient Advanced Civilizations"?

I guess it would depend on how you defined "ancient" and "advanced".

I'd consider "ancient" as anything from the end of the Pleistocene forward. Certainly the fossil record is fairly clear throughout the Cenozoic era (from the end of the Dinosaurs to today, and we certainly haven's seen the fossil of any critter smart enough to build an "advanced Civilization" (I'm assuming you don't consider coral reefs or termite-cities as "advanced civilizations").

Given that most people consider large crania a necessity of civilization-builders (you have to be smart if you want to advance), the only critters we've seen any record of which has that cranial capacity and manipulator expertise is old H. sapiens.

Since we haven't been around that long, any ancient civilization can't be much more than 500,000 years old, which means it's too young to have all its traces wiped out by tectonic subduction, which means that some remnant of it remains, either buried very shallowly on the land or on the floor of the sea. (I doubt it's under the ice anywhere, since Antarctica, I believe, has been shrouded in ice for longer than humans have existed.)

I can�t think of too many places on land which are capable of hiding an advanced civilization, which I assume incorporates cities. Admittedly, new Mayan ruins are being discovered in Mesoamerica as we speak, but they�re typically additional Classical and post-Classical city-states of the same basic culture, not a brand new one.

Sunken-in-the-ocean ancient /advanced civilizations? Possibly, but where? Atlantis, of course, is a popular belief, but the whole thing is based on one person�s story, and Plato�s �Timaeus� and �Critia� seem to be more about the destruction of Thera a thousand years earlier than anything else. But whether proto-Atlantis was Minoan or Egyptian, no trace of it has been found.

Sure, every couple of years someone comes out and sells a book that claims This Time, No Lie, We Really Found Atlantis And Here�s Our Evidence And Here�s Our Story Available At Amazon.Com For Only $29.95. Problem is, after a couple of years, the story goes away and another one on the other side of the world pops up and we�re still no closer to finding Atlantis that Plato himself was. The Might Temple Columns usually turn out to be natural-forming hexagonal columns of basalt, and the new side-scan sonar pictures never seem to get made and the Ancient Spark Plug mysteriously disappears from this guy who had it, and � but you can see where this is going.

The closest thing I can think of to a real, honest-to-Ghod sunken civilization is some fascinating research going on now at about 100 feet depth on the north shores of the Black Sea. Here�s what Amazon.com says about a great book I bought last year, entitled �Noah�s Flood -- The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History� by Walter Pitman and William Ryan:

�The Deluge of Noah has long been one of the points of tension between geology and Christianity. Scientific diluvianism--the theory that the earth's history was shaped by a universal flood--collapsed in the early 19th century, well before Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. Since that time, scientists and historians have assumed that the flood story derived from local events in Mesopotamia.�

�In 1997, geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan proposed the first truly novel interpretation of the flood in over 150 years. Their studies of sediments in the Black Sea convinced them that the body had been a freshwater lake until about 5600 B.C. When the rising waters of the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus, "ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls."

�With great intellectual daring, Pitman and Ryan have moved outside of their academic niche to suggest that this event had enormous consequences for human history. They marshal evidence from archeology, mythology, linguistics, and agriculture to describe a flood-driven diaspora of early farmers. Subsets of these people became (variously) proto-Indo-Europeans, Sumerians, Beaker People, Vincas, Tocharians--the founders of the early cultures of Europe and western Asia.�

To me, this is a real and exciting story -- and it has all the advantages of actually being true. If you like ancient civilizations -- especially if that �civilization� has affected ours -- you should really read Pitman and Ryan. It�s the real thing.


[edit on 28-9-2004 by Off_The_Street]

Originally posted by hooligan13
We are a fairly advanced society and the buildings we put up today are not designed to last forever. maybe a few decades, but that's it. When a group of people become "advanced" they really only change their survival rate. Developements in medicine, tool craft, weaponry, all that stuff is designed to aid (to the point of replacement in some cases), our original hunt and gather instinct . As a group becomes more assured of it's survival the next highest prioritized drive becomes most important. In our case it would be procreation. This new agenda would spark a population explosion that would require city planners ( or whatever they were called ) to divert the massive workforce needed for building huge monuments to projects catering to an expanding population. I dunno - it's just a thought.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs applies to both individuals and civilizations, really:

www.ship.edu...

The physiological needs
The safety and security needs
The love and belonging needs
The esteem needs

Zip

[edit on 28-9-2004 by Zipdot]

I am starting a new post about the great crystal. Whatever I find I'll post there...

I have an anthropoligy degree, and you said it all more succinctly than I could have. Yes the Black Sea investigation is incredible. My degree is 15 years old, and I already feel obsolete . . .

As far as prehistoric civilizations go, it depends on what you're looking for. Most of the evidence we are leaving behind is actual impressive for what I will call "scale" rather than "splendor." For instance, we are leaving great stratigraphic columns in our trash heaps. There's a trash heap outside of every city, at least as large as the city. What a boon for future archaeologists.

On the other hand, trying to find fossils of Australopithecus (ancient predecessors of humans) is extremely difficult. The entire population may have been only a 100,000 individuals at any one time. Without scale, there isn't much of a fossil record.

By "splendor," I am thinking of impressive monuments. Pyramids. Stonehenge. The great wall. Most skyscrapers wont stand with their steel beams rusting, which will happen within 200 years. And the glass will shatter if not constantly maintained. Same for wooden houses. Cement slabs will crack and decay in only a few hundred years, especially in acid rain.

our civ probably won't leave much behind if there is a near-extinction event. The biggest monuments we make, Interstate highway cloverleafs, will collapse without maintainence in less than a hundred years.

Picture a near-extinction event. Say a mega-megaton detonation of Iran or N. Korea's experimental reactor, followed by a "china syndrome" where the radioactive core superheats and melts through the earth's crust down until it hits the water table. The following explosion blows radioactive water into the atmosphere, where jet streams carry the fallout globally.

Most wildlife and humans die. Picture, 10 years later, a global population of a million people. They survive by salvaging parts and weapons from the remains of our civilization. Their descendants could get by for several centuries by pulling down old utility lines for their copper, melting down old autos for steel, and burning asphalt for fuel. To survive, they scavenge, and thus systematically remove the most obvious evidence of their ancestors.

But eventually, there are no more cars to melt down, no more power lines or barbed-wire fences to scrap. What then? Most of the metals are no longer in mines; most of the fossil fuels that were easy to exploit were taken by us.

If this went on for thousands of years, I could see how almost all evidence of us could be erased. At least until our descendents re-discovered high technology with which to seek out our remains: radar, deep-sea equip. etc.

Then, they'd find things analogous to the Mesopotamian battery, the Antikithera device, etc.

Suddenly, after disbelieving "ancient" myths of the Umurkins and their empire, they come face to face with evidence of an ancient civilization superior even to their own . . .

Maybe they'd find the evidence in the Black Sea?

Dude. Like. Totally Planet-of-the-Apes.

I get to be Charleton Heston.

Originally posted by dr_strangecraft
Picture a near-extinction event. Say a mega-megaton detonation of Iran or N. Korea's experimental reactor, followed by a "china syndrome" where the radioactive core superheats and melts through the earth's crust down until it hits the water table. The following explosion blows radioactive water into the atmosphere, where jet streams carry the fallout globally.

Most wildlife and humans die. Picture, 10 years later, a global population of a million people. They survive by salvaging parts and weapons from the remains of our civilization. Their descendants could get by for several centuries by pulling down old utility lines for their copper, melting down old autos for steel, and burning asphalt for fuel. To survive, they scavenge, and thus systematically remove the most obvious evidence of their ancestors.

Great post!

You brought up a lot of very interesting and relevant ideas. Nice description of a post-armageddon existence - survival by devouring whatever is necessary to climb Maslow's hierarchy. The imagery you presented is quite clear.

I gave you a way above vote.

Zip

well, Zipdot, I've given this some thought.

I spent a while researching ancient references to "Atlantis" and have satisfied myself that it never existed. It was Plato's attempt at a morality tale, a precursor to the novel.

Edgar Cayce's (sic) prophecies, unlike his healing, have been an almost total wash. Atlantis was supposed to have surfaced in 1998, and a secret chamber under the pyramids was supposed to have opened then to show us the suppressed history of the world.

I HAVE read the whole Bible, and there's no Power Crystal OR mention of Atlantis.

I use the term prehistoric civilization for this topic. Prehistoric means before histories were written, or unremembered history. Civilization comes from the Latin root civitas, city. Cities have always been the definition of civilization. Though people like the Scythians, the Tocharians, etc., could be called civilized, having the wheel, metal working, astrology, and so on even though they didn't live in cities.

There have been a few shockers in the last hundred years of archaeology. The civilizations along the Indus river valley, places like Mohenjo Daro, had their own cities with running water, and heiroglyphic writing. They merely perished before Heroditus got to meet 'em. The Scythians were on an equal footing with Hellenistic civilization, till the Persians pushed them off the steppe. People like the Tocharians, causcasian inhabitants of NW China who used an indo-european languange with a Bramhic sylllable-alphabet, are so new to our knowledge that we are still not sure what to make of them.

Anyway.

There are only a couple of workable modern arguments for advanced prehistoric civilizations. By that I mean civilizations totally unconnected to history as we know it, who were advanced technically, and had a large population base, and existing BEFORE the development of towns in Sumer, Turkey and Israel around 8000 BC.

I wonder about some of Robert Schoch's claims for a prehistoric date for the sphinx. I don't agree with everything he says; on the other hand, his argument that historic Egyptian civilization merely inhabited the ruins of a former civ are exciting, and his 10,000 BC date fits in with the end of the Pliestocene, the end of Neatherthalensis, and coincidentally, the inundation of the Black Sea. Which is the other evidence for prehistoric civilization I find interesting.

Here's a link to a schoch site:

www.morien-institute.org...

About Mohenjo-Daro and the harrapan civilizations of the Indus:

www.harappa.com...

Here are pages about the Tocharians and Khazars:

www.free-definition.com...
www.free-definition.com...


History is actually more interesting than Cayce's Pseudoprophecies.

The Department of Energy uses solid granite engraved as markers for radioactive waste deposits. I found it interesting that the DOE would use the same Materials as so called stone age people to create markers to warn generations thousands of years from now of danger.

We are forgetting the oceans. There could have been highly developed cultures that sailed the great oceans, just like nomads travel in the desert. They could have built great constructions to mark their passing; Stonehenge, Pyramids, Teahuanacu, Monoliths on malta, and more spread out over the earth. They could have designed the monuments to mark time in the stars, so that they all fall on the same date, lets say 10,500 BCE, when they are aligned against the stars.
This would leave an irrefutable mark upon the earth, that thousands of years later humanity would know that this great culture traveled the Oceans, looked at the same stars, and left their calling card.

What, permanently, like in Water World? Huh, that's possible but stone and soil are quite pertinent ingredients for civilization building, let alone survival. Nomadic waterstriders that build temporary settlements? Doesn't that describe the Phoenicians? I dunno, I'm ignorant when it comes to Phoenicians - I better get a book.

Zip