Are we too far advanced - too democratic - for the dark ages to occur again? If the Dark Ages happen again, are we guaranteed to get out of them?
Considering the availability of nuclear weapons and alarming notions of their use(to me), I would say this future has a high probability of occurance. In fact we might go all the way to late stone age. I personally think Homo-Sapians have been through this drama before.
It might sound like a quip, but these seem like dark ages to me. There are a lot of flashing lights, but let's look at what is worshiped: money, violent solution, supersitions - around plastic surgery, fame, diets, self-help books, and gene modification as some examples. I see a lot of the dystopian facets in that wonderful film BRAZIL arising and taking up more space all around us. We are shallow and will soon be able to move from psychotropic approaches to dulling emotions to genetic approaches to making us conform to an overstimulating empty society. I assume small pockets of deeper culture and humanity will survive (at least for a while) just as they did in the other Dark Ages.
You seem to have an uneducated fear of nukes. If all the nukes in the world were to be detonated over, say, the Middle East, it wouldn't knock out learning and knowledge in the USA or Russia or China. In fact, if we didn't hear it on the news, we probably wouldn't even know about it! Nagaski and Hiroshima didn't even have that kind of effect, the Stone Age, on Japan ....and it's just a little tiny island. Chernoble was touted as a horrible accident, yet the western world didn't even miss a step. Baron Max
When you say you suspect homosapiens have gone through this drama before, are you talking about nuclear war? We certainly don't live in the Dark Ages. Never before had man been able to visit outer space. This clearly is a watershed event proving that man has done something unique. Who was more shallow - us or the Romans before they fell?
This is for Baron... http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm THis describes - NON nuclear modern war effects....imagine global nuclear war.
Regarding my own open-mindedness(yes based on "pseudo-science" - sue me) Ancient nuclear war possibilities: http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1937.htm http://www.rense.com/general3/8000.htm
Re: Dark Age & maybe we can instead complain about the limits to hyperlinking here *209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:zOJwdd6ND3AJ:w w w.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail445.html+What+man+has+done+once+he+can+aspire+to.+At+least,+if+he+remembers+he+once+did+it.&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us says: Many of us do not know how to do many things. The set of things that humans can do is exponentially increasing, whereas our individual sets of skills only slowly or steadily increases. Therefore, if we are not already in our own presonal private dark age, then eventually we will all know so little that we will then collectively be in a Dark Age. * Note that I do not have enough posts to be able to link.
The better we learn to get along with each other the more likely we are to have an age of enlightenment.
Is nuclear war a massive threat today really? I mean the most likely nuclear scenario today is arguably a terrorist nuking, which wouldn't exactly spell doom for the whole world. I almost think a rogue-nanite scenario would be a more likely dark-age. Maybe even a sizable asteroid impact.
Also Consider these verses from the ancient Mahabharata: ...(it was) a single projectile Charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame As bright as the thousand suns Rose in all its splendour... ..it was an unknown weapon, An iron thunderbolt, A gigantic messenger of death, Which reduced to ashes The entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas. ..The corpses were so burned As to be unrecognisable. The hair and nails fell out; Pottery broke without apparent cause, And the birds turned white. After a few hours All foodstuffs were infected... ...to escape from this fire The soldiers threw themselves in streams To wash themselves and their equipment.24 In the way we traditionally view ancient history, it seems absolutely incredible that there was an atomic war approximately 10,000 years ago. And yet, of what else could the Mahabharata be speaking? Perhaps this is just a poetic way to describe cavemen clubbing each other to death; after all, that is what we are told the ancient past was like. Until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, modern mankind could not imagine any weapon as horrible and devastating as those described in the ancient Indian texts. Yet they very accurately described the effects of an atomic explosion. Radioactive poisoning will make hair and nails fall out. Immersing oneself in water gives some respite, though is not a cure. Interestingly, Manhattan Project chief scientist Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer was known to be familiar with ancient Sanskrit literature. In an interview conducted after he watched the first atomic test, he quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.' I suppose we all felt that way. When asked in an interview at Rochester University seven years after the Alamogordo nuclear test whether that was the first atomic bomb ever to be detonated, his reply was: Well, yes, in modern history.25" http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/ancatomicwar2.html
When was the Mahabharata written? Correct me if I am wrong, but there is no archeological evidence of any ancient civilization with technologies surpassing our own.
No ACCEPTED Evidence... The earliest known references to the Mahabharata and its core Bharata date back to the 6th-5th century BC. They most likely exhisted in some kind of previous form.
The Dark Ages only affected Europe, which by that time was only one half of Mesopotamian civilization. The other half (the Arabs) as well as the civilizations of India, China, Aztec and Inca were still going strong. (Egypt of course had been wiped out by the aforementioned Arabs.) Even at that, the Dark Ages did not plunge Europe into the Stone Age. Most of the key technologies that built civilization were retained because they were knowledge rather than artifacts. Agriculture, metallurgy, writing, sailing ships, stonemasonry, it would have been exceedingly difficult for even the Christian Church that was the architect of the Dark Ages to wipe out the memories of these building blocks of civilization. A war could destroy considerably more of our artifacts than even the Christians did in the New World or the Muslims did in Egypt, and it could set us back a few centuries. But it could not destroy the knowledge that got us here. As long as people remembered how to read and write, much of the total body of knowledge of humanity would be recorded again and organized, and used to rebuild civilization. Even if written language were somehow lost--a pretty far-fetched scenario--people would not lose the knowledge that animals can be domesticated and plants can be cultivated, allowing us to live in the permanent settlements that marked the end of the Stone Age. The earth would be covered with fragments of more advanced technology, giving us both hints and inspiration in learning how to duplicate it. We'd get here much more quickly the second time around. I think the prospect of a world-wide decline of civilization is the down-side of the inevitable merging of humanity into a single global civilization. Even today, if the West self-destructs, China and India will go on without us. (Some say that is exactly what's happening. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) On the other hand, the uniting of humanity will greatly reduce the risk of the wars that keep threatening to destroy civilization.
Nice post, Fraggle Rocker. I imagine a second industrial revolution would be a bit harder since many of the most easily accessible fossil fuel deposits are exhausted.
Hm. By what I've heard, most old supercultures knew how to do several amazing things, but never figured it out chemically like we modernly do. They just happened to figure out cool stuff when messing around with random crap, and sometimes associated it with possible gods they figured might kinda exist. So maybe someone did cause an explosion, maybe even a nuclear one, without knowing what he'd done or how he'd done it. This has been a vague, unlikely theory following a doubtable suggestion of nuclear warfare in the distant past.
