Im my limited experience most scientists love finding out something new
and are very aware of the peaks and troughs of human intellectual growth.
The renaissance was pretty much started by reading old manuscripts that were stored in islamic libraries kept safe from the christian dogma.
'the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr' as some bloke once said.
As a species we've come very close to extinction at times.
70,000 years ago it's though that when the Toba supervolcano went tits up the environmental change reduced human numbers dropped down to around 15,000.
There's also old maps of the antarctic that show the the land mass under the ice which were copied from earlier maps that have not survived.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 10 May 2012, 8:48,
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You know I can't help but feel that although we live in really rather wonderful times right now for discovery and technical advancements
We also are stil quite socially and psychologically held back thanks to the continuing influence of judao/Christian dogma and muslamic ray guns, the biggest barriers to world wide happiness and war free days being this whole concept of sin and pleasurable indulgences being shameful, and in particular that those that do such things more so than ourselves deserve some kind of harsh intervention or punishment, not to mention this clueless concept that using scientific knowledge to advance us further into the role of being our own gods/masters and attempting never to have to let 'acts of god' control our destiny is somehow the very worst sin of all. We REALLY need to get rid of that shit for good someday.
Happily what with the internets n global communications n all, I think it can't be too long before we all start pulling together and learning the true nature of man and the right balance between work and play, sans politics, sin, n dogma.
Feckin hope so anyway...
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..wil, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:26,
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For me religion is a symptom of the nature of the human mind.
We crave answers to questions and sometimes those answers arn't available yet.
I'ld be more worried if when people looked up at the accent night sky and saw the vast majesty of the universe didn't try and fill in the gaps.
Newton and Darwin were religeous and Einstein was an agnostic, and criticised atheism.
Religion is Lorem ipsum for the soul.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:37,
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Agreed
The problem comes when those with blind faith decide we all need to be similarly blinded. Or else.
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..wil, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:42,
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There's also shit-loads of lost knowledge that's being rediscovered
Events like the fire in the Great Library at Alexandria or the catastrophic collapse of civilizations like Crete or the Mayans means we're often having to make assumptions based on the evidence available.
When new evidence turns up like this mechanism it gets studied very carefully and the assumptions will be re-assessed. Saying that historians are thrown by something they didn't know is a bit ridiculous as how could they possibly know?
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:27,
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Indeed, the trick is not to leap to 'chariots of the gods' level on asumptions every time you find something unexpected.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:40,
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Ha ha, true true
but we do still seem to generally have this silly idea that mans advancement into the modern era of technical wonders was a slow and steady rise, from living like animals thru to stone tools, metals, mechanics, electronics, but anything older than a few thousand years and often pretty much nothing continues to exist for us to see or measure in any form, it's just gone, and yet if you took any child from back then and raised it as one of us it would almost certainly be capable of understanding and coping with our modern world quite normally, so there's every possibility we've been here before, not to this present global scale, but when scientists say stuff like 'Clocks were invented on this exact date by this man and computers on this exact date by this bloke here!' it does seem a bit, well, over simplified, like we're rewriting history to suit us.
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..wil, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:40,
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So you're saying it's likely that...
The Atlantians were a highly advanced civilisation, who potentially had advanced technology and an active space programme. But a war began. A war between the Atlantians and a less civilised race of humans, almost neandathals, who possessed none of their tech and were jealous. The war raged for hundreds of years and it seemed like no end was in sight. So the Atlantians, in their infinite wisdom, built spacecrafts capable of interstellar flight and fled the Earth to colonise a better world, but not before destroying all traces of their knowledge and technology by sinking their fair city into the ocean, so the jealous neanderthal race could not use their technology to advance themselves quick enough to follow them?
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Fadgebadger (1 like), Thu 10 May 2012, 10:12,
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I think you've got the beginnings of a book there
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Thu 10 May 2012, 10:37,
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Everyone's got a novel in them
It's slightly uncomfortable when I sit though...
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Fadgebadger (1 like), Thu 10 May 2012, 10:39,
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and the big hole leading to the center of the earth where the Nazi's are hiding with the dinosaurs and giant ants
(, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:55, Share, Reply)