A superchat was left recently for one of Ben’s Suspicious0bservers livestreams. I forget which livestream it was, since he does a lot of them, but I do remember it was from a band’s YouTube account:
Something to consider folks: you can’t avoid the truth of this becoming a myth, don’t try to hand down the truth. create a GOOD myth, that WILL last. Ps how high are the waters really getting? Enhance
What if there was a civilization, or a great number of civilizations before ours, on Earth, maybe they were human or human-like, that reached our level of scientific knowledge? If one those civilizations learned to correctly predict a worldwide disaster, they then might want to warn others that come after them what had happened. Perhaps as a warning, but maybe just to tell their story. Using a precise form of language would be the most efficient, but there’s no guarantee any future peoples would be able to translate it. It would make more sense if the survivors from that civilization made sure to create stories in simple language that can be passed down and “around” much more easily than a technical language. They would want to use elements that anyone on Earth could access: animals, the sun, trees, water, ice, the seasons, people themselves, their passions and peccadilloes, so that anyone could understand the basic story. This latter type of language, the “myth” language, would be more portable and “fungible” with words and concepts from another language. It would be wide and accessible where the former, technical language is deep and narrow. Besides simple pictographic imagery, like ones carved into stone or painted on cave walls, a mythical story might be the only way to make sure someone can communicate a truth as far down the years as possible.
As much as we presume about the past, we seem convinced that we are the most materially- and technologically-advanced peoples that have lived here. If you believe that we’re the best that we’ve been, or that our version of science is the only way we could know about the material universe, then next to nothing of what I said in this post is sensible.
4 Comments
Agreed; just because previous civilizations didn’t leave significant evidence of their science in the dirt doesn’t mean they didn’t have any. There’s all kinds of ways to approach knowledge of our world and universe; ours is just one.
You’d have to think, too, that after a disaster, the survivors wouldn’t have the same ways of recording as before the disaster. If humans suffer through one now, we might record things in a similar manner as those post survivors did.
There’s also the assumption that the Earth has been the same but gradually changing over time, with the same kinds of forces in play, but that’s a whole other story.
I always find it hilarious that people are so astonished over the actual technology of the past that they decide it must have been aliens. Humans could not have had creative minds outside our age.
That denial goes hand in hand, maybe too profoundly to really notice, with a lot of evolutionary theories and the gradualism of astrophysics, geology, etc. All of those ideas require enormous amounts of past time for their models to fit (some of) the observations. Our presumed material superiority, that we are the “latest and greatest,” in the long struggle for life to materially advance, is probably borne out of that.
On a side note, it’s interesting that “mythical” and “mythic” are both acceptable words. “Mythic” feels more right to me, though I instinctively went with “mythical.”