Ancient Peru (and for that matter Bolivia) was more advanced than ancient Greece in textiles, food production and storage, irrigation, stone masonry, fishing, astronomy and a host of other nice little things that make being a human more fun. The population of the "new" world was 5 times greater than the entire population of the rest of the world at the time of Jebus. In fact, the "new" world is actually the "old" world. But thanks to the ahole spanish much of the knowledge has been lost.

Dr.Zoidberg

I haven't had the pleasure of reading your posts before.

All I have to say is..

*takes a huge breath*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

thanks for posting this, subby, never heard of this machine before.

canyoneer
One could also make the argument that modern industrial man is, on the average, less intelligent than his forbears.

I don't know about that. However, today we might have better geniuses. More people means more chances to deviate from the average.

Kurst_Putz

at least one person knew of astronomy at that time. (more than we thought they knew).

Eh, I think many people knew of Astronomy at the time. The average person most likely had a greater understanding of the constellations compared to today. Most people I know cannot find the north star or recognize a planet with the naked eye, but back then (with no tv or artificial lights at night) I bet the night sky was THE show to watch, and such knowledge was pretty common.

The amazing thing about this device is the mechanical knowledge, not the astronomical.

Sloth-Man

Yeah, and we'd know alot more about how smart they really were if the library of Alexandria didn't burn down :(

The greatest avoidable tragedy in human history, IMHO. :(

/how depressing

Senescent Dawn

There is no obvious solution to the problem posed by long-term exposure to ionizing radiation. One is tempted to conclude that interplanetary and interstellar distances represent an effective quarantine. Homo sapiens did not evolve in such an environment, and there is no reason to assume Homo sapiens can survive and thrive in such an environment, just as there is no reason to believe that dolphins can survive and thrive in the Mojave Desert. In fact, dolphins have a much better chance of adapting to the Mojave Desert than we have adapting to outer space.

"Ancient Peru (and for that matter Bolivia) was more advanced than ancient Greece in textiles, food production and storage, irrigation, stone masonry, fishing, astronomy and a host of other nice little things that make being a human more fun."

Well, ancient Peru was about 2,000 years less ancient than ancient Greece.

"The population of the 'new' world was 5 times greater than the entire population of the rest of the world at the time of Jebus."

Say what? I don't think anyone has more than a half-educated guess what the population of the world was in 1 A.D., but your figure sounds like nonsense.

In many ways, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Humans still depend for their survival on food crops and animals domesticated in prehistory. Irrigation and civilization were invented before writing.

Contemporary humans look at helicopters and computers and chemistry and fancy themselves more intelligent than the persons who first harnessed fire, made stone tools, invented the wheel, fashioned the first boat, domesticated the horse, invented the concept of numbers, drew the first map, or discovered how to mix copper and tin to make bronze tools.

Well, that's nothing more than vanity. In fact, I'd say the early inventors and innovators were more intelligent than we are, having no precedents to draw upon.

They didn't have precedents but they had much more time. Nowadays inventions comes at much faster rate.

I don't think current or ancient people are dumber

/still waiting for your "end of civilization in 3.. 2.. 1.." bit

Okay there were probably worse things that we've done to each other as a species, but it's still pretty darn depressing.

/edits are fun!

2006-11-30 10:09:52 AM Senescent Dawn

Eh, it's easy to get carried away in fantasies. Personally I doubt that space travel will ever be affordable, useful, or commonplace. The efforts and distances involved are too great, finding a planet hospitable to human life is a tremendously Sisyphean challenge that we may never be up to.


Definitely something to consider. Unless we find an Earth-like planet, there would have to be some major terraforming. And from what we can see of how quick a shift in our own environment can flip from one extreme to another (on a geologic scale) I shudder to think of how difficult it would be to plan out a major ecological shift and then enact and control it.

Then would be the dilemma that if we did discover another Earth-like planet, what are the chances that life already exists on this planet. Hell, morals aside, even if it were a 'primitive life' bacterial infection (or that world's analogue) would be a pretty scary obstacle.

It makes a lot of sense that the ancients would build fantastic machines to carefully track the stars and planets. Not necessarily because they needed it for navigation (they tended to sail close to shore in those days) but because they'd need to understand the best time to plant the crops. Plant too early and a frost would kill them, you starve. Plant too late and your harvest is cut, you starve.

The one thing all ancient cultures have in common was a great understanding of the sky.

Today we can barely make out stars anymore, too much light.

Yeah, that's true. And even if we developed a kind of Event-Horizon style wormhole machine, there would still be a lot of impracticalities involved. What exactly would we be looking for? I get the idea that when people talk about colonizing space they're expecting us to find Dagobah out there.

2006-11-30 10:22:53 AM canyoneer [TotalFark]

Senescent Dawn

There is no obvious solution to the problem posed by long-term exposure to ionizing radiation. One is tempted to conclude that interplanetary and interstellar distances represent an effective quarantine. Homo sapiens did not evolve in such an environment, and there is no reason to assume Homo sapiens can survive and thrive in such an environment, just as there is no reason to believe that dolphins can survive and thrive in the Mojave Desert. In fact, dolphins have a much better chance of adapting to the Mojave Desert than we have adapting to outer space.

Even with some sort of natural-selection program, who would be the first person that would want to have their organs exposed to radiation and then see if they can produce viable offspring.


Scientist: Ok, we need volunteers to expose your testicles to radiation in doses normally only seen in space.
Scientist: Anyone? Beuller?

MrOxen: I haven't had the pleasure of reading your posts before.

All I have to say is..

*takes a huge breath*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

stay out of the gun thread then! Not as ha ha over there. More hrmmm.

/should have been sound asleep 2 hours ago. Got the apres night-shift goofies.

Perhaps humans might not one day sit is a large ship and go to other worlds. But there is nothing stopping us from creating semi-intellegent seed ships to carry our species to all ends of the universe.

We are, afterall, a species of wankers.

Sure we can't survive in a radiation bath, but we can invent technology. Maybe someone will build a better box.

Keypusher - obviously you haven't read much about ancient South America. I suggest as a beginning the book "1491" by Charles C. Mann. Your statement is 100% inaccurate. You are relying on stuff written by Europeans 50 years ago. Archaeologists have discovered AMAZING things since then. In fact, in the last 30 years the ENTIRE history book of the "new" world has been effectively rewritten to void the silly raciest notions that have permeated our history books for hundreds of years.

And, in fact, we can, fairly accurately, show the number of peoples that were living here pre-Columbian.

The single thing you a have missed here also is that Columbus was not the first "old" world person to "discover" the "new" world. He was just the first one to go there and come back and live to tell about it.

Hope your lips didn't get too tired reading this.

The team's reconstruction also involves 37 gear wheels, seven of which are hypothetical.

There was also a hypothetical chip in it packed with 400,000 tiny hypothetical transistors.



ThatDevGuy

There are 2000 characters printed on it.

I want to know what it SAYS.

Probably one of those licensing agreements you have to agree to before using software, with a clause about "no reverse engineering or the curse of the Gorgon will be on you."

Uh oh.

dhudd


Keypusher - obviously you haven't read much about ancient South America. I suggest as a beginning the book "1491" by Charles C. Mann. Your statement is 100% inaccurate. You are relying on stuff written by Europeans 50 years ago. Archaeologists have discovered AMAZING things since then. In fact, in the last 30 years the ENTIRE history book of the "new" world has been effectively rewritten to void the silly raciest notions that have permeated our history books for hundreds of years.

And, in fact, we can, fairly accurately, show the number of peoples that were living here pre-Columbian.

The single thing you a have missed here also is that Columbus was not the first "old" world person to "discover" the "new" world. He was just the first one to go there and come back and live to tell about it.

Hope your lips didn't get too tired reading this.


I'm sorry dude, but you sound like you wandered into a tourist's bookstore in Cuzco, and walked out believing the hippiest shiat you could find. Around the time of the ancient greeks, in South America the Moche (mochicha) were the only thing close, a pretty cool, porn-minded and smart bunch, but nowhere near the skill of the ancient greeks.

The people you are probably reffering to, the inca were a fly by night bunch of dolts, and were so much behind their european counterparts at the time it's not even funny.

As for the demographics at the time... Got proof?

Given the importance of goood nutrition in terms of the development of the brain, it strikes me as definitely possible that people in the past were -- on the average -- less intelligent than we are. The potential was there, it was having some trouble being realized.

Of course, they were also probably much more 'practical' in nature than we are.

hudsucker proxy - no such people as the Inca - Inka, yes. You are clueless boy. I'm guessing you've been spending too much time in the "coffee" houses. I've suggested a book for you to read that is described by the NY Times as "Marvelous, a sweeping portrait of human life in the Amreicas before the arrival of of Columbus". And your response is a bunch of drivel from the fingers of someone who obviously has no knowledge at all of ancient Peru.

When you get out of the 8th grade (or whatever they call that in Holland) you will have a better grasp of ancient history.

And for the record, I have a Masters Degree in history from a very nice University.

And you should also know that the world is not 6,000 years old and it also is not flat. Man will build flying machines someday as well. Hope you enjoy that janitors life of yours.

Why advances in science and math pretty much stopped after the rise of the Roman Empire, actually regressed after its fall, and did not continue to advance until the Renaissance?

Petr Beckman, in his A History of Pi, pretty much flat out blames the Romans. "Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists, and copying their technical know-how, which the Roman's barren society was rarely able to improve on."

The adoption of Christianity turned the Roman military gangster state in to a theocratic gangster state. When the Western Empire was destroyed by the invading barbarians, all that remained was the theocracy. Science went into a coma for a thousand years in Europe.

jman11jman

Just because they hadn't invenvted 0 yet doesn't mean they wouldn't have eventually. To surmise they would have constructed all this other stuff without inventing 0 is pretty silly. For example, calculus could not arise without a clear understanding of zero. It is very difficult to condify the idea of an infinitesimal and approximation, without having the smallest of all things.

Study Archimedes [pops] much? He not only developed the "method of exhaustion" (infinitesimals), he also developed techniques for reasoning about infinite sets [pops].

dhudd

Here is a link to Mann's article in the Atlantic Monthly that preceded his book. It's also titled 1491. Perhaps you could show me where it says the population of the Americas was five times that of the rest of the world combined in the time of Jesus?

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/Population.html

Who knew the Inca had fanboiz?

savage_world

On what do you base the assumption that humans, on average, were not as well nourished in the past? The quality of nutrition is determined more by socio-economic class than by era.

dhudd


hudsucker proxy - no such people as the Inca - Inka, yes. You are clueless boy. I'm guessing you've been spending too much time in the "coffee" houses. I've suggested a book for you to read that is described by the NY Times as "Marvelous, a sweeping portrait of human life in the Amreicas before the arrival of of Columbus". And your response is a bunch of drivel from the fingers of someone who obviously has no knowledge at all of ancient Peru.

The InKa eh? That's cool, the way they apparentely not only wrote aymara in our alphabet, but they had a distinct preference for k's above c's.

Thanks for your added times book-recommendation quote, it makes your coffee-house remark all the more pot and kettle. However I do not tend to read complete works of non-fiction and then a week later respond to the reccomenders posts on fark. It never seems to work.


When you get out of the 8th grade (or whatever they call that in Holland) you will have a better grasp of ancient history.

Mmmm. I see what you did there.


And for the record, I have a Masters Degree in history from a very naymaraice University.

so you must be getting a real kick out of my replies.

And you should also know that the world is not 6,000 years old and it also is not flat. Man will build flying machines someday as well. Hope you enjoy that janitors life of yours.

Your straw men are well, some of the worst I've encountered on fark. try boy, at least try...

As for the janitor's job, I thought you said you were the one with with a history degree...

What do the 2,000 characters on the machine say? That's an easy one: "System memory is low."

As for the stifling of technology by the ancients: the Romans weren't in much of a hurry to innovate. Once the Empire got to a certain size, it was more about dealing with those damn Germans than finding new cool machines.

For that matter, the Roman Empire had many problems that sound oddly familiar today: official corruption, unproductive taxation rates, a political class more concerned with scheming than with the common good, and an apparently irresistible urge on the part of the government to tinker with wage/price controls, sumptuary laws and other facets of the daily lives of citizens.

/What's that noise? Sounds like hoofbeats....

You must hand it to the Euros of the 15c CE, they put big guns on a ship. That gave them quite the leg up over everyone else!

I recently read a book on ancient math, in reference to infinity. They would have done better had they had a better method of writing down numbers, and if the math of the time wasn't geometry based.

Nice try hudsucker, but you fail miserably. I understand, however, that considering the time you have been drunk for a couple of hours so I excuse your ignorant rant.

I realize, howver, that it was way to much to ask of you to actually read a book on the subject instead of believing 50 year old history lessons.

I also understand why your country is completely farked as far as dealing with the Islam thing, judging from the close-mindedness that here in the real world we describe as being "so narrow minded a flea can sit on the bridge of your nose and drink of out both eyeballs at the same time."

I'd emplor you to read the book but its not an easy read for someone with a room temperature IQ like yours.

You are an ignorant pissant boy.

dhudd: I'd emplor

You are an ignorant pissant boy.,


What was that about those in glass houses not throwing stones ?

dhudd


Nice try hudsucker, but you fail miserably. I understand, however, that considering the time you have been drunk for a couple of hours so I excuse your ignorant rant.

/scanning for arguments
//no arguments found

I realize, howver, that it was way to much to ask of you to actually read a book on the subject instead of believing 50 year old history lessons.

please explain to me the innards of this book of yours. Is it the only one you have ever read? You seem so awfully proud of it, and yet so secretive about it's contents.
How does it prove me wrong in how the incas were a fly by night bunch of yahoos already falling apart when the spanish came?

How does it prove me wrong on the moche being a less advanced culture than the greeks, as the caral were less developed than the egyptians?

Arguments boy, are the key to an argument. Not saying you have a degree and telling people that a book exists.


I also understand why your country is completely farked as far as dealing with the Islam thing, judging from the close-mindedness that here in the real world we describe as being "so narrow minded a flea can sit on the bridge of your nose and drink of out both eyeballs at the same time."

/scanning for arguments
//none found...
However I like the fact that in your "real world" people are very fond of overly contrived analogyies.


I'd emplor you to read the book but its not an easy read for someone with a room temperature IQ like yours.

I will perhaps read this book of yours, although you being the one reccomending it is slightly off putting, like a screaming homeless drunkard in the street, who has just shiat himself, telling me which cookery equipment I should buy.

You are an ignorant pissant boy.

manners, please!

canyoneer

On what do you base the assumption that humans, on average, were not as well nourished in the past? The quality of nutrition is determined more by socio-economic class than by era.

That's a big subject with a lot of twists and turns. For one thing, 'primitive' hunter-gatherer populations were actually usually better off than 'civilized' folk. And occasionally you were safer from starvation if you were rural poor rather than an urban craftsmen.

In terms of physiology, you can look at things like height/weight ratios among pre-modern populations. Archaeologically, there are also a number of indicators of so-called 'nutritional stress' that can be found within human bone samples. Also, the historical record indicates that 'lean years' were a lot more common just a couple of centuries ago.

Of course, as you indicate, the upper socio-economic classes are always at an advantage. But the modern development of a middle class has blurred the once hard lines between the rich and poor -- and resulted in a very large population (both in absolute numbers and percentage-of-population terms) that has never experienced starvation. But that's a relatively recent development in human history.

Budz - yes, you are correct. My spelling has gone way down hill since the invention of the spell checker and I don't bother spell-checking stuff here in farkland. However, the fact remains that hudsucker is an ignorant pissant when it comes to knowledge of the ancient Americas.

dhudd: Budz - yes, you are correct.


Wow i`m marking that one on the calendar, no one on Fark has ever said that to me before. Thanks for making my day ;)

dhudd


However, the fact remains that hudsucker is an ignorant pissant when it comes to knowledge of the ancient Americas.

Such a rude little boy...

/And still no arguments to back it up, which is what pains me most...

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a month of Sundays. Thanks for the extra links too.

My nutty cousin tries to tell me that space aliens built the pryamids, etc. It's plain that the ancients were just as sophiticated as we are at our best. At our worst we are below snakes.

Moveable type and scientific method and the enlightenment surely were the means to push us forward, but it could not have been done without the foundations peoples like the Greeks laid down in math and philosophy.

We are recipients of a lot of ingenuity on the part of a lot of people throughout the ages.

I'm just a mediocre person taking up space, but maybe some offspring of mine will do something cool.

I do catalog rare books in a research library. Perhaps I'm not a total waste of space :-)

hudsucker - just read the frigging book. Hell, I'd be happy if you just read the various aclaims and the number of very well respected newspapers who described it as "The book of the year". Also, the author is a very well respected writer who writes for, among others, Science and The Atlantic Monthly. Your description of the Cuzco/hippie thing reveals to me that you are a right wing idiot, since Nazi is now not considered an acceptable description of your ilk here on fark.

savage_world

All true, but as always, I like to remind everyone that the archaeological record is fragmentary and statistically tiny. We have no data for 99.99999999% of all the people who ever lived. Drawing broad conclusions about relative nutrition levels (and extrapolating intelligence therefrom) over time and space is iffy, IMO. There are many variables we have no way of calculating or even considering.

For example, we know Europe experienced frequent famines during the past 1,000 years, yet it produced astounding "geniuses" like Michelangelo and Copernicus and Kepler and Newton at the same time. What general conclusions can be drawn from that?

Hunter-gatherers regularly experienced hunger...their routine diets could aptly be described as "feast-and famine," yet some among them created the Folsom Point, learned to manipulate fire, and painted masterpieces of rock and cave art.

Maybe the mental derangement associated with starvation counter-intuitively spurred innovation. We don't know. We do know that "primitives" used naturally-occurring alkaloid poisons in their survival strategies, and we know that altered mental states can lead to creativity.

dhudd

I didn't read the book, but I did read Mann's 2002 Atlantic Monthly article, also titled "1491." (url above, I don't know how to link.) Very interesting. But nowhere does he say, much less suggest, that the population of the Americas was five times that of the rest of the world in 1 A.D. (or 1 C.E. if you like that better). He quotes one author suggesting that the population of the Americas in 1491 was higher than that of Europe...not exactly the same thing. Did you read Mann's book, or did you just make that statistic up?

Inka?

Is is now Keltic?

I wasn't aware of the change in spelling. i suppose that makes me a total dunke.

dhudd


hudsucker - just read the frigging book.

Only if you promise to read a few more yourself. One book is simply a starting point, not the truth...


Hell, I'd be happy if you just read the various aclaims and the number of very well respected newspapers who described it as "The book of the year". Also, the author is a very well respected writer who writes for, among others, Science and The Atlantic Monthly.

Wow, he wrote for the atlantic monthly?! His words are gospel! Now I'm surely convinced that a wheel-less civilisation is true perfection and we will not come close to their spiritual knowledge of pachamama!!!


Your description of the Cuzco/hippie thing reveals to me that you are a right wing idiot,

"How did you deduce all this, my dear dhudd?
Elementary my dear watson..."
(an excerpt from "Sherlock Holmes starts talking out of his farking ass")

I worked in Cuzco a few years ago, and I honestly and sadly believe that the spiritual hippies are killing the indigenous culture, as they do not want to know anything of the real history and culture, but simply want to be spoonfed mindless drivel about inca spirituality, pachamama and tumi's. Poor as they are, the locals comply...

since Nazi is now not considered an acceptable description of your ilk here on fark

I have now incurred many, many insults from you, whilst I have only tried to bring you arguments and asked you for similar... and I am wondering.. how old are you?