A few years back I mentioned that the Germans had recently finished a new destroyer for their Navy but when they launched it – put it in the water for the first time – they found it has a permanent list. That is, for you land lubbers, she was tilted to one side…I can’t recall exactly but it was significant: like eight degrees or some such. This was the Germans. The people who are superb engineers and workers. Except, maybe they’re not any longer?
That incident crystalized out for me that we do have a serious problem in the world – people just aren’t as good at things as they used to be. It isn’t just the Krauts! Remember, we tried to send up a new space ship to the space station and we couldn’t bring the crew back down because of a design flaw in the capsule. We were essentially doing no more on that mission than we did with Gemini in the 1960’s and it was a total fail. That bridge in Baltimore hasn’t even started the rebuild after it was crashed into by a merchant ship…which apparently didn’t have enough seamanship aboard to avoid a big ol’ bridge right in front of them. See where I’m going here?
A few days ago I was among a large group of mostly young people (I was the oldest there by far) and they were engaged in a serious talk about zodiac signs and how important they are. A few days after that, same thing with people at the grocery store…just happily chatting away about utter drivel as if it is important.
And then this morning at Mass I saw a woman wearing a mask.
My friends, we are in a very bad place right now.
Education is becoming non-existent. Superstition is becoming rampant. Basic skills are declining. This has happened before! Constantine won supremacy in the Roman Empire at the Battle of the Milvan Bridge in 312 and the Roman Senate commission the Arch of Constantine in Rome to celebrate this fact. It wasn’t at all the first triumphal arch erected…others had been built for Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius but here’s the thing: the decorative art on Constantine’s arch was taken from the Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius’ arches. In other words, by 312, the Romans had already lost the artistic skills they had a bit more than a century earlier. I mean, take a look:
Here’s a contemporary statue of Caesar:
And here is one of Constantine:
Big difference in artistic ability here, guys. And it wasn’t restored for a long time. The Byzantines kept a lot of ancient Greek statues on display in Constantinople as a sort of freak show…they just didn’t know how the ancients had been able to create such realistic depictions of the human body. What I’m saying here is that we’re on the precipice of a new Dark Age. That we are very rapidly losing the ability to make things and right behind that loss is the destruction of the capacity to maintain. The Aqua Alexandrina was built early in the third century for Rome and ceased operations in the eighth century…not because Rome no longer needed water but because nobody in Rome knew how to repair it.
It can’t be emphasized enough how fragile civilization is. If it isn’t passed down it simply disappears and then had to be relearned all over again. If enough of it remains to provide instructions to later generations! The future might be guys consulting the stars as they head out to the well to get water because nobody knows how to fix a water pipe.
This can still be fixed! The Romans weren’t able to fix it because their enormous military and stifling bureaucracy preempted so much funding that there was nothing left for the transmission of basic knowledge. We’re not in that bad shape – but we’re going to have to get quite stern. We must start insisting that people learn…and insisting that they work. Some people simply need to know how to build a bridge, forge steel, run electric wiring…and in the end, nothing is more important than this. No great dreams you have will happen if you can’t use the roads, don’t have fresh water and can’t turn on the lights. In the end, if people won’t volunteer to do these things, they’ll have to be compelled. We’d be fools to let the modern world die because we felt it would be mean to make people work.
Blogs For Victory 
Mark, I think it was you a while back that mentioned that there may have been previous advanced civilizations that perished for the same reasons ours is likely to, and that evidence of them is probably under hundreds of feet of ocean. Sounds like a cycle centered around flawed humans. I’m at that point in my life where I don’t pay a lot of attention to stuff that’s beyond my control.
Mark, were you referring to Atlantis in the comment referenced by Spook? The Atlantis theme has always been either a morality tale—an example of the self destructiveness of human hubris—or simply dismissed as a fantasy by people who illustrate their intellectual superiority by automatically rejecting any new concept. There have been some intriguing hints of human construction now under water, as our ability to explore under the sea has advanced, and as other rejected concepts such as UFOs and USOs are now being officially recognized as, at the very least, phenomena that need to be investigated, maybe Atlantis will stop being a snide joke by the intelligentsia.
Not explicitly – but the universal “flood” narrative seems significant to me: that is, everywhere around the world you go, when you drill down to a people’s mythology, you get some version of a Great Flood. Christians and Jews know the actual meaning of it all but it is odd that everyone has it…or, not so odd, after all.
You think about the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and how it seems to be everywhere all at once…sure, it could have been mere happenstance of people in both Mesopotamia and the Yangtze valley figuring it at coincidentally…but, really? And then you remember it all started with the end of the last glacial maximum and that means a huge amount of its origins are now under seawater. It does leave open the possibility of just a few people figuring it out and then introducing it around the world. Humans are very curious creatures – we know even in paleolithic times they would wander very far. The first guys to figure out growing barley would be able to go on very long journeys…and Heyerdahl proved to my satisfaction that even quite primitive sea craft could go a very long way with his Kon Tiki expedition.
And then there was my mother’s theory – I think I’ve mentioned it before: human beings are the fruiting body on a global-scale algae plant. Mom was puzzled over how life could begin: you know, the odds against totally inanimate matter recombining by chance into self-replicating DNA are astronomically small. Like even in a universe billions of years old with trillions of stars the chances of it happening are so small as makes no odd. Unless someone made life, right? But Mom didn’t want to write a theology book…leaving aside all Revelation she set out to create a Universe Model which explained life, and there it was. With various races around the universe developing to their maximum technological level and then sending life out…not in the form of intrepid explorers (distances are too great) but in the form of bits of life to drop into likely worlds (like Earth – which had what is called the Great Oxidation Event 2.4 billion years ago when, presto!, we suddenly had organisms in our seas that produced organic oxygen and thus changed our atmosphere into something we could live in).
Main thing: there’s huge amounts we don’t know and maybe can never know because all evidence of it was lost…but the fact that by the time we were writing things down we already had complex societies with laws and property indicates what we don’t know would tell us most of how we came to be.
So did your mother think human life on Earth was seeded from some extra-terrestrial source? I’ve always liked that possibility.
One of the things that has always fascinated me is the existence of so many pyramids, so similar in age and design and construction, on different continents.
My mother would have been agnostic on alien visitation – absent wormholes, if they are really possible (which they might be, but not by any tech we can even imagine at the moment…even less so back in the 1970’s when my mother was actively formulating her theory), the distances are just too great. Even supposing you figured out how to go 90% of the speed of light (this would take, in tech we understand, astronomical amounts of energy production). So far, we really haven’t discovered any Earth-like planets within 50 light years (Trappist 1 is talked up a lot because it has 7 Earth-ish planets around it but when I look at the details (especially given that Trappist is a very cold – for a sun – red dwarf) I’m saying not too likely – at least, not for life like ours and if our planet was consciously seeded by beings with our basic underlying biology then their home world would have to be much like ours. But suppose we did find one, say, 25 light years away…still takes nearly 30 years at nearly light speed to travel. Nobody is ever going to make that trip…even if they had a life span of 200 years or so. It is just too much time simply doing nothing except maintaining the ship as it traversed the Big Empty between the stars. Even if you could hibernate…you’re 60 years on a round trip. Just too long. My guess would be like my mother’s – alien intelligence with tools even more sophisticated than our space telescopes map out the very best prospects and send life along. But, of course, I could be wrong – as dad told me when Hubble went up, when we really start looking back in time (which is what we do when we look at the stars) a very long ways, we’ll have to develop entirely new math to explain it. That is, our understanding of physics will be shown to be flawed – good enough for practical application here on Earth, but nowhere near good enough to explain the universe. So, maybe someone else out there is that much further ahead that they do understand how the universe really works? Maybe some day we’ll find out.
I have a faint memory of a story about aliens seeding planets by basically using the dandelion approach—loading up cryogenically preserved larvae so to speak in ships that would, upon getting to a certain distance from the surface of a chosen planet, burst open to spread their life forms far and wide. It was all a crap shoot, all experimental—let’s see what this kind of life form does, let’s see how that one develops. And because of the very early stages of development of the scattered life forms those that survived would survive by adapting to the conditions and demands of their planet.
And a 25-30 year-long trip wouldn’t be bad if the ship carried colonists who were not planning to return. Science fiction is full of tales of ships loaded with cryogenically frozen colonists with only skeleton crews to run the ship. (Think 2001—A Space Odyssey.) The willingness to be frozen for many years to awake on another planet would be increased if the home planet were to become uninhabitable—if the purpose is migration more than colonization.
In my opinion, there is no question that alien life has been here because, just as Amazon has alluded to, there are similar structures found all around the globe back in a time when communication was almost nonexistent … that’s hard to explain. There are signs of alien life all over. I have also read that scientists have discovered the element that defies gravity, but don’t have the sophistication yet to control it and I have also read about a metal found at one of the ufo crash sites that is not of this world. They call it memory metal because you can crush it up, just like aluminum foil, but when pressure is released, the metal springs back to its original state.
super cool stuff
What impresses me is sightings from extremely credible people, including military pilots and astronauts in space, in addition to the structures, etc. Many people think a lot of our scientific advancements starting around 1950 were due to reverse engineering from the wreck at Roswell.
You may have seen these articles about the asteroid hurling our way that displays uncharacteristic properties of an asteroid … very curious
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/scientist-says-mysterious-object-approaching-202219008.html
I don’t know if any of you happened to catch this interview on Glenn Beck’s radio show a while back. Fascinating concept.