Originally Posted By: Schmoe
we're not talking about recorded history, things that were done way before that can't be just explained away by simple math. You honestly believe that most of those works can simply be explained whereas we can't even accomplish those feats today? Come on, admit it, somethings just don't fit that genre. Galileo...that brings up one of my points. He studied the stars, mapped motions, proved orbits, etc. etc around the 1500-1600's....now what about before that? I'll bring up the Mayan calender again. If our techological advancement began, and Galileo's work has been recorded, around that point, just how did the Mayan's figure all that out if humans were not technolgically able to as we have assumed? So, from the time of Mayan's up to Galileo's time....that gap....why didn't the technology advance? There's like this void in time or like a vacuum. If "we" were so advanced wayyyyyyy back then, then logic would prevail that "we" would only advance more and more. But we didn't. It's not just the Mayan calender, there's a whole bunch of other subjects on this matter. It's like everything just stopped. Riddle me that.
You are looking at this in a far too static light. My point with mentioning Galileo was that he was one man that is now famous for his works. Do you think people before him couldn't have done the same? That intellect and genius are simply progressive points on a timeline leading up to now?
Our evolution has not been a simple upward slope. It has crested and dropped many times. Information learned has been lost through war and destruction. That knowledge then rediscovered centuries later.
And I don't think technological advancement can be pinned on a particular time. With respect to architecture, this castle in Germany was built in 630:
That puts it about 1,000 years before Galileo entered the picture
You can't just look at our past and say "these people were advanced but then advancement stopped. Aliens!!!". No, that
society advanced to a point, just like other societies around the world at various periods of time advanced to a particular point too, and then something happened. Be it war, famine, disease....etc. And that knowledge was mostly or totally lost. There was no internet, no standardized record keeping, no universal language. Information that one ancient group had, who were then eradicated by their neighbours, was then gone. With only the physical evidence of their work remaining. Their "signature" so to speak.
As societies became more and more interconnected, this enabled information transfer so that
despite the hurdles to our advancement, we've been able to retain knowledge and enable not only our own society, but societies all over the world to advance and contribute. This led to the industrial evolution, the birth of the semiconductor and overall a significant increase in the pace at which we've advanced. Because instead of individual groups developing on their own in isolation you have competing cultures all over the world who are
aware of the advancements of others. The differing methods of these different cultures leads to ideas being explored on various tangents that ultimately results in even more ideas, that then again are shared and this feedback mechanism is what has steepened the pitch of our current advancement curve.
