Topic: We will break the history cycle? (Read 2421 times)

The good die young and the power bitaches have long lives. We are due for another Ice age I heard.

Or just read the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29
It's bad science, but might make a good Dan Brown novel.

I haven't found those, no idea about what they are but the film seems pretty complete.

Good post.

Nice. Should we watch part 1 and 2 first?

Funny how every instance of mainstream science ties into the status-quot.  

It it easy to few history to confirm with ones world-view, so I claim what we know as The Renaissance happened after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages were invented and indoctrinated during the Counter Renaissance.  

addendum: This topic now got me hooked on this...
Fomenko's "History: Fiction or Science?"
http://vimeo.com/28085647

disclaimer: Russian with English subtitles, highly controversial!  
In short a mathematician uses statistical methods to validate historical evidence and discovers that historical events were copied over a large period of time.
In that light history cycles are statistically the same events. As it seems history is not 6000 years old but about 1000 years old. The conclusions are mind boggling. The stone ages suddenly appear to have occurred a few generations ago and the development of Man much more rapidly than commonly thought.

That was only in the Western Roman areas.  The Eastern Roman Empire survived until 1453 when the Turks finally captured Constantinople.  Even in the Western areas, by the time of the First Crusade, they were not only rich literate kingdoms at home but they had a unique ability to project the power sending armies 1000s of miles to Palestine. 

My wife's PhD. is in the Medieval history of music. So I know that the idea of a "dark age" is out of fashion. However I say there was a dark age after the barbarians sacked Rome. In Roman times you could travel on a *safe, maintained throughout the empire. Your kids may even be able to go to school.  100yrs. after the fall, no one could read or write, roads fell into disrepair and banditry,  and the record of history went dark. 

You are just quoting myths.
The pyramids were built using giant wooden wheels around the stones.
If you have enough money you can still pay someone to make you a real samurai sword.

Just the fact that there is some secret sauce doesn't mean that this constitutes lost technology.


But let me throw in something constructive: There are swings toward centralization and decentralization if you combine centralist propaganda the process of decentralization you suddenly have a "collapse"
The fate of the people is determined by their individual choices and their affection to said propaganda.

Damascus steel: "The process was lost to metalsmiths after production of the patterned swords gradually declined and eventually ceased circa 1750."

So when the need for it disappeared, the technique disappeared.  And from the wiki, it appears that it wasn't widely used.

The other examples you give ignore the fact that the Roman Empire in the East survived until 1453.  Yes some poetry and stuff was lost in the Alexandria library but so what.

The pyramids were religious buildings that ceased to be used when the religion changed.  The cathedrals of the Middle Ages were far more advanced.

None of your examples actually stand up as examples of civilisation collapsing. 

Yes, there are... at least temporarily until someone finds about it again...

For example, what happened to those that built Antikythera orrery? Or how catapults and onagers are known to have been in most of middle ages of poorer technology than in hellenic age... Or that a good part of renaissance started after the finding of several roman encyclopedias, and their descriptions of several interesting technologies and phylosophies...


Or the famous: How the pyramids were made? Or some other crazy ancient structures?

Or, how to make Damascus Steel? (noone know that by the way... if you have a reply for that, you probably can get some millions of USD)

We are constantly losing stuff, just look on wikipedia for lists of lost books, lost languages, things that noone know to repair or rebuild...

It just happen, it is the way how stuff works, sometimes a master of something dies without a student...




What cause a sort of mass loss of tech in "dark ages" is the loss of trading... Technology becomes isolated, and when isolated, it is easily forgotten, lost or hidden.

What secrets maybe are lost in the fire of Alexandria Library?

Some roman encyclopedias are highly interesting, and we found only some volumes, what was written in the other ones?





There is a reason why we have in several cultures, tales of lost technologies, ranging from ancient cultures (some Indian tales describe space ships, lasers and missiles and the loss of all that, tales written some thousand years ago...), to fairly modern (all our sci-fi about for example digging and finding some super cool ancient mecha underground...)

Neither.
I view "The tech singularity" as the other side of the coin, namely propaganda with the goal to obfuscate technological progress. The whole trans-humanist movement is a bunch of cointelpros and some front-man quacks.
The whole concept of autonomously improving technology is cybernetically an invalid transformation. Hence it is impossible by definition.

A collapse is nearly as retarded. It all breaks down to the current metaphysical dogma that there was some "beginning of time" either the "big bang" or a "creationist god". That implies that everything that has a beginning has to have an end. But that is a far shot...
More straight forward: The rate of destruction of information has never surpassed its growth rate. Hence the knowledge to make technology will never be "lost".

Actually there never has been a regression in technology.  There have been oddities - like the Chinese inventing gunpowder but its use in combat being developed by Europeans.  But I can't think of a step backwards.

There are a cycle of setbacks...


I mean, our techology looks like a stock market: ever increasing in long term, but if you transform that long term into a horizontal line, you see like a sawtooth wave. It rises slowly, as a civlization go from rural to urban and trade increases, and then it collapses.   After the collapse, techology is in a level higher than the last collapse, but still lower than the all-time-high during the civlization peak.


My question is: This time, we will maintain civlization working (and maybe end in a singularity) or we will have another colapse? (and return to probably some victorian era tech level...)

Not everything happens in cycles. History is not.

IMO the dark ages in Europe are at least a myth, most likely a fallacy and possible a conspiracy. They almost certainly didn't happen the way we are thought in school. That said we now have a continuous development of technology with ever increasing sophistication. 
So: No we will not break the circle, because there is none.

There are however setbacks each time propaganda catches up with the state of the art. We are currently at the end of such setback.

I really hope you are wrong about that... I never considered that factor.

If you are right... holy shit.

The bronze age collapse, the fall of Rome and ensuing dark age; They are nothing compared to what is happening now that the climate is changing. Please fasten your seat belts, this may be the biggest fall since the ice age. IMO.

On the Internet, you have to make short posts and only one logical point in each post.  If you go for a long post or have more than one point, people always go off topic.  Heck even if you have a concise post with one logical point, people often go off topic

People want to talk about everything but my question

I really hoped that this would not happen.

Polish up your thesis, cite references, correlations, dates, and please resubmit.