Warning !! This will make you think!!!

I would like to say that the title of this thread annoys me very much. It's condescending, does not refer to what the thread is about, and has far too many exclamation marks.

Cities, industry, electricity, competition, communication, these are what lead to inventions and technological advancements. It's simple, really.

EDIT: For the alien technology believers, I would like to point out that a nuclear submarine was not invented in a day. It was invented by man over the course of 1.5 million years. Expand your scope of time to include the history of human development rather than just passing off the past 10,000 years of civilization as a bunch of rock throwing.

Zip

[edit on 19-11-2004 by Zipdot]

Hmmm, I think it's ridiculous to believe that we "reverse engineered" some "alien technology." You cannot prove that anything like this ever happened, while I *can* prove how nuclear submarines, for instance, came to exist. Take a walk back and you will see that everything we have today was not piled in our lap, it was developed slowly and based on previous breakthroughs and advances.

Though the past 100 years have changed the landscape of the world arguably more than any other time period in the history of man, the same could be said 500 years ago or 500 years before that.

Put simply, man is the oldest that he has ever been right now, and that's why he's the most advanced that he's ever been. 500 years ago, the same could be said, and people were astonished at the marvels of the then-modern technology at that time as well. Get over it. It's not that spectacular. It's called "living in the present."

Zip

reply to post by porschedrifter


I've always believed this no one told me. I just came up with the conclusion as well I call it "planted intelligence". Because am i to believe we got all these cool gadgets on our own...

As for base foundation to "why" :
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.

Just another sign.

(Bible Bus peels out............................)

About 2000 years ago it took 1000 years for mankind to double its knowledge. Then it was about 500 years, then 300, then 100, then 50...

Today it is said to be about 7 years, and the reason now is the same reason 2000 years ago of the ability to communicate and the vast numbers doing it. The added thing today is the augmentation of computers to help and the connectedness of the world. Even going back 100 years it took weeks for dialogue to flow and now it is done in real time anywhere on the planet.

The next big jump will be after mankind genetically improves on Mother Nature and the population is billions more. It is not if, but when this will happen, so think about a Vulcan type human with superhuman intelligence and strength with a 300 to 400 lifespan and 20 billion of them.


[edit on 27-1-2008 by Xtrozero]

I have a couple of points to make here.

1) Germans used channeling to try to get ideas on latest technology, i.e they thought it came from aliens.
2) tesla also said he was in contact with beings not from here, and they gave him ideas on what to do.
3) Von Braun(don't know if that was correct spelling), said that we have opened the door to unknown beings who are giving us help, but we have no idea what there reasoning was, and why they are doing it. While he was at nasa, and talking about the space program.

Remeber whether you or me, believe in these things does not matter, it only matters if the people doing it believe in it.

You get plenty of people that throughout human history have gotten information or ideas from taking drugs also. What opens in your brain when you take these things, and plenty believe your inviting others in when you take them.

You can guarentee that not only nasa teaches its scientists to take part in ways to open themselves upto others beings, just what they are no one can really tell.

SO thats my view on these things, not saying humans don't play a massive part, but there is plenty of examples of people doing these things to advance the human race and its advancements.

Of course humans have there intellect, and what have you, but personally i think the advancement comes down to both the human factor and the alien(whatever that means, just not us on this planet).

For me i cannot really see how humans made it this far by themselves, and like others think we are being guded, by what, even von braun did not know, and people leading this planet from ourt point of view, have to wonder hwat that force is.

Most everyone in this thread needs to watch Connections by James Burke. It is a 10-part series that examines the development of the modern world from its beginning some 10k years ago with the plow to nuclear weapons and computers.

What someone above me said is dead on. We didn't just invent the atom bomb 50 years ago. What happened was that humans finally had all the pieces necessary to put the atom bomb together for the first time 50 years ago. Then some guy (pick one of the 5 scientist at the time that had pretty much the same idea) came along and saw all those pieces laying about and said "Hey, if we put the pieces together like this we get something completely different!"

We invented part of the atom bomb at the beginning of the 20th century when some guy (Charles Wilson) wanted to find out how clouds formed. He build a cloud chamber just to make some observations on weather and pretty much accidentally discovered radiation.

EVERYONE should see Connections which is truly one of the best television shows ever produced. I would easily rate this series more highly than Carl Sagan's Cosmos simply because the information presented in Connections is more (widely? immediately?) important to all of humanity.

Connections* (playlists of every episode):
Connections Episode Playlists
*It is remarkable to note that this series was made in 1978.

If you enjoyed Connections you can continue on to Connections 3 (skip C2 - it is crap) or watch the equally-great-series "The Day the Universe Changed" at the bottom of that play-list page.

Jon

I agree with you there, that connections is a good series. Its a 3 series program, that came out years ago, you may see it on newsgroups.

But this just by itself does not explain why things work out the way they do. Often burke in that series states the obvious question, why do some steps take so long to get done, and some jumps seem quite obvious.

So the domino effect is one reason, but its not the only reason.

Originally posted by andy1033
Often burke in that series states the obvious question, why do some steps take so long to get done, and some jumps seem quite obvious.

Burke answers that question at the end of the original series. He says that we ultimately create the future based on our current (mis)understanding which is grounded in our (mis)understandings of the past.

What this means is that discovery is all about point of view. Inventions are created by individuals who have a slightly warped point of view. What seems obvious to us today was not obvious to anyone but the inventor way back in the day.

Burke does expand on this in the very beginning of The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 1:

Let me tell you a joke:
Somebody apparently once went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said, "What a lot of morons people back in the middle ages must have been to have looked, every morning, at the dawn and to have thought that what they were seeing was the sun going around the earth. Well, as every school-kid knows the earth goes around the sun and it doesn't take too many brains to understand that."

To which Wittgenstein replied, “Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth.”

The point being, of course, is that it would have looked exactly the same.

You see what your knowledge tells you you are seeing.

What you think the universe is and how you react to that in everything you do, depends on what you know. And when that knowledge changes, for you, the universe changes. And that is as true for the whole of society as for the individual.

While Burke glosses over the "Chinese paradox" in Connections, the entirety of pre-modern Chinese culture is a perfect example of the power of point-of-view. The Chinese had a point-of-view that the universe was static and couldn't be accurately modeled by humans anyway. Because of this point-of-view, China dutifully invented and then shelved a whole myriad of technologies because they didn't augment or fit-in with the Chinese point-of-view about the universe.

The rise of technology comes about as more and more people began to embrace the idea that we don't really know anything and all we can do is poke and prod and make models to discover what it is we don't know. What changed in recent years to allow the rate-of-change to increase was that more and more people began to adopt a more fluid point-of-view.

Today, we can accept that our understanding of the universe could change completely in our lifetimes. This kind of change would almost be catastrophic in pre-modern times. Yet today, this change is embraced and even sought after because of our "everything changes" point-of-view.

The rate of creation of new technologies is inversely proportional to the amount of institutional ignorance there is. In the middle ages, the primary source of institutional ignorance was the church. Today we see institutionalized ignorance growing in corporations, governments and universities in the West. That is why change has been slowing as of late in the West and speeding up in the East.

Jon

i posted a simalar thred on this about a year ago

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by AlnilamOmega
ahhhh funbaba. this didnt make me think all that much. ok, that's a lie. im thinking about this right now.

cool question!

terrence mckenna had a good explanation for this, in his "time wave zero" theory. he compared the electromagnetic cycles of the sun to the events of life, distant past and present. everytime there would be a peak or a valley in that particular solar influence (ie, any time the sun would go 'nuts'), it would coincide with a major historyical event. his culmination of this idea was how technology was progressing just as we were progressing towards that infamous date of 12/23/2012

more realistically, I would say that the rapid level of advancement may have more to do with how humans have become more clustered together in urban enviroments. I *think* this first started to happen during the renaissance of europe, as more people shared more of their ideas with each other. the bigger the social groupings, the bigger the ideas. the bigger the ideas, and the bigger the number of a local population, the more feasible it becomes to create advanced pieces of technology.

another theory i like to indulge in is that we are in a self-repeating cycle of technological evolution. though you may not find a 5,000 year old VCR lying around in antarctica, how do we know FOR SURE that the tech we invented today wasn't around long, long ago? a quote I like to think about every now and then is how "paper and stone tablets last longer than optical data".

Quote from the Bible to lie is to perposaly decieve somebody so he did not lie you need to watch your claims.

| 3,500,000 BC Approximate human origin
|
|-- 300,000 BC Some evidence of counting (notches in animal bone)
|
|-- 250,000 BC Oldest surviving wood tool
|
|-- 100,000 BC Neanderthal culture in Asia, Africa & Europe
| Using fire for cooking, protection and warmth
| Stone tools
| Storage pits for food
|
|--- 40,000 BC First people settle in Greece
| Hunters and food gatherers
|
|--- 35,000 BC Neanderthal culture disappearing
|
| Cro-Magnon culture developing
| Sewing needles made from bone
|
|--- 20,000 BC Bow and arrow developed (by Cro-Magnon people)
| Ice Age - In some areas the glacial ice was 2 miles thick!
|
|--- 10,000 BC End of last Ice Age
|
|--- 8,000 BC Earliest Domestication of animals
|
|--- 7,000 BC Agriculture begins in the Americas
| Pottery in use
|
|---- 4000 BC Solid wheels used on carts
|
| People Along the Nile starting to build canals to
| control flooding and provide irrigation
|
|---- 3500 BC Potter's wheel in use
| Sumerians Develop cuneiform writing
| Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing
|
|---- 3100 BC Rice domesticated in the region of the Yangtze River
|
| Egyptian civilization arose in Nile Valley
|
|---- 3000 BC Masonry dams in use
| Mortise and tendon wood joints in use
|
| The population of the city of Uruk (located on the
| Euphrates River), reaches 50,000
|
|---- 2900 BC Start of the Bronze Age in Greece
|
|---- 2800 BC Plywood invented in Egypt
| Carpentry at a mastery by most advanced civilizations
|
|---- 2600 BC Pyramid of Gizeh built
|
|---- 2000 BC Spoke wheels in use
|
|---- 1800 BC Lever used (oars)
|
|---- 1500 BC Phoenicians develop an alphabet
|
| Farming common in Central America
|
|---- 1350 BC sundial
| use of iron
| water clocks
|
|---- 1200 BC ...

www.pre-engineering.com...

[edit on 4-3-2008 by Jbird]

|---- 30 BC End of the Hellenistic Age (the Greeks)
|---- 50 AD Vitruvius writes ten volume compendium of
| Roman engineering practice
|
| Buddhism introduced in China
|
|---- 105 Tsai Lun invents paper
|
|---- 400 Windmill in use in China
|
|---- 700 Chinese invent Porcelain
|
|---- 820 Algebra Invented
|
|---- 1242 Roger Bacon describes the preparation of gunpowder ( in use in China in 1000 AD)
|
|---- 1428 Painter, Masaccio (1401-1428) introduces perspective - a technique
| that brought a three-dimensional look to painting
|
|---- 1450 The Chinese develop a printing press that uses
| Movable wooden blocks
|
|---- 1454 Johannes Gutenburg invents a printing press
| with movable metal type
|
|---- 1500 Birth of Engineering Science (start of Renaissance)
|
|
|---- 1550 Simon Stevin (stuh-veen') (military and civil
| engineer) develops the
| parallelogram law for the addition of forces
|
|
|---- 1588 First Engineering Handbook (mostly sketches) written
| by Ramelli
|
|---- 1596 Birth of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) French scientist
| and philosopher Descartes developed the Cartesian
| Coordinate System. His name in Latin is Renatus Cartesius.4

www.pre-engineering.com...
[edit on 23-2-2008 by Snappahead]



[edit on 4-3-2008 by Jbird]

|---- 1760 Mechanization of British industry began
|
...
|---- 1977 Apple Computer releases the Apple II computer
|
|---- 1978 World population 4.4 billion

www.pre-engineering.com...

OK, perhaps a bit of a dramatic way of making a point in 3 posts, but I don's see any alien intervention there - just a LOOOONG history of trial and error, and a body of knowledge being passed down from one generation to the next...

[edit on 23-2-2008 by Snappahead]


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[edit on 4-3-2008 by Jbird]

Originally posted by j619pinoy
Have you ever wondered how we advanced so much in the last 100 years than the last 10,000 years!?????

When I really think about it I find it extremely odd. It's hard to grasp at first because you never really think about it, but when you look at history in general, the last 100 years stand out in terms of advancement in many things.

Any intake?



[edit on 19-10-2004 by John bull 1]

Mankind has not advanced?

I would say that the increased dependence on technology is actually causing a dangerous stagnation in human advancement.

We are not doing anything that has not been done before.

All we are seeing, in terms of our insane rush to techno up, is the exploitation by the PTB's, of our natural yearning for immorality and regeneration, our need to find a way out of our mortal state of affairs and condition.

Technology is being used to enslave us wholly, body and soul, we welcome it and the bribes it gives us to blind us in our service to it.

We are cursed to labor, it is good and right that we be, it is a physical manifestation of a spiritual reality which can not be answered by the flesh.

Ultimately Technology will require of each and everyone of us a total faith unto death, by offering a Trojan horse, the fountain of youth, a thousand years of life and health, but we can never fully escape mortality or the need to receive a loss or reward for our motives in this life, any more than a seed on its own can or should escape the genetic imperative to grow.

Its because of electricity and thats all IMO.

Electricity gives us god like power compared without it.

[edit on 27-2-2008 by NLDelta9]

It's called globalization. Knowledge increases exponentially after a point.

I don't know if this has been said as I did not read through all of the replies, but I heard an interesting theory that evolution is actually an exponential function.

It keeps getting faster and faster. That why human beings have been around for what near a million years as a species, but civilization is process less than 10 000 years old. Even then we didn't change a whole hell of a lot until the Renaissance, where things started happening quicker, then the industrial revolution, but the biggest difference in we have advanced more in the last 200 years then we did in the previous 2000, and more in the last 20 than 200. It keeps going faster and faster.

Just like how as evolution goes on it produces more and more species, which puts increased need for specialization on other species, which is turn speeds up animal evolution, though nowhere nears the speed of human evolution.

It's the computer. I think it honestly is in the top 3 greatest achievements of humanity, if not the greatest. This has been forecasted for centuries; the explosion of knowledge and realization of exponential growth in technology. I doubt it has much to do with Roswell or anything like that. Within the next century we will see even more happen technologically within a period of a month than that of a previous century in its entirety. Mark my words.

I think its very sad that people have so little faith in human achievement.

That someone would rather think that we needed alien help to come up with our technology, technology which in every single case can be specifically attributed to a creator or creators is surely just blind ignorance.

Things develop exponentially because it is not only technology that develops, it is also education, social situations, availablity of resources and materials, the psychological zeitgeist and all kinds of other opportunities. The potentially greatest inventor of all time, could have lived and died rearing sheep in Wales 400 years ago with no opportunity to do anything else.

As long as we nurture our future talent properly I believe we will forever move forward. Perhaps not as quickly as in the past, but certainly towards a better future.

We have never had it so good as we have things today.