Originally posted by neo96

Actually no there are ancient lunar calendars.

For the longest time man was a hunter/gather who had no need of calendars it wasn't until man started putting things in the ground did calenders come about.

thats my story and I stickin to it however other people are free to chime in on that.

edit on 29-11-2012 by neo96 because: (no reason given)

Yup, the demise of mankind at the advent of agriculture.

He was cast out of the garden and
I commanded you, saying, you shall not eat from it,
cursed shall be the ground because of you;
in sorrow you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
And thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
and you shall eat the plant of the field.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground;
for out of it you have been taken;
for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

Originally posted by neo96
For the longest time man was a hunter/gather who had no need of calendars it wasn't until man started putting things in the ground did calenders come about.

Not so.

HG societies did, and still do, conduct seasonal rounds to efficiently exploit their environment. They did so with an awareness of the passing of the seasons...this is when the fish ran at one place; this is when game animals migrated at another. This is when winter comes and it's time to hunker down for a while; this is when certain food plants emerge in certain areas; this is when waterfowl flock. This is when to go here for toolstone; this is when to go there to meet the rest of the extended gang. It is/was a whole lot more organised than merely dumpster-diving Mother Nature

All dictated by seasonal passing...the celestial calendar.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Ancient Alien angle is missing one crucial bit of proof, Real solid concrete physical evidence.

Dear Slayer69,
I'll also add that you put together another good thread!

I firmly believe in the Sumerian tale simply because it is our oldest known written record, but I am also intrigued as to why there isn't anything pre-dating Sumerian tablets.. if we have been around for so long, where did the evidence of our existence go, other than wall paintings and rather primitive ones at that in comparison.

If we consider the deluge to pre-date Sumerian civilisation, and evolution into homo sapiens , perhaps this is where all the evidence went? There's also some question mark over whether there may have been nuclear type detonations on the surface of the Earth, again a possible cause as to why there is no hard evidence.

My personal belief is that our understanding of time and our own history is so limited that most individuals don't even know what happened 200 years ago, let alone 2000 or 5000 or 10000. As such it is entirely possible that we are not the first "round" of evolution but the 2nd, or 3rd or even further. I think we have been here before and that we have forgotten about it throughout time. It isn't that far fetched an idea, no more so than believing in Jesus and the contents of the Bible, or Qu'ran or other religion, yet millions follow those premises blindly.

Thank you for the entertaining, thought provoking topic. *tips hat*.

Cheers,
T

Man that was quite the Op. Am just reading the fist page but some great responses, this is an important topic and one that I sense cannot be answered an intellectual standpoint. Sort of like asking or expecting ants to contemplate the giants who roam the outside world of their colony. Think about how much darkmatter is in the universe surrounding us and then focus that same energy towards the dark matter within our our brain. So much light must be activated before these types of questions can be considered within the reality we have yet to discover.

First there was language. Everything else followed.

I warn you.... you asked for it. Stick with me, I promise to be only totally overly complicated.

The universe is creative. The universe is capable of complex thought. You and I are an expression of the universe’s expressing itself as complex thought. Every part of the sentient human is part of, made from, and exists in the universe.

The Earth itself is a complex organism with complex biological drives, and part of its biological drive is expressed in humans. Regardless of humans being completely “natural” to the environment or not. This planet has undergone a number of massive die-offs, and quick climate changes and in doing so it has been undergoing a process of evolving a need to spawn. In order to assure long term survival of the biosphere and its key components, the biosphere needs a way to get off this rock and end up on another useful rock (or imitation thereof).

All living organisms have directives to reproduce – not all of them do so but the mechanisms are still active and drive much of their behaviour.

The Earth itself, its biological top layer, has a need to reproduce itself, and to potentially engage in a process of recombination to drive further changes to become better at perpetuating itself.

This same drive is probably inherent in all biospheres.

The most likely successful model for achieving perpetuation could express itself in many ways. One potentially successful way to get something greater than a couple of spores or snippets of organic material surviving a destruction event and maybe one day settling on some planet billions of years from now. Sure it could work, but the time scales involved are atrociously long.

Undergoing a process of rapid selection events such as rapid climate changes, or almost extinction events could lead to the development of components of the biosphere that act in progressively more intelligent ways. Increasing sentience and useful productivity has the possibility of producing something that may replicate the biosphere somewhere else. Or to restate this, you like celery, raisins and trees and putty cats. If you want off the planet, you’ll both need and want to take enough of the biosphere with you to do so. You are an excellent seeding mechanism.

Now if you take this and see that this would apply to any complex living organism/system, then any other system that is like the Earth would also have the potential for undergoing a process where it would want to reproduce and recombine to achieve some success in doing it even better in even more places.

Why would an alien species want to come to Earth and “monkey around?” The desire to do so is inherent in being alive, and possibly an important driving factor for a planet that maybe heading towards being incapable of sustaining life.

This drive is the creative nature of the universe itself. So even if another species provided a kick to the process of sentience, finding compatible lifeforms available for it is an act that can be attributed to and then giving the one species the need to find them would make that species a hand of the creator.

So you have a potential for a more complex interplay where the Earth has been in the process of developing several candidate species capable of intelligent behaviour, and maybe one of them finally hit a bootstrapping point where they became the best possibility for biosphere replication.

The other is that the creative force of the universe seeds the Earth with potential candidates for this sort of useful sentience, and another planet’s expression of the same found their compatible recombinants for a biosphere and species recombination. Giving the Earth itself a boost towards its goal and even if the human experiment fails, the other candidate species on the planet have been given a boost towards being success candidates by having to adapt to an environment being rapidly changed by humans and possibly some injection of organisms from another biosphere. Sentient behaviour begets sentience.

What is the possible reason for life as we are in the universe? I’d suggest that the Earth, and other similar places, serve as incubators for life and sentience. The Earth is a place where the universe begins its expression of what it is in its more complex form.

To me this says that some parts of this complex system at least contains elements of what the creative/destructive forces of the universe are, and those components have the potential for becoming themselves as they are in many parts of the universe. Complexity must have components which are the same and replicate themselves to achieve the desired outcome. I’d appeal to anyone who knows object orient design to see this as essential structuring to build complexity, and is an attempt to mimic what is inherent in the structure of the world around them already. There are persons alive on the planet at any given time may be in the process of becoming what they are all over the universe.

Now you can consider the universe as being a system that just has to do this, or that the creative component of the universe is the divine and the divine is the necessary organizing principle, or that the universe cannot really exist without an organizing principle inherent and that this makes existence and the divine creative force a necessarily entwined set of functions.

Complexity displays intelligent behaviour. Intelligent behaviour is complex. If the universe has complex behaviour and has components that are intelligent (you and I) then the universe show that being complex creates intelligence and that intelligence creates ever increasing orders of organization that reduce complexity through better intelligent behaviours. The universe itself evolves and the divine creative force of the universe evolves.

Now I’m going to go off on a tangent of about Earth as a garden for bringing about complex beings. I’ll reiterate that humans are currently the Earth’s best candidate, but it doesn’t make us the only one. For all you and I know there are intelligent plants roaming the universe – and actually, I’d suggest that the main driving force for the intelligence of the Earth biosphere is the myco sheath (fungal sheath) so I’d not dismiss the idea that intelligent cooperative fungus could be.

If there is an alien influence on the rapid development of humans it should be understood as a successful experiment by the creative force of the universe. This working model shows that recombination is possible in a way that mimics intra-biosphere development of successful intelligence. That if this is true, that Earth is then an incubator for creative dynamism. A creative component of the universe has essentially transferred its flag to Earth.

This should draw creative and destructive elements to it. Earth models the universe as it might want to be if it works out. That any intelligent components in the universe which are sufficiently intelligent to work this out then have a stake in what happens to humans. So as we become more complex, other complex elements in the universe will inject themselves into Earth’s development.

Why would intelligent life/beings come to Earth – because they by nature HAVE to. It is the nature of intelligent behaviour to at least want to know what it going on so that you can assess how it’ll impact you. Personally, I’d say that the Earth is acting as an incubator for potentially more complex entities, and possibly new variants becoming new outcrops of already existing forms of elegant complexity. I suppose this could be called multiplex entities.

So I guess you could say I say, “yes” and “all of the above” and “slightly more.”

you write: Complexity displays intelligent behaviour. Intelligent behaviour is complex. If the universe has complex behaviour and has components that are intelligent (you and I) then the universe show that being complex creates intelligence and that intelligence creates ever increasing orders of organization that reduce complexity through better intelligent behaviours. The universe itself evolves and the divine creative force of the universe evolves.

reply:
being complex does not create intelligence.

what is intelligence ? is it being 1.complex or 2.recognising complexity or also possible with intelligence, simplicity.
if you answer that you will come closer to what intelligence is.

your other remarks are quite logic, and are strong in my opinion then to say it polite.
Although there is no logic basis for other intelligent life, you are right (in my opinion) about the interconexion
between the divine and the "below"

you write:

Undergoing a process of rapid selection events such as rapid climate changes, or almost extinction events could lead to the development of components of the biosphere that act in progressively more intelligent ways.


my reply:

not possible. intelligence is never created from below to above up.

why ?

1. intelligence as consiousness is black/white, it recognises or it is dead. It can not build up.
this is my point for now. not a second point.

How about a fourth possibility.

Maybe life first evolved in what we call outerspace, in the first state of matter, plasma.

Then after millions or billions of years, life worked its way down into the gaseous, liquid, and solid states of matter found in planets.

God is a plasma entity, that at one time actively participated in the lives of men, until something happened.

We ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, or maybe it is just the knowledge part. Our logical right brains interupted the ability of our fleshy minds to communicate with our plasma based souls, and thus we began to slowly fear death. Maybe our science and technology strikes fear into plasma entities, or maybe these plasma entities help guide us to develop science and technology. There still could be fleshy aliens from other planets.

Could the sun be one huge living plasma entity, or simply host vast civilizations of plasma entities?

What about Saturn and Jupiter, could these planets host incredibly ancient civilizations of plasma entities? Can they protect us? Do they protect us from ourselves, and possibly fleshy aliens from other systems?

---

---

My belief is in a divine creator (Christian to be exact).

I have issues with self-proclaimed followers of faith that ignore fossil records and the like however, as I think that "extinct" branches of the human tree did indeed exist, how did they "disappear"? Well, I don't believe they truly ever did. I believe that the various branches of man have merged into what we now call humanity over time. There are plenty of people walking the earth with characteristics (physical or otherwise) that closely resemble those of the neanderthal, and that isn't a slight against them.

As for the fossil records referring to dinosaurs, and the various other fauna that are believed to no longer exist, I think that the Earth has changed in a great many ways since its beginning. These changes in atmosphere, ecology etc could easily have caused entire species to die out, while others thrived.

I do not put a lot of stock in the dating methods used by science, and I also do not put much stock in the assumed honesty of most of the scientific community with regards to their motives when observing nature. There always seems to be an ulterior motive ("We found the place that the ancients used to refer to as 'Hell'" etc. etc.) The findings themselves are certainly interesting, and can certainly be used for learning purposes, but are unfortunately used for a variety of other causes.

Thus, I do believe that man walked the Earth alongside dinosaurs, and that some dinosaurs could feasibly still be on Earth in the present.

I am a Christian that believes in the validity of micro-evolution (adaptation of a species to its surroundings while remaining the same species), while utterly denying macro-evolution (transformation from one species into another).

As for the "End Game", I'm sure you've heard it before from this perspective, God created the world for his purposes, and He has run it according to the same purposes, and He will end it in His due time, for His own purposes. That may not sit well with some readers, but that really isn't my concern, it is what Christians and other theistic (specifically monotheistic) religions call "Faith".

In the end, we are all along for the same ride whether we like it or not, and we can choose to view the ride in a variety of ways, some will enjoy it, some will despise it, some will find a meaning in it and others will not, it really doesn't matter when the sun sets for the last time, because whatever is waiting for us (if anything at all) will come despite our protests.

I hope that was fair and lucid enough, I'm still very tired.

some remarks, the christian god is the same god in judaism and islam,
maybe christians dont read the quran, and muslims dont read all of the bible,
but it is stillthe same god, and the quran actually writes some of these of the other faithss
are muslims too, only this is forgotten by that faith, amuslim really wants to say "believer", as wel as it is forgotten by the
christians in many ways that jesus told i dont come to abolish the law (torah, judaism)
but to fullfill it. As is sometimes forgotten by judaism that one was chosen to serve the others, not to conquer.
ofcourse these are generalisations. Indivuals are no groups.

Why do i write this, because people throw away your arguments because
they dotn want the incomplete god of the christians, nor of the muslims,
nor from the jews, they want a loving god.

The thing is God is a loving god, but the scriptures of all faiths are very
misunderstood.



One thing more, there is no salvation where there is not pleaded for the lifes
of everyone, maybe there is growth in the spirit yes, but there is no seal
, no salvation until one pleads for all lives on this earth in past, future and present,
because this is what the son does. The defender.

Do people need to know the written name of god to find God ? no, they need to fullfill
the law, Love God (or what you know from him) and with everything you have,
not with more then you have, neither with less...Jesus told, this is what i command you,
that you love one another, as i loved you, and the gospels say clearly,
prophesies and laws will be thrown away, but only one thing will stand,
love, that you love your god and all in it.

Why i focus so much on this, because religions go wrong in judging gods reasons,
so how can you find it, if one does not understand that the devil receives his power for
gods glory,anf that fighting the devil is judging god, but that improving the devil
and through this erasing him is releasing God, glorifying god, so he can glorify the
son and all in that body, which name is christ, or the body of god.

even if one is in search of the Truth under another name then the word "god, or christ",he is allready honoring what he knows of god, and his body, and not a symbolic name, even when he doesnt connect the dots. How can God withstand that,the scriptures say clearly, The only judge is the one who divides god
to become god before he reaches heaven, and int his is self-judgement,
something god never can do, this is why he is love, and a paradox, judging himself to nothing
he cant do. he loves what is in himself.

and the thing is this is logic, and logic can proof itself, it is not testing,
testing is false faith, that thinks to know something without pleading
it to be true. Faith is searching truth, testing is guessing truth.

( jesus raised lazarus to help people believe in him, not because they tested him but because they had true doubs, in the same way he healed many people, so they could believe, he said "if you dont believe what i say you, beleive then for the things you hear and see of me, he repeats this through the ages, he does not expect us to lie to ourselves about our doubts, this would have another father , the devil, which is not a individual spirit,
but a division of the Truth itself, living through us,not outside us, anothr symbol, in judaism still better understood, gods leftside, before it becomes right, as son)

I think it was ancient aliens and mothernature. I have a theory that aliens came every 1000 years to teach us how to advance our technology and we eventually became able to invent things and advance on our own threw mother nature .