Ancient Atomic War?

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-08-19 06:29pm

If anything of this is true, then the likely place to search would be the coastlines 10+kya which are now deep under water. Large metal detectors and ground penetrating radar could be swept across ocean floors near old river deltas, etc to look for buried metal structure.

And Mike, don't knock the idea of ancient civilisations just because we don't have metal structure evidence. Most buildings today, unless theyre very large buildings, are made of concrete. If we were to assume that they were no more advanced then we were in the 1940s, then its easy to conceive of a large population living in entirely wood or concrete structures. The only real need for metal supports is in very tall buildings, and they may simply not have had a need for those. However, they would indeed need metal for industrial processes, so that is what we should look for -- factories and industrial complexes -- if we are indeed considering what to look for. In that case, I would think about looking in places away from known ancient population centers, perhaps a few miles away from them, because people don't like living next to factories.

If they did indeed have a high civilisation back then, we should be able to find it, atleast by detecting buried machines.

Post by **Colonel Olrik** » 2003-08-19 06:31pm

Shinova wrote: Doesn't metal rust and eventually just become ordinary ore over time?

Nope. You're thinking of simple austenitic steel. Most steel alloys don't rust, and then you have more exotic stuff (but necessary in an advanced industry) like titanium alloys and Duraluminum. And then, obviously, you have thermoplastic.

Or for the atomic waste storage: maybe it all fell out into the open and eventually decayed itself into lead (it'll have to be not plutonium to do that).

Not enough time.

For me, I think it semed a bit like a volcanic eruption, like the kind that completely destroyed an island some decades back.

Like I said, an isolated state doesn't have the critical mass to become technologically advanced. A global society doesn't vanish because of an eruption, and leaves traces on and out the Earth in case of a catastrophic event.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2003-08-19 06:47pm

The Ramayana AND the Mahabarata both seem to describe ancient battles. The "Book of G'Quan" in Babylon 5 was supposed to be a similar type of literary work.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-08-19 06:50pm

kojikun wrote:If anything of this is true, then the likely place to search would be the coastlines 10+kya which are now deep under water. Large metal detectors and ground penetrating radar could be swept across ocean floors near old river deltas, etc to look for buried metal structure.

And Mike, don't knock the idea of ancient civilisations just because we don't have metal structure evidence.

Strawman fallacy. We don't even have metal sample evidence. Who the fuck needs a completely intact structure? Even a fragment of titanium alloy would suffice, yet we can't even find that.

Most buildings today, unless theyre very large buildings, are made of concrete.

And steel girders, not to mention sealed copper wiring, plastics, and other materials. We can find tracks left by billion year old vetebrates and fossils of fucking hundred million year old dinosaurs; if there were a global civilization which reached the nuclear age, we WOULD have found something by now.

If we were to assume that they were no more advanced then we were in the 1940s, then its easy to conceive of a large population living in entirely wood or concrete structures.

Wrong. Even in the 1940's, there was no such thing as an entirely wood or concrete structure. Every building had numerous other materials in it which would be indicative of an advanced society even if the building were blasted to the ground and buried in a crater. Do you think high-purity copper is just found laying around in nature?

The only real need for metal supports is in very tall buildings, and they may simply not have had a need for those.

Virtually all industrial buildings employ steel structural elements, not just pure concrete. Please drive by a commercial building construction site sometime.

However, they would indeed need metal for industrial processes, so that is what we should look for -- factories and industrial complexes -- if we are indeed considering what to look for. In that case, I would think about looking in places away from known ancient population centers, perhaps a few miles away from them, because people don't like living next to factories.

All we need is a piece of metal indicating advanced technology. A nuclear-age society would have, among other things, purified uranium by necessity. Why haven't we found any?

If they did indeed have a high civilisation back then, we should be able to find it, at least by detecting buried machines.

You make it sound much more difficult than it is. A single titanium alloy rod would indicate advanced technology, yet we've never found anything of the sort in archaeological digs from that era.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-08-19 06:51pm

CaptainChewbacca wrote:The Ramayana AND the Mahabarata both seem to describe ancient battles. The "Book of G'Quan" in Babylon 5 was supposed to be a similar type of literary work.

Flowery descriptions of ancient battles usually involve a little thing called "exaggeration". Pillars of fire are commonplace in ancient battle descriptions; they indicate nothing, particularly since nuclear weapons make mushroom clouds, not pillars of fire.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-08-19 06:54pm

Chardok wrote:Again, I said it was fascinating, not undeniable proof, you condescending prick.

Strawman fallacy, you moronic shithead. I didn't say it wasn't undeniable proof; I said it is utterly worthless, which it is. It is not even "fascinating", since you have presented nothing but some ancient stories and people mumbling about stone cities.

I am certainly open to to other interpretations, including the author using his imagination, but you dodge the point.

No, there is no valid point to dodge.

5000 years ago some indian guy sits down with a pen and decides to write about flying machines using mercury powered engines, that is not fascinating to you, given the fact that we are only now expermienting with said engines? (sp?)

No, since he would have been much more literal if he was talking about something he'd actually seen or understood. Interpretation of flowery, non-literal language is an art form which usually involves the trick of seeing what you WANT to see. People with real technical and scientific skills do not describe their technologies the way poets do, dumb-ass. The very nature of science precludes it.

as for the asteroid strike theory I will concede on that point, though I hold reservations.

How about the "he was just making it up" theory? Or will some idiot like you someday read the Star Wars novelization and decide that we had planet-smashing battlestations in the 20th century?

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2003-08-19 07:06pm

Darth Wong wrote:
Chardok wrote:Again, I said it was fascinating, not undeniable proof, you condescending prick.
Strawman fallacy, you moronic shithead. I didn't say it wasn't undeniable proof; I said it is utterly worthless, which it is. It is not even "fascinating", since you have presented nothing but some ancient stories and people mumbling about stone cities.
I am certainly open to to other interpretations, including the author using his imagination, but you dodge the point.
No, there is no valid point to dodge.
5000 years ago some indian guy sits down with a pen and decides to write about flying machines using mercury powered engines, that is not fascinating to you, given the fact that we are only now expermienting with said engines? (sp?)
No, since he would have been much more literal if he was talking about something he'd actually seen or understood. Interpretation of flowery, non-literal language is an art form which usually involves the trick of seeing what you WANT to see. People with real technical and scientific skills do not describe their technologies the way poets do, dumb-ass. The very nature of science precludes it.
as for the asteroid strike theory I will concede on that point, though I hold reservations.
How about the "he was just making it up" theory? Or will some idiot like you someday read the Star Wars novelization and decide that we had planet-smashing battlestations in the 20th century?

WELL! THAT was certainly uncalled for! I never Said ANYTHING to you which would necessitate such a response! And that response wasn't even directed at you! And who is to say that 10,000 years from now, someone won't pick up a star wars novelization and misinterpret it as canon. It is, after all a FASCINATING story, and would be EVEN MORESO if, in said timeframe they were using things like planet smashing battlestations and hyperspace.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-08-19 07:29pm

Chardok wrote:The Vimana
"Gurkha, flying in his swift and powerful Vimana, hurled against the three cities of the Vrishnis and Andhakas a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as the thousand suns rose in all its splendour...An iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas....The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. The hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without apparent cause, and the birds turned white....After a few hours all foodstuffs were infected.... To escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and their equipment..."
- The Mahabharata

It would seem that The Mahabharata is describing an atomic war! References like this one are not isolated; but battles, using a fantastic array of weapons and aerial vehicles are common in all the epic Indian books. One even describes a vimana-Vailix battle on the Moon! The above section very accurately describes what an atomic explosion would look like and the effects of the radioactivity on the population. Jumping into water is the only respite.

This guy's a fucking idiot. A nuclear explosion is not a "column"; it is a mushroom. Surely whoever wrote this would have seen fit to include the explosion's mushrooming qualities. There is absolutely nothing here that is inexplicable by simply saying that the writer was using metaphors and flowery language. Leaping to the conclusion that he was referring to the nuclear explosion is just silly and absurd. Frankly, even considering it a possibility is silly and absurd.

"When the Rishi City of Mohenjodaro was excavated by archaeologists in the last century, they found skeletons just lying in the streets, some of them holding hands, as if some great doom had suddenly overtaken them. These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on a par with those found at Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Radioactivity does not equal atomic bomb. Regions can have very high natural radioactivity from naturally occurring radioisotopes.

"Futhermore, at Mohenjo-Daro, a well planned city laid on a grid, with a plumbing system superior to those used in Pakistan and India today, the streets were littered with 'black lumps of glass'. These globs of glass were discovered to be clay pots that had melted under intense heat! "
- D. Hatcher Childress, "Ancient Indian Aircraft Technology"

Well-planned city plus plumbing plus radioactivity plus heat still does not equal atomic bomb. We had the ability to create such cities, possessed modern plumbing and the ability to heat clay to extreme temperatures long before we ever had a nuclear weapon. Hell, even in the Dark Ages, people could heat sand to extreme temperatures to form glass. How else do you think they did it?

These people may have been somewhat advanced, but they most certainly were not nuclear.

Found this article here:
http://www.wilsonswebdesign.com/religion/vimana.html

I'm curious to see the opionions on this from people on this board. Is it possible a grand civilization existed before us? Highly advanced enough so that, when they were at war, they unleashed weapons of such power so as to wipe the archeological record completely clean of their existence? Or is there a logical explanation of the radioactive corpses...will post with further research...

No. We'd know if there was a nuclear civilization that existed before us because they'd naturally have similar technology to ours, such as steel construction, electricity, power lines and the like. It is impossible to even discover the atom without electricity.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-08-19 07:40pm

Durandal wrote:
"When the Rishi City of Mohenjodaro was excavated by archaeologists in the last century, they found skeletons just lying in the streets, some of them holding hands, as if some great doom had suddenly overtaken them. These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on a par with those found at Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Radioactivity does not equal atomic bomb. Regions can have very high natural radioactivity from naturally occurring radioisotopes.

Indeed, a volcano eruption in a region with high uranium ore deposits would produce almost exactly this effect. And quite frankly, the story sounds like bullshit to me anyway. Even if this city HAD been nuked, the skeletons would NOT be showing such high levels of radioactivity thousands of years later!

Moreover, a cursory web search of "Mohenjorado" and "radioactive" comes up with dozens of websites which all have the EXACT SAME QUOTE in them, and not one reputable source. This leads me to suspect that it's one of those bullshit tall tales that simply gets repeated on the Internet by hordes of mindless idiots.

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2003-08-19 07:45pm

Please tell me Graham Hancock isn't the one promoting this.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-08-19 07:45pm

Darth Wong wrote:Strawman fallacy. We don't even have metal sample evidence. Who the fuck needs a completely intact structure? Even a fragment of titanium alloy would suffice, yet we can't even find that.

Oh no no I was agreeing that we have no reason to assume something exists, especially a technological civilisation relatively similar to ours, but SOME large civilisation existed back then, metal or none.

And steel girders, not to mention sealed copper wiring, plastics, and other materials. We can find tracks left by billion year old vetebrates and fossils of fucking hundred million year old dinosaurs; if there were a global civilization which reached the nuclear age, we WOULD have found something by now.

True about the finding something (and we might have, we just may not know what it is). But I would argue that 50 years ago not all houses had an abundance of artificially produced products that were not biodegradable.

Wrong. Even in the 1940's, there was no such thing as an entirely wood or concrete structure. Every building had numerous other materials in it which would be indicative of an advanced society even if the building were blasted to the ground and buried in a crater. Do you think high-purity copper is just found laying around in nature?

True true. But again, you CAN build houses without anything like that. You'd need HPCopper for electricity, etc, and for larger structures you'd be smart to use steel or iron mountings to connect multiple large heavy (or atleast high-weight bearing) parts of a building.

[quoteVirtually all industrial buildings employ steel structural elements, not just pure concrete. Please drive by a commercial building construction site sometime.[/quote]

Yes, agreed.

All we need is a piece of metal indicating advanced technology. A nuclear-age society would have, among other things, purified uranium by necessity. Why haven't we found any?

Possibly very small smounts were made and only when they needed them (and then they used them). Is it terribly difficult to purify uranium?

You make it sound much more difficult than it is. A single titanium alloy rod would indicate advanced technology, yet we've never found anything of the sort in archaeological digs from that era.

Well, any large city or industrial is likely to be near a water source, probably an ocean or lake, and most of the former coast line is now under water, so you'd have to look deep under the ocean, atmost 300 feet depth, for stuff.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-08-19 07:53pm

Darth Wong wrote:Indeed, a volcano eruption in a region with high uranium ore deposits would produce almost exactly this effect. And quite frankly, the story sounds like bullshit to me anyway. Even if this city HAD been nuked, the skeletons would NOT be showing such high levels of radioactivity thousands of years later!

Actually that makes shitloads more sense. A volcano with a large amount of a radioisotope would put the isotope into the air and contaminate the area, creating the illness affects described in the legend. Also, a smoke plume from a volcano can frequently look like a column. Thats the most likely the basis for this legend. They might have had some primitive flying crafts, however. I'm not sure, is it possible to build entire glider out of wood with primitive techniques?

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2003-08-19 08:10pm

UGH! CONCEDED!!! CONCEDED! (sp?) I just thought it's make for an interesting conversation! I'll be sure to no think so much in the future!!!
(insert jibes about not thinking here)

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2003-08-19 08:54pm

Chardok wrote:UGH! CONCEDED!!! CONCEDED! (sp?) I just thought it's make for an interesting conversation! I'll be sure to no think so much in the future!!!
(insert jibes about not thinking here)

Well, I'd say this is interesting, but interpreting ancient religious texts to promote the idea of ancient high-tech is dangerous without proof.
And just because WRITTEN history begins around 5000 years ago, doesn't mean that civilisation ITSELF began 5000 years ago. Jericho, Catal Huyuk, and other sites all prove this. But they were hardly high tech, nor inheritors of an "Atlantis" style civilisation.
These kinds of theories, AFAIC, belittle the people they're being attributed to. Mohenjo Dharo and Harappa are interesting and mysterious for their own observable qualities, such as their writing system, without any mention of atomic weapons.

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2003-08-19 09:53pm

Roman civilization didn't disappear. It continued and morphed into the Byzantine Empire.

UGH! CONCEDED!!! CONCEDED! (sp?) I just thought it's make for an interesting conversation! I'll be sure to no think so much in the future!!!
(insert jibes about not thinking here)

That's not your problem. Your problem is that you took a fanciful passage of literate, and, without any supporting evidence, extrapolated it into an ancient civilization with nuclear weapons and all the modern infrastructure needed to support it. Your problem is thinking too little, not thinking too much.

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2003-08-19 10:01pm

Okay, okay, I said conceded! It really wasn't my objective to substantiate, just to bring a topic of discussion....most of you here on the board are MUCH more knowledgable on the subjects of physics, history and engineering than I will ever HOPE to be! That I admit, and admire ALL of you for it! I also readily concede that I'd lose every debate here unless it deals with mortgages....(my chosen profession) *Sigh*
But it's fun to TRY!!! Next topic I will research more fully, so that I can perhaps substantiate an extrapolation (<--- that's me trying to sound smort!) so I'll just apologize to anyone I rubbed wrong, and bow out of the thread!

Solauren · Post by **Solauren** » 2003-08-19 10:09pm

I think we are all asking the wrong question here.

The first question should be

DID any civilization exist that predates currently known civilizations.

If we find evidence that one did, then we need to ask if it was advanced or not.

Personally, I am of the mind set that there were societies before the known ones, but i have trouble believing in one of terrestrial only origin more advanced then the middle ages or early renesasnse.

And while I like the idea of the ancient Egyptians and there contemporaries, and even the Aztecs/Mayans and the Nazcia line artists having contact with extra-terresttrials, I have my doubts.

Ancient Civilizations?
Yes

Advancement Level
Middle ages: Possibly
Bronze Age: Possibly
Early Egyption (pre Bronze Age) level: Probably
Out tech or higher: Unlikely, unless they go so advanced they pulled it all off and are living somewhere outside or off our world.
(outside our world: Anywhere that's not on Earth as we know or can access it)

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2003-08-19 10:14pm

First trick is define "civilisation".

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-08-19 10:18pm

Frank Hipper wrote:First trick is define "civilisation".

'Living in cities' is, I believe, the technical definition. Cities, I'm guessing, being just any organised non-moving homes and structures.

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2003-08-19 10:41pm

kojikun wrote:
Frank Hipper wrote:First trick is define "civilisation".
'Living in cities' is, I believe, the technical definition. Cities, I'm guessing, being just any organised non-moving homes and structures.

But that would exclude the Stonhenge builders, and the temple builders of Malta. It's a tricky question.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-08-19 10:49pm

Frank Hipper wrote:But that would exclude the Stonhenge builders, and the temple builders of Malta.

Maybe, didn't they built actual permanent settlements?

It's a tricky question.

No it isnt.

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2003-08-19 10:57pm

1) cities/communities
2) surplus
3) specialization(offshoot of #2)
4) literacy(not always)

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2003-08-19 11:00pm

It could be an advanced civilization that did not expand, but remained regional.

I know it sounds like Atlantis, but its a possibility.

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2003-08-19 11:22pm

kojikun wrote:No it isnt.

Civilization is an idea, and ideas are open to interpretation. Again, it's a tricky question.

The Duchess of Zeon · Post by **The Duchess of Zeon** » 2003-08-20 12:28am

Darth Wong wrote: Flowery descriptions of ancient battles usually involve a little thing called "exaggeration". Pillars of fire are commonplace in ancient battle descriptions; they indicate nothing, particularly since nuclear weapons make mushroom clouds, not pillars of fire.

One might add that nothing in the Mahabharata's scenes of destructions cannot be accounted for by the effects of a volcanic eruption, and the interpetation thereof by a historian of the times.

Also, one must be careful when reading such works. Terms like "missile" are, in the modern context, often though of as a guided rocket--but the original meaning of the word was any object fired along a ballistic trajectory, and could mean an arrow or a rock from a catapult.