Sunday, February 24, 2008

For those of you who know the earth is older than 6000 years...

Chasing mammoths was ... difficult.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you ever wonder whether humans had civilizations before 6,000 years ago? It's not as if we suddenly appeared, for nine hundred ninety four thousand years at least we were here before that. Never once civilized and created languages? Or did human civilization fall ... and how many times?

ellroon said...

How glorious and wonderful is the growth of life from the primordial ooze to the dinosaurs, from the weird huge mammals to homosapiens. We have fallen down and gotten up many times and will fall and get up many more.

Why on earth would the study of the progress of humans be a denial of God? Why would fossils be such a fearsome threat to religion and to people's faith?

Anonymous said...

It is only a threat to those who try to put God in a small box and keep him there. I do believe that the creation myths are about this generation of humans, -- and by generation, I take liberty, and begin with those who are written about, but they too speak of older generations of humankind. And then there are the artifacts, like Adam's bridge...

Anonymous said...

Suppose we had created a nice civilization, which was living in harmony with nature, and then...there was transgression, murder and war, which has not yet ceased. People fight wars over religion, when the true religion has always been to cease with war and love one another for we are all part of one shared conscious reality.

Anonymous said...

Another possibility is that the preceding civilization was only good for one class of humans, and they were overthrown for good cause.

ellroon said...

I feel it's more like two steps forward and one step back. We've had to learn how to do things from scratch several times.

Even that living in peace is much better for us than war.

Steve Bates said...

"It is only a threat to those who try to put God in a small box and keep him there." - Michael

This UU is pretty well convinced that S/He will not stay in a box.

A typical species lasts for between 1 million and 10 million years. (I had occasion to look that up this week. You can do the same, with Google as your only tool.) While I seriously question the projected future longevity of H. sapiens, it's pretty clear we're about 100,000 years old to this point, and our immediate predecessors are a lot older than that. Whether we became "civilized" in that period probably depends on what definition of "civilized" one uses. My guess is that language use probably goes back very close to the beginning: the equipment in the brain has been there all along for H. sapiens.

I can't help remembering the title of a famous computer science book by F. P. Brooks Jr., the head of the IBM project that developed OS/360, the first operating system worthy of the name. The book is titled, The Mythical Man-Month, and the cover is adorned with a picture of... you guessed it... a mammoth.

ellroon said...

A typical species lasts for between 1 million and 10 million years.

That means we have millions of more years to really fuck up the planet....

Steve Bates said...

"That means we have millions of more years to really fuck up the planet...." - ellroon

Personally I doubt it. Most species... "typical" species... do not have the means to destroy their own natural habitat at anything close to the rate we're ruining our own. We are about as atypical as it gets.

ellroon said...

Yay!! We're number one!!

...And only number one cuz we extinctified 2,3,4...100,009, 100,010....