Atlantis again?Follow

ogaming is run by IGE, you know, the gil/gold/plat/etc sellers

and that would explain why I never heard of it before. Thanks for the info

I completely agree with this, actually.

One of the things a civilization needs most in order to sustain a high level of technology is lots of people.

It's not to say that existing in smaller groups of people makes people dumber or that exiisting in larger groups makes the individuals smarter. Larger population bases beget higher degrees of specialization and higher degress of specialization = complexity of fields. And that's where your steady advancements of civilization come from, whether these higher degrees of specialization are in the areas of culture and manners or microchips or various things that go bang.

So it's pretty much a given that any cataclismic event that drastically reduces a population base will also reduce the level of generally available technology as specialists learn to become generalists in order to survive.

Remember the scene in "Dances With Wolves" near the end where the central character has been captured by the army detachment at his own fort? He explains that his journal has all the details of his time in it and nobody admits possession of said journal, then the scene with the less admirable soldiers using the pages for toilet paper? It's realistic that people would use books for tinder, to prop up short legs on tables, or to wipe their asses with. It happens even now and civilization hasn't even fallen, depending on who you ask.

LOL

I love it. Still haven't played the new one yet.

God is the driving force behind the whole of human history.

No longer should we try to understand the underlying forces behind historical events. The sociological, economic, cultural reasons behind why things happened at a certain place and at a certain time. No one theory can explain it all and to try to attribute it to the secular is an insult to the Creator.

When we look at the successful geurrilla war led by Iskender Beg in Albania against Ottoman Sultans such as Murad II and Mehmed the Conqueror we should not argue about support from the Venetians, Knights of Rhodes, King of Hungary or the Otttomans problems on its eastern fronts with Muslim rivals. Since we cannot accurately and definitively explain the true forces behind it we should attribute his victories as the Will of God.

Edited, Mon Nov 14 16:08:29 2005 by bodhisattva

Kelvyquayo,

I only draw the link of Intelligent Design type philosphy to the field of history perhaps to make the link that the Ottoman was once the power of the world for over 4 centuries. However over time it became mired in corruption, entrenched ideologies, and so forth. When faced with either reforming to meet the changing face of world power or reverting to fundamentalism and status quo they chose fundamentalism and sunk slowly mainly by failing to meet the new capitalism of the west.

or perhaps I cared to do it for the prupose of what the WoW players would call "post ganking"

Edited, Mon Nov 14 16:31:43 2005 by bodhisattva

Actually, there's a good argument that the more advanced a society is, the *easier* it is for them to lose knowledge.

While the raw number of specialists in various fields is higher today then say 6-8 thousand years ago, I think specialization doesn't improve the odds of re-building after a collapse of some kind.

Think about what you do for work right now. How much of that could you reconstitute on your own. Let's ignore the whole "need to survive" bit first and just look at the feasibility. An electrical engineer might be wizbang at designing circuts, but would probably not be able to build an electrical generator if his life depended on it (and it might!). And he certainly couldn't build anything that would use that electricity anyway. The number of specialized trades involved before you get to anything remotely useful is staggering. You need metallurgists, but they probably don't know how to make anything by hand, so you'd need blacksmiths to make basic tools first. And would even a blacksmith in todays world know what iron ore looked like? You'd have an incredibly difficult time making anything much more complex then a wheelbarrel, much less things like cars and computers.


And that leads to the next problem. Our information today is far more transitory then it used to be. Sure. We've got gobs of it, but do you know the average time it takes for paper today to degrade? About a hundred years. So all those manuals with information on science will be totally gone in a few generations. And how much of our information is stored on electric media? Gone without computers. Sure. The ancient civilizations could lose their knowledge in a single flood or earthquake, but what they did write down was written on substances that can (and have!) survive for thousands of years. If we can't figure out how to get things working again in less then about a hundred years or so, we'll lose pretty much everything.


This assumes a truly massive disaster though. And I honestly can't really concieve of one of that magnitude that would leave anyone left alive to worry about it. Assuming we had even that first hundred years, and the books to read, and enough people left to try, we'd also have machines already built. Warehouses with equipment waiting to be used. Powerplants that just need to be repaired and not rebuilt from scratch. I suppose it's possible to have a cataclysm of such magnitude that 99.95 of the people are killed and forced to hide in say caves or something (dunno. Just kinda imagining here), such that by the time they could find anything left from the "old world", no one would know what they were. But if enough of the surface of the world were left intact, you'd find tons of stuff left over without even looking very hard.


And that's what's kinda silly about the "high tech ancients" theories. We *do* have acheological evidence from 10s of thousands of years ago. While some civilizations have been wiped out, buried under sand or ocean, most just died off or were replaced by later civilizations on the same sites. Why assume that the handful that were burried or fell into the ocean had some magical advanced technology, yet all of the ones that didn't show no such advancement? Where are the cars and TVs and radio towers if that was the case? You have any idea how long it takes a simple steel bar to totally rust away?

I think we'll end up putting everything on disks, that archaeologists 10,000 years from now will think were coins or somthing..

This thread reminds me of Stephen King's book "The Stand." For those who havn't read it, the basic idea is a govn't "Superbug" gets loose and kills about 95% of the people on the planet. So we go from roughly 6 billion to about 6 million people in the space of a week.

The thing is, this is not just an "Interesting idea." It's happened, repeatedly. The plauge, smallpox, malaria, ebola, influenza, cholera, the list goes on and on. At this very moment people are freaking out about the "Bird Flu." Every once in a while one of our microscopic buddies just decides to jump up and ***** us royal.


Epidemics are just one of the things that could obliterate our civilization. Supposedly, a meteor killed the dinosaurs. Glaciers have advanced over most of the northern and southern continents, TWICE! A massive tsunami wiped out much of southern asia a while back. (Keep tossing money that direction. They need it more then we do.) It's a wonder we havn't nuked ourselves to hell and back by now.

The total loss of a major city isn't without precedent either: Pompeii was covered in vocanic ash centuries ago. Rome, London, and Paris have suffered plauge, fire, and all out war multiple times. Chicago was literally burnt to the ground. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devestated New Orleans. (Throw money that direction too.)

Sinking cities are not uncommon. Ever been to Venice? Beautiful city, bring your waders, and a life jacket.

All in all I'd say this could very well be "Atlantis." But what the hell do I know? =P

Actually, most specialists are capable of becoming generalists in the same field, assuming they have the will and the physical capability to do so. They have to possess the general working knowledge as a basis of their specialization. In other words, an electrical engineer certainly should be able to build a generator from the basic knowledge he/she learned before etching their first circuit. Hell, I can build you a generator and I'm not an electrical engineer. I can't however, build the components from scratch, which is what I assume you're getting at.

The inherent problem is sustaining the complexity of the economic structure. While there may be persons perfectly capable of performing tasks such as extracting fine wire or building a battery, and these tasks can be taught to others, people who can do these things have their time monopolized by achieving the basics of ongoing survival such as meals and personal sanitation. Civilization really is a house of cards.