BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 11:44 PM

The Brits grant knighthood to graduates of Eaton?

This is shocking?

Sir Ian Rankin much worth mocking

Nothing new here but a decaying publicity hound desperately-seeking acknowledgment in his waining years before he becomes food for worms.

Give Use a BREAK!

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 10:01 PM

Oh, hell, it's all been over for years and years!

Since:

1572 or 1621 or 1666 or 1415 or 1186 or 1715 or 1809 or 1814 or 1836 or March 21, 1844 or October 22, 1844 or 1874 or 1881 or 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994, or 1953 or 1957 or 1960 or 1967 or June 28 (or else December 31), 1981, or 1988 or 1990 or 1991 or 1999 or 2000 or...oh, hell, take your pick. I didn't include any BCE.

Such a shame to have been born into a world that ended before I was born.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: robomatic
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 07:13 PM

Reminds me of a great single panel cartoon I saw a few years ago. There's a small mushroom cloud on the horizon, and some concerned looking fellas with fishing gear in a row boat, except for one, who enthusiastically exclaims, "Know what this means, boys? No size restrictions, and screw the limit!"

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST,Laars Van Almsdotter
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 12:14 PM

SHHHH!!!!

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST,MMario
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 11:49 AM

not to mention that penguins marching on humanity would completly shatter their allaince with the manatees and the Dutch.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST,star warrior
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 11:38 AM

Not to worry, LH; the penguins will NOT march! They made that promise to Mr. Shatner.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Wolfgang
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 05:54 AM

Doomsday will be 29th of August, 2004

If you have watched Athens marathon run you will remember that drunk Irishman, a former priest, who stopped the leading runner. He said in court that he was very sorry for the runner but he had to act for he knew that doomsday would be on the 29th of August this year.

You have about half a dozen new doomsday predictions each year. Not each of them is as foolish as this particular prediction that the end of the world will have been yesterday. Some come in quasi-scientific guise which doesn't make them any better.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 09:59 PM

"I have only one quibble with such type of books. They should be sold in the fiction part of the bookshops and non as nonfiction."

Wolfgang,

That would put them in there with things like the various Almanacs that show the United States and Canada to have literacy rates of 99%--a little piece of non-fiction which is pure bullshit.

Science protects itself, even when it's wrong. Science is not necessarily about knowledge anymore, but more and more about politics and funding. So, maybe everything sold in bookstores, whether fiction or non-fiction should be labelled "OPINION" and then readers could decide what, if anything, makes more sense.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST,GROK
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 09:53 PM

God forbid!

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 12:22 PM

That's true, Wolfgang. What I most fear is the day all the penguins in Antarctica get organized and march en masse on humanity! That will truly be THE END. :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Wolfgang
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 10:42 AM

I have only one quibble with such type of books. They should be sold in the fiction part of the bookshops and non as nonfiction.

A flight of fancy undisturbed by too much knowledge. The average science fiction author tries to be more coherent. The guy is either completely crank or, more likely, out for money without himself believing what he writes.

There are enough real dangers that could end mankind as we know it, so we are in no need of balderdash.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 09:49 AM

Ban all crystals, say I! Sodium chloride, crystal radio sets, Billy Crystal, quartz, diamonds, rubies, meth, glass (can't be too careful!!), germanium, and all them other such-like things! Iffen chaos was good enough fer ma granddaddy it's by God good enough for me!

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: sledge
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 09:31 AM

I don't have access to Plato at the moment, but just out of curiosity, did he mention these Atlantean crystals or is that something that has crept in during more recent times.

Anyway, just to be on the safe side, maybe those new age types should be a bit more careful with their crytals, can't be too careful, have the HSE been informed?

Sledge

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 09:17 AM

Damned straight, Sledge. MY ancestors, and apparently yours, were smart enough to figure out how to move the stones of Stonehenge, make the pyramids, sail the oceans, and even make batteries without the help of alien races.

Closely fitting stones (and moving them) are no problem, IF you have enough people power and don't care how it's expended (i.e., slaves or the equivalent). Chisel a deep groove in the stone, build a fire in it for several days, scrape out the ashes and coals, and then toss cold water on it. Or chisel the groove and "drill" holes along it as deeply as you can; put dry wooden pegs in the holes and soak them in water. In cold climates you can do the second and fill the holes with water; let it freeze over the winter and the stone will be broken in the Spring.

When your stone is broken, chisel the edges as smoothly as you can and follow it by grinding with slightly harder rock until its as smooth as you want.

Accidents and silicosis will carry off your workers, but hell! there are more slaves and serfs where they came from.

We are too impatient because we have the technology to do these things faster than the ancients ever believed possible. You just take a longer view when you don't have polishing machines, explosives, and diamond saws -- all of which work on the exact principles laid out above, but with modern twists. (Explosives, for instance, are simply breaking off stone by the use of expaning gases instead of expanding water.)

We are impatient and unobservant and then expect that our ancestors were the same.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: sledge
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 08:15 AM

Still not convinced, just because we choose not to do something or invest the effort required it don't mean Aliens/Atlanteans etc. had the knack. Is it not possible that their mind set was such that the effort required was not only worthwhile it was a requirement demanded of them by religious beliefs that dominated their every day.

Remember, the Mayans indulged in mass human sacrifice and the Egyptian Phaeroh would almost bankrupt his country preparing for his funeral with its use of gold and jewellery, not something you see much of today either.

Don't want to be a wet blanket on this but how about just giving the Ancients credit where credit is due.

Sledge

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Polly Squeezebox
Date: 29 Aug 04 - 07:15 PM

"But if there were previous civilizations as advanced as ours then surely they would have left SOME trace. Some nuts and bolts, some roads, some walls, some chunks of heavy metal that were once jet engines or eighteen wheelers." - Bert.

The Mayans left us walls that have vast blocks of stone which fit together so closely that there is no way that we can emulate them today. The sarcophagi in the Giza piramids are carved from stone in such a way that we cannot fathom how or reproduce them today.

The Mayans also left us a calender which seems to indicate that the earth as we know it will cease in November 2012. Now, I'm not a Doomsday fanatic - but I'm going to make damn sure I have a b****y good time beforehand!

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 29 Aug 04 - 06:54 PM

Interesting Pravda article. The story of the destruction of Soddom and Gomorrah may also refer to an ancient use of atomic weapons by someone in the Middle East. I'm not saying it DOES...I'm saying it may.

The Atlantean civilization is said to have been destroyed by the misuse of an advanced technology involving crystals of some sort.

There are many possibilities.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: s&r
Date: 29 Aug 04 - 12:18 PM

Wasn't nightfall about a binary system where the inhabited planet only saw stars=darkness once in 10 000 years or so?

Stu

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Shanghaiceltic
Date: 29 Aug 04 - 01:24 AM

Well how about this?

Ancient nuclear blast....

OK yes it is Pravda but...

BTW in the bad old days of the CCCP the Russians had both Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (The News) and liked to quip;

'There is no news in the Truth and no truth in The News.'

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: robomatic
Date: 28 Aug 04 - 12:03 PM

it's already an old internet joke but it fits here:

German engineers at a depth of 10 feet underground found a buried copper deposit and insisted the Teutonic tribes had utilized a phone system.

In England at a depth of 20 feet some shards of glass were found and the conclusion was that a thousand years ago the ancient Britains had fiber optic communications.

In America they dug down 30 feet, found nothing, and concluded that two thousand years ago, Americans had cellular.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: M.Ted
Date: 28 Aug 04 - 10:13 AM

It would be a great premise for a science fiction story--in a parallel universe, a civilization evolves where technology is used to reduce consumption, and a science is dedicated to perfecting ways of returning things to the way that we found them--

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Bert
Date: 28 Aug 04 - 01:37 AM

Interesting theory M.Ted. They would have had to have been a HELL of a lot more advanced than us. The more advanced WE get the more mess we seem to be making.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: sledge
Date: 28 Aug 04 - 01:29 AM

If we can dig up evidence of early humans who knew enough to bang the rocks together 30 thousand+ years ago, we should have found an ancient junkyard full of Atlantian 4X4's or some such, but we haven't, nuff said.

Sledge

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 28 Aug 04 - 01:12 AM

From the article

"By any standards, Rankin's background is one of quintessential British eccentricity - a tradition he is keeping alive and well."

Enough said.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: M.Ted
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 11:49 PM

Bert--The previous civilizations might have been even more advanced than we are---and they may have known enough to clean up after themselves--

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: HuwG
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 10:27 PM

From the review of Rankin's work, posted by Shanghaiceltic:


"At the centre of the book is what he calls his "new theory", a rather bold contention that gravity doesn't exist (hence the Earth can flip over) and that the Sun isn't the centre of the solar system, but is revolving round a magnetic centre - a black hole that is as yet undiscovered."

If gravity doesn't exist ... hmmm, if I can divide both sides of this equation by zero, I can warp any result out of it you like.

And as Grab has said, you need something like this to get round the thorny problem of conservation of angular momentum. Take a gyroscope, set it spinning, and then try and turn it over by 140 degrees. It does not want to go. It will submit to brute force, but try measuring the effort you must make to force it over, compared with the comparatively small weight (mass) of the gyroscope.

Compared with the earth's axis of rotation suddenly reversing, the earth's magnetic axis is known to swap polarity. This can be proved by measuring the magnetism preserved in the rocks either side of plate spreading centres such as the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Here is a BBC site on the subject. If you ignore the infantile metaphors they use to attract the attention of Joe Public, it has quite a lot of good information.

It must be noted that these magnetic pole reversals are not associated with mass extinction events.


The other phenomenon used to support Rankin's theories, quoted in the review, that mammoths were found to be rapidly frozen almost in the act of eating tundra or Alpine meadow flowers, has been well known for many years. The most likely explanation would appear to be the very rapid local climate shifts associated with the change from "Ice Age" to "Interglacial" climate regimes and back again.



This is not to imply that Rankin, or anyone else proposing any new theory of physics or geology or whatever, is necessarily a charlatan. After all, Evolution was unheard of two hundred years ago, and Plate Tectonics dates as a properly worked-out theory only from the nineteen-fifties. (Wegener was on the right track almost a hundred years ago, but lacked the observations and experimental facilities to take his theories to their logical conclusion.)

However, the field has been rather spoiled by people like Velikovsky, who, rather than defend their theories on the evidence, claimed to be the victims of conspiracies to silence them.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: Bert
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 09:55 PM

Yes, there must be an awful load of stuff still to be dicovered. But if there were previous civilizations as advanced as ours then surely they would have left SOME trace. Some nuts and bolts, some roads, some walls, some chunks of heavy metal that were once jet engines or eighteen wheelers.

We have so much trash spread all over the globe that is inconceivable that it should all disappear without a trace. Every city dump, every railroad, every wrecking yard, every oil well, every factory. No it's just not on.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomsday?... 30 years to go?
From: M.Ted
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 07:07 PM

I like the idea of technologically advanced past civilizations, mostly because it is a necessary element in my favorite theory about UFO's, which is that they are actually our own Earth astronauts, returning from intergalactic speed-of-light journeys in which they aged only a few years, while the earth aged thousands of years--

I think there was an O Henry story where the man went on a space journey and deliberately turned off the suspended animation so he would age naturally so he would be the same age as his girl friend when he returned, but she went into suspended animation on Earth so she would still be young when he returned.

It worked out in the end because her savings account compounded for a thousand years, and they were wealthy beyond imagining--

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST,GROK
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 03:25 PM

The depletion of world oil will result in an 'ice age'. Thirty years sounds close to correct. Humanity is on the beach, and we choose not to see.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 01:21 PM

You'll get awfully old-looking after awhile, Rapaire. :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 12:08 PM

Besides, we die anyway... :-) (just a question of when)

Nope, not me, Buddy! So many people have told me what's in store for me afterwards and it sounds so unpleasant that I ain't gonna make the trip! No sir!

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 10:35 AM

There have been many interesting books, theories, and predictions about a polar shift (either a physical shift or a magnetic shift or both). A physical shift would do tremendous damage to human civilization and would necessarily locate the poles (and the cold weather) in new locations. A magnetic shift would be a more subtle event.

For some interesting reading check out Greg Braden's material or some of the books by Mary Summer Rain, for instance.

I have no final opinion on it, I simply think it's an interesting subject. It's not something we can do anything about, so there's not a whole lot of point worrying about. Besides, we die anyway... :-) (just a question of when) And then we live again. (But you might debate that if you so choose.) Regardless of a shift or no shift, things keep on.

Nancy Lieder was busily predicting such a shift on her odd site Zetatalk for the past ten years, and said it would happen in 2003. Obviously, she was not correct about that. :-)

My suspicion is that yes it has happened in the remote past and probably will again, but I certainly couldn't say when.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 09:09 AM

I wonder if Jerry Falwell & Co. will be storing up ammo for this, like he did for "The Rapture" he expected in 2000?

I used to worry about this sort of thing. Then I realized that I couldn't do anything about it or to prevent it.

"...the strength to change the things I can, to accept the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Grab
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 08:53 AM

I can't say anything on the "pole shift" theory, although it sounds mightily unlikely to me. However many zillion tons of planet has an *awful* lot of rotational inertia. To stop it on its axis and start it spinning on a different axis would take vast amounts of force. This sudden movement would not leave the Earth's inhabitants intact and shivering, it'd splatter them all over the scenery! An analogy would be taking a corner at speed - if you had an egg on the dashboard, it'd splat against the opposite side with some force.

He's also utterly incorrect that gravity doesn't exist. He can speculate that there's some other force holding the solar system together if he wants - if this other force happens to look like gravity and behave like gravity, then fine, this could be possible. But gravity has been proven to exist in numerous experiments on Earth, by suspending test masses a known distance apart and measuring the force exerted between them (it's been repeated many times to get more accurate calculations of the force). And I really doubt any of these test masses happened to be a black hole!

And then we come to his theory of there being ancient civilisations, as advanced as ours. "With few humans left, technological development is lost without trace, and man has to revert to stone-age conditions." I'm sorry, I can only say BULLSHIT!

Unless there isn't a single human left with technical abilities, I think not. Certainly the humans left after such an incident would be in a bad way, but the remains of their technology would be all over the place, and the people left would still remember how to do stuff. Consider if the world got trashed today, and say all electrical power had gone, and every microprocessor and circuit was trashed, and all records were lost. Every hardware store (and most homes) across the world still has an adequate stock of hand tools, and the trashed remains of buildings would provide plenty of raw materials. This would not only let people rebuild their homes, but could be used by the technically-minded to construct manufacturing facilities from which further hand tools can be produced. From there, we're looking at simple batteries and simple hand, animal or wind-powered generators providing electricity.

Bottom line, such a disaster would worst-case knock us back into the Victorian days of science and engineering. Stone age? I think not, somehow.

Graham.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: robomatic
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 07:59 AM

Makes for good Sci-Fi, though. Asimov wrote a cute story in the 50's called 'Nightfall' which covers the topic more properly. The newspaper article is unsupported by proper or convincing evidence. It has less relevance than the recent millenial scare.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: AllisonA(Animaterra)
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 07:21 AM

Me, too, Fibula.
As for the lack of evidence of these highly technological societies, we're talking tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago, not just thousands. As reggie pointed out, we're still just finding evidence of civilizations in the thousands.

This doesn't mean I buy the flipping poles, story, only that I try to keep an open mind.

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Fibula Mattock
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 07:02 AM

I vaguely remember learning about pole shifts in my palaeoecology classes years ago, but I'm pretty sure it concerned a shift in polarity rather than the earth flipping on its axis!

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: GUEST,reggie miles
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 06:23 AM

Bert,

Your explanation of a need to find evidence of these past cultures is outwardly both logical and easily acceptable, but how many fantastic finds of historical importance have we only just recently discovered via our advances in technology. I believe we are still only just beginning to discover the secrets of our long lost past civilizations. That whole army of clay soldiers found by accident by a farmer plowing a field in China, or what about the discovery one of the earliest known settlements of native cultures in the Pacific Northwest just recently uncovered while they were doing construction on one of the ferry docks here in Washington State, both are ancient sites. Both have proven to be among the most significant finds of our times.

Another find, proven to be as valuable, in the Middle East, is a town that was located along an ancient trade route and found to contain some of the most complete and unique examples of Roman mosaic art and design ever known to exist. This site also contained other eye opening examples of sophisticated architecture never before seen. Unfortunate that a public works project halted this dramatic discovery and flooded the entire valley where it was located. Even though the brief excavation of this site had produced historic examples of decorative art, the likes of which had never been seen before, the entire site is now submerged under a vast lake of water. The government would not allow further exploration to disrupt their scheduled flooding of the area. All of what was within our reach is no more. We may never know what else now lies below the lake in this ancient city until such time as advances in underwater exploration can reveal such. It makes me wonder how much of our collective past will be lost due to that huge dam that is now being built in China.

Who can say how long it may take to develop sufficient methods and technologies to adequately explore our earth. We are only just beginning to discover ways and means to explore what lies below the very ground on which we walk. There are other fantastic archeological finds to be uncovered and understood. We won't find them all in our lifetime.

Keep diggin'

Subject: RE: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Bert
Date: 27 Aug 04 - 12:40 AM

...he claims that human civilisation has reached its current sophisticated levels many times before - and on each occasion was obliterated by a pole shift...

Nope, There's NO evidence of this. If it were true, then we would have found some trace of their junkyards. Think how many there are of ours and how impossible it would be to hide every trace of every single one of them. And that is if we tried. If civilization had disappeared by chance in the past then we would be stumbling across their "Graveyards full of rusted automobiles" all over the place. And so far we haven't turned up even one prehistoric half shaft.

Subject: BS: Doomesday?... 30 years to go?
From: Shanghaiceltic
Date: 26 Aug 04 - 11:50 PM

I picked up on this article in the Telegraph on-line. I read a book about two years ago with a similar theory that used the idea of pole toppling as the answer to why certain groups of animals and civilisations dissapeared so quickly in the past.

Further pole toppling was a regular recurring event according to Sir Ian Rankin and the author of the other book I'd read. Sorry cannot remember that particular author.

The blue clicky is

Doomsday theory

I would be interested in any catters ideas either supporting or not supporting the theory.

In many ways it makes frightening sense.