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Post by omega on Jun 24, 2018 5:22:54 GMT
Let's say that in the future, it could be a hundred years or it could be a thousand years, that the world as it is today is frozen in time, humanity is gone and another race that has never had any contact with humans comes to Earth. They walk the streets, enter the buildings, look at and touch what we have left behind. They examine the bodies or skeletons of humans and other animals. There's a slim chance our technology is compatible with theirs, but no guarantee.
What observations do they make and what conclusions do they come to, unaware of any implicit context we take for granted? What would they read into our architecture, technology and publications?
In a way, it's like us examining ancient cultures. We can interpret Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there's no guarantee we can grasp the full meaning and pronunciation is at best a guess. Greek plays, there's topical jokes and social commentary that we just can't understand because it's been thousands of years since they were topical. Even a lot of Shakespeare material we can only guess at because the time where the understanding was implicit is long gone.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 24, 2018 12:40:02 GMT
I would disagree with some of your assessments of our examinations of the past. Anyway, I think it is an impossible question to answer.
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Post by aemiliapaula on Jun 24, 2018 17:50:20 GMT
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Post by barnabaslives on Jun 24, 2018 18:34:13 GMT
What observations do they make and what conclusions do they come to, unaware of any implicit context we take for granted? What would they read into our architecture, technology and publications? In a way, it's like us examining ancient cultures. We can interpret Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there's no guarantee we can grasp the full meaning and pronunciation is at best a guess. Greek plays, there's topical jokes and social commentary that we just can't understand because it's been thousands of years since they were topical. Even a lot of Shakespeare material we can only guess at because the time where the understanding was implicit is long gone. This is like the scenario I use a lot when questioning whether history is currently taking a number of things out of context. I often question whether a number of ancient religions were ever as devout as we might think they were - I mean, it's not like mythology always makes some of these ancient deities sound worthy of worship, and I lean in the direction of thinking that once upon a time they might have started as popular characters who got silly stories and important "helpful hints" for daily living attached to them. The parallel I usually cite would be, what if in 1,000 years archaeologists dig up Disneyland, take one look at statues of Mickey, Donald and Goofy, and confidently declare it was an important center of animist worship. "Judging by the number of ritualistic "Mouse Ear" headgear pieces that were unearthed, Mickey appears to have been their supreme deity..." ;-)
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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2018 5:53:39 GMT
What observations do they make and what conclusions do they come to, unaware of any implicit context we take for granted? What would they read into our architecture, technology and publications? In a way, it's like us examining ancient cultures. We can interpret Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there's no guarantee we can grasp the full meaning and pronunciation is at best a guess. Greek plays, there's topical jokes and social commentary that we just can't understand because it's been thousands of years since they were topical. Even a lot of Shakespeare material we can only guess at because the time where the understanding was implicit is long gone. This is like the scenario I use a lot when questioning whether history is currently taking a number of things out of context. I often question whether a number of ancient religions were ever as devout as we might think they were - I mean, it's not like mythology always makes some of these ancient deities sound worthy of worship, and I lean in the direction of thinking that once upon a time they might have started as popular characters who got silly stories and important "helpful hints" for daily living attached to them. The parallel I usually cite would be, what if in 1,000 years archaeologists dig up Disneyland, take one look at statues of Mickey, Donald and Goofy, and confidently declare it was an important center of animist worship. "Judging by the number of ritualistic "Mouse Ear" headgear pieces that were unearthed, Mickey appears to have been their supreme deity..." ;-) Either that or someone ends up leafing through a history book with entries such as: And so on. The historical legacy of humanity, if encountered by another species, would ultimately be determined by the biases they exhibit within their own time and culture. Humans experience dissonance with their own historical culture after twenty-to-thirty years with the nostalgia gap. You could run riot with what a completely different race thousands of years in the future would think of our customs. For instance, energy beings might see the idea of existing as fleshy meat utterly repulsive and just let our story get buried underneath so many archives. ("They communicate by squirting air through wet flaps in anatomical cavities." "Well, that's altogether too much...") Another culture who measures their history by periods of peace rather than war, might look upon us with fascination and bewilderment. "So obsessed with conflict!" they might tut. "Really, they seemed so determined to war with one another, they must worship death to the exclusion of all else." It would be untrue, but looking at all of human history, they could make a strong case for the contrary. Hell, they may come from worlds where spaceflight is just a natural function of their physiology. Imagine if aliens came down, looked at our spaceflight capabilities and decided that actually made us more likely to be non-sentient animals than the alternative; the buildings looked upon in the same way we see an ant hill or bird's nest. And that's even assuming that they would be relative to our size and not kaiju-like behemoths who really would see these massive constructions as we would a bee hive. Even hominid or human-like doesn't necessarily guarantee their mindset. A digital race -- let's call them the Gib -- might have looked upon biological reproduction with indifference, maybe even favour, until a massive cultural shift in mechanised equality made the whole concept socially distasteful. The Gib seeing it as a form of marginalisation against humanity's emergent machine culture, so exclusively having biological children is condemned as "one of the evils of humankind." Historians a century from then -- with distance -- might look upon their own ancestors' value judgement as needlessly harsh to a long-dead culture and change their opinions again. When you take out the human factor it becomes very difficult to say.
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Post by TinDogPodcast on Jun 29, 2018 18:03:30 GMT
Poisoned earth
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Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2018 21:40:17 GMT
What observations do they make and what conclusions do they come to, unaware of any implicit context we take for granted? What would they read into our architecture, technology and publications? In a way, it's like us examining ancient cultures. We can interpret Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there's no guarantee we can grasp the full meaning and pronunciation is at best a guess. Greek plays, there's topical jokes and social commentary that we just can't understand because it's been thousands of years since they were topical. Even a lot of Shakespeare material we can only guess at because the time where the understanding was implicit is long gone. This is like the scenario I use a lot when questioning whether history is currently taking a number of things out of context. I often question whether a number of ancient religions were ever as devout as we might think they were - I mean, it's not like mythology always makes some of these ancient deities sound worthy of worship, and I lean in the direction of thinking that once upon a time they might have started as popular characters who got silly stories and important "helpful hints" for daily living attached to them. The parallel I usually cite would be, what if in 1,000 years archaeologists dig up Disneyland, take one look at statues of Mickey, Donald and Goofy, and confidently declare it was an important center of animist worship. "Judging by the number of ritualistic "Mouse Ear" headgear pieces that were unearthed, Mickey appears to have been their supreme deity..." ;-) Don't think the parallel holds water really. It is not just statues There is a plethora of ancient texts & stories which easily show that they were ancient religions & they were devout. Just different to the monotheist mythologies people believe in today.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2018 23:25:09 GMT
This is like the scenario I use a lot when questioning whether history is currently taking a number of things out of context. I often question whether a number of ancient religions were ever as devout as we might think they were - I mean, it's not like mythology always makes some of these ancient deities sound worthy of worship, and I lean in the direction of thinking that once upon a time they might have started as popular characters who got silly stories and important "helpful hints" for daily living attached to them. The parallel I usually cite would be, what if in 1,000 years archaeologists dig up Disneyland, take one look at statues of Mickey, Donald and Goofy, and confidently declare it was an important center of animist worship. "Judging by the number of ritualistic "Mouse Ear" headgear pieces that were unearthed, Mickey appears to have been their supreme deity..." ;-) Don't think the parallel holds water really. It is not just statues There is a plethora of ancient texts & stories which easily show that they were ancient religions & they were devout. Just different to the monotheist mythologies people believe in today. Another example might be The Odyssey. Grecian archaeologists believe they may have found the house where Odysseus lived, but that's still quite heavily disputed over half a dozen years after the fact. Beyond that, there's still a lot of doubt over whether Homer's accounts of the mariner's journey to Ithaca were pure fact, pure fantasy or some hybrid in between. One of the oldest surviving texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, had fallen to this fate. We know there was a historical king of that name, but we also know that the tales were originally passed down by oral tradition, so how much distortion is there we can't say. Probably a great deal. So, strangely enough, it's not unlikely that a figure such as Conan the Barbarian might one day in the far future end up as someone hotly disputed to be a historical being or fictional creation.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 30, 2018 15:14:44 GMT
Don't think the parallel holds water really. It is not just statues There is a plethora of ancient texts & stories which easily show that they were ancient religions & they were devout. Just different to the monotheist mythologies people believe in today. Another example might be The Odyssey. Grecian archaeologists believe they may have found the house where Odysseus lived, but that's still quite heavily disputed over half a dozen years after the fact. Beyond that, there's still a lot of doubt over whether Homer's accounts of the mariner's journey to Ithaca were pure fact, pure fantasy or some hybrid in between. One of the oldest surviving texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, had fallen to this fate. We know there was a historical king of that name, but we also know that the tales were originally passed down by oral tradition, so how much distortion is there we can't say. Probably a great deal. So, strangely enough, it's not unlikely that a figure such as Conan the Barbarian might one day in the far future end up as someone hotly disputed to be a historical being or fictional creation. Nah.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 1, 2018 8:05:33 GMT
Another example might be The Odyssey. Grecian archaeologists believe they may have found the house where Odysseus lived, but that's still quite heavily disputed over half a dozen years after the fact. Beyond that, there's still a lot of doubt over whether Homer's accounts of the mariner's journey to Ithaca were pure fact, pure fantasy or some hybrid in between. One of the oldest surviving texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, had fallen to this fate. We know there was a historical king of that name, but we also know that the tales were originally passed down by oral tradition, so how much distortion is there we can't say. Probably a great deal. So, strangely enough, it's not unlikely that a figure such as Conan the Barbarian might one day in the far future end up as someone hotly disputed to be a historical being or fictional creation. Nah. Fair, but you'd be surprised. History can be a funny old thing. Quoted post removed by moderator.
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