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Ancient Planes and Other Claims Spark Controversy at Indian Science Congress
An anonymous reader writes A paper presented at the 102nd Indian Science Congress on Sunday claims that Indians had mastered aviation thousands of years before the Wright brothers. India's science and technology minister Mr. Harsh Vardhan who was present at the conference claimed that ancient Indian mathematicians discovered the Pythagorean theorem but that the Greeks got the credit. These startling claims come just a few days after prime minister Narendra Modi had called Lord Ganesha who is part elephant and part human, a product of ancient India's knowledge of plastic surgery.
...and the best part is they have Nukes!
it is not at all surprising that innovations by the many have stolen from them been.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Of making dense posts in the Internet and in technical forums. I have left too many technical forums because there is no patience for the multitude of posts "I don't know how to this simple task, poor of me, do my job for me"
To make them easier to find for a laser guided drone strike!
Elephant in the room...
lord ganesha proof of plastic surgery?? rarely do i found abject ignorance so funny. but this is gold!!
The greeks got the credit, but lost them some years ago due to economic difficulties. The common wisdom now is that the Pythagorean theorem have been discovered by an anonymous hedge fund.
And the ancient planes also had the ability to fly between planets too. Don't think that these claims will stand up to review.
Ancient peoples were just as smart as us, but you need time to build the necessary tech. base in order to make advanced equipment so that you can discover advanced scientific theories and engineering disciplines.
If they were so smart, then why did they forget all of these important advancements?
They couldn't have invented the airplane 7000 years ago... the earth is only 6000 years old!
Though had they invented it at the beginning of time then it does explain how they could survive Noah's flood.
Indian politics has a long history of using pseudo science to sway the gullible. Many years ago, we had a veteran politician getting farmers to agitate against dams claiming that the dams removed the electricity from the water, so when it reached the fields it did not have any electricity left. The lack of electricity was affecting the quality of the crops.
The creationist museum here in the US where I currently stay is the US version of the same thing. The use of "common sense" and "the written word of God" to counter empirical, evidence driven hard science.
The problem as I see it is that in the name of defending religion, we are required to unquestioningly suspend all argument and reason when reading religious texts. It is a very short step to suspend all argument and reason when listening to the people who hold themselves as defenders of these texts.
Instead of claiming they created works that others got "credit" for, they should "revise and extend" like Microsoft does, then claim they "made major important improvements" to those "old works".
We may poke lots of fun at this (and I do from time to time), but watching fundamentalists right and left (Christian fundamentalists in the USA and elsewhere, neoliberal fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, whatnot) doing their version of "science" has me very scared.
We're heading towards dark times, it seems.
This is labeled "Science" but was miscategorized. It should be under "It's funny. Laugh."
... but I guess a paper entitled "Indians Invented Nothing" might not be selected for presentation.
...the Indian "Science" Conference ?
Well, documentation is legendary in Indian code.
The inventions were obviously self documenting
I'm sort of disgusted this wasn't filed under humor where it belongs.
...they're going to dig for copper cabling that's thousands of years old, to prove they had a phone network before everyone else. When they don't find any, they'll conclude the only reason for that can be that they moved to mobile phones even back then!
Because that caste system is still going strong today.
People have be fighting over algebra for centuries, it's old we get it. What have you done for me lately!
It's also proven that ancient people mastered the art of wireless communication. The lack of wire traces is definite proof.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
so, after kim jong il died his science advisor was hired by the indians
so, what's next ? unicorns or yeti's ?
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
I mean other countries had president which believed in an apocalyptic religion (revelation) or that atheist should not given the right to vote. Being from outside, the apocalyptic believer make me far more fear than the plane-to-other-planet Veda believer.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
http://blogs.unicef.org/2014/04/25/one-billion-people-still-cant-take-poo-to-the-loo/
Ok. Indian culture has been around a long time. We get that.
But outrageous claims like this just make them look like attention seeking IDIOTS.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Never seen gold in a quartz crystal, almost wireline. Hehh!.almost snorted my coffee.
Well to be fair, I could buy the Pythagorean Theorem thing, that could have been discovered and forgotten, only to be dug up later. But the aviation claim is ridiculous, especially when one reads the rest of the claim where the vehicles could visit other planets.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
And the ancient planes also had the ability to fly between planets too. Don't think that these claims will stand up to review.
Oh I'm sure all of this actually happened. If ancient philosophers smoked the right substances they probably did visit other worlds.
SInce the Indian government has historically been unable to provide basic services (running water, electricity, sanitation) to a large percentage of its citizens (a percentage which is now equivalent to more than 500 million people) it is resorting to the oldest page in the book: cheap populism based on unsubstantiated notions.
The more reality diminishes the realm of nonsense, the more subscribers to nonsense will fight back with increasingly extraordinary claims, demanding they be taken at face value.
Another Western plagiarism of Indian prior art.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Article seems like a bunch of selective quoting in order to make someone look bad. An anecdote by a speaker, a confused musing by some scientist, and all of a sudden we have faux science created by unabashed nationalism. Right.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Nearly every comment on this article deviates from 'really bad peer reviews' into racist bigotry. Shame on you lot.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Being Light years ahead they used FTL communications. We just haven't got up to speed with them yet.
North Carolina to reissue license plates. We're now "Second In Flight".
The British royal family. They all live in the same family house together - Indian. All work in the family business - Indian. All have arranged marriages - Indian. They all have sons; daughters no good - Indian. Children live with their parents until they are married - Indian!
Except Prince Charles. He's African.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
nt
Or, you know, talking.
Mastered aviation. Good. And geometry, evn better. Now if they could only master indoor plumbing they'd be a heck of a country.
"A shoutout to my buddy Prakash!"
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Nuclear war that destroyed a civilization would probably leave some kind of trace, as would a civilization that advanced. The burden of proof would lie with those making such an outrageous claim.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Especially that new exhaust system.
And the ancient planes also had the ability to fly between planets too. Don't think that these claims will stand up to review.
I call BS! It's been proven that Xenu, Overlord of the Galactic Confederacy, brought billions of his people in an old, beat up DC-8 to Earth, over 75 million years ago, just to blow them up with a nuke while they were strapped to a volcano. Ask your body Thetans, they'll tell you it's true!
this reminds me of a joke...
scientists around the world were trying to figure out which was the most advanced in the past
so, the french dig a deep hole and found some copper string, and claimed that they had invented the telephone 1000 years ago
the english dug an even deeper hole and found some glass shards, and claimed that they had invented fiberglass wires 2000 years ago
the portuguese dug an absurdly deep hole, and found NOTHING
so they claimed that they invented wireless cellphone 6000 years ago
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
And let's not forget the clacks.
There are plenty of you right wing idiots here joining right up with the left wing idiots.
No wonder America is in such horrible shape.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Look at how liberals hate nukes without a thought of how to deal with all of the waste.
Likewise, they back the science on AGW (good), but then come up with solutions in which they tell the world's largest polluter to go ahead and double in size, while telling the ENTIRE WEST, which emits less than China does, to cut their emissions.
And none of that speaks about how anti-science the GOP has become.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Can you imagine a country where the leaders preach that women have natural defenses against rape, having nukes? You wouldn't credit such a country with having electricity.
It is not just cream that rices to the top.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's also proven that ancient people mastered the art of wireless communication. The lack of wire traces is definite proof.
- you make it sound as if all of it was just smoke and mirrors...
You can't handle the truth.
Seems that India has a Grand Old Party as well, complete with their storybooks and illusions of grandeur.
And they invented the Internet before Al Gore did, too!
And the Irish invented civilization, drank a bunch of Guiness and forgot where they put it! Now, on to the show!
Actually, they were smarter than us, because there was no internet to easily spread dis- and misinformation so far and wide so quickly.
here is an english translation of the papers: http://www.bibliotecapleyades....
random moderators: BEFORE considering hitting "-1" please read the full text below.
if you look up the papers they apparently had mercury-based plasma ion drives (which i hear NASA and the JPL have been researching for some time) as well as highly destructuve beam weapons (which i hope *nobody* in modern times has been researching). the papers are thousands of years old, and have been well-known for a considerable amount of time, mostly for the metallurgy as the papers go through absolutely every single detail required, from sourcing the materials to creating the crucibles and kilns, to making the garments needed to deal with altitude. there's a story on the internet that someone in india, during victorian times, actually recreated one of these machines, directly from the instructions. when the british heard about it they had it destroyed.
doing a quick google search.... yes, this is the vedic "vimanas" being presented at this conference: it's actually nothing "new", it's just that peoples' reactions are... well, if one wants to put it charitably, it's just surrounded with an amazing amount of incredulity and disbelief, but if we are honest the better way to put it is that it is absolute pure arrogance to think that our current level of technology is the first and only peak of technological capability on the planet: it's just that we are far more connected now than we were before, so word of new discoveries tends to get around.
that "incredulity" you can counteract by simply reviewing the documents for yourself. i recommend focussing on the sections covering the science that *has* been re-discovered since the techniques were lost, for example the mining and metallurgy sections. once you have at least verified that these sections correspond precisely with modern techniques, is it so hard a stretch of one's mind to consider that the other sections and instructions might be correct as well?
Since when was TIME an issue for ancient people? Humanity is at least 10,000 years old, and modern science is less than 400 years old. There's been time for an entire technological civilization to rise, fall, and be for all practical purposes erased (e.g. the Atlantis legend). I'm not saying that happened, but it's a perfectly viable plot for a sci-fi novel or TV show. The only real problem is that modern science also sits on a technological base in which glass, iron, etc. all exist, and as far as we can tell these took a long time to be discovered using the trial-and-error (non-scientific) method. So really it's not the advanced equipment you need to worry about, it's the mundane things like the ability to grind a lens from glass you made.
Goodness Gracious Me was an Indian sketch show on UK telly we grew up with... they had a character we called 'Everything is Indian' man. Check che-che-che-check it out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln5QgeCL1fs
...some bad India jokes:
I'm Gonna Jump
In Mumbai, a man is going to jump off the building.
Up rushes good Hindu cop to talk him down.
Cop yells up to the man "Don't jump! Think of your father" Man replies "Haven't got a father; I'm going to jump."
The cop goes through a list of relatives, mother, brothers, sister, etc. Each time man says "haven't got one; going to jump."
Desperate the cop yells up "Don't jump! Think of Lord Krishna"
Man replies "Who is that?"
Cop yells "Jump, Muslim! You're blocking traffic!"
Two Accountants
One day two accountants, who were best friends, were walking together down the street.
One was a Hindu and constantly berated the other for eating meat!
After stopping for a hot dog, the Hindu erupted "Why do you eat meat?, Do you even know what's in that hot dog? You know, you are what you eat!"
The American replied "I am what I eat, an uncontrollable vicious animal (beating his chest)"
As they stepped off the curb a speeding car came around the corner and ran the Hindu over.
The American called 911 and helped his injured friend as best he was able.
The injured Hindu was taken to emergency at the hospital and rushed into surgery. After a long and agonizing wait, the doctor finally appeared.
He told the uninjured American, "I have good news, and I have bad news. The good news is that your friend is going to pull through."
"The bad news is that he's going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life."
Currency Exchange
A hindu man walked into the currency exchange in New York City with 5000 rupees and walked out with $100.
The following week, he walked in with another 5000 rupees, and was handed $84.
He asked the teller why he got less money that week than the previous week. The teller said, "Fluctuations."
The hindu man stormed out, and just before slamming the door, turned around and shouted, "Fluc you Amelicans, too!"
They had to discontinue use of the mobile version, though. Turns out signal fires kept in the pocket or held to one's ear emit harmful radiation.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I see no reason that ancient Indians had planes, or lines, or angles.
OP mentions several ways in which his putative civilization did leave traces. The burden of proof lies with whoever wants to make a categorical statement of fact, and you're a lot closer to that than OP is. OP is just wondering out loud.
"X would probably do Y" isn't a remotely scientific argument, by the way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln5QgeCL1fs
'nuff said
As did the ancient Chinese...if you see a square set within another square, creating an inner square and four congruent right triangles, in a mathematical treatise, it is extremely likely that you are looking at a relatively simple proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. This is especially true if you see the computation of the square root of 2 accurate to six decimal places in the cuneiform base-60 number system beside the figure, as depicted on clay tablets.
Indeed, a lot of weird things exist in India.
- Regions with really high radioactive background but with no compelling natural explanation. Ruins of ancient castles where the stone walls have thoroughly melted as if glass, at temperatures most likely higher than termite or oxy-acetylene
- Rather detailed descriptions of tactical nuclear warfare in the vedas, including fallout and decontamination activity.
- Descriptions of giant arrow throwers, which protect aginst vimanas or flying war chariots, but are so complex no less than 4 people in close cooperation can operate them.
(Those passages bear eerie similarity to the SA-2 missiles that downed B-52s over Hanoi: they were so complex at least 4-5 people were needed to guide them. This was NOT because of the low level of automation-computerization available to the soviets, as it has been proven over and over that higher automated systems, e.g. BUK, TOR can be jammed deterministically by advanced enough pods. In contrast, man in the loop systems, like the SA-3 remain efficient after over 40 years in service and earthed an F-16, F-117 in 1999 and a jewish AGM-142 flying bomb a few weeks ago.)
- There is a long-running rumor among the jews (the gem trading race) that those fabulous giant diamonds found nowhere else but India are artificial, rather than of natural origin. Many millenia ago, there was some advanced civilization in the Indus valley, who could make fist sized diamonds. We are decades, if not centuries from that level of sophistication.
- Hinduism is the only major religion that never felt the need to exterminate the faith of her neighbours or the neighbours themselves. India is spiritually more advanced, maybe because they have already have their many major wars many millenia ago, thus having learnt what we learned only in WWI and WW2. (May I mention stories about the legendary King Ashoka and the secret anti-war society of the Nine Unknown Men, he founded?)
- If you watch the recent prequel of Alien movie, the extraterrestrial "engineer" is seen reading ancient sanskrit there (tale of the horse and lamb or something like that). I think there is a deep-running understanding in the graeco-roman heritage that white people culture and the large majority of european languages can from northern India, the so-called aryans.
Airplanes and Television invented by Americans.
Smoke signals. The bps rate was terrible tho.
Due to European colonization and prior Mongol/Turkic conquests a lot of Indians have an inferiority complex. By making outrageous claims politicians can make gullible people feel good about themselves, their culture and their glorious 'technologically advanced' past. By doing so they divert attention from real issues.
The claim:
"Mr. Harsh Vardhan who was present at the conference claimed that ancient Indian mathematicians discovered the Pythagorean theorem"
Actually the Mayans demonstrated usage of trigonometric principles before the Greeks, but since they are not still around to defend themselves.. We have Mr Vardhan's claim and Pythagorus.
It also happens in Egypt.
The guide told us that the Pyramids were built by Arabs and this shows superiority of Muslims.
Until you have read him in the original Hindi.
This is really a historian problem, not a science problem. India and Pakistan have a long and difficult backstory with regard to nationalist historiography: following the overthrow of the British empire, they quite understandably had a bit of anti-Western sentiment and a re-appreciation of indigenous history and culture. Unfortunately this translated into some pretty jingoistic "we created everything" hypernationalism, which was most prominent in the '60s and '70s, but continues today.
Case in point: I once wrote an essay in college on the science and math knowledge of the Indus Valley civilization circa 1800 BC. One of my sources claimed that these folks invented everything from relativity to calculus to quantum mechanics, but the best bit was an archaeologist who measured the ruins of a circular well, noticed that the ratio of its circumference to its diameter was about 3.1, and argued that this meant the Indus River folks knew the value of pi.
Louis Farrakhan has been making such claims for DECADES, only in his case he claims all these things were once the product of blacks in Africa (show he calls "sun people") and that the "Ice People" (one of his nicer labels for whites) destroyed all the evidence when they colonized the continent (He has never been able to explain how those primitive white "ice people" in their wooden sailing ships concquered the high-tech, jet plane flying "sun people" of Africa)
This seems to be a tactic of rabble rousers trying to build the self esteem of communities that have been backward for centuries due to tribalism, rejection of western education, rejection of free markets, etc (Farrakhan, for example, is NOT appealing to average black Americans but rather to his insular Black pseudo-Muslim cultists)
Obviously because Nazis used their superior Nazi Science to travel back in time to ancient India with a V2. They even taught the locals superior Nazi Ideals like a racist caste system and mathematics. Ganesh's trunk is an obvious allegory for Hitler's thin mustache. Is there any other reason "bitte machen das enfordern" would be a common phrase in both German and Hindi?
Remember folks, with 18% of the world's population, 18% of the world's best developers, scientists and business leaders are in India!
Ancient peoples were just as smart as us
Not necessarily, considering their poor nutrition.
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10 000? Try 200 000.
Let's just stipulate that Indians invented and discovered everything and were cheated of their deserved recognition by vile revisionists. Then, move on.
I guess the History Channel has finally arrived in India, and Anciente Aliens is the #1 show.
Russian science has had this periodic fad of climaing extraordinary qualities of water like under certain conditions it becomes more healing, or retains a memory of enviroment it once previously was in. I saw this in the two "New Age" documentaries called "What The Bleep?" Part of this goes back to trying to prove the claim that blessed water in Russian Christianity has altered the physical properties of water into somethime more useful which science can detect. Part of this that even in accepted Western science water is fiendishly complicated with at least nine frozen phases, unusual hydrogen bond behavior, extreme solvency, and the like.
Were the planes DC-8s, by any chance?
As an Egyptian, I have to take issue with India claiming they were flying first. The Egyptians indeed had helicopters, submarines and spaceships thousands of years ago. And not in oral myth. We have real carvings on the temple of Abydos showing them clearly.
Don't believe me? See for yourself.
For the sarcastically challenged, they indeed look today live those vehicles, but the cause is recarving the new pharoah's name on top of the old one, hence this artifact.
Mod this informative, not funny!
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Ancient peoples were just as smart as us
This is highly debatable. Much of our "smarts" amounts to education, research, modern tools, and discoveries made over thousands of years. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. Even if you argue by smart you mean intelligence and thinking skills, you still have to consider nutrition and health both of which can have a huge impact on adult intelligence levels.
You know, we really need to get rid of this first-past-the-post system for selecting representatives. At this point about all it's doing is insuring that we only ever see two viable candidates for far too many positions and people wind up holding their noses while voting for the least objectionable candidate... just voting 'someone else' tends to not be very effective. Consider the banking collapse in Iceland and how a bunch of jokers wound up winning elections there... and then wound up coming up with some viable (at least in the short term) solutions for the problems. Now consider how the holy fuck things would have to go sideways in the US for anything even remotely resembling that to happen above the city or county level. Seriously, NOBODY seems to want to take the risk that the Other Party Who Is At Least Marginally More Objectionable will win, so they refuse to vote for a candidate that might actually properly represent them and instead just vote for the slightly less objectionable candidate who seems to stand a chance. Yeah ... not viable to keep this up in the long term.
When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong.
And the ancient planes also had the ability to fly between planets too. Don't think that these claims will stand up to review.
Ancient peoples were just as smart as us, but you need time to build the necessary tech. base in order to make advanced equipment so that you can discover advanced scientific theories and engineering disciplines.
I believe that Church of Scientology will corroborate these findings.
there is a new research of Vedic Science based on numerical axiom from 68 sutras which beyond all doubt establish what knowledge ancient civilization acquired in pre glacial era goes back to 33000 years with precision and consistency. New research has unite all spectrum of hidden/detectable domain of dynamic space comprise of elemental particles where space critical density 3.63115 E-25 kg/cum beyond whic detection is not possible due to merged vibrations as well as smallest interval 1.344E-51 . There is a perpetual rate of 2.96E+8 and observe don earth as 2.99E+8 m/s due to ratio of sun's radius to earth's orbital radius as 1.0108.....All prtical mass proton neutron etc derived from within the axiomatic domain is surprise among many new findings !one is in all humility request all scholar to explore & investigate facts provided in research based on axiomatic foundation is perhaps help open the door for new possibilities .Research can be freely explored at kapillavastu dot com
India claims their invention of messengers is a precursor to the modern internet, thus they invented it. Indignant Al Gore re-asserts his claim to inventing the internet.
He forgot to mention, probably out of modesty, that the transistor, integrated circuit and the Internet were all invented in Bhrat Gaarjya as well.
Seastead this.
did it all first.
Thanks, was really interesting to see how fantastical-seeming (and authentic-seeming) findings can give way to rather more mundane explanations.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
That's a nice word salad you have there.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Seriously - this is not in dispute in any way. A statement of the theorem and proofs appear in both the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra and the Apastamba Sulba Sutra, and this has been known in the West for a couple of centuries at least.
Whether Indians discovered it before Pythagoras is a different question, and the answer seems to be "most likely". The dating of the authorship of the aforementioned sutras is uncertain - the latest dates offered are after Pythagoras, but earlier dates (which seem stronger) push it one to three centuries before Pythagoras.
I am surprised to see this being held up to ridicule here.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Boy, cornbread are square, pi(e) are round!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Cavemen were the first to have a wireless society. And even more, I hear they liked to go clubbing too.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The thing about the Pythagorean Theorem is completely true and well-documented (by maybe one or two hundred years). Pretty sure it's in a sidebar to the college algebra text I teach out of.
Wikipedia: "In India, the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra, the dates of which are given variously as between the 8th century BC and the 2nd century BC, contains a list of Pythagorean triples discovered algebraically, a statement of the Pythagorean theorem, and a geometrical proof of the Pythagorean theorem for an isosceles right triangle. The Apastamba Sulba Sutra (ca. 600 BC) contains a numerical proof of the general Pythagorean theorem, using an area computation. Van der Waerden believed that "it was certainly based on earlier traditions". Boyer (1991) thinks the elements found in the ulba-stram may be of Mesopotamian derivation.[67]... Pythagoras, whose dates are commonly given as 569–475 BC, used algebraic methods to construct Pythagorean triples..."
[67] Carl Benjamin Boyer (1968). "China and India". A history of mathematics. Wiley. p. 229.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History
There's all kinds of examples, maybe more often the case than not, that mathematical principles get named after someone other than the original discoverer. It doesn't even require "forgotten knowledge" or anything like that, just some kind of power relationship at play. In fact, Stigler's Law of Eponomy (named after Stephen Stigler, Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Statistics of the University of Chicago) states, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." See also: Matthew Effect and Boyer's Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
Here's professor Richard Lipton writing on that particular subject:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/why-is-everything-named-after-gauss/ ... but obviously the other stuff mentioned at the conference is total looney-tunes.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Are you saying an ideologically driven, chaste moron is somehow prevented from blindly following one side or the other?
It's a very long distance from fanciful imagery in ancient texts (Ezekiel's wheel is a UFO, obviously, for example) to the historical existence of a nuclear war.
Explanations for natural and/or artifical oddities have to be seriously sought before giving credence to theories developed by those looking to use seeming correlations to bolster possible fantasies. How many times has Nostradamus been proved "correct"? It is a human trait to look for correlations; if the first three times your tribe passed a rock outcropping it was attacked by a lion, maybe those who noticed the pattern survived to pass down the trait of observation. There is, to my knowlege, never been a seriously funded and staffed attempt to look for rational explanations for fear of offending the believers.
We make artificial diamonds now; it's just not cost-effective compared to low-wage workers digging and dying in Africa.
When's the last time Buddhists staged a jihad?
...everyone's Indian really. Here's some examples from British sitcom, Goodness Gracious Me!: https://www.youtube.com/playli...
Ancient indian bagavad ghita. There are claims that calculus was invented thousands of years ago by indians and when europeans started taking the ancient texts back to europe Libnitz and Newton among others decoded the texts and put the material in a more rigorous format. and "invented" calculus. Claims like these are ridiculous. Just like christians claiming the bible knew that the earth was round.
back it up. The only thing I know (heard and believe) about India is that they were the first to come up with plastic surgery. Specifically, reattaching things that are severed. The tale I was told is that India law led many a convict to pay the penalty of having something chopped off... but then they could go to the doc and have it sewn back on. Evidence is observable from very old bodies/remains.
Where is the radioactive glass temple? Or any evidence of growing diamonds? Suspected ancient India-grown diamonds could be analyzed to see if the match the chemical signatures of dug up diamonds or synthetic.
I not sure, but I think my relatives from 7,000 years ago wouldn't be invited to dinner (if they could somehow be alive), just what would we have in common? If you're going to brag about your ancestors you should probably at least have met them.
Thousands of years? Modern technology is only a few hundred years old. All the Roman-era tech was lost after the fall of Rome, and western society didn't develop any real technology again until the Renaissance, and later the Industrial Revolution. We went from swords to landing on the Moon in less than 500 years.
This is a great example of the self serving nationalist nonsense that has so much currency in India.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Not generous misreading of religious texts.
Re: Aliens - the indulgence by Hollywood of pet Aryan origin theories is not proof of anything. I can't believe I have to say that.
P.S " jews (the gem trading race) "....that is a priceless phrase.
"Gort, Kla'atu verada nikto!"
And this is yet another reason why I left Hinduism for Buddhism. The Indiots have failed to understand the sages so thoroughly that they have to resort to corrupting science like the Abrahamic religions.
Betcha he's turned the speaker volume waay down..
"These startling claims come just a few days after prime minister Narendra Modi had called Lord Ganesha who is part elephant and part human, a product of ancient India's knowledge of plastic surgery." ... ...
Christ! Is it any wonder many Asian countries have the death penalty for smuggling drugs in?!
Nuclear war that destroyed a civilization would probably leave some kind of trace, as would a civilization that advanced.
It would, but surely it could be long-buried. If this civilization is truly ancient, for instance more than 10k years old, and was destroyed that long ago, that's a long time for ruins to be covered up by natural and geological processes. We're still finding whole cities in the rain forest of Central America now which were previously thought to be legendary or were simply unknown, and that's from a civilization that only died out about 1500 years ago. As for timelines to develop technology, remember only 500 years ago we westerners were all living in wooden huts and burning each other at the stake for heresy; the Industrial Revolution only started less than 200 years ago. It's conceivable (though highly unlikely, thanks to the lack of physical evidence so far) that another technological civilization rose up > 10k years ago, but destroyed itself in nuclear warfare. 10k years is probably enough time for radioactive contamination to peter out to background levels and not be easily detectable, I should think. And who knows, maybe the timeline of these ancient writings is wrong: what if this stuff actually happened 20k or 30k years ago? Not much evidence would be left over from that long ago, unless you can manage to find a vimana in a deep cave somewhere.
Now again, I'm not saying any of this is likely, only that it might be possible.
The main problem I do have with all of this, however, is the lack of evidence. While that much time is a long time for things to be buried or weathered away, it seems like some of it should have survived somewhere. And if a civilization back then were as advanced as, say, our civilization circa 1945, it likely wouldn't have confined itself to the Indian subcontinent, it surely would have expanded far beyond that place, and pieces of its technology taken all over the planet.
Nuclear warfare and a society with that kind of tech would leave behind much more than civilization we've found so far, and India is the second most populous country in the world by a rather large margin, which would make it harder to hide something there than the Amazon. Also, in order for them to develop the kind of technology to have a nuclear state, they would need to have had advanced farming, and would have had to have had a bigger population than the rest of the world combined at that time to have the manpower to have developed such things. Occam's razor is screaming that this is just a bullshit theory that's been made up.
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Nuclear warfare and a society with that kind of tech would leave behind much more than civilization we've found so far
That's what I'm thinking, but also remember, 10k years (or better yet, 20k or 30k) is a really long time; natural processes quickly erase signs of civilization.
and India is the second most populous country in the world by a rather large margin, which would make it harder to hide something there than the Amazon.
Not necessarily: if all the evidence is buried, it could still be there. India may be populated, but it's never (in the last thousand years at least) been a major center of economic activity or a world power, and has been a bit of a backwater. Here in industrialized western nations (US and EU), we regularly find stuff (especially in the EU) when we're building stuff and accidentally dig up something old. We just recently discovered the skeleton of Richard III in England for example. Many other important archeological discoveries have been made when, for instance, digging the foundation for a large building. India has only recently gotten a decent degree of industrialization; perhaps there's all kinds of things underground waiting to be discovered. Plus, in Europe the oldest technological stuff will only be 2k years old or so, except maybe for stone tools made by Neanderthals and the like. If there's 20k-year-old stuff in India, it might not be discovered until people do really deep digging for things.
Also, in order for them to develop the kind of technology to have a nuclear state, they would need to have had advanced farming, and would have had to have had a bigger population than the rest of the world combined at that time to have the manpower to have developed such things.
Probably true. The other problem I have is that not only should there have been artifacts in India, but elsewhere too, as such a civilization surely would have sent people and technological items around the world. They wouldn't have just flown their vimana around India and stayed away from everywhere else. But there's no evidence for any such technology, even though we have, for instance, found ancient stone tools from humans from before those times, and have found very ancient human bodies trapped in bogs.
That's what I'm thinking, but also remember, 10k years (or better yet, 20k or 30k) is a really long time; natural processes quickly erase signs of civilization
There is a difference between a few large cities, and a large industrial civilization in terms of their impact, with the latter having a lot of global impacts that much harder to erase than a specific site. The example of nuclear warfare would leave deposits of material all over the world, some still radioactive after 10s of thousands of years, others messing with isotope ratios. In particular, isotope ratios are studied for a variety of dating methods, not just carbon dating, and are important indicators how plant life was doing, volcanic eruptions, and meteorite impacts, which can all involve very small changes. Tree ring, ice core, and sediment core records of the atmosphere go back a couple tens of thousands of years too.
How about this thought experiment? Forget the Indians for a moment, because you're right, a nuclear war probably should have left more evidence than that (any nuclear experts around?).
We know that humans have been around for about 2 million years. We also know that humans can go from very primitive technology to nuclear weapons and airplanes in only 1000 years (imagine where we'd be now if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed and all that technological progress lost, with 1000 years between then and the Enlightenment).
Is it possible humans, somewhere, at some very distant time in the past (perhaps 1 million years ago), developed an advanced civilization and then destroyed themselves with nukes? Is 1M years sufficiently distant that several nuclear (or just atomic) detonations would be undetectable now, and for all other traces of that civilization to be gone?
Just how far back do we have to go before a civilization is completely undetectable to us with our present technology and amount of digging we've done? How about non-humans? Would it have been possible for some race to have evolved and created such a civilization 100M or even 1 billion years ago? IIRC, Arthur C Clarke's book "Light of Other Days" actually has this as a plot point at the end.
Ice core samples of the atmosphere go back currently about 800k years, with plans/efforts to push that back to about 1.5M years ago. A change on a similar timescale and amount as 1800-1900, maybe even 1800-1850 would be visible (so potentially the effects of something like the industrial revolution, before it reached a global spread). Nuclear testing also leaves a trace of Cl-36 in ice cores, which increased by almost three orders of magnitude in ice cores by the early 1960s from atmospheric testing. It does have a half-life of 300k years, but even after a million years, even considerably smaller atmospheric testing than done by the US and Russia would still produce a large change. Some of these things go further back in ocean sediment, although a bit noisier. U235-U238 ratios also can indicate if uranium was present in a nuclear reactor or enriched, and some evidence of a natural reactor can go back billions of years, and uranium from our use in testing and accidents gets spread around the globe in dust (although mixed with natural uranium as a result too).
Indian Science Congress will claim that it found cure to cancer thousands of years back
Casteism
India follows the "Sheep Herd" mentality.
The whole country's economy is based on people getting into "Profitable" domains mostly following the success of a pioneer in the field.
The most recent example of this ideology is the "Business Process Outsourcing" industry and Mars Exploration.
New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final deliverable.
This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum.
Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes place.
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