{"id":38724,"date":"2019-05-29T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2019-05-29T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38724"},"modified":"2019-04-29T08:04:34","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T12:04:34","slug":"qotd-past-civilizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/05\/29\/qotd-past-civilizations\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Past civilizations"},"content":{"rendered":"

… when anyone says \u201cthere was a civilization before us\u201d your head (our head) jumps to airplanes, trains, steel mills, refrigerators, dentistry.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m telling you the chances of that are negligible, though I won\u2019t scruple using a more advanced than us past civilization to give my characters a nasty shock when they get to space. I won\u2019t because that\u2019s just cool.<\/p>\n

However of things like Ancient Greece or Rome? I almost think the chances against it are worse. And of course civilizations that live and die by coastal sailing would be mostly engulfed in the great melt of the last ice age.<\/p>\n

And no, Europe hasn\u2019t been extensively studied. As I said before, Europe is mostly built on Europe. And you can\u2019t dig in a field without finding SOMETHING. If you think everyone runs to the academics or the authorities when something is found, you don\u2019t understand people\u2019s interest in building a house, or sowing a field, as opposed to you know, giving up ownership of their land in all but fact. Frankly I\u2019m amazed so many people do report discoveries.<\/p>\n

But the thought of \u201csuperior civilizations\u201d got me to thinking of what say the Romans or the Greeks, or those other ancient civilizations if they ever existed, would make of us in the West. We cross the globe by flying through the air. Not just heads of state or priests, no, common people. Hell, our pets fly. Most places have clean, fresh water that someone doesn\u2019t have to carry a mile or so (which has been most of the work of humanity I think, forever.) Forget aqueducts. We have water that comes from our faucets whenever we want it. Cold AND hot. We have temperature control inside our houses, allowing us ignore the weather and keep warm in winter and cold in summer. We can magically cure diseases that killed millions of people by injecting this magical elixir into the sick person\u2019s veins. Our old live a long time in relative comfort. We get our teeth fixed and replaced, so most people can chew to the end of their lives. Most of us can read, and most of us have access to untold wisdom of the sort their hermetic orders would kill for.<\/p>\n

We are the superior civilization. We are the enlightened ones, the shining and resplendent inhabitants of the wonderful future.<\/p>\n

And we worry about what gender we feel like being that day, who is allowed to pee where, whether someone used the wrong word to refer to someone else who might be offended, whether our use of fossil fuels offends Gaia, whether slapping a kid on the behind is a criminal offense, whether we are doing all we could do with our lives.<\/p>\n

In other words, we\u2019re neurotic, unsatisfied, and a bit crazy like most of people who were born and raised rich throughout most of human history.<\/p>\n

Which is why if we really were doomed to repeating a cycle, and if the civilizations before us were the same but more advanced, the message of the pyramids would be \u201cDon\u2019t use so much toilet paper. Just wash one square and reuse it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps we should be grateful they are truly profoundly unlikely to ever have existed or tried to send us any message.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2017-05-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… when anyone says \u201cthere was a civilization before us\u201d your head (our head) jumps to airplanes, trains, steel mills, refrigerators, dentistry. I\u2019m telling you the chances of that are negligible, though I won\u2019t scruple using a more advanced than us past civilization to give my characters a nasty shock when they get to space. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,62,7,41],"tags":[288,495,85],"class_list":["post-38724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-archaeology","tag-civilization","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a4A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38725,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38724\/revisions\/38725"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}