Posted on 10/14/2013 8:38:08 AM PDT by null and void
Maybe, but squirrels do not understand pointing. If I toss a squirrel a peanut, and he doesn’t see where it landed, my pointing at it doesn’t clue him in at all. He’ll still search around randomly trying to sniff out where it went.
Yep, but even in legitimate archaeology they recognize the Mediterranean filled abruptly when the natural dam at Gibraltar broke, the abrupt flooding of the Black Sea when the natural dam at the Bosphorus broke, the formation of the Scab-lands when the ice dam for lake Missoula broke, and the climate shift when the glaciers retreated enough to drain the Great Lakes region down the St Lawrence rather than the Mississippi.
Not to mention the world wide 300 ft sea level rise at the end of the last Ice Age that flooded places like Sundaland and what is now the English Channel.
Too bad we couldn’t point to the right and have the GOP elephant understand.
My elephant never plays fetch. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand.
He just doesn’t want to play fetch.
Your squirrel just doesn’t want to play fetch.
Reread the story. Both groups were maintaining continuity, but from opposite viewpoints. The Church had records going back several cycles.
Also the original short story is different from the expanded novel.
It wasn’t fundamentally all that different from the current situation where both science and the Bible seek to explain everything. Odd convergences happen...
I seem to remember that elephant that went crazy in Hawaii a few years back, killing everybody he could.
Elephant, Hawaii, Obama,...say...
I wonder if Obama had gestured to the elephant moments before the attack.
In Stephen Baxter's fairly recent novel, "Evolution" (highly recommended, BTW), one chapter entitled "The Hunters of Pangaea" posits a stone-age civilization of humanoid dinosaurs, but they don't have enough of an impact on the environment to be noticed by humans, 145 million years later. Quoting from the book:
The whole of the orniths’ rise and fall was contained in a few thousand years, a thin slice of time compared to the eighty million years the dinosaur empire would yet persist. They made tools only of perishable materials — wood, vegetable fiber, leather. They never discovered metals, or learned how to shape stone. They didn’t even build fires, which might have left hearths. Their stay had been too brief; the thin strata would not preserve their inflated skulls. When they were gone the orniths would leave no trace for human archaeologists to ponder, none but the puzzle of the great sauropods’ abrupt extinction.
When asked whether some of the strange species he invented for the book actually existed, he answered essentially, "Of course not".
Fun to read about, though!
Ooooooo! I gotta read that one!
“The older cities would be mined for the metals, and the remaining traces after enough weathering could easily be taken as ore deposits.”
How exactly would we mistake man-made, refined metals and alloys for natural ores?
Your point about maintaining continuity is well-taken, although my point was that the scientists were trying to preserve civilization and technology, something the Cult had no interest in...they were simply mystics trying maintain their religion (a point of view Asimov wasn't particularly fond of; the scientists are presented positively, whereas the members of the Cult are wild-eyed fantatics).
Also the original short story is different from the expanded novel.
I've never read the novel, only the short story.
Exactly so. Certain metals (chromium, nickle, etc.) would still be present in far greater concentrations than any natural ore.
Especially if you are convinced that any metal ores you find simply have to be natural!
No one, and I mean no one, thinks it the slightest bit odd that the iron ore deposits in India had precisely the amount of vanadium need to make Damascus steel.
Nickle iron? Ever been to Sudbury?
You read it, I'll read Evolution, sounds like a fair deal to me!
It's my understanding that the concentrations of heavy metals that would result from the remains of a cluster of skyscrapers such as those present in a major city are far great than even a nickle-rich area such as Sudbury.
My understanding could be wrong, of course...
Deal!
(after I finish Baxter's latest novel, "Proxima", which I just started)
“Add enough oxygen, chlorine and just plain dirt and slime and it would eventually look “natural”.”
No, it really wouldn’t.
Run by libs, everything was renewable, natural fiber and biodegradable. Government shut down and they disappeared without leaving a trace.
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