This entry in today’s “Writer’s Almanac” astounded me.
On this day in 1902, archaeologist Valerios Stais discovered the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient analog computer from the first or second century B.C., that was used to calculate the position of the sun, moon, and stars in relationship to the observer’s position on the surface of the earth. For many decades, archaeologists did not recognize the mechanism’s degree of mechanical sophistication, which is comparable to a 19th-century Swiss clock. To date, the only other artifacts with that degree of mechanical sophistication have come from the 14th century or later.
Stais uncovered the mechanism while exploring the Anitkythera shipwreck off the northwest coast of Crete. Today the mechanism is on display at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Very interesting – thank you for sharing!
And no, this does not mean that ancient Greeks were visited by aliens, though some of them were smart enough to seem like aliens. LOL.
People have not gotten any smarter.
But the surprising thing about Antikythera mechanism is that the engineering and materials to produce all the tiny metal toothed wheels is far more advanced than is normally assumed for the time.
Which means we need to revisit our assumptions about the technological capabilities (eg, tools and metalurgy) of some of the ancient cultures.
“People have not gotten any smarter.” Indeed. (Well, maybe a tiny bit.) But, important point!
Any aliens capable of getting to earth from a distant planet would have been able to teach the Greeks about technology far more advanced than the antikythera “clock”.
I think one of the reasons people give aliens as a reason is that the picture painted of ancient cultures by many academic “experts” who report about these things has been largely one of people with only primitive tools. ( Christopher Dunn has had some things to say about that)
If you reject the latter assumption, it makes stuff like antikythera plausible without resorting to alien visitation as the reason.
There is also presupposition involved in the reactions of scientists to popular culture ideas. For example, archaeologists working at one of the earliest cities, Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, have found big-breasted, big-hipped female figurines (like the Venus of Willendorf) in the grain storage bins in homes, and the homes are decorated, inside, with skulls of cattle, with their horns. Now, of course, in many cultures, cattle were associated with a fertility goddess because cattle are such good mothers and because the crescent horn shape is reminiscent of the crescent moon, and the moon is often associated with a feminine deity because of the 28-day cycle. Like other early cities, Çatalhöyük started not as a permanent settlement but as a ritual center, built near water and stands of wild grain (in this case, Emmer wheat), in a time before settled agriculture. Then, people figured out how to plant grain themselves, and these ritual centers developed into permanent settlements, the first cities. Now, the confluence of these factors–the ritual center orgins, the feminine goddess figurines in grain bins, the horned cattle decorations–suggest, strongly, a matriarchal fertility cult religion, and this used to be the standard explanation of the phenomena at Çatalhöyük, but contemporary scientists are less likely to go there, even though this probably IS the explanation, because of reaction against pop culture notions of ancient Earth Mother worship. I think that there are strong reasons to think that their wariness about these explanations is, while understandable, misguided, and it prevents them from seeing the freaking obvious.
Gobekli Tepe was supposed to have been built by hunter gathers according to many experts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
How what is claimed to be a preagricultural culture would have been able to build such structures is not at all clear.
The more people become entrenched in a certain way of thinking, the more difficult it becomes to escape that way of thinking.
Anyone who questions the dogma is ostracized or worse.
This phenomenon held back science for over a thousand years.
Bob, are you sure about that? 🙂
LOL. No, of course not. Science is always tentative. But one looks for the most parsimonious answer, the one that explains with the least amount of deviation from what is currently thought of as known. But, of course, the universe is almost certainly full of other life.
Are there aliens? Well, one thing you can do is engage in warranted speculation. In other words, you can put forward POSSIBILIITIES based on what is known. So, let’s apply that to the subject of aliens.
According to astronomers, the Milky Way is an average-sized galaxy. It has about 100 billion stars. There are about 10 billion galaxies in the observable universe, the part of it we can see. So, there are a billion trillion stars! Now, what the Kepler Mission has told us is that 1.4 to 2.7 percent of stars have Earth-sized planets within their habitable zones. So, that’s 14,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 27, 000,000,000,000,000,000 Earthlike planets!!! 14 to 27 sextillion!!!!
That’s a lot of real estate. And, ofc, using spectography, we can know that stuff out there is made of the same stuff that’s here. So, it seems very, very likely that the universe is full of other life.
The Earth circles a very, very young star. Most are much older. So, life elsewhere has had a lot more time to evolve. It’s probably very, very different from life as we know it.
So, where are the aliens? Well, there is the cosmic speed limit. You can’t go past the speed of light. Our current understanding is that that is impossible. So travel over the distances between stars is, according to current understandings, impossible. But there are ways around this—multigenerational arks, robotic probes, wormholes, etc. But if intelligent life elsewhere is far beyond us, the chances are that we aren’t very interesting to it. When was the last time you tried to hold a conversation with members of an ant colony? That life may long since have given over transient physical form. It may have retreated into virtual worlds of its own creation (highly likely, I think). But it probably isn’t ANYTHING like the silly fantasies of most pop sci-fi and of, say, L. Ron Hubbard’s religion. I read about his “Galactic Emperor” and find this incredibly dumb. It’s like a sci fi story, written in the 1950s, that has people of the far, far future using telephone booths and typewriters.
So, one can speculate based on what we actually do know. But one must be clear that it’s speculation. Typically religious people often don’t grok the speculative. They want absolute truth/knowledge about that which they actually don’t know much. There’s a name for that: it’s called lying to one’s self.
Oops. A serious error in the comment about. There are about two TRILLION galaxies in the observable universe. Two million times a billion.
Einstein’s special theory of Relativity, which is based on the cosmic speed limit (speed of light) actually allows you to “travel” into the future (further than normal life, that is) but not the past.
The reason for this is that if you go fast enough (relative to a distant star, for example) distances in the direction of motion to the star shrink down for the rocket ship traveler by a factor that depends on the relative speed. The faster the space traveler goes toward the distant star, the more the distance shrinks. This effect is very convenient if you can go fast enough😀
The upshot is that time (as measured by the traveler) to get to the destination becomes smaller the faster they go.
The “catch” is that you have to be going very close to light speed (relative to the star that is your destination) for the factor to be appreciable (it’s about 0.4 when you are traveling at 90% of light speed), which means that for destinations that are very far away (> 50 light years, for example), you have to travel very close to light speed to get to your destination before you die.
But the closest star system is “only” 4.3 light years away, so (even without taking the factor into account) a rocket ship traveling even 1/10 the speed of light (which might be possible with nuclear propulsion) would get there in about 43 years (the shrink factor is not appreciable at “only” 1/10 light speed)
Back in the late 50’s freeman Dyson and others proposed a nuclear propelled rocket (that literally ejected nuclear bombs out the back) to take people to Saturn and even the nearest star. His “super Orion” rocket ship would have traveled at about 3.3% the speed of light and taken 133 years to get to the nearest star
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Bob
I’m glad you cleared up the point about the number of galaxies.
It makes all the difference.
BTW, there’s a great book about the Orion Project called The Starship and the Canoe, by Kenneth Brower
Surprised that it is so little known. I saw it in Athens a number of years ago.
The ancient Greeks, Egyptians and others may have been far more advanced (eg, in engineering) than is normally recognized in academia.
Engineer Christopher Dunn has investigated the stone work of many ancient cultures and found it surprisingly sophisticated, concluding that it required tools far exceeding the normally assumed hand tools.
https://www.gizapower.com/LoTeAnArticle.htm
Dunn has some very interesting things to say
Dunn points out that some of the stone artifacts made by the ancients (eg, 100 ton granite boxes in the Serapeum) would be difficult to produce even with today’s tools and technology.
The proof of the level of technology is in the precision of the products themselves.
NOVA PBS did a very nice program in 2013 on the mechanism, for those that want to know more.