Carolina Bays
(Most people do not know that there are 500,000 of these spread across the east coast of the US. Some think they are Tunguska type explosions/near impacts from comet fragments)
Posted on 07/11/2002 1:56:44 PM PDT by blam
Yes, some of it. (He's one of the reasons reputable scientists largely shun this subject today.)
"If Baillie is right, history has overlooked probably the single most important explanation for the intermittent progress of civilisation. Worse, our modern confidence in benign skies is foolhardy, and our failure to appreciate the constant danger of comet "swarms" is the result of a myopic trust in a mere 200 years of "scientific" records."
Baillie himself notes that :
"There is, I feel, a strong case for the contention that we do not inhabit a benign planet. This planet is bombarded relatively often. If this story is correct, we have been bombarded at least three times - and probably five times - since the birth of civilisation some 5,000 years ago. And each time, the world was changed."
In their book "The Origin Of Comets", Bailey, Clube, and Napier write :
"the destruction and chaos accompanying the fate of the Roman empire [midway through the First Millennium] was all but total, the almost complete breakdown of the old order leading to a loss of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of antiquity which was far from temporary."
Carolina Bays
(Most people do not know that there are 500,000 of these spread across the east coast of the US. Some think they are Tunguska type explosions/near impacts from comet fragments)
a.cricket
Thank you for the ping, Carry Okie
Sorry, I don't have a ping list. I just call up people who have expressed an interest in the past, also, I don't know how to do a ping list anyway. These posts usually end up either in my bookmarks or in the Gods, Graves, Glyphs files set up by Ernest_at_the_Beach. I will try to remember to ping you.
Baillie says the significant dates that show up in the tree rings are: 3195BC, 2354BC, 1628BC, 1159BC, 540AD and two 'minor' events at 207BC and 44BC. All these events, except the 540AD one, are recorded in the ice core (acid layer=volcano) data. The lack of data (acid layer)for the 540AD event in the ice cores leads him to suspect a celestial connection.
Moreover, it is silly to say the dark ages started then in some grand cataclysm. The dark ages began much earlier and were not a grand cataclysm but a slow historical process. The causes of which were not written on the sky, but in perfectly understandable and perfectly boneheaded practices of the governors of the Roman empire, in lost wars, etc. Whether the article writers like it or not, grand historical events of entirely human making are far too common to need explanation by such distant and esoteric causes.
Then there are particular claims like multi-megaton impacts every 50 years. This seems incredibly unlikely, given that all of one has ever been even remotely documented in all of recorded history, a little less than 100 years ago. By hypothesis, there were 7 others since the time of Galileo. Where are they? Where is any observation of their effects? Not even one in any location where anybody would see any aftermath?
Then there is the idea that it must be associated with comets. Um, how? A full straight on hit by an entire comet would indeed be spectacular enough, and on geological timescales (millions and hundreds of millions of years) is believeable enough. But cometary debris? Give me a break. It is more rarified than snow, and the same composition. Tossing it in seems entirely an appeal to ridiculous astrological beliefs of the distant past, which were based on entirely false ideas of what they were in the first place, let alone what they caused.
The hard realities of the matter are that sure, stuff from space can and does hit the earth, but also recorded history is but the flies of summer compared to the time scales involved in such solar system phenomena. A few thousands years is nothing, and that is all there is any real record of. As for 1159 BC and 1628 BC, the idea that anybody knows anything truly reliable about them is pretty silly, let alone shifting dates of civilizational events clear around the globe by 70 years arbitrarily. Let alone the idea that civilizational changes need any such esoteric and remote causes, when we know perfectly well that e.g. Dorians arriving can make a Greek "dark age", and Germans arriving a western European one, and Mongols arriving can revamp China, etc. There are about 100 times too many big civilizational shifts to map all of them to impacts from space.
Moreover, such explanations have a long and entirely dubious history. Sunspots and a solar minimum are suppose to explain the crisis of the early 17th century, for example. Little things like the Reformation or the 30 years war depopulating central Europe are supposed to be mere aftershocks. Yeah right. And Gustavus Adolphus was fated by a meteor, and born under the sign of whatever, too. Praetorian guards selling the empire to the highest bidder, dozens of civil wars, whole nations invading the empire, ridiculous economic practices, systematic slavery, declining population induced by all of the above and by changes in morals, are all supposed to not matter at all. Which is rather like Kim Il Sung blaming 7 years of famine in North Korea on the weather.
That would have been sufficient.
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