Rediscovery of Technology

smr wrote:The other day was watching a documentary about Egypt. This Egyptian trained archaeologist explained they built the pyramids for a number of reasons: 2 pyramids built to house 2 different pharaohs; several were built as power-plants; and many others were built to heal individuals using sound frequency technology. He explained between the old and new kingdoms that Egypt went through a 200 year climate change. The spring rains quit falling in Ethiopia. The Nile quit flooding and agriculture took an extreme hit. The result was famine, starvation, and internal war. Much of their technology was lost during these years.

And you actually believed that? I mean, great, if that's the case, I have some prime real estate to sell you.....

Now, for explanation on how they could move the rock is sound technology. In the present day, we can move objects through the air on sound waves in the lab. Lets extrapolate this technology to a 100 years in the future. Its' very possible that our ancestors had developed a sound based technology that could move a 200,000 ton rock. Combine that with broadcasting energy through the air or ground using the pyramids.

I notice you haven't yet given any evidence for this "200.000 tons" crap. I mean, the internet doesn't seem to find anything about it.

The history channel has a show of future Earth without Man on it. The gist of the show is that most of man's cities would be destroyed because the buildings, streets, and roads have to be maintained. The normal weathering and oxidation processes would break down the plastics and metals. Combine this with normal catastrophes of hurricanes, severe thunderstorms, flooding, avalanches due to snow or rain, tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Very few societies remains would have existed after a couple hundred years of exposure to the environment.

Your point being?

The Indian Vamas speak of flying vehicles. In the bible, it talks about King David went to Ethiopia in a matter of hours. I don't think God or the Angels moved him. Maybe, they had air power of some type. A Zeppelin or an airplane could have been the culprit. Consider that maybe I history has been suppressed by the powers that run the planet. As one person put it, ignore our dogmas and predispositions to look at a topic, book, or suppositions with an open mind. The facts are that as we become more technologically developed our civilization become more fragile. If we have a world wide collapse, could you grow your own food? Do you know the best time to plant? Do you know how to hunt or fish? How do you make clothes? Our present day ancestors of America did! I don't how to feed myself consistently for a long period without going to the store. I know...I goggle it. Opps, no power means no access to the databases.

Oh, great, a conspiracy theorist. Your mind is so open that literally anything can get in and take root; that is not the mark of a proper skeptic. The reason why thousands, if not millions of scientists reject these theories is not because they're all part of a great shadowy conspiracy, it's because the theories are transparently bullshit.

Go read the accounts of Noah and then talk to the geneticists of our past. We came from 6 women. All humans can trace their ancestors to 6 different woman.

Please cite evidence. You are making extraordinary claims, SOME proof is required.

Did you read the account of Noah? Hmm, interesting how science backs up the bible. Maybe our legends are the truth in some basis.

Actually, there is no scientific evidence that confirms any of the multitude of variations to the flood story. I mean, people who read the bible can't even agree on which parts are literary truth and which are allegory; Claiming that stuff in it is confirmed by science is like claiming that fortune cookies can predict the future.

Thanks to The E.
Even in the medieval times most people didn't travel more than 20 kms from their village.
Relatively big flood (like the UK is experiencing at present or Australia got a couple of years ago), and the local witchdoctors will insert into verbal tradition a story of how all animals are preserved in an Ark. Probably a squire on a hill saving his livestock. Much later the literate rabbis write it up and bingo - scripture.
Move forward a couple of millennia to the Bible Belt and TV evangelists are milking it for all they can screw out of the credulous.

The whole problem with lost technology is that how does one confirm that said technology existed outside the minds of conspiracy theorists?
Let us look at a recent example.

Scientology.
Scientology is a religion (according to its adherants) or a cult (according to its critics). Its primary scripture (insofar as the term can be applied) was written by the deceased Sci-fi writer (and I use that term loosely) Ron Hubbard. If one tries to match Scientology and its "Aliens crossed intersteller space and dropped ghosts into volcanoes" precepts with known history, one gets quite a few mismatches.
Nevertheless, based on what is currently known, the theory that Scientology derives from can not be logically disproved. There may indeed be aliens, they may indeed be able to cross intersteller distances and they may be able to create temporarily-stable mental fields that can be unloaded.
Of course, the actual chance of it being true is quite low.
The problem of confirming/disproving it is made harder by the sheer amount of secrecy that the Scientologist organisation promulgates. When they were forced to place their "holy writ" into public archives for others to look at, they dispatched their followers to check out the relevant texts so that no-one who was not a Scientologist could read them, causing much comment and mockery.
Of course, having Tom Cruise sofa-surfing on national TV didn't help their public relations.

Once you look at the amazing things like the Pyramids, they suddenly become far less amazing. The Pyramids had to be huge to reach the height they did because the stone they are built from has great difficulty supporting large weights, hence the need to make the base as large as possible to stop it from collapsing. Had they been built from Granite, for instance, they could have fitted in more than a couple of chambers and passages before the risk of the rock sheering and collapsing became too great.
The monoliths of Stonehenge were almost certainly levered into place using a combination of tree-trunk levers, ropes and artificial (temporary) slopes that were then taken away and used for the next stone being dragged into position.

History may not be what we thought it was, but that's in specifics. Troy may actually have been a trading city on the coast of Britain (a theory derived from re-examination of the environmental descriptions in the Iliad and backtracking Ulysses' journey home in the Odessy). However, that doesn't mean that it had the NHS patching up its soldiers. However, if any old civilisation had advanced technology, they would have ruled pretty much the entire continent that they were on and THEY WOULD HAVE LEFT SIGNIFICANT TRACES! Rubbish heaps, large cities with specific design style, even actual vehicles! Technology lasts, even if it rusts and corrodes, it can still be recognised when re-discovered.

While absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, no theory may be considered viable until it has accrued several supporting pieces of evidence. Nevertheless, there will always be people willing to believe anything, hence why so much money is stolen by internet fraudsters relying on the gullibility of their victims. Just because something is a new way of looking at it, doesn't mean it must be right.

200,000 ton guide stone (I think that's the base stone is in Jonathan Gray book [url]Dead Man Secrets[/url]. All I asked was to stretch our minds and see if their alternative facts and explanations for history. History has been written by the victors not the oppressed. Imagine what American history would be like if it was taught my native Americans.

Now, we have watched civilizations rise and fall. Most technology was hidden and not shared! What history of the America's is known to you and others before 1600. We mock the bible story of a biblical flood. One was about 11000 to 12000 BC and other was 65 million years ago. The second occurred because of a comet or asteroid strike at Niagra Falls. That is where the North Pole was at the time. The ice pack was immediately destroyed. We find the remains of the impact in the soil due to micro diamonds in it. Micro diamonds our only created by some meteor, comet, and/or asteroid strike(s). That strike set off the Ring of Fire volcanoes and destroyed the dinosaurs (most of the world died that day.) Our planet has experienced multiple worldwide cataclysmic civilization catastrophes.

Let me relate a story that was told to me this morning on Feb 9, 2014. I was speaking to foreman that was working on the building. We got talking politics, religion, and 9/11. He referenced growing up in Mexico in small village. Near his village home, there is a mountain that with caves and running water coming out. These caves go deep into the mountain and near center of the mountain are cave drawings. It shows multiple pictures of sun getting bigger than normal. He believes whoever lived their was documenting some type of catastrophe of the sun and these people had fled to cave and documented what the problem was. Now, I can not prove this story is true or not. Why would he lie about this story? There is no motive for profit. I believe this story is documentation of some type of problem with the sun. (A huge solar storm or flair...the event so shook the natives that they drew it on the cave walls.)

smr wrote:200,000 ton guide stone (I think that's the base stone is in Jonathan Gray book [url]Dead Man Secrets[/url].

That is not a link. The thing is, if this thing actually exists, it would be remarkable! If it was clear it was moved by humans, it would be an astonishing feat. But, as far as I can tell, it never made an appearance on the various "largest man made structures" lists that seem to appear ever so often. So please, where's the wikipedia entry for this thing? Where's the Ecuadorian tourist guide entry for it? Any other source for this aside from the ramblings of a pseudoscientist?

All I asked was to stretch our minds and see if their alternative facts and explanations for history.

Strange how it is never the people like you who "stretch their minds". You're telling us not to accept blindly what Science has uncovered, and yet you seem utterly convinced that you know the truth and the rest of us are too blind to see it.

History has been written by the victors not the oppressed. Imagine what American history would be like if it was taught my native Americans.

Not that different. The names, facts and dates would still be the same, the interpretation however would not be. That's the thing here: You are conflating the facts of history with the interpretation of said facts.

Now, we have watched civilizations rise and fall. Most technology was hidden and not shared!

Really? Over the course of the technological development periods which we can trace, innovations have rarely stayed contained to one particular group of people. Give it a generation or two, and most innovations will have travelled far and wide. There is nothing to indicate that this was ever any different.

What history of the America's is known to you and others before 1600.

There are quite a few things known about that period. Not by me, I hasten to add, I am not all that interested in that topic, but we do have quite a body of knowledge from archaeological findings available to us (That the europeans did quite a lot of damage to our ability to know more about the people who lived there is one of the great tragedies of history).

We mock the bible story of a biblical flood.

Well, not so much mock as "refuse to accept as a given due to a lack of corroborating evidence and a lack of an universally accepted interpretation of the relevant passages".

One was about 11000 to 12000 BC and other was 65 million years ago. The second occurred because of a comet or asteroid strike at Niagra Falls. That is where the North Pole was at the time.

Niagara? Really? Look, we know what killed the dinosaurs, and it happened a few thousand kilometers to the south.

The ice pack was immediately destroyed. We find the remains of the impact in the soil due to micro diamonds in it. Micro diamonds our only created by some meteor, comet, and/or asteroid strike(s). That strike set off the Ring of Fire volcanoes and destroyed the dinosaurs (most of the world died that day.) Our planet has experienced multiple worldwide cataclysmic civilization catastrophes.

Hahahahahaha no

I mean, I do not doubt that there have been several cataclysmic events over the course of Earth's history, but civilizations have so far not witnessed one. Oh, sure, maybe some tribe or another got wiped out in some Tsunami or Earthquake or Volcano eruption, but those are small things in the grand picture. Humanity as a whole has never faced an extinction-level event.

Let me relate a story that was told to me this morning on Feb 9, 2014.

Oh good, an anecdote. You do know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, right? Good.

I was speaking to foreman that was working on the building. We got talking politics, religion, and 9/11. He referenced growing up in Mexico in small village. Near his village home, there is a mountain that with caves and running water coming out. These caves go deep into the mountain and near center of the mountain are cave drawings. It shows multiple pictures of sun getting bigger than normal. He believes whoever lived their was documenting some type of catastrophe of the sun and these people had fled to cave and documented what the problem was. Now, I can not prove this story is true or not. Why would he lie about this story? There is no motive for profit. I believe this story is documentation of some type of problem with the sun. (A huge solar story or flair...the event so shook the natives that they drew it on the cave walls.)

Oh boy.....

Okay, so you have one (anecdotal!) data point. Now, let us take your hypothesis and run with it. What would we need to see in addition to that one data point in order to turn this hypothesis into a proper theory?
Well, for starters, we would need to see other records of it. We know humanity wasn't wiped out by whatever it was these people saw, so there must be other records dating from the same time period depicting something similar (since something that affects the Sun would by definition affect the entire planet). But we already know that there is nothing like that (Because, again, if there was, this would be big news). So, let's look elsewhere then. If something would cause the Sun to grow larger, but for some reason not change the amount of radiation emitted or the amount of radiation absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere (and both of those things have to be true, else we'd be looking at something that would have extinguished pretty much everything not hiding in caves or the deep ocean), we would be unable to find any evidence in the fossil record.
Finally, stellar evolution is a very well understood field. We can predict what a Star will do with pretty good accuracy, and "suddenly swelling up and then shrinking again to such a degree that it would be visible to the human eye at a range of 8 light minutes" is nowhere to be found in those.


Look, dude, I know you're all excited about these theories. They're great entertainment, and they give you that tingly satisfaction of belonging to a secret club that knows the truth that "the powers that be" want to suppress. But that does not make them true. You are asking us more scientifically minded people to "open our minds" and look for "alternative interpretations", but you do not realize that the scientific method already forces us to do this continually. The people who write the books you're buying make their money by ranting and raving about how the scientific establishment rejects their bullshit, and how this proves that they and the other cranks who get similarly rejected are in posession of truths so astounding and dangerous that there is a vast conspiracy to keep it all under wraps (Quite why that is is never adequately explained, of course).

Let me reiterate: The reason why noone will accept your theories is not because they're close-minded, or afraid of something. It's because your theories are bad, and not fully thought through. They lack scientific rigor, and cannot be tested properly.

Have you forgotten, our geneticsts say Mankind came from 6 women! Now, go to the library and get the book. Thank you! As far as using the technical term of conspiracy theory....well I prefer alternative history theory. One, I can't prove my hypothesis on the subject. Now, take the Great Flood over 100 ancient & current civilizations have a story of the World being flooded. Our Ancestors took the time to record these events because it so effected them. Look at the 200 destroyed cities just in the Med. Oppenheimer took inspiration for atomic weapons out of the Vedic texts of India. Tesla inspiration for technology came right out of the old testament or the Torah! Instead of attacking, try to use some alternative thinking. Think outside the box. Question what we are being taught. Modern day dogma will only get you so far. The Indian texts say civilization goes back 35,000 years. My personal belief is Man has been here alot longer than previously thought. By the way, I notice that you choose not answer some questions that would be inconvenient to you to answer. I admit it's kind of petty but it's a response to the attack dog mentality rather than having a give and go discussion. Most modern construction would not survive a hundred years without regular maintenance. Some how much would our civilization survive 1,000 year...what about 10,000 years. Maybe I give too much credit too our ancestors and maybe you do not give our ancestors enough credit. HMMM! Something to ponder and think about before replying. What do you know about the history of North America before 1500 or 1600?

The E wrote:

smr wrote:200,000 ton guide stone (I think that's the base stone is in Jonathan Gray book [url]Dead Man Secrets[/url].

That is not a link. The thing is, if this thing actually exists, it would be remarkable! If it was clear it was moved by humans, it would be an astonishing feat. But, as far as I can tell, it never made an appearance on the various "largest man made structures" lists that seem to appear ever so often. So please, where's the wikipedia entry for this thing? Where's the Ecuadorian tourist guide entry for it? Any other source for this aside from the ramblings of a pseudoscientist?

All I asked was to stretch our minds and see if their alternative facts and explanations for history.

Strange how it is never the people like you who "stretch their minds". You're telling us not to accept blindly what Science has uncovered, and yet you seem utterly convinced that you know the truth and the rest of us are too blind to see it.

History has been written by the victors not the oppressed. Imagine what American history would be like if it was taught my native Americans.

Not that different. The names, facts and dates would still be the same, the interpretation however would not be. That's the thing here: You are conflating the facts of history with the interpretation of said facts.

Now, we have watched civilizations rise and fall. Most technology was hidden and not shared!

Really? Over the course of the technological development periods which we can trace, innovations have rarely stayed contained to one particular group of people. Give it a generation or two, and most innovations will have travelled far and wide. There is nothing to indicate that this was ever any different.

What history of the America's is known to you and others before 1600.

There are quite a few things known about that period. Not by me, I hasten to add, I am not all that interested in that topic, but we do have quite a body of knowledge from archaeological findings available to us (That the europeans did quite a lot of damage to our ability to know more about the people who lived there is one of the great tragedies of history).

We mock the bible story of a biblical flood.

Well, not so much mock as "refuse to accept as a given due to a lack of corroborating evidence and a lack of an universally accepted interpretation of the relevant passages".

One was about 11000 to 12000 BC and other was 65 million years ago. The second occurred because of a comet or asteroid strike at Niagra Falls. That is where the North Pole was at the time.

Niagara? Really? Look, we know what killed the dinosaurs, and it happened a few thousand kilometers to the south.

The ice pack was immediately destroyed. We find the remains of the impact in the soil due to micro diamonds in it. Micro diamonds our only created by some meteor, comet, and/or asteroid strike(s). That strike set off the Ring of Fire volcanoes and destroyed the dinosaurs (most of the world died that day.) Our planet has experienced multiple worldwide cataclysmic civilization catastrophes.

Hahahahahaha no

I mean, I do not doubt that there have been several cataclysmic events over the course of Earth's history, but civilizations have so far not witnessed one. Oh, sure, maybe some tribe or another got wiped out in some Tsunami or Earthquake or Volcano eruption, but those are small things in the grand picture. Humanity as a whole has never faced an extinction-level event.

Let me relate a story that was told to me this morning on Feb 9, 2014.

Oh good, an anecdote. You do know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, right? Good.

I was speaking to foreman that was working on the building. We got talking politics, religion, and 9/11. He referenced growing up in Mexico in small village. Near his village home, there is a mountain that with caves and running water coming out. These caves go deep into the mountain and near center of the mountain are cave drawings. It shows multiple pictures of sun getting bigger than normal. He believes whoever lived their was documenting some type of catastrophe of the sun and these people had fled to cave and documented what the problem was. Now, I can not prove this story is true or not. Why would he lie about this story? There is no motive for profit. I believe this story is documentation of some type of problem with the sun. (A huge solar story or flair...the event so shook the natives that they drew it on the cave walls.)

Oh boy.....

Okay, so you have one (anecdotal!) data point. Now, let us take your hypothesis and run with it. What would we need to see in addition to that one data point in order to turn this hypothesis into a proper theory?
Well, for starters, we would need to see other records of it. We know humanity wasn't wiped out by whatever it was these people saw, so there must be other records dating from the same time period depicting something similar (since something that affects the Sun would by definition affect the entire planet). But we already know that there is nothing like that (Because, again, if there was, this would be big news). So, let's look elsewhere then. If something would cause the Sun to grow larger, but for some reason not change the amount of radiation emitted or the amount of radiation absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere (and both of those things have to be true, else we'd be looking at something that would have extinguished pretty much everything not hiding in caves or the deep ocean), we would be unable to find any evidence in the fossil record.
Finally, stellar evolution is a very well understood field. We can predict what a Star will do with pretty good accuracy, and "suddenly swelling up and then shrinking again to such a degree that it would be visible to the human eye at a range of 8 light minutes" is nowhere to be found in those.


Look, dude, I know you're all excited about these theories. They're great entertainment, and they give you that tingly satisfaction of belonging to a secret club that knows the truth that "the powers that be" want to suppress. But that does not make them true. You are asking us more scientifically minded people to "open our minds" and look for "alternative interpretations", but you do not realize that the scientific method already forces us to do this continually. The people who write the books you're buying make their money by ranting and raving about how the scientific establishment rejects their bullshit, and how this proves that they and the other cranks who get similarly rejected are in posession of truths so astounding and dangerous that there is a vast conspiracy to keep it all under wraps (Quite why that is is never adequately explained, of course).

Let me reiterate: The reason why noone will accept your theories is not because they're close-minded, or afraid of something. It's because your theories are bad, and not fully thought through. They lack scientific rigor, and cannot be tested properly.

smr wrote:Have you forgotten, our geneticsts say Mankind came from 6 women!

No, I haven't. Neither have I forgotten that you haven't substantiated that claim in any way. Also, here's an article you ought to read.

Also, you are now postulating that the entire human species was repopulated 12000 years ago from a cave in Mexico. Historical evidence does not support this theory.

Now, go to the library and get the book. Thank you!

Nope. Why should I spend money on something like that (Because no library in my vicinity carries this thing), when I am already pretty sure that most of it is bullshit, just going from the things you've posted here?

As far as using the technical term of conspiracy theory....well I prefer alternative history theory. One, I can't prove my hypothesis on the subject. Now, take the Great Flood over 100 ancient & current civilizations have a story of the World being flooded.

Yes, stories about great floods are common amongst coastal tribes. Funny how they don't seem to match up to one specific worldwide flood.

Our Ancestors took the time to record these events because it so effected them. Look at the 200 destroyed cities just in the Med.

Umm, okay? Sure, all the tribes that lived there will have recorded it, but remember: The biblical account, if taking literally, is completely falsified by the existance of those accounts. Relevant reading here.

Oppenheimer took inspiration for atomic weapons out of the Vedic texts of India. Tesla inspiration for technology came right out of the old testament or the Torah! Instead of attacking, try to use some alternative thinking.

I tried to. I thought about these things, looked at other available data, and came to the conclusion that these "alternative" accounts are bullshit. People taking inspiration from something doesn't mean anything, it certainly doesn't prove that these ancient texts had scientific truths encoded in them.

Think outside the box. Question what we are being taught. Modern day dogma will only get you so far. The Indian texts say civilization goes back 35,000 years. My personal belief is Man has been here alot longer than previously thought.

Really. Care to offer some citations for that?

By the way, I notice that you choose not answer some questions that would be inconvenient to you to answer.

Like what, for example?

I admit it's kind of petty but it's a response to the attack dog mentality rather than having a give and go discussion. Most modern construction would not survive a hundred years without regular maintenance. Some how much would our civilization survive 1,000 year...what about 10,000 years.

Okay. Let me explain something here: The reason why I am so vehemently attacking the bullshit you're repeating here is because vehemently attacking new hypothesises is part of the scientific process. Part of being a skeptic is not blindly accepting what you are told. And I am not blindly accepting the things you say, because you are failing to provide citations I can look up beyond what is mentioned in one particular book by one author. Come on, there should be many more references to the extraordinary things you claim than just that! Like the 200 kton stone you keep throwing around, for example.

Daryl wrote:Thanks to The E.
Even in the medieval times most people didn't travel more than 20 kms from their village.

That´s a very misleading statement though.

With the records i´ve seen, going back as far as the 14th century, but most of it being from 16th and ahead, it is surprisingly common for people to marry or simply move FAR from home.
As in HUNDREDS of km.

In an average village 10-30% would come from away from the immediate region(>50km) and 20-50% would come from beyond the local area(>20km).

The really weird thing about this however, is that it´s true even at times when there were no known means for easy communication at these distances.

So, like some of the most extreme cases, how the heck does a guy down in Scania find a girl to marry up north in Västerbotten, and then figure out how to get together and then move both of them to maybe Dalarna or Uppland...

Scania to Västerbotten is a matter of a thousand km(and up north was more "unknown" than anything you could find maps of), yet the above is almost identical to a real example i´ve seen from the 15th century(and a combination with some others).

(i´m using my own country as an example because there´s a fair amount of very old records here that has survived, but you can find similar records from elsewhere as well)


So, while the statement MAY be technically correct(and i´m leaning more and more to consider it one more of those myths that are based on "oh but they couldn´t have!" rather than evidence), it most certainly doesn´t give a realistic picture of past reality.

Relatively big flood (like the UK is experiencing at present or Australia got a couple of years ago), and the local witchdoctors will insert into verbal tradition a story of how all animals are preserved in an Ark. Probably a squire on a hill saving his livestock. Much later the literate rabbis write it up and bingo - scripture.
Move forward a couple of millennia to the Bible Belt and TV evangelists are milking it for all they can screw out of the credulous.

Pretty much yeah. And there HAS been some much bigger floods through history.
The most extreme probably being when the lowlands outside of western Europe were permanently drowned, those are bottom of the sea ever since.

Wow

I will admit to having a secret liking for "Alt History", but mostly because it is Science Fiction written "inside out". Generally taking one or two facts and stringing them together with a lot of assumptions does not make for real history, science or anything else. It is a bit like that old cartoon of a scientist at the chalkboard covered with a giant equation, but there is a big gap in the middle and a chalked in the space is "And Here a Miracle Happens".

Science is about proof, and proof needs to be repeatable or at least available to everyone. In other words, if you claim that "x" happens in an experiment, then I should be able to gather the equipment, set up your experiment in the same way and get "x" as well. If you claim that in 3500BC there is evidence for some event, then anyone who goes and makes a dig at the site should be able to find evidence.

Now I believe you actually are on to something about the human genetic bottleneck, since scientists have, using DNA evidence, backtracked the human genome to a very small number of individuals. There is supporting theoretical evidence as well; a megavolcano erupted at about the same time period, which caused enough climactic change to seriously disrupt ecosystems, which would have greatly affected our Neolithic ancestor's ability to survive.

Now this isn't just a wild assertion, but requires evidence from several unrelated fields to mesh together. You can also find literally hundreds of articles from scholarly journals discussing the mechanisms that caused this, and of course the argument isn't closed; someone might discover a new fact or interpret an existing, unexplained fact in a way that changes the understanding of how this happened.

Notice this is far different than citing a single source.

If a global flood was a real event, then the evidence would be rather unambiguous. Everywhere on Earth there would be a layer of sediment, mud or clay corresponding to the year of the global flood. The layer would be so similar in nature that anyone digging in Japan would be forced to wonder why it looked the same as that layer in Argentina. We know such things can happen, the K-T boundary where a giant asteroid hit the earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs is marked by a global layer filled with the metal Iridium, which is common on asteroids but not very common on Earth.

So if you can show lots of sites from time "x" are covered in a layer of sediments all over the globe (and I mean all over, any place that was at or near sea level at the time would,by definition, have to have been covered), then you will have satisfied the first standard: evidence that an event happened. After that, you will need to demonstrate a mechanism that would have caused this to happen. Finally, anyone in the world should be able to go and dig to confirm your evidence, and experiments should be able to be conducted which demonstrate the ability of your mechanism to cause a global flood.

Now there are a lot of anomalous things out there that are difficult to understand. We see devices like the Antikythera mechanism, which is obviously a computer, but is hard to put into context since there is only one of them, and no other records have survived from that time that refer to anything like it. How it was designed and built, and in what context it was created and used is difficult to discern based on the surviving evidence, but that is no reason to jump in and say alien beings or some secret society was responsible for building it. There is simply not enough evidence to make more than informed speculation.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so when you find out about things that are not explainable today, just hold your breath and don't jump in off the deep end.

Michael Everett wrote:The whole problem with lost technology is that how does one confirm that said technology existed outside the minds of conspiracy theorists?
Let us look at a recent example.

...

While absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, no theory may be considered viable until it has accrued several supporting pieces of evidence. Nevertheless, there will always be people willing to believe anything, hence why so much money is stolen by internet fraudsters relying on the gullibility of their victims. Just because something is a new way of looking at it, doesn't mean it must be right.

Quite true, but there is a huge bunch of evidence pointing very sharply towards "a lot more was known about 'back then' than currently aknowledged by common telling of history".

This is a perfect example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/702478.stm
"It seems that the elliptical lens design was invented much earlier that we thought and then the knowledge was lost," says Dr Olaf Schmidt, of Aalen University in Germany.

And even in that article they make the unconditional assertion that the maths for the theoretical side behind doing and understanding such lenses wasn´t known until centuries later, taking the absence of evidence as absolute evidence of absence.

Which is a horribly common fail, even despite the vast changes that have been forced upon historians based on discoveries over the last 50 years, repeatedly showing this way of thought to be severely flawed.

The:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
is another perfect example.

Before it was found, everyone KNEW that something like it was 100% impossible.
And then it was found and suddenly it wasn´t quite so impossible, and some OTHER previously found artifacts had to be looked at again, as they had been incorrectly dismissed or classified due to these same prejudices.

And as has already been repeatedly mentioned in the Safehold forum, the steam machine idea was known well enough that we KNOW, that a functional and useful steam engine COULD have been built over a millenia earlier than what happened...

However, if any old civilisation had advanced technology, they would have ruled pretty much the entire continent that they were on and THEY WOULD HAVE LEFT SIGNIFICANT TRACES! Rubbish heaps, large cities with specific design style, even actual vehicles! Technology lasts, even if it rusts and corrodes, it can still be recognised when re-discovered.

That isn´t really true unfortunately.

There´s also the problem of definitions. I always take care to remember that when talking about "technology" or "advanced technology", i have to think relative to known and expected tools and knowledge of the time i´m looking at.

A wind mill would be considered extremely advanced technology 3000 years ago, despite being perfectly possible to build with the tech base available at the time.

One of the MANY problems with demanding "significant traces" however, is the issue that it´s perfectly probable that the most advanced civilisations in history, were the ones located exactly where todays naturally sited cities are today.

Also, "technology" does not in any way mean or imply "metal".

And if you look at the Antikythera mechanism, and just how much effort it took to figure out even just that it was more than a small lump of metal, you should quickly realise that there´s no telling how much or how little we are missing.

As a comparison, so called nodules, of iron and manganese is in many places quite common, it´s basically a lump of metal, just big enough that some people are considering mining them from the seafloors. And very hard to distinguish from something like the Ak mechanism as it looked when taken from the seabed.

And you are also blatantly wrong about "ruling the continent".
The Celts were far more advanced technically than the Romans, they did not rule Europe, notably, they didn´t even TRY to rule.

The Mongols in comparison didn´t really have ANYTHING truly advanced, they just used wellknown things in combinations that others had never really thought of, or was simply not realistic for others.
And they created the 2nd largest empire ever after the British.
They didn´t even have sappers until forcibly recruiting Chinese after conquering China.

Leading to a simple fact of history.
Technology does not equate conquest or supremacy.