283 watch out
This is a city in Peru, one of several that is about 5000 years old. This is older than the pyramids of Egypt. It pre-dates pottery even, by about 600 years.
For a long time, Euro-centric historians believed that humans arrived in the Americas by land bridge during the last ice age.
Numerous older excavations have proved that wrong. There's some evidence that pre-sapiens sapiens were here over 100,000 years ago. There's definite evidence that older settlements were along the coast, and were covered by the ocean when the sea level rose 300 feet at the end of the last ice age (about 10,000 years ago.)
My guess is that civilization in South America has been around a long-ass time, and only moved inland due to flooding. These cities are the remains of that. They had the calendar figured out, even to be able to predict solar eclipses.
The Mayan calendar was pretty good. They used a base twenty, because we have fingers and toes. 18 sets of fingers and toes, plus a five day festival, made a 365 day year.
And then there are the knots. Someday, someone will figure them out. Because the rest of old South American record keeping was pretty accurate, if we come up with a rosetta stone to help translate them, or give an AI the task, it will be fascinating to see what they tell about the civilization we killed.
My buddy the infectious disease doctor dropped by on Xmas Eve. I got three bits of info out of him. Two are speculative.
1. He showed off the bump from his vaccine shot.
2. The virus accidentally escaped that virus lab in Wuhan. (That is speculation... But consider the source. I do.)
3. We haven't seen the worst of it yet. (Said by a man who has gotten the first of two vaccine shots, and whose father died of Covid just recently.)
Hey holiday travelers, did you hear that last one? WE HAVEN'T SEEN THE WORST OF IT YET.
A hundred years ago, our "stuff" had half the bulk of nature.
This year, we hit equal. All biomass versus human junk. This doesn't include shit like plowing fields or dirt roads, just the "stuff" like concrete and buildings and garbage.
I forget the exact number, but it was estimated that in another twenty years or so, we would have reduced the amount of living stuff enough, and increased our junk pile enough, that we'll have twice as much human-stuff as natural, living stuff.
Seems totally sustainable, huh?
45 days in, and the Vendee Globe is the tightest race they have done. This is apparently because of light weather, and maybe better weather software and communications. There are three foiling boats about 400 miles ahead of a larger pack. Even with the time corrections for the rescue off South Africa, the lead is about 10 hours.
That's not much after sailing halfway around the world.
File under: central planning
Wherein, we come to the potential realization that maybe we went a little overboard over the summer?
That same doctor friend is the one who told me early on "wearing masks outdoors is a joke."
(BTW, he was wearing a mask when he stopped by the other day. If it's a joke, apparently we all want to be in on it.)
Yeah, it's tough to second guess, and really, we didn't know then what we know now, but yeah, I was saying the same thing. Shit, I still am. I think we went overboard. Not drastically overboard, but I would have loved to attend some outdoor shows last summer.
(Although, come to think of it, I did have the chance. I heard of a few events. And I didn't go. Probably less out of fear, and more because of couch.)
Be safe, everyone. And if you haven't seen Jupiter and Saturn close to each other, you still have time. The big day has passed, but the planets are still there.
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