Re: Juvenile fooleries (was Re: Neanderthal and PIE (Long!))

On Oct 15, 2008, at 11:38 AM, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 12:25 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier
> <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>> I also dabbled with a conworld featuring a "classic-style"
>> Atlantis drowning in the mid-Atlantic when I was in my teens.
>> My Atlantis was a high-tech, even starfaring, civilization
>> that eventually bombed itself out of existence (however, it
>> was too late to meddle with Neanderthals: I placed it about
>> 10,000 BC), but left behind a few colonies in neighbouring
>> planetary systems such as Tau Ceti.
>>
>> Later, I scrapped that universe because I realized that it
>> was way too corny and Dänikenian.
>
> No, no, no.  Not at all!  Now if the Atlanteans were *from* Tau Ceti
> and came to Earth, that'd be Dänikenian. :)
[ In advance, I must warn everyone that this is a long post. I didn't
mean for it to be, when I started it! If anyone doesn't want to read
the conworldy parts, there is a linguistics part near the end. ]

I must say the idea that people from the ancient world were
spacefaring is fascinating; I read a lot of those von Däniken books
as a kid where early humans came from space, so the idea that early
humans were the product of alien colonization is fairly mundane to
me ;) but had never thought about the possibility of early humans
venturing out themselves.

I also incorporated space colonization and an Atlantis-like submerged
continent (creatively called Atlan) in my childhood and adolescent
conworld. In that world, about 8000 years before the "present", there
were no less than three sentient species, only one of which was
autochthonous, and all the humans (who were from elsewhere) lived on
this one continent. Of course, that continent was destroyed, but
several groups of people managed to escape and settled in other parts
of the world, leading to today's cultures and languages.

For several years I've been trying to decide whether to abandon this
conworld, or rehabilitate it to be more realistic. I have a few
possible reasons for the humans to only live on Atlan, e.g. the
continent was only home to a research outpost, and humans weren't
actually intent on colonizing; or there were just so few of them that
they had only one population center; or they had a treaty with the
natives that said they would only settle there. I tend to envision
the land as fairly populous and urban, so the first two don't seem to
fit... although I suppose it could have started as an outpost or
small settlement and grown huge over the years. I don't see any
reason why the indigenous species would not have settled there
themselves... although just as I was writing that, it occurred to me
that maybe they had a religious or superstitious reason to avoid it
(and perhaps with good reason, since it *did* get destroyed after
all!) :)

Still more problematic is how and why the continent was destroyed.
Although the conworld in question has supernatural as well as sci-fi
elements, I'm mostly ruled out the trope that Atlan was destroyed
because it was morally corrupt. Another line of thinking holds that
Atlan was either artificial, or was held up artificially somehow, and
perhaps a mechanical failure caused it to be submerged. (Hmm, if it
was artificial, that would help explain why the natives didn't
colonize it -- it wouldn't have existed until humans created it.)

Then there's the question of how some inhabitants survived. There is
an idea in my mind that some of them were warned supernaturally, but
there are no details. And the traditional idea is that they left in
boats, but I guess there's nothing to say they didn't escape in air
vehicles instead.

In any case, after settling in different areas of the world, they
(gradually or suddenly) lost their "high" technology. I guess because
there were few experts among them, and they didn't have time to bring
along any books on science and technology, and there was no
infrastructure such as computer networks or electricity where they
landed.

Finally, the linguistic part. I've always maintained that the fall of
Atlan happened about 8000 years before the "present", but also that
the linguistic diversity of the resulting present world is similar to
that of Earth, or at least a large landmass like Eurasia. But based
on that 8000-year figure, I now think the world's languages would be
about as similar as the Indo-European ones to each other. On the
other hand, the bands of people landed on several different
landmasses and were isolated from each other for at least hundreds of
years, something which is not true of IE. I'm not sure how long their
year is, either, but I've always assumed it to be similar to our own.

Any thoughts on the logistics of this kind of technological collapse
population dispersal scenario?

Reply