Talianki: Ancient Ukraine City Ignored

Wikipedia says:

Talianki (Ukrainian: Тальянки́) is an archaeological site near the village of the same name in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine. It was the location of a large Cucuteni-Trypillian settlement dating to around 3850–3700 BC, currently the largest known settlement in Neolithic Europe

I am into ancient history and had zero idea that such sites existed in that part of the world, until I read The Dawn of Everything. This site had perhaps 10,000 people (and even 25,000 if you include satellite towns) and was not unique in that location. The homes had timber frames and stone foundations, and each had their own garden.

It points out that because the city had no “government buildings, fortifications, or monumental architecture” and no “acropolis or civic centre”, and no “gran burials”, then there is no story to tell. So we never heard of it!

Seemingly people just got along, everyone being equal.

Archaeologists refuse to call it a city, because of the lack of apparent social structure and no rulers. So they call it a “mega-site” or even an “overgrown village”, as if to punish it for not telling them a story.

Creating A Tsunami

This relatively simple idea comes from Termination Shock, a fiction book by futurist Neal Stephenson. And it is mostly brilliant (and scary).

Drop a shipping container, full of high explosives to the ocean floor. Detonate it and high waves spread in every direction, then dissipate.

But, not far away is a second shipping container, and it explodes when the first wave is overhead. This amplifies the wave.

Keep doing this for a sequence of shipping containers in a line, and you get a tsunami.

The science is correct in theory. The problem I foresee is that oceans are predictable enough to pull it off. You would need an intimate understanding of the current state of the waves, and wind and weather.

Still, yet another reason to not live by the coast.

Reproducing Robots = Grey Goo Apocalypse?

Grey Goo

Background: John von Neumann came up with the idea of self-replicating machines in 1949. This lead to the computer virus…

Then in 1986 K. Eric Drexler coined the term Grey Goo. Read this carefully because it is very, very scary, and nobody will see it coming:

Imagine such a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals, making copies of itself…the first replicator assembles a copy in one thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight. At the end of ten hours, there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the Sun and all the planets combined — if the bottle of chemicals hadn’t run dry long before.

A progamming error or errant scientist is all that it takes. Of course this is all fantasy until someone actually invents it.

Err…

…these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.

And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. Again and again.

“With the right design—they will spontaneously self-replicate,” 

Team builds first living robots—that can reproduce [Harvard]

Many scientists don’t mind dabbling with danger, like creating black holes in labs. In this instance, the seem to not care that nothing is ever 100% safe:

These millimeter-sized living machines, entirely contained in a laboratory, easily extinguished, and vetted by federal, state and institutional ethics experts

It’s OK, they are only little…

This was not widely reported, and we are edging closer to a situation where dabbling with nature and assigning ourselves god-like powers could end all intelligent life as we know it.

Orchestrated Denial of State Revenue

It is not too unusual for someone to attempt to profit from not paying – debtors, wages, income tax, GST, rent – while syphoning off the profits. Then declare bankrupt. And next year, do the same again with a new limited liability company, perhaps under the name of your husband/wife/child…

What if the same was applied, but only so that the government and major corporations lost out?

What if it was orchestrated, by a significant percentage of society?

What if they implied that – if the government doesn’t improve something – they’ll all default on government revenue and go bankrupt?

I’m sure that amongst all the legal structures, payment arrangements, tax obligations… someone can contrive a threat that would work at least once – a tax strike of sorts.

More extremely, don’t contrive. Simply don’t pay tax. If enough businesses do so, government action could damage the economy.

GDP

While we are at it…

GDP is everything to governments in advanced economies. Wanna hurt the government? Spend less!

Every business has discretionary spending:

  • marketing
  • R&D
  • updating equipment
  • staff bonuses
  • Xmas parties
  • pay rises
  • prices can be reduced…

Now a drop of 0.01% in GDP, two quarters in a row, equals a “recession” in Australia.

Growth is perhaps averaging 1-2% these days…

So if everyone spends (maybe) 1% less for a short while we can create a recession. But businesses aren’t everyone. And few will get on board.

BUT! What if a recession was almost happening, and this year growth was predicted to be 0.1%?

Then, if for arguments sake, GDP is half created by business, and 10% of businesses are on board, then collectively a mere 2% less spending by those businesses, over 6 months, could cause a recession.

NOW, while perhaps doing the above could be a powerful message, the implicit threat of it could maybe be more powerful.

CME / Solar Storm and Internet Sea Cables

A paper was just released that looks into how much damage a major solar storm can cause to the infrastructure of the Internet.

Here’s my summary:

Long metal things, especially at high latitudes, are prone to more harm than anything else. Solar activity that doesn’t even make the news does harm. Large countries have longer metal things, like power lines, railway tracks and pipelines.

Add to the mix undersea Internet cables. While the fibre optics are not metal, the casing is, and the repeaters every 150kms are.

We get a 1-3 days warning of incoming solar activity, and at its worst, we can switch off power grids and (importantly) disengage transformers.

We can’t switch off train tracks and pipelines, which can be bent or break.

We can switch off the Internet, but the cables will still be harmed. Fixing them could take years.

CME Scenario – we (hopefully, there is significant room for human error, and errors of judgement, and cost mitigation) turn off the power grid, disengage transformers, and after the storm we have power back on. Damage to pipelines and railways won’t cause too much death or suffering.

Undersea cables might be harmed and take months/years to repair. However, the Internet is primarily designed around redundancies. We won’t go without the Internet, it will just be slower and more congested. Simply turning off YouTube could fix things.

Satellites are quite likely to be fried. If that brings down GPS, that is a major catastrophe, as it is used by all sorts of things, including ATMs and the stockmarket.

So – one more reason to prepare for a major solar storm, something that society is serious unprepared for. But nothing particularly new or worrying.

Control Your Neighbourhood

Often survivalists wonder if they should be part of a collective or intentional community, or go solo (just immediate family).

More people with a range of skills is clearly better, but with more people trust diminishes, secrecy diminishes, and people wanting to run things or disagree increases.

I think at the most, unless you have amazing leadership skills and full control (owning everything), a handful of fully trusted known people is the limit.

Of course you can get to know your neighbours and local community without ever mentioning survivalism. This is good for life in general, and specifically when the SHTF, because trust, familiarity and friendship can be invaluable.

Take it a step further, and get like-minded people to live in the same locale. Like the Free State Project that urges libertarians to move to New Hampshire. Many like-minded people in a low-population place can affect politics and local laws, which in turns encourages more to turn up.

Locally (Victoria, Australia) I have looked through all the low-population areas with survivalist potential (basically, not desert) where the local council members are elected by ward (say a small town) instead of across the whole local government area evenly.

I found two:

Shire of Mansfield, 9,000 people, 4 wards, 5 councillors. That means perhaps 1,000 people in a rural area voting for one councillor.

Shire of Northern Grampians, 11,000 people, 4 wards, 7 councillors.

I’m not saying getting enough people to move there and vote you in would be easy or even possible. I’m saying these are the best places in Victoria to try. It can be a long-term, even multi-generational plan.

Even getting a dozen like-minded people to move there can make a big difference. If they work on networking and making friends, and speak sense instead of coming across as weird or crazy. At public meetings, just a handful of people in the crowd agreeing is noticeable and can influence change.

What changes? Key for me is planning laws, in an age where you need permission to do anything on your own land. Also, get some community SHTF planning happening – not hard if there is history of bushfires or floods (most have one or the other). Also, self-reliance, developing a culture of local produce and services. Schooling could perhaps be aligned with some aspects of self-determination.

In the long-term the idea of a local currency is possible.

How to start it? Be a voice in the self-sufficiency world (don’t mention survivalism) and talk up your location, and offer help/advice.

NEW: The Theory of Non-Space

Space is considered to be the framework of the universe, and is fixed, just like we imagine the framework of a house, or a chess board.

It is thought that there is a finite size to a piece of space. It is called the Planck Length. It is super tiny.

Theories around quantum gravity try to make sense of how local pieces of space, super tiny, interact with each other. And how those interactions can be used to work out how quantum mechanics works.

I have a different idea. I don’t think space is fixed, I don’t think it is a frame work. I don’t think there is a framework at all.

  • The universe is a sliding puzzle, but without edges
  • Units of space are the puzzle pieces. They can move, but when one moves, another must take its place.
  • Units of space carry particles, like an elephant in a dinghy
  • Gravity works on units of space, and particles get a free ride.
  • Gravity is a tow rope, units of spare are the dinghy, and the elephant is a particle
  • Possibly gravity still works on the particle, and space comes with it
  • Particles of space loosely cling together, and that is the observable universe
  • Beyond that is emptiness, the framework of the universe that has nothing in it. The non-space.
  • Not framework like a lattice, but a container like a bowl. Moving around inside it are units of space. They make it look like a lattice, like the pieces in a sliding puzzle

Of course space is 3D so think of a bowl full of marbles. Move one and another takes its place. But that doesn’t work well with a bowl of cubes, so there is perhaps a shape to these units of space. Which means they are either spheres, or many combine to make a shape (probably a sphere).

We could actually call a unit of space, a thing that can move, a Planck. Possibly this vessel that transports particles is a physical thing that incorporates all of the Planck constants? As in it has a mass and energy, and that needs to be deducted from the mass/energy that has been measure for the particles themselves. If that make equations work better, good! If not, the physical space thing doesn’t have mass or energy of its own (not so good, makes it less prove-able).

I don’t know how to research to find out if this has been thought of before. I do know that solution is bound to be very simplistic, which means an idiot like me could accidentally think of it 🙂

BONUS TIME

It just crossed my mind that if we involved time, then that would mean however long it took to traverse one Planck length at the speed of light is the minimum unit of time. Seems others have thought of this already (it is a bit obvious…) BUT with the above ideas it means that space actually has a peak velocity of the “speed of light”, and it carries the light.

This means that when we talk about space and time, they are more intertwined than ever before.

A 2012 Flashback

Some things I had forgotten about…

The Daily Mail said this:

Without wishing to sound too smug, I think we can predict the menu for the next five years at Robert Bast’s ‘Survive2012’ Australian hideaway: tinned beans, tinned beans, bottled water and more tinned beans.

The same goes for thousands of others who had expected to be the only remnants of today’s scheduled termination of the human race. Like Bast, a well-known ‘survivalist’ and online prophet of doom, they have been leaving nothing to chance.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2251430/The-end-world-Armageddons-delayed-notice.html

The 2012 Comet Prediction was Accurate?

Is there a comet with a periodicy of 5000 years, due to return in 2012? Without any evidence from 3114BC it is impossible to say.
(my article in 2010)

When our very early ancestors were colonizing the Nile River Valley, 5,000 years ago at the dawn of civilization, it’s likely a brilliant comet appeared in the predawn sky. There is no direct evidence for this visitor because the start of recorded history was still a few centuries away.

The belief is that comet at least split into two pieces, which would not return to the Sun along the same orbital track until 5,000 years later. This forensic evidence can be linked to the great comet of 1844 that was nearly as bright as the brightest naked-eye star, Sirius. The second fragment, called comet ATLAS, appeared near the beginning of 2020.
NASA, 2021

My best guesses of what the ancient Mayans predicted for Dec 21, 2012, were a solar storm or a comet.

A solar storm could in theory have been predicted, from thousands of years of observation. Modern cultures have only been observing them for 150 years or so. However, knowing which direction the storm pointed – the Sun is rotating – I figure was impossible. As it happened, in 2012 a solar storm powerful enough to wipe out our electrical grids, occurred. Thankfully it was not directed at Earth, but it was quite rare.

Comets were always the better candidate:

  • Visible to the naked eye if big enough and close enough
  • The return can be calculated
  • Scary enough to form a religion around

To find the comet, my only option was to look at historical records. And they don’t go back to 3113 BC, the start of the ancient Mayan calendar. Clearly a comet spotted then, with a 5,000 year orbit, would be the best candidate, bookending the calendar. But such a period of orbit could only be back-calculated if observed in modern times.

Instead, I found a comet that could fit the 5 “ages” within the calendar – Caesar’s Comet:

The Long Count calendar was 5125 years long, which divided by 5 is 1025 years. 2050 years before 2012 was 39BC and in 44BC was Caesar’s Comet – It was perhaps the most famous comet of antiquity.

Accuracy, strangely, is not so important. Because travelling past the planets can cause gravitational disturbances, even NASA and their computers aren’t very accurate.

When Comet Hyakutake was discovered in 1996, astronomers determined that on the way in to our solar system it had an estimated periodicy of 17,000 years, yet after having its orbit disturbed by the largest planets, its new course meant it would take between 72,000 and 114,000 years to return.

When 23P/Brorsen-Metcalf was first discovered it was closest to Earth in August 1847. After completing its orbit it was back in that approximate spot in October 1919, and again in August 1989. The two observed periods were 72 years and 70 years. That’s roughly a 3% deviation between 2 orbits.

My bet is still with Comet Caesar. Not only could it still return soon and still be a remarkably accurate prediction…

…it might have zipped past us in 2012. Each time a comet grazes the sun, ice is burned off (that is literally what we see). After enough orbits, there is no ice left, and we cannot see it. They become a dark comet and some experts believe that half of the comets passing close by us are dark. We could literally be the path of one and not know until a few days before impact.