What happened to Atlantis? What will happen to us?

Listen to the author reading this essay

All thinking people know, or suspect, that human civilization presently faces existential dangers, just as all thinking people find ways to put this truth out of our minds so we can shop for groceries and take care of our loved ones.

Some of us focus on global CO₂ levels, some on broader measures of environmental devastation, including loss of biodiversity, right up to the Sixth Existinction. If you are not familiar with Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, she documents that species are now dying at a rate unseen since the disappearance of the dinosaurs, 65 mya. The chain reaction of disappearing species will continue, leaving a much impoverished global ecosystem that may or may not be able to support human life.

I suspect that we won’t have the luxury of an illusion of normalcy much longer. We will look back at 2020 and say, that was the year when things started to get weird, the first hint that the background we have taken for granted all our lives’ long must be questioned and re-evaluated.

To put our present crisis in context, I suggest a radical detour to consider evidence that a technically advanced, global civilization existed in the deep past and disappeared suddenly in an event that geologists call the Younger Dryas..

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The Younger Dryas Event

Geologists know what happened 12,700 years ago.  We just don’t know what caused it, or how fast it happened. It is called the Younger Dryas Event.  [One view, another, classical view]

The last ice age ended very suddenly. North America had been half covered in a glacier 2 miles thick that was dumped into the oceans. Sea levels rose 100 meters. Some say this happened in a matter of weeks. The best geological evidence of the violence of this event is in the Columbia River Gorge

It is natural to identify this event with flood myths from many cultures, including Noah’s Flood. Plato wrote about the lost civilization of Atlantis, and that it ended at a time that corresponds exactly to the Younger Dryas event.

 

Ancient Machine Tools

Graham Hancock has devoted his life work to documenting evidence for a global, technically advanced civilization. This would be the civilization destroyed in the Younger Dryas event. More recently, UnchartedX has summarized evidence for both high power and precision machine tools. Very briefly:

• The Pyramids are far older than the Egyptian dynasties (5,000 YBP). They could not have been built with technology of the Dynastic Egyptians, nor indeed with today’s construction technology. We today might cut millions of identical blocks of stone and fit them together, but the Pyramids are built with stones all one-of-a-kind, yet fitting together so tightly you can’t wedge a piece of paper between them. I wonder if this could have been done without computers and, of course, powerful cranes.
• Likewise, there are pyramids and other megaliths around the world, Easter Island, China, Eastern Europe, Machu Piccu. Did you know there is a pyramid outside St Louis?
• In many locations, there are quarried stones in the 100 ton range, at the limit of 21st century cranes. The largest I know of is more than 1,000 tons in Lebanon, far heavier than we can lift with today’s machinery.
• Precision carved statues, symmetric to a fraction of a mm are housed in the Cairo museum. They could not have been hand carved.
• There are 40,000 stone vases and pots in the Cairo museum, ranging in size from a few inches to a few feet. They were carved hollow from hard stone often with wide bellies and narrow mouths. I don’t know of anyone trying to manufacture such objects today, but if they did, it would be with a computer-controlled lathe and a diamond cutting tool.
• Core drill holes have been found in hard stone, where you can see drill marks indicating the pitch of the drill, in Saqqara and in many Egyptian artifacts. These drills were more powerful than any we have today. UnchartedX Video
• The Colossus of Ramsesis a proof unto itself. (Unrelated, it was the subject of Shelley’s famous poem.)

  

   

Culture of Atlantis

This is to me the most interesting question of all, but we know almost nothing. We know they had powerful and precision machines. We can be pretty confident they had global communications, because there are architectural parallels in megalithic structures around the world. There is every reason to think they were traveling around the globe.

But what were they thinking when they built the Pyramids or the Easter Island statues? Did they have religious beliefs unlike any religion today? Were the pyramids built for religious purposes or were they a network of Tesla towers, or something we can’t imagine? How many diverse cultures filled the globe? Or were the cultures homogenized by communications networks, as is happening in today’s world?

I wonder about their music, but that will be the last thing we learn about.

I think it remarkable that no written records from that period have survived. Of course, we have pictographs going back much earlier, so writing existed. Maybe it was all on paper, and they thought their literature was safely backed up to The Cloud. Or maybe their communication relied on a highly developed version of what we call “telepathy”.

What was their relationship to Nature? We can be confident that they didn’t trash the global ecosystem, because so much of what today’s “civilization” has wrought will require much more than 12,000 years for Gaia to fully recover. Think about the fact that there were virgin deposits of coal, oil and minerals when people began exploiting them on an industrial scale in the 19th Century.

Heavy machinery that could cut and lift a stone weighing 1,000 tons out of a quarry, but without fossil fuel or nuclear power? Not only their culture, but also their technology must have been very different from ours.

I wonder if they had wars and violence. I wonder if the end came via a natural catastrophe like a meteor event, or a nuclear war or something we can’t understand. Even if it was a comet impact, as geologists suspect, it may have been nudged by a hi-tech space weapon. There is no evidence of ancient nuclear waste. The Bible and Gilgamesh and Egyptian mythic traditions all hint that it was a time of moral decadence; but whatever mistakes they made were very different from the mistakes that we are making today.

 

The Flood

Imagine if sea levels rose by 100 meters tomorrow. Most of the world’s population is in coastal cities and would drown, and all the global infrastructure that keeps us fed and supplied would quickly be washed away. The internet would still work because it is decentralized. But people and goods would not be able to move. Fuel shortages, electric outages, and mass starvation would follow. I expect that global civilization would disappear, but pockets of tribal peoples who are locally self-sufficient would survive to begin the world over.

 

Graham Hancock

He is the one who taught me this story. He calls us a “species with amnesia”. His work rewrites human prehistory. I recommend his books, starting with the latest, America Before. But his interview with Joe Rogan two years ago is a good 3-hr introduction.

In his books 1491 and 1493, Charles Mann cites evidence that some of the many pre-Columbian American cultures fed themselves with a system that looked to Europeans like a crude hunter/gatherer lifestyle, but which was in fact more efficient than their European agriculture. Amazonians subtly and wisely managed natural, local ecosystems greatly enriched in edible plants and animals. This goes beyond even sustainable agriculture as we know it today,

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Relevance to the present

Before COVID, our global ecosystems were in slow-motion collapse, probably over the brink but the inevitable sequelae would not have been catastrophic for some decades to come. CO₂ is just one small piece. We humans have dried up waterways, killed most of the insects, drained topsoil into the oceans, turned forest ecosystems into wood chips, overfished and polluted the oceans with plastic, spread poisons wantonly over the planet. Just war alone has had devastating environmental impacts. Whole habitats and ecosystems have been swept away for mining plantation crops. This is the Sixth Great Extinction (book) event since the beginning of life on Earth. My guess is that Gaia will require 10 million years to recover completely.

Our human systems are in collapse as well. American hegemony based on military force and covert regime change operations cannot last. Everywhere, rebellion is brewing against American neocolonialism. China is the heir apparent to global leadership, but the US will not let that transition happen peacefully. The global banking system is drowning in debt. Concentration of wealth has made democracy into a window dressing in most Western countries. The diverse, free press  that supports our Global Brain has been the object of a hostile takeover by capitalist propagandists.

 

Deliberately triggering the collapse sooner rather than later

There is a small, elite group of billionaires, working in secret over the last decades, maybe centuries. I don’t know who they are, but there are some good candidates. Catherine Austin Fitts calls them “Mr. Global”, so I will, too. Anyone who extolls the Great Reset is a candidate. They have perceived, correctly, that if human civilization is to collapse, the sooner it happens, the less damage there will be from which to recover.

Mr. Global got that right. But what he got wrong is that he thinks he can control the collapse and lead the world that is left in its wake. Mr. Global is smart but not wise, and, of course, “wisdom” is far insufficient to “manage” global ecosystems. His ideas are based on the corporate model of top-down control, deciding what is to live and what is to die. Species useful to us will be cultivated in endless rows, everything else will have to go. Mr Global has no idea how interdependent is all life, and he doesn’t understand that ecosystems have lives of their own. They are self-organized, self-regulating systems. Top-down management can never work. Let’s make sure he never gets the chance to learn that lesson the hard way.

 

The Pandemic

The pandemic is the first phase of Mr Global’s demolition of human culture and economics. Let’s take a step beyond the Lab Leak hypothesis. Reiner Fuellmich and Richard Fleming, among others, have amassed evidence that COVID19 was engineered, then deliberately released.

[Footnote: it may be more complicated than this. I suspect that COVID was first released as a bioweapon targeted at China, like SARS in 2003. But this time, like a kung fu master, China exported the virus to plague its creators. When Mr Global saw the incipient pandemic, he swapped the playbook for one he had been planning to use a few years down the road. This paragraph is purely my speculation, even more than the rest of this essay.]

The goal of Mr. Global is control of our thoughts and behaviors. This was the largest motive behind COVID. It was an excuse for paralyzing our thinking with fear, keeping us isolated from one another, and shutting down culture and the arts, disabling our collective human genius so we can be deceived and controlled one-by-one. I have no doubt that Mr. Global has convinced himself this is a necessary evil.

The deception has worked well on the world’s intelligentsia. But there are large groups who see past it. There are the street-wise masses, white and black, who have known all their lives not to believe the authorities. And there is a network of brave scientists, doctors, independent journalists, and lawyers the world over who are in touch with one another and constantly dodging the censors to spread the truth. This week, for example, their focus is on exposing the underreporting of vaccine side-effects, including deaths. The official numbers are already worse in 7 months than the sum of all vaccine deaths over the last 30 years, and the truth is far worse than the official numbers tell.

COVID is just one piece of a multi-pronged covert war against all vital systems that support human life in the manner of the 21st century.  For example, weather manipulation is a mature, secret technology from DARPA. Weather has been used to destroy livestock and crops this last year. Another example: when it came out that hydroxychloroquine was a safe and effective early treatment for COVID, a chemical plant in Taiwan that produces its feedstock exploded mysteriously. Food processing plants are blowing up and airplanes are diving into grain silos. Fires in California seem to burn houses efficiently but leave trees between them uncharred…Laser ignition from satellites? Directed energy weapons? BLM protests and the Jan 6 DC event were all staged with agents provocateurs from the FBI. Meanwhile, a transfer of wealth upward that goes all the way back to Reagan’s trickle-down economics has greatly accelerated since 2020 with failures of small businesses and real estate owners’ inability to collect rent to pay their mortgages. The added wealth for billionaires is less important to them than impoverishing the rest of us and making us dependent.

All of this would be impossible without information warfare. All totalitarian regimes depend for their survival on controlling the information that the people receive. The Internet is thus our most important defense, so Mr Global is working overtime to legitimize internet censorship.  As of today, there are two streams of scientific/medical literature and also two news streams of news. The mainstream, including NYTimes, NPR, CNN, etc are tightly controlled. Fox news is mostly controlIed, but not as tightly as the liberal press. Assume there is an ongoing struggle behind the scenes at each news outlet. I’m sure the gruesome story of Julian Assange has made many a brave and honest journalist think twice about speaking out.

The counter-narrative is healthy, diverse, and open, as it should be in a democracy. But it is also heavily censored and “shadow-banned” — meaning that Google searches will direct you away from it. Some of my favorite sources include Dr Meryl Nass, Robert F Kennedy, and Dr Mercola.

I expect accelerating repression and new, manufactured crises to keep us scared and isolated. Already, the definition of “terrorist” has been expanded to include anyone who wants to debate questions of medical science. Already, detention camps have been built to warehouse the dissenters and the unvaccinated.

But can Mr Global get away with sweeping half of America into detention camps? Our strength is in numbers, but we must act collectively. Organization and non-violent resistance are the order of the day. Share information widely. Network, especially with local allies. Assume we might need each other for food and electricity. Build bonds of mutual trust. Community, community, community. This crisis has brought together people on the left and right who would not seem to be natural allies. Naomi Wolf on the left and Tucker Carlson on the right share a common agenda. The masses who will resist in great numbers are mostly Trump supporters, and we would be much weaker without them.

Mr Global jumped the gun, and is overextended. It seems that the lies are growing bigger before he has completely secured the Internet against dissent. There are substantial legal challenges to the many violations of Constitutional law and International treaties (especially the Nuremberg Code). This is a vulnerable moment when the COVID narrative could come unraveled with one more whistleblower or one judge who can’t be bought.

The main thing to keep in mind is that the future is not yet determined, and that we each have a hand in co-creating it. Whether the coming crisis ends our civilization or transforms it is up to us. Don’t think about “hope”, but rather pro-actively build the future we want, even before present systems collapse. My aim will be toward an end of rapacious resource exploitation, and return to local autonomy and diverse, independent human cultures.

We are privileged to live through an event as significant as the Younger Dryas extinction, but it doesn’t have to end in collapse and mass death.  Let’s aim for what Charles Eisenstein calls The More Beautiful World that our Hearts Know is Possible. We must re-discover the energy source that moved 100-ton stone blocks without fossil fuels or uranium. And we must re-learn what Native American tribes knew about managing robust ecosystems enriched in foods and herbs, so that nature provides all our needs in a sustainable way that is actually more efficient even than organic agriculture.

We will have help from disembodied spirits and/or extraterrestrials.
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Listen to Graham Hancock on the Prophecy of Thoth