Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?
Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.
Revisiting Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (about the African Dogon tribe’s alleged contact with extraterrestrials 5000 years ago), some questions came to mind.
Why would extraterrestrial visitors visit a small, primitive tribe in the isolated, at the time (and even now), heart of Africa.
Yes, the Sumerians and other cultures on the rim of the Mediterranean Sea are said by some, including Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii in 1966’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, to have been contacted by extraterrestrials, that left intimations of writing, agriculture, math, and other accoutrements of civilized living.
Oannes, the being from the sea who supposedly proffered these gifts is not unlike the Dogon visitors who told those peoples about their place of origin, a planet in the Sirius star system.
Click HERE for an online precis of the Dogon story.
But extraterrestrials would have to be significantly advanced to get here from the Sirius planetary environment, and one would think that such emissaries would seek out cultures and peoples who were much more advanced than the Dogon tribe, to whom they would communicate the locale of their home planet(s).
The chatter between the Dogons and the Sirians would have had to be something beyond difficult.
Even today, the Dogons do not represent an advanced element of Earth’s global society.
Either the Sirius visitors were inept at furthering the cultural evolution of the Dogons or the Sirius visitors represent a civilization that doesn’t regard technolocial advance as a sine qua non of their existence; technology is a prosaic tool, and other considerations make up the essence of their existence.
Or the visit never occurred at all.
For the sake of rumination, I’d like to address the second option above; that is, civilizations do not need technology to be advanced.
Perhaps it’s the music, the art, or social intercourse that is the high point of “advanced” civilizations, not the attributes of the ships that transport them hither and yon.
This would explain, perhaps, why UFOs have appeared in various guises, some not so futuristic as we imagine: the airships of the 1890s for example.
This would also explain, perhaps, why flying saucers have had a propensity to crash; they are not technologically refined, nor meant to be.
They are constructed to get here from there, much as Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci did with their rudimentary, by modern standards, ships.
If visitors sought out this planet, for whatever reason, they would impart elements of culture – music, art, writing, mathematics, and the like – rather than methods with a technological bent.
Technology wasn’t and isn’t their primary incentive or objective.
The artifacts touted by Ancient Alien theorists are esthetic not technological: the pyramids of Egypt and Middle/South America, Stonehenge, the Easter Island moai, et cetera.
What the Dogon were and are mimics the alien races and beings - the alien cultures –that seem to have visited the Earth in the past and today.
UFO researchers, governments, military constructs have missed the point.
UFOs visit to impart refinement, high culture.
And that refinement or culture is so foreign to our understanding, we humans can’t grasp it, although one might find hints of it in such workings as that of the Dogons, or the Egyptians, or the Inca, the Olmecs, the Mayans.
The message of UFOs isn’t about nuts and bolts or plasmatic ships.
It’s about existence as a thing rarefied, transcendental, or, shall we say, spiritual?
RR |
