Mu

I'm reading an old book at the moment called The Lost Continent of Mu. The author attempts to prove that the homeland of the first humans to populate the earth was a large continent located in the Pacific Ocean between Asia, America and Australia. Interesting reading, but because of the age of the writing, the author's not afraid to make fairly bold presumptions from minimal evidence and very little scientific substantiation. None the less, some of his points seem vaild, such as remaining monolithic structures located around the world reminiscant of the same architecture and culture, using the same symbols in their inscriptions paying tribute to their homeland which they place geographically in the correct place.

My interest in ancient cultures is that some of them may have achieved quite advanced technology before falling victim to some kind of cataclysm. It's a kind of romantic fascination I guess, as I prefer to look ahead into the future rather than behind usually, but there must be something to be learned from large, advanced societies which today are all but lost, having left us huge stone monuments and buildings, and some ancient writings as clues to how they lived. It just lead me to thinking that if there was some kind of terrible cataclysm now, what would future civilations find remaining of ours? Nothing we make now is designed to last, it's more intended to be bought, sold and consumed. And while some of our records may survive intact, most of them now require quite advanced devices to read them. A civilisation which has reverted to a lower technology after a world wide cataclysim would have a hard time interfacing with any records they found of our current civilisation, assuming of course that perishable records such as books and paper documents were destroyed and only more durable electronic media survived.

There should be an initiative to construct a non-perishable record of our history, culture, religions, arts, technology, medicine and science which is designed to interact with and instruct future generations in a simple intuative way which would allow them to recover lost knowledge even after many generations, centuries or millenia of reversion to a more basic form of civilisation. Even just spidering the entire internet into a single data bank would be a good start.

It should make a pretty good piece of toast too.