History is like Swiss cheese (just ask Sam Beckett). So many civilizations that have been lost and we have no clue what happened to them, so many people whose stories we will never know and even animals we never knew existed.
If someone found a Britney Spears CD in the future amid a desolated landscape would they think she was a Queen we once worshipped? Hmm, let me get back to you on that one, but the Antikythera device that was discovered aboard a ship wreck may be along the same lines. For those who don’t know, this device is an ancient form of computer and as history is Swiss cheesed, computers weren’t supposed to exist, yet someone, somewhere in the past created one albeit a primitive one.
Discovered in 1901 aboard a Roman shipwreck, it is an astronomical analog computer far in advance of its time, so history says but since its origins are unknown who’s to say it’s an anachronism? We know ancient peoples had a penchant for studying the stars and created batteries, mapped systems that were unknown to them and carved vast images in the land that are coordinates and maps so precise some say they would to have had to have the power of flight to make them so precise.
Now scientists are saying that the original ship is in fact twice as large as they thought, now an estimated 160 feet and contains more devices like the Antikythera one. The Roman Empire was vast and superior to any other. Did they have computers as we do now? Was their power gained from knowledge far beyond their ken? Could the Roman Empire have fallen because it relied on such devices leading to an arrogance unparalleled in the world? If you think you have the power of a God then you will fall a very long way indeed. But the question is if there are more of these things down there, where were they going on that ill-fated ship, what happened to their creators and what else did they create? Modern diving methods may give us that answer soon but for the moment, we must stay in Swiss cheese mode.
