In Turkestan engineers found semicircular structures made of a kind of glass or pottery. Their origin and significance cannot be explained by the archaeologists.
The ruins of an ancient town which must have been destroyed by a great catastrophe exist in Death Valley, in the Nevada Desert. Even today traces of melted rocks and sand can be seen. The heat of a volcanic eruption would not have been enough to melt rocks—besides the heat would have scorched the buildings first. Today only Laser beams produce the required temperature. Strangely enough not a blade of grass grows in this district.
Hadjar el Guble, the Stone of the South, in the Lebanon weighs over 2 million pounds. It is a dressed stone, but human hands could certainly not have moved it.
There are artificially produced markings, as yet unexplained, on extremely inaccessible rock faces in Australia, Peru and Upper Italy.
Texts on gold plaques, which were found at Ur in Chaldea, tell of 'gods' resembling men who came from the sky and presented the plaques to the priests.
In Australia, France, India, the Lebanon, South Africa and Chile there are strange black 'stones' which are rich in aluminium and beryllium. The most recent investigations showed that these stones must have been exposed to a heavy radioactive bombardment and high temperatures in the very remote past.
Sumerian cuneiform tablets show fixed stars with planets.
In Russia archaeologists discovered a relief of an airship, consisting of ten balls arranged in a row next to each other which stand in a right-angled frame supported on both sides by thick columns. Balls rest on the columns. Among other Russian finds there is a small bronze statue of a humanoid being in a bulky suit which is hermetically closed at the neck by a helmet. Shoes and gloves are equally tightly attached to the suit.
In the British Museum the visitor can read the past and future eclipses of the moon on a Babylonian tablet.
Engravings of cylindrical rocket-like machines, which are shown climbing skywards, were discovered in Kunming, the capital of the Chinese province of Yunnan. The engravings were on a pyramid which suddenly emerged from the floor of Lake Kunming during an earthquake.
How is anyone going to explain these and many other puzzles to us? When people try to dismiss the old traditions wholesale as false, erroneous, meaningless and irrelevant, they are merely dodging the issue. It is equally unreasonable, when all is said and done, to lump all translations together as inaccurate arid then make use of them when it happens to suit one's purpose. I think that there is something cowardly about stopping one's eyes and ears to facts'—or even hypotheses—simply because new conclusions might win men away from a pattern of thought that has become familiar.
Revelations take place hourly and daily all over the world. Our modern means of communication and transport spread discoveries all round the globe. Scholars of all disciplines should inquire into the reports from the past with the same creative enthusiasm that they bring to contemporary research. The adventure of the discovery of our past has finished its first phase. Now the second fascinating adventure in human history begins with man's moving into the cosmos.
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Chapter Ten - The Earth's Experience Of Space
The question whether space travel has any point has not yet been silenced in discussion. The partial or total meaninglessness of space research is supposed to be proved by the banal assertion that people should not poke around in the universe so long as there arc still so many unsolved problems on earth.
As I am anxious not to enter into the realm of scientific argument unintelligible to the laymen, I shall only give a few obvious and valid reasons for the absolute necessity of space research.
From time immemorial curiosity and the thirst for knowledge have always been the driving force for continuing research on the part of man. The two questions, WHY did something happen and HOW did it happen, have always been the spur to development and progress. We owe our present-day standard of living to the permanent unrest that they created. Comfortable modern means of transport have removed the hardships of journeys which our grandfathers still had to suffer; many of the rigours of manual labour have been noticeably alleviated by machines; new sources of energy, chemical preparations, refrigerators, various household appliances, etc., have completely liberated us from many activities that formerly could only be done by human hands. The creations of science have become not the curse, but the blessing of mankind. Even its most terrifying offspring, the atom bomb, will turn out to be for the benefit of mankind.
Today science reaches many of its goals with seven- leagued boots. It took 112 years for photography to develop to the stage of a clear picture. The telephone was ready for use in 56 years and only 35 years of scientific research were needed to develop radio to the point of perfect reception. But the perfecting of radar took only 15 years. The stages of epoch-making discoveries and developments are getting shorter and shorter; black and white television was on view after 12 years' research and the construction of the first atom bomb took a mere 6 years. These are a few examples from 50 years of technical progress—magnificent and even a little frightening. Development will continue to reach its targets faster and faster. The next hundred years will realise the majority of mankind's eternal dreams.
The human spirit has made its way in the face of opposition and warnings. In the face of the archaic writing on the wall saying that water was the fishes' element and air the birds' element, man has conquered the regions which were not apparently intended for him. Man flies, against all the so-called laws of nature, and he lives under water for months in nuclear-powered submarines. Using his intelligence he has made himself wings and gills which his creator had not intended for him.
When Charles Lindbergh began his legendary flight, his goal was Paris; obviously he was not really concerned with getting to Paris; he wanted to demonstrate that man could fly the Atlantic alone and unharmed. The first goal of space travel is the moon. But what this new scientific-cum-technical project really wants to prove is that man can also master space.
So why space travel?
In only a few centuries our globe will be hopelessly and irremediably overpopulated. Statistics already calculate a world population of 8.7 milliards for the year 2050 Barely 200 years later it will be 50 milliards and then 335 men will have to live on one square kilometre. It doesn't bear thinking about! The tranquilliser-like theories of food from the sea or even cities on the floor of the sea will prove inefficient remedies against the population explosion sooner than their optimistic supporters would like to think. In the first six months of 1966 more than 10,000 people, who had tried in desperation to keep themselves alive by eating snails and plants, starved to death on the Indonesian island of Lombok. U Thant, Secretary-General of the UN, estimates the number of children in danger of dying of hunger in India at 20 millions, a figure which backs up Professor Mohler of Zurich's claim that hunger is reaching for world domination.
It has been proved that world food production does not keep pace with the growth of the population, in spite of the most modern technical aids and the large-scale use of chemical fertilisers. Thanks to chemistry, the present age also has birth control products at its disposal. But what use are they if the women in underdeveloped countries do not use them? For food production could only draw level with the population increase if it were possible to halve the birth rate in ten years, i.e. by 1980. Unfortunately I cannot believe in this rational solution, because the 'sound barrier' of prejudice, ostensibly due to ethical motives and religious laws, cannot be broken through as quickly as the calamity of overpopulation grows Is it more human or even divine to let millions of people die of hunger year after year than to save the poor creatures from being born?