Humanity seems to have inherited a gigantic, abandoned world.
Just as rats will move into the engine compartment of a car that's left parked for too long in a field, nibbling at the wires and cables without really understanding the true function of their new house, we-- the modern day Earthlings-- have apparently been successfully breeding and surviving upon this weathered machine we call our planet, and yet we still have no idea who really inhabited the place before we came along, how they built their amazing structures, or how they nearly all got knocked down again.
The Old Bridge- Hubert Robert painting, 1775
In the Hubert Robert painting above, the Earthlings have found that the old bridge serves as a shelter from the weather, and being too busy with life and its many chores, these survivors were making use of the bridge house in the ways that survivors do, most of them with no time to imagine building such a structure themselves.
As we survivors scurry around the giant remains of a former civilization, we rarely stop to wonder how anyone in the past had the time, resources or skills that it would take to build such massive buildings as the ones that we see broken all around us here on this mysterious planet that we call our home.
The Backwards Evolution of Architecture on Earth
In practically every major city on every continent of the Earth, there are clues showing the engineering and building skills of the Earthlings that were here before us. In the years since we last rewrote history, we Earthlings still don't seem to know how ancient people were able to design, shape, or move some of the massive stones that were used in some of the remaining structures around the world today. While things like huge stone columns may be commonplace around our planet, the knowledge of how to make one or even stand it up is knowledge that remains in the past.
A thousand years ago, buildings were made to last a thousand years. About a hundred years ago, buildings started being made to last at least a hundred years, while in the last twenty years, everything is made to last only twenty years.
Still ignoring the massive structures that persist around us, we slap together our shelters in planned obsolescence, still surviving, but we only plan on making it to the end of the week these days.
Pictures of a Cataclysm
Hubert Robert was a French painter who lived from 1733 to 1808, and was known for capturing the ruins that surrounded him, with his lush paintings showing a grand world that had tumbled into the earth previously. Hubert Robert's paintings suggest what it might have been like for the first survivors of that lost world to finally creep back into the broken empire's remains, exploring the bewildering ruins and finding themselves surrounded by giant architectural relics, now overgrown and returning to the wild.
Earth's True Story, Hiding in Plain Sight
The planet that we live on seems to have a reset button, and once the traces of previous civilizations have been scattered and buried under the mud, it only takes a generation or two in time for us to forget how anything was done before.
Hubert Robert shows us with his paintings a planet of orphans, climbing around on the megalithic remnants of their ancestor's world, and his work hints at a larger mystery that is ignored by history and time. Like lost children, we might be tempted to play and sing among the ruins that have been left laying around, but eventually we might come to learn the true story of our past. Figuring out how these grand palaces were built, and then how they were knocked down could teach us a way to not only survive on this planet, but if we were to finally understand the truth about our history, we might change the way we build our future.
Instead of painting over his reality, Hubert Robert left us with clues to what was beneath the facade that society has erected over of our planet's past, forcing us to consider the possibility that our world may have been a brighter place than we have been told, and now we have to wonder why our own magnificent past seems to have been hidden from us.
The image at the top, The Old Bridge, is a photo I took of a print that has haunted me my whole life with its story of survival and human persistence, all the other images are also Hubert Robert paintings as found on Wikimedia Commons, (link below to the larger images.)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Robert
I suspect that the 100,000 year default ice age cycle is the big reset button and we are only about 100 - 1000 years away from that.
Here in Wellington we have earthquakes, and in the last big one (Nov 2016) it was all new buildings that cracked up - the old ones were OK.
That was when it struck me that something is very wrong with modern buildings (like most modern things) Our own 1926 house was fine :)
And the worst buildings that have since all had to be torn down? - all the new government buildings!
I'm in no hurry for that ice age, but 100 - 1000 sounds optimistic to me! Of course I'm in the middle of winter here, so it's easy for me to think the age has begun already.
There is something wrong with modern buildings, one thing I think is they no longer use the irregularly-shaped blocks like the ancient megaliths often incorporated. The theory is that the vibrational rate of the quake might crack a few of the stones, but most will be out of range- something like that.
In the photo, it looks like the solution is to build everything out of bookcases, those held up well!
The funniest part is that the worst building was the "Department of Defense" - they couldn't even go into that one to get their bookcases!
It's fairly hot here - not off the charts or anything, but we are getting some of the heat from Aus blowing over - they are hotter than usual.
Fantastic food for thought!
One could almost wonder if we reached our modern period in time before (perhaps more than once) and all the evidence eventually returned to nature. We only see parts of what lasted for longer, to leave clues to it, but after a collapse, if nothing is maintained it would eventually be nothing more than a story, if people chose to pass on that story. Perhaps this devolution of buildings and other things is one of the things that leads to a collapse of civilisation. They would be the first things to return to the earth leaving us speculating over the wrong period of time when things were built to last.
Learning a bit about ancient Sumaria was the first thing that really got me wondering about civilization cycles and whether we'd always be doomed to make the same mistakes as we don't retain the history to learn from.
A couple of layers of mud, a couple of generations of forgetful children, and there would be very little trace of our civilization to be found. I suppose that maybe nothing is built to last anymore because the general feeling is that it will just get demolished anyway, but I expect new technologies to come along and make the construction of giant stone buildings become easier in the future.
There is always an aura of great mystery and mysticism around ruins all over the world is an eerie feeling of melancholy and longing for a great past that is often explored in the works of fantasy literature authors like Tolkien, the idea that our antecesors live in a better or perhaps higher wolrd, I personaly think that we live in not a better but a more pragmatic world than the people before us, but perhaps the ones before us felt the same way, like a never-ending melancholy for our forebearers, thanks for sharing this with all of us!
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Great essay on the cycles of the world. Thank you for introducing me to this artist. I always love art that finds beauty in the ruins.
I read somewhere that he was know as 'Robert of the Ruins' by those familiar with his work.
Interesting take on Hubert's work. I have always been fascinated by ancient (and not so old) architecture. I agree with you that the current breed of eathlings, as you call us, seem to have lost that drive towards creating lasting things.
Every time I hear about space exploration and colonization it sounds to me as if we are in a hurry to be done with this planet and move on to destroy something else.
Hopefully art and reason will prevail and we'll find a way to at least creat a lasting artistic movement capable of preserving the best in us.
Yeah I wonder why we would want to colonize another planet, but such a plan doesn't sound realistic at our current level of advancement-- we'd be doing well to show up on another planet with some camping gear and tents, and enough wood to build a McDonald's or two.
Hahaha. You're right
We uae everything from the past to live (the bridge) without valuing the past . This post makes think us , that the solution ,maybe the future is solidity the past for a better future
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It looks like we've always built on top of older structures, like the Inca tended to add smaller stones to the megalithic buildings that were already there. Apparently the technology used to build the older stuff has been misplaced over the years.
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That is such an interesting perspective and interesting read. You touch on so many different ideas here I dont even know where to begin. With record keeping being so much more difficult back then compared to today with our books, photographs, video, the internet... etc the past remains a great mystery in so many ways. I never thought of paintings and artwork as a form of historic documentation. But they really are. They give us a glimpse into the past. Great post!
:)
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We see today how records can be lost on purpose for various reasons, and it's easy to conclude that a lot of our past records were hidden similarly. The physical evidence on the planet rarely matches up with the official story on every continent, so a lot of information is obviously missing from our history. The remaining megalithic structures almost always tell a story that's more interesting than the one on the historical plaque. It's kind of a thrill to have my idea of history change every minute as I see the curious details of old paintings along with the unexplained evidence that still scatters the planet.
So true
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Quite interesting point of view with the inverse architectural logic on Earth, but actually its a fact that our quality of a built constructions is decreasing drastically. Should we blame capitalism for it ? Since the darkest ages, people always had someone above them, some more or less powerful and mystical forces determining them to certain actions. We had gods, emperors, kings or lords which were expecting to leave huge and impressive "leftovers" after themselves. Today we have capitalism which is just boosting our abilities to spend more to get more (shit).
I don't think we can blame capitalism, since it's never been tried. These days we have something like a kakistocracy (government run by the very worst individuals in a society) and they are invariably told what to do by large corporations, so perhaps corporatism is what ails us today. Actual capitalism may be the system that helped erect those old megalithic structures, with individuals voluntarily trading their time, labor and skills for some kind of reward, but that's one of the mysteries of those ancient structures; who built them, and why?
This sounds like something many should expound on, exploring possibilities we've been taught to un-see, so as to help everyone tear their blinkers off.
One of the things I like about Steemit is having the opportunity to read valuable pieces like this. Thank you very much for sharing this interesting and brilliant post. It was a pleasure to read it.
Thanks! I do like having a place to spill out these little essays and stories, and since I think about all kinds of eclectic things, it's nice to be able to post whatever I like here. So yes, I like Steemit too! I appreciate your comment.
I believe in God and I believe in the big bang. My believe is that a world existed before creation and the big bang happened to restart everything. We might never get to know what really happened, we just have to live with that. I m guessing things made 1000 years ago lasted for a 1000 years because they believed the world would end by then, and from what's happening around the globe, those doing things now also believe the world would end pretty soon so there's no need to make things that would last a lifetime.
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It seems that God would always have an infinite amount of information- containing all that is- so even before any bang could happen of any size, there was already a universe that any and all bangs have happened within.
In the modern days, it's hard to imagine having the time or resources to build something that's made to last forever, but eventually new technologies might emerge that make such solid construction faster and more affordable.
Gradually we will all make the world a better place and free from disasters. Great write up and I really loved everything in there.
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We will make it better, though a lot of people are probably going to be surprised when we do!
Yea.... They have to be, since they never wish to change
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Really interesting read @therealpaul. I hadn't though of modern building as 'backward evolution', but that certainly makes sense. You see it all the time. I came across the term 'planned obsolescence' in the book by Vance Packard called The Wastemakers, and questioned things breaking and parents just buying a replacement as a child. Lastly, that final painting with the bridge is fascinating, incredible that such dwellings were built on bridges. There was a painter (whose name completely evades me) that painted dark, megalithic city type apocalyptic scenes from the same era as Hubert that I really like too. Thank you for bringing Hubert Robert to my attention
I think I first heard of planned obsolescence when someone pointed out that the military has tires on their vehicles that will last forever, while the rest of us get these wasteful and costly replaceable ones.
I think that last painting is depicting what is called the Notre Dame bridge, the way that thing is built, I'll bet it's still standing today.
In america, a hundred years of weather turns everything into a foundation slab. There is nothing solid. Even those big steel frame towers will crumble just as soon as the weather gets to the steel beams. (and actually quite quickly after that, as you can see down in central america)
Have you looked at any of the videos circulating ThemTube right now about the mud flood?
It looks like many capital buildings around the world came from a previous society, that the new rulers just moved into.
I've definitely been looking into the mud flood, and even walked around the local square with a camera, finding some architectural anomalies like sunken entrances and buried windows. Trips me out to think that this stuff could have been here before the European settlers came along. I can see the Army going into 'Injun country' just to clean out these abandoned towns and get them dug out a little before the new tenants were allowed in.
Thing about the "Army" in the terms of the Masons.
The Masons was one of the first groups formed in america.
A secret society that almost all people of position was a part of.
So, all the leaders of the "Army" knew about these pre-mudflood buildings and when found, took them over. Because of the occulted knowledge, they knew what they were, and what to do with them.
an interesting thought experiment.
Brings a new light to the term 'free' masonry.
indeed.
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STOPWhat a fantastic post! I'm endless fascinated with that mystery of how things were built in ancient times. I've never seen the paintings of Hubert, so many thanks for introducing them to me, they pull me in an indefinable way. It's as if...they're sparking a deeply buried memory, I can almost taste the air in them. It's like when a smell I can't put my finger on wafts past me and then is gone.
I get a similar familiar feeling from his paintings, they seem to trigger some faint recognition somehow. I've always been fascinated with old stone work anyway, so his stuff is magical to me. It looks like Hubert was around during a time when all the chunks were still laying around everywhere, like it was freshly tumbled, just long enough for small trees to start growing into everything. With so much evidence already that our official history is wrong, I have to keep an open mind as to how much time had passed since the previous civilization flourished all over the planet. It's my latest quest, trying to untangle the mystery based on old art and photographic evidence of what was really going on here before, and when.