[ExI] For the sake of argument

[John Clark]

On Sep 20, 2009, at 5:28 PM, Tom Nowell wrote:

>  Religious organisations were not responsible for the Dark Ages.

You don't know that, we can't be certain what caused the Dark Ages,  
perhaps it was just a coincidence that they started at just about the  
same time that Christianity caught on big time in the West, perhaps  
not. Christianity certainly can't be blamed for the collapse of the  
pre-Incan Moche civilization that ruled present day Chile, Peru, and  
Bolivia; but it is a little odd that a South American Dark Age started  
at almost the same exact time as a European Dark Age. Perhaps that's a  
coincidence too, perhaps not.

> The Western European dark age following the fall of Rome was cause  
> by invading nomadic cultures

Well yea, but why did those cultures choose that time to go invading  
people? Probably because things weren't doing very well at home. The  
evidence is pretty good that somewhere near the equator a volcano  
erupted in the year 535 that was 10 times as powerful as the 1883  
Krakatoa explosion and 4 to 5 times as large as the 1815 Tambour  
eruption that caused the infamous "year without a summer" in 1816 that  
killed many millions worldwide. And 536 was the coldest and driest  
year of the first millennium, that must have had an effect on human  
history.

We can't be certain what that big volcano was, but by far the best  
candidate is Krakatoa, made famous by it's much smaller eruption 1348  
years later. The 535 eruption was absolutely enormous, it probably  
created the Sunda Straits and separated Java from Sumatra. This was  
not in the Super-volcano category by any means, but it was pretty damn  
big.

  John K Clark


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20090921/21904f7a/attachment.html>