The crazy stuff he says is not the stuff about civilization going back further than conventional models. There are numerous archeologists who argue that and their positions are usually considered outside the mainstream but not insane.
Hancock says a lot of other things that are actually crazy, and like many people he’s gotten much worse lately.
That Atlantis was real and probably had steam engines and lasers and psychic powers when everyone else was still hunting dinosaurs but then a global catastrophe wiped out the world (again) and here we are, half their size and half their glory.
I don’t think it’s that crazy.
What’s crazy is thinking eggs are bad for you and that the fabric of reality itself is nothing but a social construct
I think for steam engines and laser tech, there would have to be some sort of evidence to be found. The only slightly "plausible" theory might be, if a advanced civilisation would have had psychic powers (quantumnwaves something) and no need for conventional tech, then there is a reason nothing can be found today. And then of course there was a global mage war, with all the psychic powers burned out of the minds of human.
(I do recommend the Illuminatus! Trilogy from Wilson and Shea, for interesting alternative history fantasy and all kinds of crazy stuff)
I made that up about the psychic powers because I thought it was funny but that’s why people doubt Hancock. An advanced civilization, whether here or in space, leaves debris.
If we can find the Titanic we should be able to find the Atlanteans. Maybe.
Well, I am not an expert in obscure experts, but I know that on 2 occasions people told me in all seriousity the idea of a psychic advanced Atlantis and mentioned a name who discovered it, but no Idea if that was Hancock.
And that lost civilisations existed, I have no doubt.
>An advanced civilization, whether here or in space, leaves debris.
Not really. Just look at abandoned places today, and you can see how quickly nature takes them over and erases them. Sometimes traces can be found, like ancient cities that are sometimes found in the jungle of central America, but that's after ~500 years or less. On much longer timescales, nature and geology bury or destroy most evidence. If you're really lucky, something might be dug up, but that's rare. The only reason so many prehistoric fossils (dinosaurs etc) have been found is because there are SO many of them: they existed for hundreds of millions of years, all over the planet, so we've captured a tiny slice of what lies beneath the surface.
Perhaps there's some evidence of a past advanced civilization buried somewhere, but we haven't found it yet.
The Titanic is barely over 100 years old, so of course it's (partially) still there.
I agree, which is the reason I don’t buy Hancocks theories or for that matter, the idea that aliens and UFOs exist.
I admit I went too far with the lasers but my thinking is that the fact that we are alone in the universe gives a lot of credence to the theory that we live in a simulation, and wouldn’t “Age of Atlantis” be a fun mod?
Hancock is a charlatan of the worst kind, in that I firmly believe he fully knows the vast majority of what he says is utter bullshit, but he keeps on saying it because it's garnering him a ton of money and attention. "They" (rightly, mind you) call him crazy for claiming the pyramids are 12000 years old, despite huge volumes of verifiable evidence strongly refuting such claims (Literally 100s of carbon dates from organic materials in mortar remnants between blocks, stratigraphy, lexical references like the Merer texts, etc.), and despite the lack of single shred of credible evidence for any of his claims other than his typical "This rock here looks like that rock on the other side of the world so the pyramids are 12000 years old and Atlantis is real" nonsense.
It should be evident that, with effort, the date of all firsts (and lasts) will continue to approach (but probably never reach) the date of The Oldest (or Newest) Artifact We Can Plausibly Find.
It doesn't take genius, intellectual courage, or prescience to expect this to continue.
There's certainly room for theorizing about what we may find and where, but archaeologists should in some fundamental way be more limited by proof than their imaginations.
Aside: I'd love to see the citation for "They called him crazy for thinking that the Egyptians had structures 12,000 years ago", as I'm a bit flummoxed by who's stupid enough to get any further out over their skis than "we don't have any evidence for that."
Hancock says a lot of other things that are actually crazy, and like many people he’s gotten much worse lately.