Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Jesus Chan asks, Gary, hello again from South Texas. In several of the last episodes, you have mentioned that some things have been discovered simultaneously by different people in different places. To what do you attribute the independent development of similar ideas across isolated human societies such as agriculture, pyramids, calendars, weapons, etc? Is it Aliens, Collective Unconscious, Genetic Memory, or something else?

Jesus, I think the answer is actually really simple. I’ll answer the question by posing another question: why do dolphins and whales look like fish? The answer is that similar problems will result in similar solutions. In the case of a dolphin and a fish, the problem of swimming in the water results in similar body types because that’s what works.

The same is true for innovations. There are many ideas which were discovered indepenetnly in different places, at different times. A pyramid is nothing more than a shape. It is a cone with flat sides. Children playing in sand or mud could easily come up with the shape.

If you were playing as a kid, you probably reinvented the lever just by playing around with sticks.

Many times, the discoveries occurred centuries or even millennia apart from each other. Looking back, the difference between 7000 and 8000 years ago might not seem like much…..but it was 1000 years.

Calendars are nothing more than people observing nature and the stars….and every culture and civilization were all looking at the exact same thing, so it should come as no surprise that they developed similar calendars based on the Earth, Moon, and Sun.

Ancient people in Mesoamerica and in Mesopotamia developed agriculture, as did the people in West Africa and Papua New Guinea, but all of those places cultivated totally different crops that they had available. However, the basic idea of planting seeds to grow plants to eat was a pretty simple one that doesn’t require aliens.