Wow, can you believe it?
Another year has come to an Yeah, we're finishing up twenty twenty five and birthing twenty twenty six.
You know, I guess as you get older, it's like, what happened to the year? What happened to the year. It's because we have so much responsibility when we're older.
We're looking out for our loved ones. We're paying the bills, we're working, we're worrying. We have governmental issues, we have health care, we have health issues, and it just adds up and all of a sudden, the time is going. So I enjoyed twenty twenty five. We did a lot of fun things. We introduced some new and provocative topics here on Earth, ancients, our little sister Destiny has some
fun material too. I got to tell you, this last tour to Guatemala was impressive, not only because we had the wonderful access to the ruins, to be able to walk among them, to climb them, to sit among them, but it was it was fun connecting with the people as well. And I think I've mentioned that a couple of times. But hey, there's many more trips coming up, and we have a lot happening in twenty twenty six. I'm not going to be as active in twenty twenty six as I have in the last couple of years
because I'm trying to get this book done. The book must be finished.
I've been talking about it forever so and the publisher's kind of going, what's going on, buddy, what's happening there. But I want to mention that Gail Tour, our producer, has been hard at work with new people. We have a lot of new authors that were introducing in twenty twenty six. Right off the bat. On the first part of the new year, we have a panel discussion where we look back at twenty twenty five with some of the important discoveries that have been made, and that's always
that's always good to go through and highlight. But we also have some new people, we have some old people. We always have a nice mix on Earth Ancients, and so I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, as I hope you are with most of the programs here on Earth Ancients. We try to make the show as interesting as possible, and in some cases we're cutting edge. We present topics
that are new, provocative and insightful. Now, one of the things I do want to talk about is We've had doctor a Vio Lobo on the program a number of times, and I've been asked to continually have him back when there's new information. He has come out and said, basically that what is happening was this with the three I Atlas meteor is that it's not a meteor at all, It's not a floating rock. It is actually a craft and this is this is We'll have him back at
the end of the in of January. This is pretty provocative, This is pretty unusual for him to say something like that, so but he has he is determined, based on some of the latest Hubble imagery and the science behind the trajectory, how this so called asteroid is moving. He's determined that it is actually as an it's a et craft of some kind. And we'll have to get him on the show to hear about this. I mean when I heard that, I was I was amazed. He has been on countless
programs now and he's backing up what he has to say. Now, I don't know, he hasn't given us an idea of is this craft coming to land on Earth or is he just going to do a flyby. If it's just going to be a flyby, you know, maybe we'll see the body, maybe some craft will come out of this larger mothercraft mothership is if you want to call it that. I don't know, nobody really knows, but you know me, I mean, I'm all about first contact. Let's stop, you know,
pussy footing around with UAPs UFOs, sightings, occasional interactions. Let's have a ship land, Let's have some communication. Let's have some audio communication where they're actually speaking to us, welcoming us to the planetary brotherhood or whatever. You know, it's time. I think we're ready. I think we are ready to go. I think if you think about it, and you're sitting there and you're going, do I want to have contact
with another race of beings? Most people would go, yeah, I would like to know more about our place in our cosmos. Heaven knows. Our ancestors seem to have understating of it. The Maya talk about the Star people, the Hope, the Navajo, and many other indigenous people to the United States were very much in tune with Star people. I remember one time we had Cliff Mahodi on the program and he was actively talking about the lineage of his people,
the Hope and their interactions with star people. So this is not casual discussion. This is stuff that happens, but I want it to happen on a larger scale. I want like the ships to land or a representative of ship to land. But you know what doesn't have to be that they could send some information through the cosmos and we pick it up on our big dish and all of a sudden we're like, hey, you know, we're here to talk to you. We want you to wake up and understand that you're not the only ones in
the universe. So that would be a great Willn't that be wonderful for twenty twenty six? I'm thinking it would be great. So anyhow, we're gonna have a great year twenty twenty six. I hope that you're as you conclude twenty twenty five, it's been a good year for you. And if not, this hope twenty twenty six is better.
Let's hope it's better. So Happy New Year. Today's program is on ancient history that has been lost, understanding which libraries have been burnt and destroyed, forgotten technology, forgotten wisdom, and just history that we've completely forgotten. So today's program is Lost in Time, Are Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge? And my guest is Jack Biolic. You've just finished Christmas, you're preparing for the new year. You have family, you have friends.
You need to keep a connection with that past, to those events that you've been participating in. What better choice than our frames. You can collect everything. You can put video, you can put photographs, and you can actually preload them and send them to her parents. Isn't that a great idea? I thought about this for my mother. She would love something like this. For a limited time, visit our frames
dot com. Get forty five dollars off Aura's best selling carver maat frames name number one by Wirecutter by using promo code Earth Ancients at checkout. That's au Raframes dot com promo code Earth Ancients. It's the perfect gift for the holidays and a great way to store memories every year. Gail Toward, my producer, and I are kind of scanning the internet looking for new material on the ancient civilization topic, and we found a good one in a book called
Lost in Time, Are Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge. It's written by Jack or Bailick. And this is a fascinating book, not only because Jack doesn't have a good job in research unknown and forgotten technologies and systems, but he actually has a section where he's looking at lost data and how we store maintain our data, how we've lost centuries, if not thousands of years of information in libraries that have burned, which is horrible. When you read the chapter,
you'll be sick. But he's done a great job in looking at technology that people may not have known existed. That is the title of the book, Lost in Time, or I should say lost Technology would be a good subtitle. So Jack, Welcome to Earth Ancient. It's great to have you on the program. Thank you Cliff for having me talk a little bit about the motivation behind writing a book like this, because it's not like sitting down and you know, going through the internet and going, hey, this
is something I'm interested in. What was the what was the motivation to write such a detail book? Yeah, well, you know this book took ten years to write. Oh wow, yeah, yeah, and so you know it started out and the title, you know, it was interesting too, Lost and time are forgotten and vanishing knowledge, And you think about it, how can you write about knowledge that's been lost or forgotten? But it turns out that we do it all the time.
So what happened to me was I was sitting there, I was watching a TV show, I think, and I saw, Oh, they had vending machines in ancient Rome, you know, And I'm like, wow, you know how I didn't realize that, you know, and you could put a Roman coin in a vending machine and it would dispense holy water at temples, and even more sophisticated, it would send steam up on top of these idols to make them look like they're crying so that the people in the temple would give more money.
That hasn't changed in two thousand years. But yeah, but you know, I said, wow, you know, that's really interesting. But wait a minute, did we always have that? And then you know, I ran into another fact and another fact, and I just kind of built upon it and started investigating it. And there's a lot of things that we've done before, forgot and then found it again later.
Yeah. You bring up a number of topics that are just fascinating. We're going to go through a few of them today for those of you listening. Lost in Time just It came out a few months ago and is available on Amazon. Is there an audible version? Did you narrate a copy of the book itself?
Yeah, no, there isn't one yet. There is a kindle version, you know, you can get it on Barnes and Noble two, So there's a nook version. But yeah, you can get a electronic version. It's hard back in paperback.
Yeah. Okay, well, let's jump into this. I was a little shocked that you opened with this cataract surgery, which is something that we all kind of cringe at having your eyes messed with it all at all, But you discovered that they were doing cataract surgery over four thousand years ago in ancient Egypt. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, just a side note. Is it record supposed to be on? Yeah, no, I'm recording.
Okay, very good. Yeah, okay, Yeah, cataract surgery. You know, that was probably the most amazing thing that popped out to me. The know, we started cataract surgery and you know, seventeen hundreds or whatever, you know, and it was kind of a tough thing to do, you know, because your corny of your eye has more nerve endings per square inch than any other part of your body.
Yeah, that's so.
You know, if you get a hair in your eye or a piece of dust, you know, it drives you nuts until yeah, it out. So what they had to do was tie you to a chair and then do the cataract surgery, which was a little bit different than how we do it today. They did a couch that they lends the eye out of the way so that you could see clearly. But then I found that there's a very famous physician, Shashuda and eight hundred BC, who
did cataract surgery, among other things. He did nose jobs, he did diabetes, treated people for diabetes, all kinds of things. There's a big book written about him that he wrote, he left notes on what he did, and that was an eight hundred BC. So he did cataract surgery. And then there's the ebers but Pyrus and on there they did they show where they did cataract surgery in ancient Egypt and twenty four hundred BC. Oh my god, there's even records that the Babylonians did cateract surgery as well.
So you know, here's a surgery that we think is modern, although our version is probably better. I think they had a forty percent success rate. But but you know, very very amazing that you know, we've we did that, we forgot about it, lost it, then we did it again, and then we found it again.
Talk about that because you know cateract surgery is the lens is foggy and you're not able to see through your eye. They're not removing the lens. What are they doing, Jack? Are they are they clearing out some fluid and the eye? What is the exact procedure that they're doing because I don't think they had artificial lenses back then, did they?
No, Well, what they would do is they would just get behind and would push the lens out of the way so that there would be no lens in front of your vision because that lens gets cloudy as you age. That's a natural thing that happens. So they would just push the lens out of the way. Now you know it would you wouldn't be focused. You know, you'd lose some of your focusing ability, you know, so you know it's marginally useful, but at least you could see clearly.
You know, it would be clear and you could see.
So they're pushing the lens into the eye. Are they are they moving the limbs? Is that what you're reading?
They would push it out of the way. I think they would push it to the side.
Oh my god. Well that doesn't sound very scientific at all. But I so you're saying that you read that the success rate was forty percent.
Yeah, Well, the people would eventually end up blind or you get an infection in their eye, and then they wouldn't be able to see out of their eye anyways. But you know, I guess people who really wanted to do that would take that chance.
Yeah. You know, it's funny because if you study some of the Greek and of course during the Renaissance period, people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo actually did dissection on the body, and so they kind of would know some of the inner workings of the body. And I wonder if we know of this Greek physician that you talk about doing dissection and really understanding that the intricacies of the body.
Yeah, from what I've read, there's a lot of information about the procedures he did. You know, he would tell in great detail, like for this cataract surgery, they would put butter on the eye to help heal it.
Again.
I don't know if that was a good idea, but that's what they used, you know, so there's a lot of details about what he did. I don't know how he came up with his techniques or how he figured it out. I don't know that that is documented.
That's fascinating. Let's move on. The famous bag Dad battery is another feature in your book. Can you talk a little bit about how that works, because that's a fascinating topic.
Yeah, well that was about two thousand years ago. You know, that's when those batteries were made. There basically, you know, just a clay pot. But they've been able to reproduce how these worked today. I think MythBusters did a thing on them where they actually made some, but there's been other experiments and what they would do is take a mild acid, like by using lemon juice or something like that, and you could make it into a battery that they
estimate would generate about one point one volts. So, you know, the next question is now, what do we do with one point one volts? Two thousand years ago?
Yeah, so.
You know there's conjecture maybe a light of some kind or maybe for some healing kind of effects or something like that. But we're not sure, of course, but they found twelve of them, so you know, it wasn't a mistake, it wasn't an accident. They definitely were manufacturing these. And yeah, so it's pretty interesting. And we think batteries are you know, today's invention. Yeah, it's amazing that we have found these batteries.
You suggest a light of some kind. Is there any attachment that they would use to create a low vault light of some kind or is it just they've only measured the electrical charge? Yeah, yeah, they've just done the measurement. They know that that voltage is there and that it can be you know, it could be used.
And no idea what what it could be used for such a low charge. Just like it's amazing though that they're able to generate that. It's almost like it's part of a lost technology of some kind. Yeah, well that this this is really the crux of it is that there are many examples of things. You know, we have things that we find or whatever that we don't know what they were.
Four. So if I can I have here a replica of an ancient Roman dough decahedron, Right, I've seen a bit.
Have you seen these? Yeah?
Yeah, So the interesting thing about these is so they're twelve sided device. They found these artifacts around They think they're manufactured around the year two hundred and in Roman encampments in Britain, and they found one hundred or so of these, so they're not mistakes. There's twelve sides. There's six on the top and six on the bottom. That's a dough decahedron. But the interesting thing about these is we don't know what they're for. Like we know that
they made them. There's a lot of conjecture. We think maybe they're used for knitting, or they think they were used for you know, games, or they think maybe they were used for all sorts of all sorts of things, for doing what do you call it when you measure distances and that sort of thing. But we don't know. There's nothing written, there's no drawing of one of these. There's no indication even of how they made them. They're they're kind of this is a replica, of course, the
real ones. You can look up a real picture. They look very similar to this. They have these knobs out them. They're made out of bronze.
They are made out of bronze. Yeah. Are they manufactured like poured into a mold or how are they made? Yeah, well that's the question because they're kind of sophisticated in their manufacture. You know, could you pour this into a mold? How would you get these knobs out? I mean, would be an interesting thing to make even you know today might be a bit of a challenge, but you know, we have so just like the Bagdad battery, we've got these do decahedron. We don't know, you know, we don't
know how they made them. We don't know what they were for. We know there's a lot.
Of them, you know, there's and then there's the big one, you know, and Egypt, the elephant in the room, so to speak, the Great Pyramids you know of Egypt.
Yeah.
Yeah, all kinds of conjecture about how they were made as aliens or not or people or what technology did they use, And the point is we don't know. I mean, it's all conjecture. Yeah, so it's lost technology.
That thehedron is Roman period, you're saying, And was it attached when they found it? Was it buried? Was it attached? You said, You've there's been a number of them that were found. What is the speculation? Is there any ideas that's not a simple item. It looks very sophisticated. Some engineering genius made it for some purpose. Yeah.
Well, you know it had to be made. It had to be made with purpose. You know, you just can't put you know, you know, it's just going to build one of those, you know, maybe for to put on the table. I don't know, I don't know. Uh. Yeah, they think maybe it was a rangefinder, a candlestickholder, a dice for gambling, something for the venation, you know, maybe
a spiritual use. It seems too sophisticated for that simple of use, which brings me the next topic that you describe, which is the Anticotherian device or mechanism that has been dated to over two thousand years old. Now that thing is really an out of place artifact because it's a computer, isn't it. Yeah, well, it's been called by many sources a computer. It's got sophistication in it that is very contemporary, very modern, and so whoever built that, and they've done
a lot of testing on it. There's replicas of it that have been built. You know, they've done X rays to find the dials and the gears that are within it, so they know pretty much how it was, how it worked.
But I mean, that's that's one of these devices that shows up at the bottom of the ocean in I think it's in crete somewhere, and they can't link it to any known civilization. It's like it was, you know, it came out of nowhere. It's just so sophisticated in its gears. And one of the questions I wanted to ask you is are the gears manufactured or are they hand carved on that thing?
Well, of course they've been underwater for a couple of thousand years and they're encrusted, so I don't know that they've been able to determine exactly, you know, how they were manufactured, but they you know, they had manufacturing techniques at that time where something could be you know, possibly made that way. Well we see the decahedron here, and I mean the Romans were very smart. But yeah, so
it's it's got dials on it and gears. I think they estimate seventy five discrete fragments with Okay, handcut, they are handcut.
The gears are handcut. Yeah, that that's you know, was it cut from was it duplicated from a master plan that was manufactured. Is it from Atlantis? Is it from the Minoans? Is it from an earlier civilization? It is really an enigma, a complete enigma. Well, they estimate it was from built in two hundred BC. Now I don't know how they can estimate that, because metal, you can't carbon dates anything like that. So I mean, could it have come from an older you know, an.
Older culture suppose, so you know, it's metal, so it could have been around a long time. But it is a type of astrolobe, so that was something in ancient times people were very interested in. You know, an astrolobe shows the position of the stars around the earth. You know, it's a globe and it would show where the stars would be at any particular time, and that could help with navigation or different different purposes that they might have zodiac signs and that sort of thing. But you know
who would use an astrolobe. You know, they've been used for thousands of years. Those have been manufactured in other forms as well.
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My guest today is Jack Biliky is a research investigator who has written a book called Lost in Time, Are Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge. This is a history of knowledge lost through time, through fires, through wars, through pestilence, but also inventions that we've forgot about and have been handed down through the ages. So this device or mechanism was it used primarily for navigation? Do you think so? They would set up in a pattern. I'm trying to remember
and maybe you can shed some light on it. How they hypothesize it was used. What the theory is on the use of this mechanism, because I always thought it was like you said it and then you as you're sailing, you fix on a certain star constellation so you know where you're going.
Yeah, yeah, they So the experts say that it's a ancestor of weather tracking, uh and a type of a GPS device really, so it would be it would do many of the calculations that you would use to figure out, uh, you know, where you're at, that sort of thing, so you know, GPS tells you where you are and and date and time too. So this this device was accurate with date and time and compensated for leap years as well. So what's your gut feeling on this, Jack?
Is it something that comes out of uh nowhere? And it is so as you know as a rudimentary computer. Who's the brains behind that?
Who thought that up?
Yeah?
Well, again we don't have written records or there were no records found with it, and so you know, obviously somebody you know designed that and put it together. Uh you know, but we have other experts in the world that have divine you know, design things and and trying to think, you know, even samples of the death ray that was used in ancient times to fight the Romans
off and so we have records of that. But if this artifact is older than two thousand years old, you know, look, only one point six percent of human history has been recorded, so you know, there's much out there that we don't know about. They've forgotten that we don't even know. And so this balls into one of those categories.
Hans lost in time. Good title. You spend a great deal of time on water works or plumbing, your chapter of the Great Plumbing Debate is really amazing because there's a number of extremely old uh clization that felt that plumbing and toilets were essential. And I want you to talk a little bit about the Orkney Islands of Scotland.
They had indoor toilets and I didn't know that, And I want you to talk a little bit about the waterworks that would go into something like that, because I didn't have a clue.
Yeah, well, you know they have archaeologists have found that. Yeah, back in Neolithic people in Scotland and the Orkney Islands they found toilets and sewers, and you know that's three thousand to two thousand BC, and that's pretty pretty old. Yeah, Babylonians had sewers and twenty nine hundred BC, and even the Romans and five hundred BC. So but the Middle Ages, you know, they they forgot about toilets, and you know, we had sewage running off the top of buildings and
into streets. So you know, it took until the fifteen hundreds for us to start to use toilets again in castles. So you know, this is an example of something that we really need. You know, it's a human need and not only that. You know, in the Middle Ages we had all the problems with the Black plague and a lot of death that was probably unnecessary if we would have had good hygiene. They knew about that, They knew about that years ago. Yeah, I mean, you're right, the black plague.
And these these horrible diseases were cultivated in that terrible period. The other thing about the plumbing is that you go into copper pipes that are found in the Indus Valley of India, and that area has been dated to thousands of years before Christ. I think in this valley is twelve thousand years and some places are older. How do they use the copper pipes in that situation? Did they run them under the buildings or what did they discover? Yeah?
Yeah, well certainly they did find them under the buildings, and there are many civilizations. While that Indus Valley is very interesting the technology and things that they've found there. There is some indication that they've even found remnants of an atomic explosion that in that area. They've found classified artifacts and some radioactive senders have been found. So not only did they have toilets, they had, you know, maybe
some other technology as well that could be useful. But the interesting thing we're having with with that civilization is that there is writing available, there is language available there from fifty three hundred years ago, and the Tamil Nadu organization there, the government of Tamil Nadu, has put up a one million dollar reward for anyone who can crack the script that was used by these people. So maybe if we do that, we could figure out what these
things and what their technology was. Is there any written documents or tablets of any any kind that we have in our possession that we just need to crack in terms of understanding, Oh yeah, there are several. I mentioned this one. This is a language there that's fifty three hundred years old. We've also had the manuscript of I forgot the name of oh okay, the Vanoyage manuscript, which
is housed at the Yale University Library. They have and that manuscript is interesting because scholars and linguists and cryptologists have all tried to crack that manuscript. Now it's very interesting. You can look it up online and view it and it's got interesting pictures of people and they're dancing plants that seem otherworldly almost in a language. They have been able to determine by using computers that the language is
a real language. There's a certain law that languages have to follow in order to be an actual language, not one that's been made up, you know, for example. But this is a real language, and it follows the correct laws for languages. And that manuscript has been around, oh for hundreds of years.
We found it.
They think it was made somewhere in fourteen hundreds or something like that. Carbon dated the paper, but they don't know how to read it. They don't know how to decode it. So you need something that you know, you need a progression in order to be able to decode a language, you know, if you lose the context of how that language was put together. You know, ancient hieroglyphs,
they had a difficult time. They were on the wrong track for many, many years trying to decode the hieroglyphs until they found the stela there that had several languages on it and they could translate it right exactly. Let's talk about the lost libraries. This is a real sad statement about human kind. You start with Alexandria Library, which was at its time the largest, most sophisticated library in the world, and something that you wrote I thought was
quite interesting. I think you believe you wrote that the administrators of the library would talk to all the captains who would more their ships in the harbor and say, we need to have all your books that we can translate. You'll get a copy, and we're going to keep a copy too, because these guys are all over the world and perhaps talking to other civilizations that are in existence at the time. How many documents scrolls did Alexandria have it as peak?
Yeah?
They think it had as many as thirty thousand tablets there.
Wow, yeah at one time. And so how did someone go in and I asked to research I'm sorry, thirty thousand tablets four hundred thousand scrolls, so one hundred thousand scrolls?
Wow? Yeah.
So how did someone access that library? Is it's just like you go in? Do we know?
Yeah, I'm not sure that we have knowledge of that. I would think there would be some sort of you know, I would imagine it be like a library today where maybe you could go in, But you know, I think back then not many people could read, you know, reading right was you know, pretty rare. A lot of information
traveled by word of mouth. So who's going to go into a library like that, You know, it has to be a pretty scholarly person to want to go in there, so it was probably limited to certain people that with an education I get.
Yeah. Yeah, what year did it burned? And who burnt it? Was it the Romans?
Yeah?
You know, it was burned down a couple of times actually, but I think the last one was in three ninety one was the last fire that destroyed that building. And part of the reason that it was destroyed was because it held a lot of pagan scrolls, a lot of pagan cultural artifacts, and the people at that time didn't want that. They wanted to destroy it, which this happens all the time, turns out, and it was always destroyed, Yeah, by the Romans.
If you were to pick another great loss of a library following Alexandria, because you do list a number of them, what would you choose as a real loss to human history? Yeah, well.
That's a good question.
You know.
One of the interesting ones I think is probably the libraries that were destroyed in ancient China. The emperor there, the first Emperor China, Quinn Chi, and around the year to thirteen BC, told everyone that they were destroy all their books, all their papers, all their readings and writings, all their books, and the only books that were allowed
were the ones in his library of course. So if you were caught with a book back in his day, you'd be tattooed on your face and sent to work on the wall of China.
Oh my god. Yeah, So.
There were many fires at that time. They burnt classics, there were ancient Chinese literature, and they were all lost forever.
So these repositories of knowledge aren't really that safe, are they. I do want to ask you a question about cuneiforms, which are the clay tabits. It seems that there are different digs and excavations going on where they find parts
of libraries in these Sumerian ruins. So we still might luck out at some point and find our library of those, because we've had people on the show who are experts at cuniform decipherment, and there's apparently in the British Museum in London there's thousands of these cuniforms that have not been decod Yeah.
Well there's a fairly famous one. I think it was found fairly recently. Esher rupinol I think I'm saying that right. He had a library of thirty thousand cuneiform tablets that he assembled in around six hundred BC, and they found it, you know, and now we could open them, we can read them, you know, we can see what they were talking about and Nick found you know, they're finding all kinds of things. Some of them are not too fascinating. Some of them were, you know, just like.
Receipts or daily activities like I bought groceries or something. Yeah, which is kind of funny that they would write some daily activity like that. But when you got that many tablets, there may be some very important information hidden in that.
Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of the old stories and things that maybe our culture is even based on.
Yeah. Yeah. Do we know if AI is involved with the cipherment yet or would you know?
Yeah? Actually, I was at a talk at the at It was a webinar for they were talking about the Vannoyage manuscript and they were talking about the linguists there, the scholars that were on the call. We're talking about the use of AI to decipher languages, and it's very ineffective. Really, they couldn't use it, and I think the reason is that AI is based on all the knowledge that we have. You know, it doesn't have knowledge we don't have.
You know, it all can't think independently and come up with a system or a technique to decipher unknown language.
Well, I think it has some capabilities in that area, but without a good basis, you know, it runs into the same problem we run into. You know, we can't figure it out either, don't So I think, you know, at least they said for the Venoige manuscript, it's been ineffective at helping them it.
Wow. Yeah, that's kind of sad. Maybe there's something to look forward to. I want to talk about the vanishing cultures, but before I go there, you have a whole chapter on media life expectancy where you're looking at the old days where we had beta tape and we had all types of encryption devices and data storage. This is really a critical issue because as we continue to grow and sophisticate, become more sophisticated, storing data and keeping it is important.
So what is your conclusion on the life of media?
Yeah, well, I think this is this is really getting to the point of the book. Really, you know, after I assembled all this information, I said, well, so what's the point, you know, I mean, this is interesting. It's interesting to know that we did catteract surgery thousands of years ago, But you know, what's the point. What can we learn from it? And really the point is that our knowledge, in our data is being stored on equipment
and devices that have a shorter and shorter lifespan. I mean, if we look at the cuneiform tablets that are thousands of years old, or even papyrus last thousands of years. You know, paper lasts a long time, but digital media has less and less life. You know, your USB drive that you put a tremendous amount of information on, how long is that going to last? I was just trying to find a picture the other day and I pulled out eight of my old USB drives and two of them didn't work.
Oh so yeah.
That's that's gonna happen. I mean, how long is your computer work now before it died.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, Jack Biolek, discussing his new book Lost in Time. Will be right back. My guest today is author Jack Biolek. He has written an important book
called Lost in Time Are Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge. This is on historical museums and libraries that have been burnt down and all the data lost to us, and also inventions and other bits of knowledge that we have lost through history. What about cloud storage, Jack? What about you know where you have these data mines or these huge offices or warehouses where there's nothing but computers that are storing data for everybody. Does that make a difference?
Well, this is this is maybe one of the things that could help us is replicating data. So data replication and having it in multiple places, because you know, events can happen. You know, if we look at those libraries that have all been lost and destroyed, different things happen. Wars, earthquakes, fires, floods. You know, war actually destroys a lot of artifacts and a lot of history. But you know, maybe if we replicate our data in multiple places. But even that isn't
you know, maybe a perfect solution. But the point is we don't really think about it in terms of is our children's children going to be able to remember or find this information? You know, we're thinking about, well, how can we get our information in a smaller device, you know, make it more cost effective and that sort of thing. So I think as one of our design ideas we need to keep in mind what about the future, you know,
and how's that going to work? There definitely are possibilities for catastrophic events, even in our world, where a lot of the information could get destroyed.
So you have a diagram of your book, I thought was funny. The best kept system is stella, which is like cutting and carving in a stone, which we see with the Maya and the Egyptians and so forth and so on. But hell, that's going to be the slowest way to imprint data that you can possibly think of.
It.
It's fail safe though, And I've been to Mexico many times and study these stala, which are time markers or events with kings and things like that. But what do you suggest, what have you found is one of the better ways in modern times to store data?
Yeah, kind of brings up the idea. I interviewed the head curator at the Computer History Museum near San Francisco, and we were talking and they have all these original IBM PCs, you know, and they all have floppy, floppy drives. Right, and those those floppies, you know, they get dry, brittle, they crack, fall apart, and and so he's talking to me. He says, well, you know what we have to do to save the computer programs have to print them on paper.
Oh my god, so they're going backwards. And so I think the point is when we're trying to save data information, we need to be thoughtful about it, you know, and think about it. You know, should does this? Well, what I'm trying to save, is it a good place to put it on this USB drive? Or would it be better if I printed a picture of it? Or would it be better if I had three USB drives all at the same thing, you know, whatever, you know, I mean, just depending on what it is you trying to save,
you know. So I think just be thoughtful about it and different purposes when I have different applications on how you want to save it. But isn't there is there any any technology that is up and coming that you've discovered that is the best avenue to store quantities of data. I don't think there is a single one. There are organizations that are working on archival grade kinds of techniques to save information for many years so I mean, there is some inroads being made. What is it, m drive
I believe is the name of it. Where it's supposed to be good for a thousand years. You know, even CDs and DVDs degrade over time. Yeah, the pits will oxidize, so even those aren't forever. But there are some inroads being made to try to address that, but probably not enough. I mean, I don't think people think about this in their normal life.
Which is scary because you know, if we have an asteroid hit in the part of our civilization and is burnt up in the fire, keeping this data available is critical, you know, otherwise we've fallen into the dark ages and we have to turn all over again.
Yeah, we have to start all over again. We have sewage in the streets. I don't know, I don't know where we're gonna go. But yeah, and there's even other events, you know, I think talk a little bit about Carrington events from the Sun. You know, they had a Carrington event back in the eighteen fifties. And Carrington event is a large, you know, emp event from the sun, you know, a solar flare, and it was so big that it energized all the power lines well, they didn't have power lines.
Then they had telegraph lines because they had the telegraph back in those days. But it energized all those telegraph lines and cause fires at telegraph stations. And I mean, what would happen today if we had one of those. I mean, it would be a huge mess. You know, it would be a big problem.
Yeah, solar flares have been a problem in the past. We've recorded them. As we come down to our time here, I wanted to talk a little bit about your chapter on vanishing cultures or vanishing civilizations. There's quite a few, and it's interesting to note that some of these cultures have left records and artifacts of their time on Earth,
but having a culture completely vanishes kind of scary. One of the cultures you didn't mention, which is Insai in South America, is the Parrakas people, and they are the strangest people we have their skeletal remains. They have these very long heads. I think I had a pathologist on the program one time and he said they had between fifteen and thirty percent more brain mass than we did, and yet all we have of their remains are these
mud brick buildings, which is very sophisticated. But what was the idea behind a chapter on these lost, vanishing cultures? Is it because maybe they have given us part of our humanity in a way that you felt was important to mention.
Yeah, I think it's part of our growth. You know, it's part of our growth. And I think it's maybe that, as you know, cultures grow over time, the strong survive too. You know, they're making the right choices, and so they have continued on until they don't anymore.
You know, the.
Ancient Egyptians would get overthrown by the Romans or right whomever you know is stronger, smarter, better, And maybe that's just part of the natural progression of humankind.
That's a good point, you know, through wars and through I don't know if you could call it natural selection or not, because it's not really nature's human against human. Let's bring let's talk about a few of them. One of the ones that I thought is interesting is the Manoans, who we find in create. They we have a lot of evidence for them. They have some beautiful sculptures, and
we don't know where they came from. I mean, some people believe that the Minoans are descendants of at Lentinians because they are sophisticated and they're their statuary and their sculptures are gorgeous. Talk a little bit about them. Yeah.
Most of what we know about the Minoan civilization comes from what they left behind, you know, and they've left a lot of art and architecture. We have artifacts of tools that they used. They also had toilets. Yeah, smart people, and even we even have lightning rods that they you know, put in place. So these people were, you know, sophisticated and you know, but it is interesting. I think they just recently were able to decode discs that had the Minoan language on it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, did did they? Are they referred to by other cultures like the Egyptians or Romans or any cultures that have survived today.
I'm not sure that they had a lot of references from other organizations or other cultures, I should say, but they they were a significant ancient civilization. I think part of their religion was also sent you know, other other parts of the world.
Yeah.
I think they are really baffled by archaeologists and have been for years, for hundreds of years. Yeah, talk about the Tambora people of Indonesia, I've never heard of them, and I'm wondering if they are the ones who built the pyramid on Java, Java Island, because there's never a name of those people. But whoever built the pyramid that everyone's curious about was very sophisticated.
They were good engineers, good designers.
Yeah. So the Tambora people, you know, they were destroyed by volcanic eruptions, pyroplastic flows.
You know, this is a.
Thing that happens a lot in history, of course, and.
You know.
That again, I think we know very little about these people, but you know, it's unfortunate that we keep losing this information. I think the point of these these cultures is really that, you know, we have records. We see the Tambora people were there, and we see that the harpen And people were there, But what we don't see is what they did and what did they learn or what could they do that could help us. So we I have a
there's a really good example of this in Peru. They have examples of where cranial surgery has been done and it was done in four hundred BC. A cranial you know, somebody got hit in the head from acts or fight or something like that, and so they had to do a patch you know on the on the hard structure the skull. Well that they were forty percent successful in
that cranial repair. Well, they continued to do those repairs up to the year fourteen hundred, and then the year fourteen hundred they were over ninety percent effective, ninety percent successful in their cranial surgery. Now, if we look at the Civil War in the United States, when we were doing cranial surgery, we were about fifty percent effective, fifty
percent successful. So somehow we could have got the knowledge that those Peruvians had and kept it, you know, alive, we could have saved people's lives during the Civil War. And I think this is the point is, you know, if we could save our knowledge so that it can help people in one hundred years and a thousand years, you know, it's a good thing, you know, and and we just need to take steps to do that.
This is just the nature of the human being to kind of hopefully trip around and stumble and kind of try to exist the best you can and not really pay attention to the past. I mean, I'm fascinated by the past. That's why I started this podcast. Or Earth ancients,
because I think we're missing a lot of history. And that's why I'm having you on the show, Jack, is because you've got a book that says, pay attention, look at what the hell's happened here, and you know, note it as best you can and don't let it, you know, don't forget it, you know. But maybe it's our our nature to reboot, restart our existence after certain catastrophes. Yeah.
I liken it to the difference between knowledge and wisdom, Like we have a lot of knowledge, but how much wisdom do we have? Are we making the right choices?
You know?
It's sort of like, you know, a child, You tell a child, now, don't touch that stove. It's hot, you know, don't touch And what do they do? They go and touch the stove and then they get burned and then they're you know, but now they have wisdom, you know, they're not going to touch that stove again because it's hot, you know. And I think until we get to the point where we're like, look, guys, girls, ladies, gentlemen, we keep doing this to ourselves over and over again. Can
we not do this? You know? Can we make a better choice? Quit putting our hand in the door and slamming the door on our hand, you know, and do something smart, something wise. You know, the books called lost in time are forgotten and vanishing knowledge.
My guest today has been Jack Bullock, and what would you like to leave us with. Why is this book important to read? I think it's got a ton of good material in it. But what would you say is the key takeaway that you are trying to instill in your writing? Yeah?
Well, I really believe that awareness is a catalyst for change, and by being aware of these things that have happened in the past. You know, you can't change the past. The past is only good for one thing, and that's to learn from And if we can use the past to help us be smarter today and be a catalyst for change in the right direction, then we can live better lives in the future.
Fantastic Jack. Do you have a web site or social media? Give us other contacts people can check you out.
Yeah, go to Loston Time dot World. That's my website, and from there you can go to all my media I've got, I'm on everything. I'm there, all right, Fantastic Jack.
I appreciate your time.
Thank you, Thank you so much, Cliff for having me.
On Lost in Time just came out. You can get it on Amazon, and he also has a nice website with some other details and information on upcoming books that he's been writing. So Lost in Time are forgotten and vanishing knowledge. You know, it's one thing to think about the Great Alexandria Library in Egypt, but the Spanish destroyed huge repositories of knowledge and books and information when they came to the New World present day Mexico and Central America.
We know about the book burning that DeLanda did in Mexico in Yucatan when he arrived, and he wanted to control the natives and so he wanted to impress upon them their need to convert to Catholicism. But that loss is significant. Even today we can feel the loss. And also this happened in Central America in Guatemala. I discovered there was another book burning in Idle burning about the same level. And so we don't talk enough about the indigenous loss of knowledge, but it probably would shed light
on lost civilizations. It shed light on where the natives got their brains in cosmology, because they were able to track planets and constellations and use it for prediction, for prediction, for prophecy, and astrology. You know, we think astrology is kind of a game or a not a real science, but when it's applied correctly, it's very very powerful. And we know the Maya and the Aztecs used it quite regularly,
so that's something to consider. Hey, I want to mention that if you are thinking about vacation, if you're thinking about next year and when you want to get away, think about Earth Ancient seventh annual Grand Egyptian Tour. It's scheduled for April twenty eight through May tenth. We all meet in Cairo, and it is one of the best and most reasonably priced twelve day tours that you can
ever consider. Not only do we have an expert in travel that's Muhammed, Imbrahem and Saba Tours, but we're going to see some of the most unique sites in the world, including the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, and a number of ancient cities that have megalists. The focus is Megalithic Tour for this twenty twenty six Earth Ancients Tour. For all the details and more information, go to Earth Ancients dot com,
forward Slash Tours and see our entire itinerary. This includes a boat ride for a few days on the Nile River, five star accommodations everywhere you go. And this is what we call a diplomatic tour. And what's fascinating about this is when you look at the price, it's over half of what you'll typically pay, which is around twelve grand on this kind of a tour. For all the details again and all the information, go to earth Ancients dot
com forward slash tours. If you have any questions whatsoever, send me an email senter to earth Ancients the number four the letter you at Gmail say Hey, Cliff, what's going on? I want to know more about this? Come out and join us. We only take about twenty maybe twenty five people and it is excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent. The semi annual Grand Egyptian Tour April twenty eighth through May tenth, not to be missed. All right, that's it
for this program. I want to think like my guest today, Jack Bullock, coming to us from the East coast of the United States. As always, the team of Gueltour, Mark Foster and Feya in Pakistan. You guys rock, Happy New Year. We'll see you on the other end in twenty twenty six. Happy New Year.
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