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- Moon and Venus near a conjunction
It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of navigation. Without it there would be no trade, no discovery, no war, no culture. It’s clear that in the far distant past some people were navigation geniuses. How did they do it? Read about Crichton Miller’s amazing REINVENTION of a very simple, extremely effective, and accurate ancient navigation and measuring tool.
Long before maps, people learned to navigate by the observing the stars, sun, moon, and planets. Because the positions of the close celestial bodies like the moon move frequently, they primarily depended on what what was called “fixed stars”. Those stars that were very high towards the poles were visible all year long, so these were particularly important. At very high latitudes, of course, there are periods when it’s always daylight.
Navigation by fixed stars locates the observer at a position on our planet that is relative to those stars, ( sidereal ), so it does not depend on a magnetic compass. In fact, sidereal navigation can be much more accurate than magnetic navigation, because the magnetic north pole is not at the same place as the true north pole. If you navigate by magnetic north only you will need to use a “magnetic correction ” adjustment, of as much as 18 degrees, depending on where you are on Earth. In addition, there are areas on the planet where the magnetic readings are disturbed and unreliable for a variety of reasons.
Celestial Navigation Site
When people marked their repeated observations onto the ground, they formed circles. The inevitable conclusion they came to is that the earth is a sphere, it is moving through space, moves in an arc, and the arcs of the celestial bodies can be measured and calculated. The math that results from those observations is astronomy and spherical geometry. Researchers have found stone and bone circles all around the world. There is a good reason for this.
Some cultures like the Sumerians and Egyptians used a remarkable math system of base 60, allowing them to easily calculate values related to 360 degrees, which is close to the 365 days of earth orbit around the sun. There is a proposition, supported by good evidence, that at one time the earth orbit period was 360 days, and after a major event began a 365 day orbit. The Egyptian pyramids demonstrate that some people knew spherical geometry and sidereal navigation a very long time ago. The builders were very smart people.
Because we know for sure that many ancient peoples travelled long distances with relatively small boats, as well as on camels, elephants, horses, and yaks, and on foot, we must assume that among these people were some who were experts at celestial navigation. In fact, it’s likely that many people learned to navigate because it was so critical to survival.
Do you know how to navigate ? Do you even know what direction your front door faces?
By watching the sky, one can calculate seasons and provide a time-keeping scale that organizes human activity. Making frequent measurements over time leads to an understanding of spherical geometry, because the movements of heavenly bodies proceed in arcs. They are very precise movements too so our celestial canopy is truly a clock. Ancient navigators used that very effectively. Spherical geometry is an extremely useful knowledge to have because it can be applied to navigation, timing, building construction, and much more.
Read about Crichton Miller’s amazing REINVENTION of a very simple, extremely effective, and accurate ancient navigation and measuring tool. It’s shaped like at was only a streamlined, coded icon for this fabulous tool. You can make one yourself and learn to use it.
Build a star finder / tracker
Previous global catastrophe causes planetary reset.
It’s my belief that after the end of the last ice age, when the collapse of the northern glaciers occurred, human beings had to basically restart civilization. There were many small remnants of people left on the earth at that time. Some of these groups were far more knowledgeable, or technically literate, than others. Some knew how to build boats and some did not. Some knew how to navigate, and others didn’t. Some were good at agriculture, and others were best at hunting or fishing. Some of them got stranded on islands, just like some animals did.
Most people started watching the sky religiously because of the events that had happened. They developed short and long term calendars in an effort to forecast possible dangers. They tried to tell future generations about the earth and sun’s journey through the galaxy, the earth’s rotation and its cosmic wobble. Sometimes they went way up into the mountains to get away from any future floods.
I believe also that the earth probably shifted slightly on its axis at least once, so one of the first things people did was mark the positions of the sun, moon, and other celestial objects in order to determine the NEW calendar and their star-centered, or sidereal, location on earth. They used stone circles and other kinds of observatories to do that, resulting in places like Stonehendge and the Mayan pyramids. These were sometimes developed over many centuries, that’s how important it was for them. Even today, we stand in awe of these structures, and wonder how they were built and what they were used for.
So, it has taken thousands of years for our modern world to develop, after getting a major reset long ago and hitting some serious bumps along the way. We do not know much about any civilization that may have existed back then because so much was utterly devastated by the sea, ice, volcanoes, and other cataclysms. Therefore, we should not expect to find a lot of evidence because it was destroyed completely or buried, sometimes in hot magma.
The population of “developed” civilizations may have been a small percentage of the total earth population, and these more developed cultures may have been spread far apart. So, it’s really not surprising to me that we don’t find much evidence. We do find plenty of stories, however, and those stories are very, very interesting. In fact, they are shocking. They declare that there have been many times in the past where there was massive, global, and ABRUBT, geological cataclysms upset the planet.
To put this into perspective, in the past 100 years our civilization was traumatized by 2 world wars, Hiroshima, some major tsunamis, earthquakes, and so on, and our society is intent on preserving the memories. The stories we hear from long ago talk about events that were much, much greater than anything in modern records. They talk about worldwide trauma, mostly because of geological, or astronomical events.
Tags: ancient technology, glacial melt, ice age, navigation, stars
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