the crushing and convincing objection to the possibility that real fiery chariots were described in the ancient texts? Surely not the vague and stupid assertion that fiery chariots cannot have existed in antiquity! Such an answer would be unworthy of the men I am trying to force to face new alternatives with my questions. Lastly it is by no means so long ago that reputable scholars said that no stones (= meteors) could fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky. Even nineteenth-century mathematicians came to the conclusion—convincing in their day— that a railway train would not be able to travel faster than 21 miles an hour because if it did the air would be forced out of it and the passengers would suffocate. Less than a hundred years ago it was 'proved' that an object heavier than air would never be able to fly.
A review in a reputable newspaper classed Walter Sullivan's book Signals from the Universe as science fiction and said that even in the more distant future it would be quite impossible to reach say Epsilon-Eridani or Tau-Ceti; even the effect of a shift in time or deep-freezing the astronauts could never overcome the barriers of the inconceivable distances.
It is a good thing that there were always enough bold visionaries oblivious to contemporary criticism in the past. Without them there would be no world-wide railway network today, with trains travelling at 124 miles an hour and over. (N.B. Passengers die at more than 21 m.p.h.!) Without them there would be no jet aircraft today, because they would certainly fall to the ground. (N.B. Things that are heavier than air cannot fly!) And lastly there would be no moon rockets (because man cannot leave his own planet!). There are so many, many things that would not exist but for the visionaries!
A number of scholars would like to stick to the so-called realities. In so doing they are too ready and willing to forget that what is reality today may have been the Utopian dream of a visionary yesterday. We owe a considerable number of all the epoch-making discoveries that our age thinks of as realities to lucky chances, not to steady systematic research. And some of them stand to the credit of the 'serious visionaries' who overcame restricting prejudice with their bold speculations. For example, Heinrich Schliemann accepted Homer's Odyssey as more than stories and fables and discovered Troy as a result.
We still know too little about our past to be able to make a definitive judgment about it. New finds may solve unprecedented mysteries; the reading of ancient narratives is capable of turning whole worlds of realities upside down. Incidentally, it is obvious to me that more old books were destroyed than are preserved. There is supposed to have been a book in South America that contained all the wisdom of antiquity; it is reputed to have been destroyed by the 63rd Inca ruler Pachacuti IV. In the library of Alexandria 500,000 volumes belonging to the learned Ptolemy Soter contained all the traditions of mankind; the library was partly destroyed by the Romans, the rest was burnt on the orders of Caliph Omar centuries later. An incredible thought that invaluable and irreplaceable manuscripts were used to heat the public baths of Alexandria!
What became of the library of the Temple at Jerusalem? What became of the library of Pergamon, which is supposed to have housed 200,000 works? When the Chinese Emperor Chi-Huang ordered the destruction of a mass of historical, astronomical and philosophical books for political reasons in 214 B.C., what treasures and secrets went with them? How many texts did the converted Paul have destroyed at Ephesus? And we cannot even imagine the enormous wealth of literature about all branches of knowledge that has been lost to us owing to religious fanaticism. How many thousands of irretrievable writings did monks and missionaries burn in South America in their blind religious zeal?
That happened hundreds and thousands of years
A review in a reputable newspaper classed Walter Sullivan's book Signals from the Universe as science fiction and said that even in the more distant future it would be quite impossible to reach say Epsilon-Eridani or Tau-Ceti; even the effect of a shift in time or deep-freezing the astronauts could never overcome the barriers of the inconceivable distances.
It is a good thing that there were always enough bold visionaries oblivious to contemporary criticism in the past. Without them there would be no world-wide railway network today, with trains travelling at 124 miles an hour and over. (N.B. Passengers die at more than 21 m.p.h.!) Without them there would be no jet aircraft today, because they would certainly fall to the ground. (N.B. Things that are heavier than air cannot fly!) And lastly there would be no moon rockets (because man cannot leave his own planet!). There are so many, many things that would not exist but for the visionaries!
A number of scholars would like to stick to the so-called realities. In so doing they are too ready and willing to forget that what is reality today may have been the Utopian dream of a visionary yesterday. We owe a considerable number of all the epoch-making discoveries that our age thinks of as realities to lucky chances, not to steady systematic research. And some of them stand to the credit of the 'serious visionaries' who overcame restricting prejudice with their bold speculations. For example, Heinrich Schliemann accepted Homer's Odyssey as more than stories and fables and discovered Troy as a result.
We still know too little about our past to be able to make a definitive judgment about it. New finds may solve unprecedented mysteries; the reading of ancient narratives is capable of turning whole worlds of realities upside down. Incidentally, it is obvious to me that more old books were destroyed than are preserved. There is supposed to have been a book in South America that contained all the wisdom of antiquity; it is reputed to have been destroyed by the 63rd Inca ruler Pachacuti IV. In the library of Alexandria 500,000 volumes belonging to the learned Ptolemy Soter contained all the traditions of mankind; the library was partly destroyed by the Romans, the rest was burnt on the orders of Caliph Omar centuries later. An incredible thought that invaluable and irreplaceable manuscripts were used to heat the public baths of Alexandria!
What became of the library of the Temple at Jerusalem? What became of the library of Pergamon, which is supposed to have housed 200,000 works? When the Chinese Emperor Chi-Huang ordered the destruction of a mass of historical, astronomical and philosophical books for political reasons in 214 B.C., what treasures and secrets went with them? How many texts did the converted Paul have destroyed at Ephesus? And we cannot even imagine the enormous wealth of literature about all branches of knowledge that has been lost to us owing to religious fanaticism. How many thousands of irretrievable writings did monks and missionaries burn in South America in their blind religious zeal?
That happened hundreds and thousands of years
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