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Comment by phekunde | Hacker News Reader

One thing that is curious about the Indian sub-continent is their mythological texts. There are two well-known epic texts: The Mahabhrat and The Ramayan. Both these texts talk about aeroplanes, teleportations, rockets, test-tube baby, body preservation and medicines that heal serious battle injuries. And it is talked about in a matter-of-fact way, as if there is no novelty in these technologies. The frustrating part of these texts is the mixing of facts with fiction. So it becomes difficult to know what was really available back then. But the sheer thought that ancient humans atleast dreamt these advance ideas makes one wonder what type of civilisation was there back then?

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There's a weird effect with these things - myths from other cultures seem fascinating and indicate Atlantis-like civilizations. Similar myths from you own culture are obviously just boring metaphors and scary stories to make children behave.

For example the Tower of Babel could be interpreted as aliens destroying a space program (possibly space elevator) with mind-control technology. But with the cultural baggage of the christian civilization we interpret it very differently.

The story about Jericho could be about nuclear weapons or orbital bombardment.

The story about Lazarus could be some advanced medicine.

There's a lot of this stuff in any culture - but they seem more awesome when you weren't indoctrinated about the "correct" interpretations since you were a child.

> For example the Tower of Babel could be interpreted as...

But there is no need for interpretation or misinterpretation of some of these texts because the text directly mentions the transportation e.g. in Raamaayan, the then king of Lanka(present day Shri Lanka), Raavan, flew from Lanka on his "vaayu yaan"(i.e. aeroplane) to Panchavati(in present day Nashik in the western state of Maharashtra in India) to kidnap Sitaa, wife of Raam.

> flew from Lanka on his "vaayu yaan"(i.e. aeroplane)

That id est contains a large interpretive leap. Is every culture's flying chariot also a heavier-than-air flying machine? And every chariot carrying the Moon a lunar lander?

> Is every culture's flying chariot also a heavier-than-air flying machine?

Who said it was a chariot? I think you are linking some "flying chariot" from other text to "vaayu yaan" from some different text. "vaayu" means "air" and "yaan" means "vehicle". This is far more specific that "flying chariot".

> And every chariot carrying the Moon a lunar lander?

Just curious, isn't carrying a Moon very different from landing on the Moon? Equating "carrying a Moon" to "landing on Moon" does not even mean same thing, so that can be thought as extrapolation. But the more specifics of "using vaayu yaan" to travel on earth from Lanka(which exists today) to Panchavati(which also exists today) does not need the extrapolation as was required in the previous sentence.

> "vaayu" means "air" and "yaan" means "vehicle"

Which is a valid translation for most mythology's flying chariots. We use the translation "chariot" because, at the time, the only vehicles we know of in the relevant culture were chariots.

> Which is a valid translation for most mythology's flying chariots.

No, that is not true. Your own sentence use the word "most". In Indian there is a distinction between vehicle("yaan") and chariot("rath").

> We use the translation "chariot" because, at the time, the only vehicles we know of in the relevant culture were chariots.

How do you know? If the ancient text itself makes a distinction between "vaayu yaan" and "rath" then that indicates there were more than one modes of transportation.

That might just mean the authors were smarter than their contemporaries, and realized that an air-traveling vehicle probably wouldn't look like a chariot.

Which does speak to their scientific knowledge, even absent an actual vehicle existing, given that their peers couldn't reason past "this thing we have on land, but in the air."

I’m imagining a similar debate in antiquity as I witness today whenever I suggest a helicopter does all the things people say they want from a flying car.

> Which is a valid translation for most mythology's flying chariots

>> No, that is not true. Your own sentence use the word "most".

This is a non sequitur. The claim was "flying vehicle" is a valid translation for what is commonly translated as "flying chariot" in most cultures, i.e. non-Indian cultures. (It's certainly so for Ancient Egyptian myths, for which, unlike Ramayana, we have contemporaneous sources.)

I'm actually struggling to think of a culture which (a) had, at the very least, chariots or something like them and (b) couldn't have some part of its ancient mythology properly translated as "flying vehicle." Maybe Sumerian?

>> In Indian there is a distinction between vehicle("yaan") and chariot("rath").

Clarification: in modern Hindi.

>> In Indian there is a distinction between vehicle("yaan") and chariot("rath").

> Clarification: in modern Hindi.

https://kosha.sanskrit.today/word/en/Chariot/sa

You don't know Samskrut, do you?

One problem with this line of logic is that we don't have any written text 1000s of years old, so we don't know if the words were changed in later renditions or if the story itself has been modified for changing times.

Vaayu yaan means air travel not aeroplane. Your slight of hand here and overall comment history suggests you're parroting some right wing propaganda. Tell me something, why do people like you always find things that exist now in the past but not things that will exist? If airplanes and testtube babies are mentioned, why aren't there any mentions of things that modern society will invent in a few years, decades or centuries? I'll give you a hint: you don't have them because you can't retrofit those. Once someone invents them, then you can find vaguely related sentences in a large corpus of Indian origin and claim _there was something there_.

"Yaan" mean vehicle in Hindi/Sanskrit.

Prayaan(a) is traveling/marching in Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada. No vehicle involved. Sanskrit and Hindi aren't exchangeable.

"yaan" means both vehicle and travel. You both are correct :)

"Air vehicle" meaning "aeroplane" is an interpretation. I could interpret it as sailing ship for example. Or a ballon. Possibly something like a chinese lampion which were already known 2000 years ago so it's not a big stretch.

> I could interpret it as sailing ship

In air? Then how is it better than the general characterisation as "Air vehicle"?

> Or a ballon.

Yeah, could be. And flying a balloon from Sri Lanka to Nashik(while crossing ocean) and back again would have been an achievement in itself during that period.

> In air?

Why "in" air? Could just mean it's a regular sailing ship - after all they are powered by "air" so they are "air vehicles". Or it could be made out of air. In which case you could claim Indians had inflatable ships thousands of years ago :)

> And flying a balloon from Sri Lanka to Nashik(while crossing ocean) and back again would have been an achievement in itself during that period.

Of course, my point was that there are many possible interpretations and when you say no interpretation is needed you're just showing your cultural baggage.

There's a legend about Pan Twardowski. In it a nobleman makes a deal with the devil and forces him to do various impossible feats to avoid going to hell. One of these feats was "making a whip rope out of sand". Optical fiber is basically a rope made out of sand :) After that the nobleman escaped from the devil and landed on the moon (where he lives to this day).

It's pretty obvious to me that it's just a legend, but if I wanted to interpret it literally then Poles were on the moon in 16th century and had optical internet :)

You interpret "vaayu yaan" as aeroplane, but what is the basis to assume it is something so specific? You just as easily assume they meant something like the flying carpets of Arabian myths.

> they seem more awesome when you weren't indoctrinated about the "correct" interpretations since you were a child

This isn't totally true in India. I've had relatives seriously contemplate ancient Indian civilizations with heavier-than-air flight, nuclear weapons and even orbital capabilities. (A similar thing happened in industrializing Britain and Prussia, so maybe it's just a natural thing in a culture undergoing rapid industrialization.)

As an aside, for those interested : this sort of "paleo-contact" ideas were proposed by Erich von Däniken. Aztec lines are space-ports, the flaming angel from the bible is a landing space craft, etc.

Someone even made a sci-fi cartoon about it, that 8-year-old me enjoyed =) It can't be that hard to find a PDF somewhere.

https://wearethemutants.com/2020/04/30/ancient-astronaut-com...

Debunked as bad science fairly quickly, but, Sodom & Gomorrah being destroyed by a meteor aeroburst is less in the realm of science fiction but a good example of how a natural catastrophe can be retold as folklore and integrated into religious text. IIRC the flood is another one of those that is retold in a wide number of texts/cultures and had scientific evidence behind it? Last one I'm not sure about now.

> Both these texts talk about aeroplanes, teleportations, rockets, test-tube baby, body preservation and medicines that heal serious battle injuries. And it is talked about in a matter-of-fact way, as if there is no novelty in these technologies. The frustrating part of these texts is the mixing of facts with fiction. So it becomes difficult to know what was really available back then. But the sheer thought that ancient humans atleast dreamt these advance ideas makes one wonder what type of civilisation was there back then?

If ancient civilization actually realized any of those technologies, I'm certain it would have left a significant archeological trace that would have been discovered by now. For instance: an actual airplane (as opposed to a glider) would need a significant industrial base for the engine and fuel that we'd probably see all kinds of evidence for. I don't think that's the kind of thing a solo inventor or even a city-state could manage independently.

There's the ancient atomic war theory:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/thedanispost/resea...

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4541

It couldn't have been atomic war, because traces would still be found of nuclear fallout, like how they look for steel from pre-ww2 shipwrecks now because they're not contaminated by trace radiation. But who knows? Maybe it was a vision of the future?

Depends on, how long ago those events happened and the amount of human activity in the area.

Most of these were novel and rare mostly given as a boon by the Gods. We also have monkeys, vulture, bear with human like or beyond intelligence. The numbers were off by all practical imaginations. Armies were of order of 10^7 - 10^70.

But but my WhatsApp forward said ancient Indians also had VR and AR so anything is possible. /s

It’s just sci fi. If you read a modern sci fi book you’ll find casual references to spaceplanes, wormholes, and stuff like that.

In many of them, the characters won’t even remark about the wormholes. It’s normal.

Like almost all ancient literature, Gods are just the primary medium via which the ideas are delivered. So sci fi becomes divine sci fi, drama becomes divine drama, etc.

Yep, this could be one potent reasoning. And that is why I said in my original post that it will be interesting to find out about that ancient civilisation that was able to think about so many advance concepts.

I could be wrong because I haven't read unabridged versions of either. My sense is we tend to relate what was described abstractly with advancements we see around us.

For e.g. with flying vehicles in ancient epics I'm skeptical that they describe in any detail how flight was achieved besides magic or divine power.

> My sense is we tend to relate what was described abstractly with advancements we see around us.

How is the mention of ""vaayu yaan" abstract? Can we similarly say that to the mention of present day "aeroplane" abstract and dismiss it as non-existent?

> For e.g. with flying vehicles in ancient epics I'm skeptical that they describe in any detail how flight was achieved besides magic or divine power.

In present day writings(fiction or otherwise) when we mention flights or aeroplane, we don't mention every nut and bolt of the aeroplane. So saying the ancient text did not give much details is unfair to those texts. As I mentioned in my original post, these advance ideas were mentioned in a matter-of-fact way as if it is not a novelty, similar to how we now mention air travel or space flights.

There is a lack of consistency and continuity. We had aeroplane in stories but no similar ground vehicle like Car/train, which should have been invented earlier if technology was present. We had vision across space/time but no knowledge of places outside India.

We had teleportation ;) Jokes aside, the link between car/trains and aerial vehicles is superficial. There is no hard requirement that one has to come before the other.

> were mentioned in a matter-of-fact way as if it is not a novelty

You've said this twice now. In persuasive writing, once you state a fact, you must draw a conclusion, clearly. Please, draw for me your conclusion.

Since we're asynchronous, it appears that the conclusion you're drawing is that these texts refer to real things that actually existed: heavier than air flight, spaceflight, test-tube babies, etc. Since we know where (fairly precisely) these things took place, we should have significant archaeological evidence for them. Could you point me to the physical proof of these? Because, I feel like these objects would've come up in my readings, before.

If you're not drawing the conclusion they actually existed, what conclusion are you drawing?

I’ll bite!

The conclusion is that there were ancient civilizations that we don’t currently have archeological evidence for. If you know anything about archeological research in India, you know that it is far, far from comprehensive.

Here’s a small example: Shiva is often represented smoking a chillum. Yet, the accepted understanding is that smoking was developed in the Americas and no smoking in the old world took place pre-1492. It would therefore be a major discovery to establish that a chillum was precolumbian. There simply isn’t a research base (no funding, no training) to investigate even simple questions like this.

Might we find evidence of, say, metallurgy that is 10,000 years old in India? Perhaps! Should we expect to? Probably not. Should we do more archaeological research in India? 100% Who will fund it?

Smoking is attested both archeologically, and historiographically dating back something like 7000 years in the old world. People have been smoking opium & marijuana in the middle east for probably 2000 years. Smoking culture in India goes back at least 3000 years. Anyone who's accidentally put the wrong thing on a fire will immediately recognize the source for "smoking".

This makes me feel like the rest of your comment is probably not accurate, either.

Bro. Smoking is not the same as putting the wrong thing on a fire. And, while evidence of hotboxing cannabis in tents goes back 3000 years, there is minimal evidence of pipe smoking in the old world. Maybe a bit in Africa— but not conclusive.

No evidence for smoking pipes in India before 1500. Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smoking

Nobody thinks smoking originated in the new world. Smoking TOBACCO originated in the new world, because at that time it was the only place tobacco grew.

> it appears that the conclusion you're drawing is that these texts refer to real things that actually existed

Please read the last line of my original post.

> If you're not drawing the conclusion they actually existed, what conclusion are you drawing?

I am saying, that the description given in the text is too specific for it to be dismissed right away. And even if it is hokum, then the sheer level of imagination of ancient civilisation to mention flying vehicles, missiles, teleportation, body preservation and test-tube baby is appreciable. It will be good to know what type of civilisation was that that was able to imagine these advance concepts.

> Since we know where (fairly precisely) these things took place, we should have significant archaeological evidence for them.

Sure, I am all for scientific evidence. In fact I would like to see that it is either supported or refuted with evidence. From some of the comments it looks like for rejecting a hypothesis no evidence is required, but for supporting it evidence is demanded. If there is no evidence to either support or refute it, then the matter should be inconclusive rather than concluding it either way.

Off the top of my head "flying vehicles" and "body preservation" are well-attested in many other cultures (Ancient Egypt; Mayans) that I'm 100% certain had neither. You are for sure reading too much into this.

> And even if it is hokum

I 99% believe that you think these things are real; I don't know if you're a von Danikenite, but you sure talk like one.

> If there is no evidence to either support or refute it

There is evidence that there's no evidence: we've been digging holes all over the world for centuries, looking for raw materials -- quadruply so, very recently, in the Indian subcontinent. If there was a civilization capable of supporting space-age technology, we'd've found it by now.

> I 99% believe that you think these things are real;

Again, go read the last sentence of my original post.

> There is evidence that there's no evidence: we've been digging holes....very recently, in the Indian subcontinent.

Hmmm.

I mean, if a complete layperson were to describe how an airplane works, how would you even begin? It looks a bit like a bird and err, it's very loud, and it flies! I mean if you don't know the least about an engine, how would you describe it? There's untold masses of people out there that still lack even a basic education, and that education / class difference was worse as you go back in time.

Anyway, your second sentence reminds me of how we interpret e.g. Nostradamus' writing in hindsight, how he predicted Hitler and 9/11 and all that. But only in hindsight.

This is a well-known and popularized myth about the ancient scriptures which plays on patriotic feeling by claiming "uniqueness" and advancement in ancient India. It is manifestly not true or based in fact that any of these technologies existed at the time - there's simply too many holes (why didn't any other culture reproduce these fantastic feats or obtain access to these? where is the archaeological record? why did no other text from the time corroborate this story?), and the best "evidence" the scriptures even talk about this are generous translations that don't accord with the actual historical or linguistic data.

This sort of myth is yet another distortion of the past in favour of a narrative enshrining pre-modern India as superior that has taken ahold of my country. Only in India will people claim Valmiki's is the only valid version of the Ramayana (there are hundreds of versions of the Ramayana, some told as far as Thailand, of which Valmiki's is just one - see A. K. Ramanujam's "Three Hundred Ramayanas"); make homeopathy derived from Ayurveda a nationally accredited field of medicine despite overwhelming clinical evidence it is no better than a placebo; and claim the Vedas predicted the inventions we take for granted today. It is misplaced reverence untempered by an awareness of how to interpret historical documents, and all it serves is to blind people to facts and common sense.

Yeah it's unnerving because there are many great, real accomplishments from people in India, and no doubt many more to be found in the future. But dreaming about a special destiny inherited from the past doesn't necessarily require the dreamer to think about the here and now and what responsibility they may have to bring about the future we all desire.

It's dangerous because it simultaneously pacifies people towards the active role they should take in creating the world they will live in but also promises them they are the would-be inheritors of some mythical past, and that others are unlike them in that way.

As always we gotta work together and look towards the future, not the past. Basically, if you want to live in Star Trek, at least.

At the same time, one must remember these stories form a significant party of Indian culture. The telling of hari katha in order to inculcate good values, the recital of the Vedas, the teaching of the Upanishads, the chanting of the various stotrams all have great benefit. I make that statement from personal experience.

Many habits that have been passed down the generations have helped make us the society we are today.

As the next generation, it is our duty as a whole to preserve this for our descendants. For history one forgotten is tough to be retrieved. It would be a shame for one of the oldest cultures in the world to die out.

You can say the same thing about mythology from other cultures (Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Chinese, Arthurian and hundreds more). Ultimately human imagination works the same way worldwide.

'matter-of-fact' - what is more important is that the after effects/side effect are eerily accurate so makes it hard to dismiss it as mere imagination.

In the Hindu thought, everything is cyclical including the birth and death of the universe. It is not human or earth centric, talks about other planets or worlds requiring space travel, space-time effects of travel. Nagas - advanced reptilian people who precede humans and in some stories come to the aid of humans sound alien or a parallel species.

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