Originally published July 7, 2019.
A bare-foot white-man from North Queensland walks into the jungle wearing nothing but shorts. Soon he makes a stone axe and builds a grass hut. Next he rubs two sticks together and starts a fire. Then he builds a kiln and fires roofing tiles for his new house. With a sapling fence around his bush tucker farm he sets to work building a blast furnace. In no time he has gone from Stone age to Iron age.
Take your time to watch a handfull of these Primitive Technology videos then ask yourself the following questions. If this is what one primitive/sophisticated bushman can create alone and from scratch, what do you think 5 men like him could create together? How about a whole tribe of 50 or 300 men and women working together like Spartans of the past?
How long would it take a primitive/sophisticated tribe to create electricity, large ships, megalithic structures and flying machines? What else could they create if given enough time? Imagine it is 5000 years ago and you are a member of this small tribe. You master aerodynamics and build a hybrid internal rotor and helium anti-gravity flying dome or a pulse axis gyroscopic Vimana that produces positive lift and vertical takeoff. Where do you go?
You fly around the world and all you see are primitive tribes. Do you want to teach them your technology? Do you want to share with them your medicine and scientific philosophy? What relationship are you fostering when you try to help them? Do you need them? Do they need you?
You land on hilltops and teach the local tribes people how to cultivate the land, how to rear livestock, how to smelt steel, how to build ships, how to quarry rocks and build pyramids. You build monuments to record your technology for future generations. You fly away to another continent and repeat the process. Why do you feel a desire to help people and make their lives easier? What is it about you that you wish to alleviate the suffering of nomads and double their life expectancy?
Cargo cults spring up and your structures become temples of worship. They speak of the white gods who brought wisdom. Other tribes are jealous and envious. They form an angry mob and attack your camp. You start up your flying machine to get away but your mate is down by the river fraternising with the locals. They catch him and take him to the top of the pyramid where they rip his beating heart out of his body with their bare hands. You keep flying.
You set up another colony deep in the jungle where no other peoples can find you. Your people have so much philosophical and technological work to do. There are so many things you wish to build and create. What is driving you? Where are you going? What is it all for? You have everything but you strive to solve the puzzles of the universe. Why?
Traders come to your village. Do you welcome them in? They want to stay. What do you do? How can you turn away weary travellers? They like living with you but they have no respect for you or your people. They bring in other people to do their dirty work. What do you do? Your society is losing its vigour and ambitions. What is the relationship between your people and the intruders? Is it mutually beneficial? Is it master and servant? Is it victor and vanquished? Is it host and parasite?
Like bees you have work to do, things to build, equations to solve, but the parasites continually suck your time away and divide your tribe. Your people start fraternising with the intruders. You have to rear their children and more and more people are coming. They claim it is a human right to live with you.
Nomads are drowning in the rivers and perishing in the mountains to get to your village. Half your people have turned against their own tribe and wish to destroy it. You don’t understand why. You have given the world so much technology and medicine. You have doubled their life expectancy but they hate you. The more you give them the more they hate you. How does it benefit a parasite if it kills it’s host? So many questions. So little time.
Your race is going extinct. You are kind and gentle but you suffer from guilt. Why can’t other people create the systems and technology that you create. They are blaming you for holding them back. How do you shake off a parasite? Do you harness the powers of divided atomic energy to eradicate the parasites or do you flee to the jungles of the Amazon or the ice sheets of Svalbard. Do you fly to Antarctica and set up a city by a thermal spring a mile bellow the ice? How you solve this dilemma will determine your people’s very existence.
Where will white flight take you? Your people finally make it into space. Around you are a billion sparkling diamonds of the Milky Way. Your destiny is accomplished. You are free at last. Your race is on a journey, a journey to the stars.
