Content below is from episode 166 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast
RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT
- This week I recommend you leave that bug alone!
- LOL, I shall explain…
- All my life Ive hated bugs. Id kill them at any chance.
- But I’ve realized they are an important part of the ecosystem.
- Exception being invasive bugs that destroy ecosystems they weren’t supposed to be in…
- But bugs like spiders, wasps, ants, and so-forth… let them be. … if you can. Unless they are an immediate threat… just let them go.
- Our planet is lacking insect numbers. The scientist have noticed a drop in numbers of all sorts of insect species. Chances are, that’s not healthy for the world’s ecosystem.
NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT
- About 100 miles east of Atlanta Georgia was the site of the Georgia Guidestones.
- In 1981 the Elberton Granite Finishing Company published a 50-page book about one of the strangest jobs they had ever been hired to complete.
- They had erected the Georgia Guidestones in a cow pasture about 7 miles outside a small farming community in the rural American south. It was all done under a cloud of mystery.
- The New Yorker‘s Charles Bethea Writes:
Elberton bills itself as the “Granite Capital of the World,” owing to a massive deposit of fine-grained bluish-gray rock beneath it, which is used in two-thirds of U.S. headstones. The book celebrated a much different undertaking. The company had spent the previous year quarrying, sawing, refining, engraving, and positioning six stones—standing nearly twenty feet tall and collectively weighing a quarter of a million pounds—in a Stonehenge-like configuration. It was meant to function, partly, as a solar calendar. Of greater interest, though, were ten guiding principles engraved on the stones, in eight languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, and Swahili; they seemed to anticipate a post-apocalyptic future. The instructions ranged from the sensible (“Be not a cancer on earth—leave room for nature” and “Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts”) to the eccentric, or even troubling (“Unite humanity with a living new language” and “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature”). It was, by far, the town’s most popular tourist attraction.
The idea for the Georgia Guidestones, as they came to be called, had not originated with anyone at the Elberton Granite Finishing Company—nor, it seemed, with any Georgian at all. They had been commissioned, down to the most exacting detail, by a nattily dressed middle-aged man who showed up in town one June day in 1979 and introduced himself to Joe Fendley, the president of the granite company, as Robert C. Christian. This turned out to be a pseudonym. Christian shared his real identity with just two known Elbertonians: Fendley and the president of the local bank, Wyatt Martin, who acted as Christian’s escrow agent during the financing of the monument’s laborious and costly construction. (Payments were never wired from the same location twice, Martin said.) Fendley died in 2005, and Martin, who exchanged letters with Christian for years after the creation of the guidestones, passed away last December.
- So we know who physically made these things, but the public will probably never know who came up with the idea or who paid for the job.
- And no one can agree on what they actually mean. The inscriptions are ambiguous as all hell.
- They were written in 8 modern languages and 4 dead languages.
- English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian
- Some sources also say Sanskrit was on there
On the stones are ten instructions:
- Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
- Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
- Unite humanity with a living new language.
- Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
- Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
- Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
- Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
- Balance personal rights with social duties.
- Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
- Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.
Many hate the stones. When Randall Sullivan of Wired visited the stones in 2009, they had been vandalized, “Death to the new world order” painted on them in polyurethane paint.
Sullivan writes:
The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun’s yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.
But today, astronomers say the astronomical features on the guidestones are crude—”an abacus compared to Stonehenge’s computer,” Loris Magnani of the University of Georgia told Neimark.
It’s unlikely the mysteries of the Guidestones will ever be revealed now, as the monument was destroyed by an explosive device Wednesday morning, the New York Times’ Livia Albeck-Ripkareports. Footage released by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) shows a detonation reducing one of the side stones and part of the capstone to rubble around 4 a.m., and a car leaving the area shortly after.
Though part of the monument was still standing after the explosion, the entirety had to be demolished by officials in the aftermath out of safety concerns. Investigators currently haven’t released any kind of suspect description or possible motive, according to the AP, and are asking the public for assistance in figuring out who was behind the attack. Prior vandalism to the monument led to the county installing cameras at the site that were able to capture footage of a silver sedan fleeing the scene.
The Guidestones have been the subject of controversy since their erection in 1979 by an anonymous individual known only as R.C. Christian, the New York Times reports. Wyatt Martin, who assisted Christian with installing the monument, claims to be the only individual to know Christian’s true identity and says he’ll never divulge the benefactor’s secret.
Standing 19 feet high outside of the small city of Elberton, the stones both serve as an astrological calendar (a hole in the center stone allows the midday sun to shine through on the day’s respective date) and as a mysterious message to humanity.
The first two rules have led some to imply that the stones endorse eugenics or genocide, per the Independent’s Graig Graziosi. Backlash of that kind and that the stones were “built for cult and devil worship” began upon the monuments’ unveiling, and only increased in the advent of the internet era. Prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has linked them to the Illuminati.
“We’ve seen this with QAnon and multiple other conspiracy theories, that these ideas can lead somebody to try to take action in furtherance of these beliefs,” Katie McCarthy, a conspiracy theory researcher for the Anti-Defamation League, tells CBS. “They can attempt to try and target the people and institutions that are at the center of these false beliefs … [These conspiracy theories] do and can have a real-world impact.”
- Were these stones part of some satanic cult’s agenda!?
- No, I doubt it. But I can see why people would speculate as much. They weren’t cheap and they likely would have lasted a long time against the elements had it not been for someone blowing them up .
- On the other hand: Do I think what was written on them was going to be a civilization-building pillar for furture generations to look to for guidance?
- No, I don’t think that either. Does the OG Stonehenge guide our civilization today? Does Gobekli Teppe (arguably the most exciting archeological discovery of the past 3 decades)? Do the Pyramids?
- No they don’t . They are certainly marvels from the ancient world and they do draw on our collective curiosities, but we don’t need them to kickstart civilization. That comes out of hundreds, thousands, millions, and now billions of people believing in a common idea or set of ideas. THAT’s what makes a civilization… not ten instructions written on some pretty white stones…
- Not to mention the instructions would likely be frustratingly (or dangerously) ambiguous… or in the case of the population control instruction… unrealistic.
- The stones are definitely interesting or… they were.
- I’ve often thought about what as a species could do to relay clearer messages to the archeologists of the distant future. Our ancestors made it damn-hard for us to interpret their messages, requiring rosetta stones found by chance and backbreaking work diggint stuff up.
- What do you think Who’d a Thunkers?
- Is it a worthwhile venture for our current society to spend our resources on generations or civilizations of the future (civilizations that will likely be unrecognizable to us now) just to send them a message… just to fatten their history books?
- I sure-as-shit think so and so do lots of organizations. That’s what time capsules are all about.
- put some valuable stuff in a sealed durable container, bury it, and hope someone unearths it some day in wonderment. .. knowing full-well you will not be around to see them open it.
- It is a weird niche version of dreaming. Its cool to me.
- put some valuable stuff in a sealed durable container, bury it, and hope someone unearths it some day in wonderment. .. knowing full-well you will not be around to see them open it.
- But I say we go bigger. ! How about we bury an apache helicopter or like gobekli tepe, we could bury a temple, skyscraper, or even a town!
CREDIT:
- a good and more-detailed read about the stone’s origin:
- https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1113855150/1114417145
The Journal of A_C_Unit 