NASA in the dirt

Dead and gone:

For 1200 years, the Maya dominated Central America. At their peak around 900 A.D., Maya cities teemed with more than 2,000 people per square mile -- comparable to modern Los Angeles County. Even in rural areas the Maya numbered 200 to 400 people per square mile. But suddenly, all was quiet. And the profound silence testified to one of the greatest demographic disasters in human prehistory -- the demise of the once vibrant Maya society.

What happened? Some NASA-funded researchers think they have a pretty good idea.

"They did it to themselves," says veteran archeologist Tom Sever.

"The Maya are often depicted as people who lived in complete harmony with their environment,' says PhD student Robert Griffin. "But like many other cultures before and after them, they ended up deforesting and destroying their landscape in efforts to eke out a living in hard times."

"They had to burn 20 trees to heat the limestone for making just 1 square meter of the lime plaster they used to build their tremendous temples, reservoirs, and monuments," explains Sever.

If anything, that's an argument in favor of industrialism, rather than against it. Semi-nomadic, non-industrial lifestyles are wasteful of resources, non-productive, and culturally stagnant. The still-extant native South American "empires" fell like wheat before the scythe when European explorers came across them, primarily because they hadn't developed metal working beyond the soft-metal artisan stage.

In fact, an argument can be made (and has been) that the war impetus driving Europeans to produce better armor and swords, then later guns and cannon, resulted directly in industrialized, modern society. But that's an extensive argument, and one that I've studied for many years, so I won't get off on that tangent. Instead, I have a question: why the hell is the National AERONAUTICS and SPACE Administration being given my tax money to study a thousand-year dead culture?

"Space technology is revolutionizing archeology," he concludes. "We're using it to learn about the plight of ancients in order to avoid a similar fate today."

Hogwash. We know how to "avoid their fate." See above. Now stop wasting MY MONEY, because I assure you that I couldn't care less why the Mayans died off; they were a cultural dead-end and met the fate they sowed for themselves, (pun clearly intended). If a bunch of academic ne'er-do-wells wish to fritter away their lives on such psuedo-scientific clap-trap, they can bloody well pay for it with their own money. I'm pretty certain the vast majority of tax-paying Americans would agree with me.

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(Hat-tip to Vizigoth)