Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and Julie Douglas Julie. Isn't
Speaker 1: there just something delightfully intoxicating about the notion of a
Speaker 1: lost world, a lost continent, a lost city. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: especially in this day and age, where everything is mapped out.
Speaker 1: You have GPS, you can zoom to nearly any street
Speaker 1: and take a gander. The idea that there is this
Speaker 1: continent out there, undiscovered or perhaps once known and now
Speaker 1: just um unknown to us again, just ripe and ready
Speaker 1: to be discovered, is amazing. Yeah, I mean we uh.
Speaker 1: When we were talking about HP Lovecraft in a recent episode,
Speaker 1: we talked about his um, his novella At the Mountains
Speaker 1: of Madness, which which is written in a time when
Speaker 1: when man is on the cusp of exploring ing the
Speaker 1: last unknown um Antarctica, and Lovecraft injects his fiction and
Speaker 1: places some uh, the ancient remnants of a primordial alien
Speaker 1: civilization there, and in in a sense he was investing
Speaker 1: our our last hopes for something undiscovered on this world
Speaker 1: in that place. We love the idea if there's not
Speaker 1: something undiscovered out there in the present, then maybe there
Speaker 1: was something in the past that we've lost, and failing that,
Speaker 1: hey we'll just look to the future and dream something
Speaker 1: up there. Well, I feel like he was tapping into
Speaker 1: something anyway, and this idea that there are cultures so
Speaker 1: very ancient civilization is so very different from us, that
Speaker 1: they did seem or might seem alien to us. And
Speaker 1: especially if you think about all the artifacts in that
Speaker 1: novella that they come across um the ancient writings or
Speaker 1: drawings and things that we discover today when we're trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how people worked in the past. So
Speaker 1: it is this idea that this lost cons and that
Speaker 1: could give us another angle and another lens into humanity
Speaker 1: and what what ultimately helped to create us and where
Speaker 1: we are today. And certainly even just within known history
Speaker 1: there there there are plenty of places and times it's
Speaker 1: very difficult for us to to wrap our heads around,
Speaker 1: like it's it's been pointed out to me before that
Speaker 1: the religion of the ancient Egyptians, for instance, Uh, it
Speaker 1: never really took off behind the ancient egypt because it
Speaker 1: is it is very difficult for an outsider to sort
Speaker 1: of wrap your head around, uh, these these concepts and
Speaker 1: what exactly they were going for, which I think it
Speaker 1: makes makes it even that more romantic, these notions that
Speaker 1: these lands could have existed, these these utopias where you know,
Speaker 1: people were incredibly strong and and the societies were wealthy,
Speaker 1: and and they were technologically advanced. This idea that this
Speaker 1: could have existed. And I'm even thinking about El Dorado,
Speaker 1: which is, you know a perfect example of the sort
Speaker 1: of um romantic version of society, but all through this
Speaker 1: idea that all these treasures exists and you just need
Speaker 1: to go find them and plunder them. And El Dorado
Speaker 1: is the famous city of riches. Seventeenth century European explorers
Speaker 1: were trying to find in South America with all sorts
Speaker 1: of fantastical stories of you know, this Indian chief covered
Speaker 1: in gold and all sorts of gems and rubies just
Speaker 1: there for the taking if you can find the city. Yea. Indeed,
Speaker 1: one of the sources we both read for this particular
Speaker 1: episode an article by else Broad de Camp titled Lost Continents,
Speaker 1: which is published in the National History magazine. You can
Speaker 1: find it online. Uh. He pointed out that as we've
Speaker 1: been saying, we love this idea of utopia. We love
Speaker 1: this idea that there's some lost land somewhere that that
Speaker 1: captures perfection. Um. Our world sucks, but surely we got
Speaker 1: it right at some point, or we will get it
Speaker 1: right at some point in the future. He says that
Speaker 1: we we used to situate these Eden's and Golden ages
Speaker 1: in the remote past or in some unex word portion
Speaker 1: of the world, but now we're we're forced to place
Speaker 1: them on other planets or in the distant future. So
Speaker 1: so one day, one day, maybe we'll get there. But
Speaker 1: failing that, of course we we we fill our our
Speaker 1: our fantasies, we feel our dream worlds with these various places.
Speaker 1: So I think we've already mentioned a few, but just
Speaker 1: some of the writers that come to my mind when
Speaker 1: we think about lost worlds uh Um Lovecraft, of course,
Speaker 1: Clark Ashton Smith wrote whole cycles of short stories set
Speaker 1: on the lost continent of Hyperborea, on the future continent
Speaker 1: of Zofik, and on the last chart of sunken Atlanta
Speaker 1: is known as Poseidonus j R. Tolkien wrote of uh
Speaker 1: New Minore, which I made. The Tolken fanetics will probably
Speaker 1: correct me on that, and the pronunciation of Tolkien's name,
Speaker 1: but I grew up saying Tolkien's though it's grew it. H.
Speaker 1: But this world is another one that a fictional world
Speaker 1: fell into darkness sank beneath the waves Thomas Moore's Utopia
Speaker 1: fifteen sixteen classic. We also in remembering this chapter in
Speaker 1: Ken jennings book map Head, in which he talked about
Speaker 1: this law professor Austin tap And right, who died in
Speaker 1: one but he left behind something like twenty three d
Speaker 1: handwritten pages describing and mapping this fictional country in his
Speaker 1: mind called Islandia and decades long fever dream for him, right,
Speaker 1: you know. And this is beyond the sort of scope
Speaker 1: of his work that he did in his daily life.
Speaker 1: So this is what he did in the mornings and
Speaker 1: when he got home from work, and it detailed, uh everything,
Speaker 1: the population, the culture of the languages. And again here's
Speaker 1: this idea that we can't help but storytelling, we think
Speaker 1: about distant lands, real or imagined. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: something that really takes hold of us. I'm glad you
Speaker 1: mentioned map Head because because that really cuts down to
Speaker 1: two of the key features here. In discussing lost continents
Speaker 1: and lost worlds, on one hand, the mapping of our
Speaker 1: world us as we will roll out as we continue
Speaker 1: in this conversation. UM. A lot of the stems from
Speaker 1: our attempt to understand the shape of our world, the
Speaker 1: layout of our world, where the where the continents are, where,
Speaker 1: where various islands are, and then misinformation theories, hypothesis here
Speaker 1: and there, and and a lot of dreaming. We get
Speaker 1: into the the the theory of what may exist gets
Speaker 1: picked up by the into and transformed into the desire
Speaker 1: for something to exist. Yeah, that's a good point because
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this. You have maps that are
Speaker 1: physical maps, and you have allegorical maps. In the same way,
Speaker 1: you have the same kind of stories, right, you have
Speaker 1: some of their allegorical stories, and then you have some
Speaker 1: stories that may be rooted in historical fact. And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about the city of Troy, which was written about
Speaker 1: by Homer in the fictional poems Iliad and Odyssey, and
Speaker 1: turns out that the city of Troy is was a
Speaker 1: city that is located in modern day Turkey, and the
Speaker 1: Trojan Wars may actually have happened. So you have all
Speaker 1: of this sort of tinging these ideas of history and
Speaker 1: legend and no more so than the idea of Atlantis. Ah. Yes,
Speaker 1: And I do want to say a place like Troy,
Speaker 1: it instantly makes me think of any number of places
Speaker 1: that have an important role both in real history as
Speaker 1: well as in fiction, as well as in religion and myth.
Speaker 1: And some individuals want to really only take one of
Speaker 1: those or want to combine them all into a single thing.
Speaker 1: But I really feel a place like that, like Troy,
Speaker 1: it kind of exists in a like a quantum superposition.
Speaker 1: You know, it is at once a real place and
Speaker 1: it is this fantasy place. And and these things are
Speaker 1: not necessarily connected. You can't necessarily overlay them like see
Speaker 1: through panels in a book and expect to see a
Speaker 1: concise image. It could be dueled with nature. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And indeed Atlantis, the Big One definitely falls into this
Speaker 1: category as well. Well. The thing about Atlantis, though, is
Speaker 1: widely seen as an allegorical story. Yes, right in the
Speaker 1: time that it was written in the present, but we
Speaker 1: just can't help ourselves, right for all the reasons that
Speaker 1: we just ticked through. Um, so when we talk about
Speaker 1: the story of Atlantis, for talking about the lost city,
Speaker 1: and you can't have this actual story about Atlantis unless
Speaker 1: you talk about this other city, this Athenian city that
Speaker 1: existed in the story at the same time. Um, this
Speaker 1: is huge empire that was organized along the lines that
Speaker 1: Plato had set forth in his republic, and the state
Speaker 1: was ruled by a communistic military cast and everybody was
Speaker 1: brave and handsome and virtuous kind of like Garrison Keiller's Yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that Lake Wobegone as Atlantis new theory, new theory.
Speaker 1: Garrison Killer needs to write that episode for like what
Speaker 1: are we gone? Um? But his rival city, of course
Speaker 1: was Atlantis. And this is an island west of the
Speaker 1: Pillars of Hercules, larger than North after good Asia, Asia
Speaker 1: minor combined, right, so just land mass wise huge, right,
Speaker 1: And this was just a rehash written and he's saying
Speaker 1: this was nine thousand years ago from in was like, hey,
Speaker 1: this happened nine thousand years ago, which kind of as
Speaker 1: a red flag anyway, Right, we'll discuss why. Um, this
Speaker 1: is long ago in a galaxy far far away. Basically, yes,
Speaker 1: you're right, but basically this continent had all sorts of
Speaker 1: great power, had tried to conquer the eastern Mediterranean, but
Speaker 1: had been defeated by the Athenians, and up to this
Speaker 1: point in the story, we get all this background on
Speaker 1: Atlantis and how it was an advanced society, but there's
Speaker 1: no flying planes, no laser guns. There's they have a
Speaker 1: really fancy bronze like metal that science shines like the sun,
Speaker 1: but that that's pretty much yet place. It doesn't allot
Speaker 1: anything else sci fi. But they have fancy architecture and art. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: fancy pants. Okay, But at this point you have a
Speaker 1: great earthquake that devastates this Athenian city and Atlantis, and
Speaker 1: along with it, uh you know, you you then have
Speaker 1: the flood swallowing it, or you have Poseidon mandating that
Speaker 1: these floods um swallow these cities whole, right, because it's
Speaker 1: also laid out in Plato's work that that Poseidon puts
Speaker 1: his ten sons in charge of Atlantis. In the Atlantis
Speaker 1: gets gets kicked off with to begin with, Yeah, the charter,
Speaker 1: if you will. Josh Clark has an article about this,
Speaker 1: this an Atlantis article and has stuff works, and he
Speaker 1: says Plato loses some credibility when he mentions that the
Speaker 1: city was also populated by blood descendants of the sea
Speaker 1: and earthquake god Poseidon. Yeah, I tend to agree with them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're gonna try and take Plato seriously.
Speaker 1: But it's it's like if you read J. R. Tolkien
Speaker 1: and said, this Middle Earth thing is just completely made up.
Speaker 1: I tried to find it on a map. I couldn't
Speaker 1: you work really hard. I came close a couple of times,
Speaker 1: but it just doesn't pan out. Of course, it doesn't
Speaker 1: pan out because Middle Earth does not really exists. It
Speaker 1: exists as a fiction. It exists. You could argue as
Speaker 1: an allegory for for for Europe during the Second World War, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But wait, wait, wait a second, I saw that documentary
Speaker 1: Lord of the Rings. Yes it exists. Well, New Zealand exists,
Speaker 1: and we'll actually discuss New Zealand a little bit in
Speaker 1: part two of this uh this episode, yeah, the perfect
Speaker 1: setting really for Lord of the Rings, and um, the
Speaker 1: perfect setting as as all lost. The idea of a
Speaker 1: lost continent right has all the elements, all right. But
Speaker 1: there are two remaining points to hit here, and one
Speaker 1: is that the fact that nobody in Greece for nine
Speaker 1: thousand years had mentioned a giant battle between Athens and Atlantis,
Speaker 1: the except for Plato's tail on various commentaries by his successors.
Speaker 1: There's not another surviving word about Atlantis in the Greco Roman,
Speaker 1: Egyptian and Babylonian canon of literature, which is a little suspect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again, everyone knew in Plato's day that this was fiction,
Speaker 1: this was allegory. Uh. Those who came after him knew it.
Speaker 1: But as els Brague de Camp points out, critical standards
Speaker 1: in the later Roman Empire degraded, and some began to
Speaker 1: take the tale seriously. And that's kind of the beginning
Speaker 1: of what would later pick back up in terms of
Speaker 1: re examining Atlantis and thinking or wanting it to be true,
Speaker 1: even though and this is the second point, Plato was
Speaker 1: a philosopher, not a historian, so he wrote on an
Speaker 1: allegorical level. Yeah, but he's Plato. He's a big name,
Speaker 1: so you know, especially as the centuries roll by, there
Speaker 1: becomes this there's more of a tendency to want to
Speaker 1: take what he says really seriously. And if he's talking
Speaker 1: about mysteries, all the better. Right, do you think Oprah
Speaker 1: will have that sort of power? And I always ask
Speaker 1: this Tony in some fashion in two hundred years, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: people will be rereading the works of of Oprah looking
Speaker 1: for the lost works of Oprah and her disciples. Dr
Speaker 1: phil Across Susie Ormon. All right, let's take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we get back, we're gonna tell about some
Speaker 1: of the people who are trying to get at the
Speaker 1: bottom whether or not Atlantis could have ever existed. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. Let's talk about some people who have looked
Speaker 1: at this fascinated idea of I guess it's sort of
Speaker 1: like archaeology meets history meets geography meets could Atlantis have existed? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where it gets, uh, gets even more interesting
Speaker 1: because after about the sixth century, you didn't really hear
Speaker 1: much about Atlantis for a long time until you reach
Speaker 1: the beginning of the European Age of Exploration during the
Speaker 1: fifteenth century. So we're out there, we're exploring the ocean,
Speaker 1: and we are in fact discovering new lands. But then
Speaker 1: of course we're mapping our ways too. But this is
Speaker 1: our Our maps were populated by many a non existent creature,
Speaker 1: which we've discussed before talking about the science of sea monsters.
Speaker 1: So too, do non existing islands pop up throughout the Atlantic.
Speaker 1: It's especially the Atlantic. So in some ways you have
Speaker 1: you're on the cusp of discovery, right, and you have
Speaker 1: these large swaths of undiscovered land in oceans, and so
Speaker 1: it would make sense that people would try to say,
Speaker 1: I think that I have found where Atlantis went under. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you have a sect of these people who
Speaker 1: you might consider scientific atlantists. Yes, And and this also
Speaker 1: picks up a lot when we discover America, because oh
Speaker 1: my goodness, here is a world and it has people
Speaker 1: living on it who we've never discovered before. So that's
Speaker 1: even more fuel for the fire right And and in fact,
Speaker 1: some would end up saying, hey, America is the Atlantist
Speaker 1: and well it's not. Yes. Els brag de Camp divides
Speaker 1: Atlantist enthusiasts or atlantists into three categories, the scientific, the
Speaker 1: pseudo scientific, and the occultists. Um, we'll start with the
Speaker 1: scientific because that's the reasonable place to start. And really,
Speaker 1: they it's kind of a progression, right as you sort
Speaker 1: of drift off a little a little more, a little
Speaker 1: more from having a firm grasp in reality, but it's
Speaker 1: trying to be rooted in in reality, it's trying to
Speaker 1: be rooted in data. But then sort of drifting off.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this, that that cognitive bias that
Speaker 1: we sometimes experience when we're trying to create that picture
Speaker 1: that we want to see. Yeah, he's sort of like
Speaker 1: the scientists, the scientific atlantists are saying, could it be true?
Speaker 1: Let me see, here's my theory about how it could be,
Speaker 1: And then the pseudo scientific the the the desire for
Speaker 1: to be true takes over. And then with the occultists,
Speaker 1: just any other nonsense you might have lying about the
Speaker 1: house gets thrown into it, your fantasy. They're the most fun. Yes,
Speaker 1: so yes for scientific atlantists, Uh, they are again they're
Speaker 1: looking for an ancient culture that could have possibly inspired Plato.
Speaker 1: And and they're not necessarily even getting into the whole
Speaker 1: uh worry over an actual Atlantic island or some sort
Speaker 1: of large land mast sinking into the ocean. So in
Speaker 1: the sixteen seventy nine, Olaf Rudbek Uh supposedly found Atlantis
Speaker 1: in Sweden, and then subsequently other individuals found Atlantis and
Speaker 1: Uh in the Tunisia and Nigeria and South Africa, uh,
Speaker 1: just about everywhere else. Right, Um, the best theories that
Speaker 1: have been put forth regarding the location of Atlanta tend
Speaker 1: to put it in Minoan crete or in tar TESSAs,
Speaker 1: which is a harbor city and the surrounding area on
Speaker 1: the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula that was abandoned
Speaker 1: to floodwaters, most likely before the Common Era. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: Eastern Mediterranean Minoan Empire I really did suffer overwhelming disaster
Speaker 1: around fift dred BC. And this was a Bronze Age
Speaker 1: power that flourished from the twenty seven century BC to
Speaker 1: around the fifteenth century BC. Oh, that's an example of
Speaker 1: scientific Atlantis. Now you have pseudo scientific Atlantis, and a
Speaker 1: good example is Augustus Leclegan. I'm glad you tackled that.
Speaker 1: When you have more of the French tongue. Anyone who
Speaker 1: is proficient in French may take issue with that, but
Speaker 1: I tried. Let it be known, I tried. Um. He
Speaker 1: spent a lot of years in the Mayan ruins of
Speaker 1: the Yucatan. He became quite an expert. He claimed to
Speaker 1: understand the Mayan alphabet, and he considered Egyptian higher growth
Speaker 1: like hieroglyphics similar to the Mayan. And he claimed to
Speaker 1: be able to to sort of sort all of this
Speaker 1: by using a modification of something called rascille de Bobuls's
Speaker 1: modification of a de Landis alphabet. So all of those
Speaker 1: words just falling out of my mouth, I think already
Speaker 1: gives you an idea that this guy was completely obsessed.
Speaker 1: No doubt he was a scholar, but he is uh
Speaker 1: carving things together in such a way that he was
Speaker 1: really really was world building and doing it with language. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think world building is key here, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: he's taking what he knows about mind culture and then
Speaker 1: he's connecting it. He's forming connective tissue to not only
Speaker 1: the real ancient Egypt, but to this imagined Atlantis and
Speaker 1: just stitching together a world anew. Can you imagine him
Speaker 1: living today and tackling like the moon landing hoax? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he would have a huge following online, I'm sure you know.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that continually amazes me looking
Speaker 1: around at a variety of topics, not just this one online,
Speaker 1: is just how much material there is out there supporting
Speaker 1: just bad theories, bad ideas about say, uh, how recently
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs, uh when extinct, or where Atlantis is or was,
Speaker 1: or just it's it's it's a little depressing at times. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it speaks to this idea that humans have
Speaker 1: to chew on something and sometimes and a lot of
Speaker 1: the problem here is that our experience is so subjective
Speaker 1: that it's hard to say, well, this is the thing
Speaker 1: all that. It's actually not that hard. In fact, you
Speaker 1: can take scientific data and help yourself guide yourself into
Speaker 1: the right area of exploration. Nonetheless, we are world builders,
Speaker 1: we are storytellers, and we gotta chew on something. I
Speaker 1: found an hour long h amateur documentary on YouTube the
Speaker 1: other day where a man was arguing for the recent
Speaker 1: existence of dinosaurs based on evidence in the Bible. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing. He wasn't trying He didn't seem to
Speaker 1: have any other point, but there are dinosaurs in the Bible.
Speaker 1: He wasn't trying to push any kind of like new
Speaker 1: uh you know, Young Earth kind of a model. He
Speaker 1: wasn't trying to disprove evolution. He was just saying, hey,
Speaker 1: there are dinosaurs in the Bible, and here's an hour
Speaker 1: of me talking about it. Because for him, that is
Speaker 1: the thing that obviously is problematic, and if he could
Speaker 1: just figure out how dinosaurs fit into this, then all
Speaker 1: of it would make sense. Again, you have the cognitive
Speaker 1: bias at play that when you are faced with something
Speaker 1: that really refutes the data in front of you, you
Speaker 1: will double down and find a way to make it fit.
Speaker 1: Speaking of pseudo scientific atlantist, another individual worth mentioning is
Speaker 1: Paul Schlieman. And Paul Schleiman was actually the grandson of
Speaker 1: Heinrich Schleiman, who actually dug up Troy. We mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: about the finding of Troy, and really Troy is a
Speaker 1: real place in addition to you know, whatever else it
Speaker 1: might be in the in in the popular mindset of man.
Speaker 1: But yeah, nineteen twelve, Paul Schleiman um gave the New
Speaker 1: York American magazine a sensational tale about how his grandfather
Speaker 1: had left secret papers instructing him not to instruct him
Speaker 1: to break open an owl headed vase and supposedly they
Speaker 1: were Atlantis secrets in side. But nothing ever came of that,
Speaker 1: no vase was ever presented, no documents, so um, but it.
Speaker 1: But it added just a little more fuel to the fire,
Speaker 1: all right, Um. The last category here would be, as
Speaker 1: you mentioned before, the occult atlantis, and this these really
Speaker 1: are the people that are going to bring the life
Speaker 1: to the party. Here yeah, with occultist Atlantists, and occultist
Speaker 1: doesn't just mean I know it brings to my mind, uh,
Speaker 1: images of individuals and dark cloaks meeting in secret rooms
Speaker 1: and discussing Atlantis. But really, um, we're talking about here
Speaker 1: is just any additional crazy idea, conspiracy theories, fictional imaginings. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the same kind of energy that would go
Speaker 1: into rectifying the Old Testament with with with modern um paleontology,
Speaker 1: that's the kind of energy you're getting here. So you're
Speaker 1: getting everything from uh you know, ancient airplanes sailing through
Speaker 1: the skies of Atlantis, to know magical powers, um, bisexual
Speaker 1: Lemurian's astral bodies, you name it. It's gonna wind up
Speaker 1: in this version of Atlantis and Atlantis thought, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: gets super cosmic on this level. You could trace some
Speaker 1: of this new life breathed into the legend to someone
Speaker 1: named Ignatious Donnelly, who penned Atlantis the Antediluvian world elishments
Speaker 1: before the flood, before the flood, the flood, because there
Speaker 1: have been many flood in the Big Flood, the Big
Speaker 1: Biblical flood, Yeah, that one. Uh, so we're talking about
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty two and donally argued that small islands have
Speaker 1: disappeared in eruptions, so why not a continent. So this
Speaker 1: is his place of logic that he's beginning at, right,
Speaker 1: which doesn't really hold out because it's of course it's
Speaker 1: one thing for an island to sink, but for a large,
Speaker 1: massive piece, so an actual continent to sink, it just
Speaker 1: doesn't hold up with our our modern understanding of geology. Now.
Speaker 1: He also cited many alleged resemblances between the appearance and
Speaker 1: cultures of the peoples of America, Europe, and the Near East,
Speaker 1: and insisted that therefore the civilizations of all must have
Speaker 1: come from m Atlantis. It's like they're all humans. So well,
Speaker 1: he starts with a good observation, there's something universal here
Speaker 1: there there are there are aspects of various cultures that
Speaker 1: seemed to be connected. There's some sort of connective tissue here.
Speaker 1: What could the reason be? Answer Atlantis Atlantis instead of
Speaker 1: saying like maybe genetics, but of course there's not a
Speaker 1: great understanding of genetics at that time anyway, so you
Speaker 1: gotta give him a little room. But the problem here
Speaker 1: is that he completely besides coming from this place of logic,
Speaker 1: he completely ignores Plato Smith and he replaces it with
Speaker 1: a variation on the biblical myth of the flood that
Speaker 1: wiped out everything except for Noah his family into his
Speaker 1: menagerie of animals. He wrote that Atlantis was sunk in
Speaker 1: the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during the flood, but
Speaker 1: before all this it had given rise to the Egyptian
Speaker 1: and Mayan civilizations, and too, blue eyed, red haired arians
Speaker 1: of Ireland. Here you're going there only so he pulls
Speaker 1: in a lot of ideas in this theory. He's bringing
Speaker 1: in the Biblical theories, bringing in some Irish myth he's
Speaker 1: bringing in um discoveries about ancient Egyptian beliefs, and uh
Speaker 1: about mind beliefs, and just sort of again world building
Speaker 1: at all into this version of reality that doesn't actually
Speaker 1: match up with with what we know to be true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and think about this time period too. You have a
Speaker 1: ton of excavations going on in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and you also have the occultists exploring these more cosmic
Speaker 1: ideas of how we came to be in these more
Speaker 1: fantastical ideas. So it was sort of like the perfect
Speaker 1: story to Ussher in an expression of all of this
Speaker 1: the ziente gist of the moment. All right, So let's
Speaker 1: let's back up just a little bit then, So we've
Speaker 1: we've ventured head first all the way from scientific to
Speaker 1: pseudo scientific and into the occult and considering Atlantis, and
Speaker 1: at that point we're just lost. We we reached. It
Speaker 1: just turns into pop culture and fiction and uh and
Speaker 1: uh indeed, uh old I think like nineteen eighty two
Speaker 1: Atari game called Atlantis that I remember seeing the trailers
Speaker 1: for in which alien Gorgon's battle the Atlanteans and it
Speaker 1: was an amazing TV commercial for it. Um. But but
Speaker 1: but to back up, let's let's go back to this
Speaker 1: h this period of time in which we are actually
Speaker 1: exploring the world. We are exploring the oceans, and we
Speaker 1: are in fact looking for and expecting to find undiscovered continents.
Speaker 1: Particularly we're looking in the Southern Ocean, all right, in
Speaker 1: the Southern hemisphere. Um. A lot of the early explorations
Speaker 1: of this area were actually an attempt to find what
Speaker 1: was called Tara Australis incognita, not really to explore the
Speaker 1: ocean itself as much. I mean, we we did that,
Speaker 1: but it was simply uh, because there were there had
Speaker 1: to be this great undiscovered continent out there. And there
Speaker 1: are a couple of reasons for this. Um For instance, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a religious one, and that is that you have
Speaker 1: there's so much land in the northern hemisphere. The truly
Speaker 1: a divine creator would not have created an asymmetrical Earth.
Speaker 1: I mean, forgetting the fact that he apparently created asymmetrical humans,
Speaker 1: because we're not perfectly symmetrical, but surely he would have
Speaker 1: made the Earth symmetrical. So I get it from a
Speaker 1: geographical standpoint and from a sort of god worldview standpoint.
Speaker 1: They're sitting there and they're looking at this land mass,
Speaker 1: and they've they've mapped what they know, and they think
Speaker 1: that symmetrically there should be something on the other side. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like when we look into the night sky,
Speaker 1: and based on our model of what we know, it's
Speaker 1: not unbelievable to think, well, there must there might be
Speaker 1: other planets out there that have life on them. We
Speaker 1: we we just have to sort of fill in the
Speaker 1: blanks based on the existing model. So and this all
Speaker 1: boils down to Plato in his Platonic ideal. Yet again.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, Plato emerges once more to populate our world
Speaker 1: with fictional continents. Um. Now scientifically you can there's also
Speaker 1: the it's not all just completely based in religion and philosophy,
Speaker 1: but scientifically. It was also thought that if you had
Speaker 1: all this land in the north, then there must be
Speaker 1: land in the south, because otherwise the planets of balance
Speaker 1: would be disrupted and uh, and it would spin off
Speaker 1: out into the void of space, and so much of
Speaker 1: the so much of the Earth was unknown. It was
Speaker 1: simply assumed that there was more land in the south. Um.
Speaker 1: And again this doesn't completely line up with the Obviously,
Speaker 1: this doesn't line up with the way uh, the planetary
Speaker 1: science works, because we haven't spun off into the void
Speaker 1: and there is in fact less continental mass in the
Speaker 1: southern hemisphere. But the idea that they even understood that
Speaker 1: there was a kind of mass at play is really interesting.
Speaker 1: And trying to extrapolate that in a in a larger
Speaker 1: view of things. So in other words, that maybe you
Speaker 1: have a weight, um, you know that on one side
Speaker 1: it's got a bunch of rocks and nothing on the
Speaker 1: other side. But to get that concept and to to
Speaker 1: try to apply it to geography is really interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we ended up setting out into the into into
Speaker 1: the Southern Ocean. We eventually discover Antarctica, and we we
Speaker 1: explore all the waters in between, and there is a
Speaker 1: lot of nothing out there. Um. There's a really great
Speaker 1: episode of Ideas with Paul Kennedy title of the God
Speaker 1: for sacon See that really gets into depth about about
Speaker 1: some of our early explorations of of of the Southern Ocean,
Speaker 1: but also uh, people who've sailed there, people who have
Speaker 1: tried to set records sailing around the globe down there.
Speaker 1: And one of the points was made in that episode
Speaker 1: that that keeps resonating with me pointed out that, uh,
Speaker 1: you're so far away from civilization down there in the
Speaker 1: Southern Ocean. Uh. In fact, you're further from human habitation
Speaker 1: than an astronaut on the International Space Station. So think
Speaker 1: about that the next time you stare at the globe
Speaker 1: and get this false idea of of how how well
Speaker 1: we know everything and how civilized our planet is, or
Speaker 1: if you just feel isolated, yes you know, all right,
Speaker 1: So there you go. That is part one of our
Speaker 1: two part series on the idea of the Lost Continent.
Speaker 1: This one was very Atlantis heavy. The next one will
Speaker 1: be less so, but we'll get into some uh some
Speaker 1: equally wonderful content, and we will set out for the
Speaker 1: lost continent of Limuria. Namers. Hey, do you guys have
Speaker 1: any thoughts so far? Let us know. You can find
Speaker 1: this at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's where you'll find all the podcast episodes, all the videos,
Speaker 1: all the blog posts. And you know there's an old
Speaker 1: fashioned way to get in touch with us as well.
Speaker 1: Send an email to boil the mine at how stuff
Speaker 1: work dot com for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.