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Easter Island story

It always seemed a little weird to me that inhabitants of a small isolated island would place huge statues announcing their presence to a dangerous world.

I sometimes wonder if Easter Island is a metaphor for our modern world - we cheerfully send things into space without the slightest inkling of how dangerous the universe really is.

Someday hot hail will fall, and if we look to the sky and wonder at the miracle and pray, all will be well with us.

But if we ask too many questions (as science is wont to do), and go to investigate, that will be our doom. Evil aliens will come to destroy our planet because we have become too smart for our own good.
 
So the answer is mainly 1), a bit of 2), so 4), and probably 3), maybe. :D

The point of 2) seems to be that 1) is just us seeing 'eco-cide', something our times are very concerned with, when it may not have occured.
 
T'ai Chi said:
So the answer is mainly 1), a bit of 2), so 4), and probably 3), maybe. :D

The point of 2) seems to be that 1) is just us seeing 'eco-cide', something our times are very concerned with, when it may not have occured.
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More like 5) You're out of your cotton pickin' skull.

Yeah... that's the one.
 
T'ai Chi said:
So the answer is mainly 1), a bit of 2), so 4), and probably 3), maybe. :D

The point of 2) seems to be that 1) is just us seeing 'eco-cide', something our times are very concerned with, when it may not have occured.
Click to expand...
Answer the question:

What is your point?
 
Feels sort of like a yummy hook baited with 'religious crazies'.

Just looking at the history, the statues existed a long time, long enough to play a major part of the economy. What else do you do on an island? So #1 seems least likely to me.

An isolated island lovingly devoted to their giant statue building and worship could be prey to an outside economy that was (instead of being devoted to peaceful religious pursuits) - devoted to sailing the seas and pillaging.

From a purely statistical standpoint, the odds don't seem to be in favor of survival of the peaceful.
 
Kopji said:
Just looking at the history, the statues existed a long time, long enough to play a major part of the economy. What else do you do on an island? So #1 seems least likely to me.
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I don't see how that follows...
An isolated island lovingly devoted to their giant statue building and worship could be prey to an outside economy that was (instead of being devoted to peaceful religious pursuits) - devoted to sailing the seas and pillaging.
Click to expand...

Who?
 
Correa Neto said:
Read Jared Diamond’s Collapse

Ok, now what? :D


Oh, and I got 2) wrong. Instead of

2) disease brought by outside populations, and rats, led to demise

it should be

2) statue building started earlier, population was much less, rats mainly responsible for eco-cide, timeline different by hundreds of years
Click to expand...
 
Just maybe they lived during the jurasic age and as the oxygen level at that time was thinner than it is now, and everything grew large, just maybe the people were large too giants in fact and Easter Island was part of a mainland and the people just walked away during a great catasrophy like massive vocanic eruptions, killing many and darkening the world, perhaps.

What we see is what is left of a much larger picture
 
T'ai Chi said:
Correa Neto said:
Read Jared Diamond’s Collapse

Ok, now what? :D


Oh, and I got 2) wrong. Instead of

2) disease brought by outside populations, and rats, led to demise

it should be

2) statue building started earlier, population was much less, rats mainly responsible for eco-cide, timeline different by hundreds of years
Click to expand...

Ah, I see that you had time to do some actual research. Backpedalling, as usual.

Still you need to answer the question:

What is your point?
Click to expand...
 
OK, who's responsible for an ecocide?

The rats or who brought the rats to an ecosystem where there were no rats?

As you can see from the book, the causes were multiple. Most induced by a certain factor.

BTW, exactly what are you trying to discuss?
Don't take this as hostility, I am just having problems to grasp this, what may cause some understanding problems... So, we're trying to discuss:

-The factors (and their relative roles) that may have contributed to the collapse of the Easter island's society.
-An alternate model for what happened.
-The reliability of the "ecocide" concept and if it can be indeed a cause for the collaps of a given society.
-The changes in theories when new data or models are avaliable.
-Something else that I failed to recognise...
 
It's kind of hard to say what is or is not correct when the choices are single sentences that do not begin to describe the complex histories they represent.
 
Correa Neto said:
The one with the best data support and whose proposed model has a better fit with the data.
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I agree, of course. So.. 1) or 2) or some mix do you think?

Does anyone know if the dating methods in 2) were undertook in 1) at all?
 
Don't ask other people questions, if you won't give any answers yourself.
 
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