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positions? From what precision workshop did the cut crystal lenses come? How could anyone smelt and model platinum, since platinum only begins to melt at temperatures of 1,800° C? And how did the ancient Chinese make aluminium, a metal which can only be extracted from bauxite with considerable difficulty. prepared to accept or admit that there was a higher culture or an equally perfect technology before our own, all that is left is the hypothesis of a visit from space! As long as archaeology is conducted as it A Utopian archaeological year is due, during which archaeologists, physicists, chemists, geologists, metallurgists, and all the corresponding branches of these sciences ought to concentrate their efforts on one single question: did our forefathers receive visits from outer space? For example, a metallurgist would be able to tell an archaeologist quickly and concisely how complicated the production of aluminium is. Is it not conceivable that a physicist might instantly recognise a formula in a rock drawing? A chemist with his highly developed apparatus might be able to confirm the assumption that obelisks were extracted from the rock by wetting wooden wedges or using unknown acids. The geologist owes us a whole series of answers to questions about what is of significance in certain Ice Age deposits. The team for a Utopian archaeological year would naturally include a group of divers who would investigate the Dead Sea for radioactive traces of an atomic explosion over Sodom and Gomorrha. Why are the oldest libraries in the world secret libraries? What are people really afraid of? Are they worried that the truth, protected and concealed for so many thousands of years, will finally come to light? Research and progress cannot be held back. For 4,000 years the Egyptians considered their 'gods' to be real beings. In the Middle Ages we still killed 'witches' in our burning ideological zeal. The belief of the ancient Greeks that they could tell the future from a goose's entrails is as out of date today as the conviction of ultra-conservatives that nationalism still has the slightest importance. threadbare and is really only an acute form of stubbornness. At the conference tables or orthodox scientists the delusion still prevails that a thing must be proved before a 'serious' person may—or can—concern himself with it. In the past the man who put forward a brand-new idea had to count on being despised and persecuted by the church and his colleagues. Things must have become easier, one thinks. There are no more anathemas and fires at the stake are no longer lit. The snag is that the methods of our time are less spectacular, but they are hardly less obstructive to progress. Now everything is more 'civilised' and there is much less fuss. Theories and intolerably audacious ideas are hushed up or dismissed by killer Impossible questions, to be sure, but does that mean that we should not ask them? Since we are not has been so far, we shall never have a chance to discover whether our dim past was really dim and not perhaps quite enlightened. We have a thousand and one errors of the past to correct. The self-assurance that is feigned is phrases, as the Americans say. There are many possibilities: