Around 34 000 B.C. we destroyed most of the scientific knowledge we had.
Basically we had 3 studies
The structure of teh cosmos, The structure of livin stuff and The structure of information. What we call physics, biology and ICT today.
The later was all about packaging the other 2, as the physics and biology stuff is kind of hard to absorb. A study dedicated to wrapping physics and biology into one digestible wrapper. "how can it be presented?"
Indications of advanced knowledge is found in as good as all ancient civilisation. It was spread out over the world almost instantaneous in stead of expected slow spreadin. The same symbols are used over and over again, it's bloody obvious.
Mankind also appeared all over the planet instantly. We didn't evolve here, we use to live on Mars back when we still had space boats. We evacuated the planet because we had destroyed ourselves again, don't think that was the first time either. lol So we moved our ass to Earth in order to destroy ourselves some more down here. That was about 36000 years ago. I think we have forgotten where we came from literally thousands of times now.
When we find a habitable planet there is always some goofball willing to settle down on the thing then make baby's. Teach the kids to feed themselves. And die without looking back.
We use to go here for dino hunting but the dino's lost. A bit like the fish today, we really owned their ass, ha! they never had a chance, we are so good. :-)
The rest of the universe is amazed how 6 000 000 000 people can forget to invent space travel "...even their anarchy, bureaucracy and capitalism isn't powerful enough".
The key is in educating one person for data recovery, archeology and physics. We need to invent the method to make such people. The current systems are to complicated. It's like they are made to work with rubber bands, paperclips and duck tape. For example Steorn created 4 phases here.
http://www.steorn.net/challenge.aspx?p=1 The number and the names they chose is not important for my example, the key is in dividing 'innovation' over a range of trustworthiness.
I would love to see a system where "E=MC^2" can exist in harmony with "training pink elephants on fary dust". The system should be able to instruct the reader on how established a technology or art really is.
For example Conversation of energy should be able to move quite a bit on the scale of "realness" without moving out of the domain of trustworthy theory. If the
Steorn tech really makes a mess of COE it should be able to move over that line.
The need for this doesn't exist so much on the side of trustworthy formulas, it's needed on the side of the much to incredible and true nonsensical theory. The lowest quality level of science should still present a fun read, as long as it's read as just that. For this area of implausible theory the black and white, true/false system just isn't good enough.