Approximately every 2500 years, mankind kills itself. I will go ahead and say that people survive, because the race has continued, but the destruction is to such a point that everything that was built up over that 2500 year period is essentially lost. Humanity repeats history, but it also builds upon the previous history.

This is why we have (at least as far as we think) achieved such great technology in our time. We have built upon all that has come before us. But around the beginning of the Christian calendar, humanity was in its infancy.

I have several reasons for coming up with this theory.....

*Do you ever what happened to cause the halt of such great civilizations as the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans?
*Modern man has not managed to even remotely equal any of the ancient wonders.
*The arrogance of a given epoch is such that we assume those who came before us were technologically inferior. How can we ever know that the ancient Egyptians were in fact beyond us in capability? Because we have no proof? There is likewise no proof that they built the pyramids with chisels.
*It was around 2500 BC that the Egyptian empire was at its height.
*It was around centered around 0 AD (give or take 250 years either way) that the height of the Greeks and the Roman Empire were reached.

Part of the reason I started wondering was, for whatever reason, yesterday driving home I started wondering what a computer would seem like to a person from 300 years ago. Like, what did they go home and do for fun?

Then I guess I thought, well, how do we know that such technology was not only achieved but far surpassed by those who came before us? The real innovation has only occurred within the last 200 years or so....as far as we know.

Do you ever wonder why the Pyramids were built? What if that society was so far advanced that they had exhausted their needs, and turned to things like monuments to express their civilizations? If, for lack of a better word, they were art?

It is the arrogance of today's humanity that we think we have gone above and beyond anything that has ever happened before.