But first, my position: I am proud to be Indian and of Indian descent, and in keeping with that sentiment, I believe in truth and careful examination of facts to arrive at that truth. This has been a common philosophical undercurrent in most philosophical traditions in our culture.

Thus, in order to uphold that ideal first discussed and followed by our philosophers, I propose that we must not jump to conclusions based on literary evidence without supporting physical evidence and corroborating evidence from other, impartial sources. If a civilization long after ours were to find nothing of our civilization except our repository of science fiction literature and movies, would they be correct in assuming that we had mastered space travel, time travel, hyperdrive technology (if it is at all possible), star trek style beaming technology, space colonies, etc?
It may be entirely possible that our ancestors had indeed mastered advanced technology, but it is more likely that they did not. Human literature is limited only by our imagination, but reality follows radically different rules.

Thus, till solid evidence is presented, I will remain skeptical, in keeping with the ancient Indian philosophies of accepting facts as truth only after carefully examining them.

What do you think?

“These weapons, having achieved success, have gone away to the place they came from. They will, again, come into thy hands when the Time for their coming approaches.”

I think it means that the knowledge for such weapons (and pretty much all the advanced knowledge of the ancient vedic civilization) was lost in this war and the time for their second coming is RIGHT NOW, the last century where scientists rediscovered nuclear power.

I think it just illustrates the cyclical nature of the yugas when all is lost at the end of an aeon for it to rise again in the next.

The only eternal existence in the universe is said to be the Supreme Consciousness (referred to as Vishnu, Narayana, etc). And then there is the concept of Sankalpa. The universe is said to have created due to the Sankalpa of this eternal consciousness. Which is why it is depicted as Brahma coming out of the Nabhi of Vishnu. Brahma is the physical universe and nabhi as we know represents the birth, and the nabhi coming out of Vishnu indicates the supreme consciousness causing the birth of this universe. Brahma or our Universe in the end gets back into the Supreme Consciousness.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! If only Sanskrit were as popular as English today, our entire understanding of world history and the universe would have been totally different. And most probably humans would have been living in harmony with nature around us.

If the ancients could invent mathematics as we use even today (the place value system and zero which form the very foundation of modern mathematics was invented in ancient India), then what could stop them from inventing advanced technologies? After all their civilizations spanned for thousands of years where as our modern science is merely couple of centuries old.