The Antikythera mechanism may be an ancient Greek sort-of-clockwork device that has taken longer than a hundred years to understand. And we still don't really understand it. The mechanism is housed in the Greek National Archaeological Museum in the Greek capital and is regarded to be the single most complex antiquity in existence. I saw it at the museum in Athens two years ago, but really didn't think a lot about it until Jeff Clinton recently pointed out several articles and videos about the science and origins of the device.
The question you have to ask: were the ancients really smarter than us (in that we haven't figured it out yet), or was the device something left behind by Our Cousins, The Greys? Anytime we can't really explain why or how something happened, there is a group of people who will attribute it to aliens, or The Greys. Gene Rodenberry was particularly cranky about this--saying something to the effect that every time we can't explain something, or we find something particularly brilliant and ancient, people say it came from the aliens. It's didn't, he said, we're smart!
The Great Pyramids are often attributed as the work of Visitors. Rodenberry believed this happens because we somehow can't accept that our forebears weren't just knuckle-dragging troglodytes. They were, in fact, smart--wickedly smart. So smart that this device used some of the same techniques and technology that we wouldn't come around to until we began to construct the first serious and powerful analog (e.g., mechanical) computers in the 20th century.
Research is still ongoing--we keep learning from and analyzing the device. The device is stunningly complex. People originally thought it was some sort of clock, but when Greek inscriptions were found using advanced technology, it turned out to be an engine for predicting eclipses and moon phases and the positions of the planets. Scientists say it seems to be 1,000 years ahead of its time.
On the other hand, the device seems to mainly track the five planets known at that time. Wouldn't The Greys, having flown to earth, been aware of the other planets in our little solar system?
From various articles, you learn that the machine was able to perform computational tasks 1400 years or so before the time when crude machines of this sort probably appeared. What sort of tasks? Well, using 37 gears or so, it can do subtractions, multiplications and divisions to show the cycles of the moon, predict eclipses, and who knows what else? It even has an adjustment you can make for Leap Day, since the calendar it employs requires you to catch up with reality once every four years.
From The Wikipedia: The mechanism is the oldest known complex scientific calculator. It contains many gears, and is sometimes called the first known analog computer,[8] although its flawless manufacturing suggests that it may have had a number of predecessors during the Hellenistic Period which have not yet been discovered.[9] It appears to be constructed upon theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers and it is estimated that it was made around 150-100 BC.
The most recent findings of The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, as published in the July 30, 2008, edition of Nature also suggest that the concept for the mechanism originated in the colonies of Corinth. We know the Corinthians were no 'tards.
When a date was entered via a crank (which we did not recover), the mechanism calculated the position of the Sun, Moon, or other astronomical information such as the location of other planets. Not bad,
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