What proof could Ragnarök leave behind?
Ragnarök is the Norse rendition of the apocalypse. A major event during this apocalypse is Fernir devouring the sun. If we assume that the sun and all of its influence disappear entirely for 3 days, this could have serious effects on the environment.
Another side effect of Ragnarök for the purpose of this question is that humanity and all traces of them are wiped out, with the exception of two humans who then repopulate the earth.
Assuming that gods meddle in human affairs from time to time and the possibility of Rangnarök is known to be real (this means that the gods, including Fernir, have been proven to exist), how could humans with knowledge of science similar to ours prove with statistical significance Rangnarök already occurred once a few ten thousand years ago? This should take into account all effects that the absense of the sun would have.
Additionally, could it be shown that these traces were not the result of an original creation?
We know however that we won't be able to do this using astronomy.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2703. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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There is - believe it or not - a loophole that could show give solid evidence that Ragnarok happened. It involves a black hole (or a very massive body).
One of the coolest effects of general relativity is that mass and energy can bend light. It's known as gravitational lensing, and it often is shown as this:
You can bend the light to any angle. So all you have to do is put a massive object somewhere in the cosmos. Position it so that the light from the Sun reflected off of Earth will bend around it and come straight to Earth (this is nearly impossible because of the motion of the Earth, but hey, perhaps there's a solution). If this was done in the past, we could "look back in time" and see the solar system in the past. If we found a severe irregularity, such as the complete lack of an image of Earth - or an actual image of Ragnarok - we could tell that something had happened.
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