Sunday, March 7, 2010

weird ideas: ancient astronauts

I have no problem with the idea of other life in the universe. In the words of Carl Sagan, it'd be an awful big waste of space if we're alone. But here are the problems I have with the Ancient Astronaut idea:

- They use all these weird images from all over the world as 'proof', but the pictures don't look the same, even when we account for differing art styles

- If all civilization came from aliens, then we're all descended from idiots who weren't smart enough to make it on their own, and we happen to have numerous and varied examples of just how smart and surprisingly sophisticated people were in the past. My ancestors the idiots. Nope. *

- There's absolutely no reason for aliens to look or think or act anything at all like we do, or even be close enough to recognize us as sentient life or vice versa

- Out of all of the millions of years of world history, we're just a narrow sliver; chances are, if aliens just randomly show up, they won't coincide with us

- It shows lack of imagination; I don't understand it, so people in the past who lived in a different world and had entirely different understandings probably wouldn't understand it either, and therefore it's obviously from some powerful exterior source? Nope again. That's just religion pretending to be nonreligious. Religious sentiment is built in to the species, and this is just another manifestation.**

- There are similarities between many great civilizations, true. But this can as easily be explained by the fact that humans all have the same basic build and functioning, all people in the world came from the same original place and culture, and echoes would have continued even as they diverged, people even thought to be isolated often turn out to have been connected in strange and unexpected ways. Nothing exists in a vacuum. People who have never met will often have heard stories of stories of stories of each other.

- Things that aren't understood have a tendency to be minimized by those who don't understand because it's easier to declare something impossible than to try to understand it.

- All the things that are claimed to be so similar are really very different in close investigation: Mesopotamian pyramids were solid and filled with dirt, Mexican pyramids were temples made of big blocks often fitted together like jigsaws, Egyptian pyramids were tombs with a clear and definite history and evolution still standing right next to them. The 'proof' doesn't stand up. People just like big things. It's the same impulse that built Chartres Cathedral and all the massive skyscrapers all over the world today, and we know they aren't built by aliens or by alien knowledge.

- It proves how little critical thinking people use. In scifi, it's great. Otherwise, it makes very little sense.

And that's my two cents.


* It short changes humans, and it puts limits on human ingenuity, which is cruel and in turn limits future understanding.
** Which is fine, but just admit that it's a religious impulse.

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