Ancient Astronaut Theory

Discussion in 'Discussions' started by Ruigi, Jul 2, 2012.

  1. mining

    mining Member

    Well, there's nothing wrong with having a hypothesis and putting it out there. He has evidence (albeit scanty) and it does explain some things nicely. Occam's razor doesn't necessarily play nice with it, but its a cool little hypothesis that hasn't been blatantly disproved. It incites thought, and that in itself makes it worthy of appearing on the discovery channel or whatever.

    Slightly relevant: [​IMG]
     
  2. Mythbusters (given that they actually test things with experiments) is an entirely different animal than this Ancient Alien shyster.

    Regardless, those channels are clearly allowed to air entertainment programming. That said, pseudo-science (or bullshit presented in a scientific cloak) holds back the progress of humanity.
     
  3. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Snake Oil was not mentioned one time in that hour and a half program from the Abject Conjecture Channel. The Aliens must have warned them not to give away all the details of their master plan. :p
     
  4. Loswaith

    Loswaith Member

    I find it amusing that scientists cant correlate simple factors. Like the wooden/bird plane bit, modern flight was discovered by watching brids and to some extent emulating them and extrapolated from there. So why isnt it considered that achcient egyptions may have studdied the same thing, but lack the technology to actually make anything different than simply models or toys that could fly when thrown or propelled (ala paper planes or elastic gliders).

    Their explination is it must be anchient planes/ flying machines, for which we have never discovered any remains of :rolleyes:.

    They also seem to have the notion particularly with the stone work that people wouldn't bother because it takes too long "wasting ones life", though efficiency (as in effort and time used for a desired result) is a fairly modern concept.
     
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  5. jhffmn

    jhffmn Member

    Ehh, people believe stupid things. We are simply not logical animals. I'm a firm believer that human nature is fairly static. We are still genetically the same barbarians we were 5k years ago.
     
  6. mining

    mining Member

    Just because its not mainstream science doesn't mean we should shun it. It might have minimal evidence, but there's no reason to say "people should not know about this". Homeopathy is, as far as we know, total crap - but the placebo affect is a very real thing which is exhibited by homeopathic medicine. They (homeopathy and AA) are elephants in the room - they have minimal evidence backing them up, but not permitting active discussion of and discussion around the two hypotheses - especially when there is entertainment value in doing so - seems backwards and counter to the expectations of progress.

    If people who say wrong things never said anything, we'd never have progressed.
     
  7. o_____O

    AA had its day. Some proponents made a presentation at the metaphorical "Science Forum." They got laughed out of the place because it is nonsense. At this point, barring some new "evidence" its proponents are on par with advocates for the Creation Museum. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum)

    Anyway, who is preventing active discussion? You are discussing it right now. I said the presentation method pissed me off because it enabled stupid people to be stupider. It wasn't evenhanded OR clearly marked as fantasy. And thus idiots call the government about Mermaid population levels.
     
  8. Syphonix

    Syphonix Member

    This show is clearly trying to push square pegs into round holes. Plus, that hair. Holy hell.

    That being said, however, it's important to keep an open mind about all things, even aliens. The shear size and age of the universe make the odds staggeringly in favor of life existing outside of our own planet, and well before our own time. Now, I'm not saying it was aliens that basically wrote our history, but I am saying it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. The provided theory and evidence appears to be as stable as Lindsay Lohan on a cocaine submarine, but it is equally dangerous to assume something cannot possibly have happened because of how absolutely crazy it sounds.

    But seriously, that hair.
     
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  9. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    The problem with it has nothing to do with how crazy it 'sounds'. It has to do with how science works. You start with the evidence, you come up with a theory and then you test it. If it does not hold up to close scrutiny, then you find something more likely and test that.

    So lets take two theories:
    A. Alien astronauts came to earth and built the Empire State Building
    B. People built the Empire State Building.

    The craziness of the first theory has nothing to do with how it sounds. It has to do with the fact that the preponderance of evidence says that the architects, the construction people, the people driving the trucks that cleared the area, the people who ran the steel mills that created the beams to build the structure, and so on -- were all human.

    Is it there a remote possibility that at least some of those 'people' where not actually human? Of course. We don't have DNA evidence to say otherwise.

    But let me just put it out there that if you reject the simpler explanation --- that human beings built the Empire State Building, then you are a crackpot, simply by virtue of the fact that the preponderance of evidence shows that humans indeed built the structure, and there is absolutely no evidence to the contrary.

    Now how is that any different from what these nuts are saying? What makes them rational while someone who claims that NYCs most famous landmark is alien-built is not?

    Now if they had actual evidence that supports their theory, then it would actually be a theory. But what they claim can't doesn't even have enough backing it to be considered a theory, much less a conjecture. In science, when you discover that you made a mistake, you make corrections, or you abandon your theory. These guys rely on their mistakes to support their case.
     
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  10. banjo2E

    banjo2E Member

    There's entire Buddhist monasteries based around the idea that each person contributes just a little bit, every day, to one of the statues next to their house.

    You end up with either one really freaking huge half-done statue, or thousands of little bitty ones.
     
  11. mining

    mining Member

    To be fair, we have solid evidence that ESB was built by humans. To say otherwise is madness. In contrast, anything about 1000+ years ago? [censored] all. History is very much not a science, it is the practice of establishing events that can explain the past. Some of it was documented for us, a lot was not.

    Is it a part of the scientific central "this is how shit works"? No. It really shouldn't be.

    Is it something worth thought? Yes.

    All I'm saying, is we live in a world where we don't understand very much, and blatantly saying "such and such is crap" with relatively minimal amounts of evidence - to me it just doesn't ring true.
     
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  12. banjo2E

    banjo2E Member

    Agreed.

    Take the Great Pyramids: There's several people who think that that much stone couldn't possibly have been moved in the timeframe provided in our best guesses of when/how they were built; despite their fame, we really don't know a hell of a lot about the things. The only reason we know they belonged to someone named Khufu was because of some graffiti written in an out-of-the-way part of one of the inner chambers' vaulted ceilings.

    However, at least one viable method for humans to, in fact, move that much stone with the tools available to unaugmented humans in the time period has been documented and tested. So, really, it comes down to "do the pyramids exist because aliens wanted to impress/uplift us puny earthlings, or because a bunch of guys got together and decided to build a huge flurghen pile of rocks just because they could?"
     
  13. Warlock

    Warlock Member

    [​IMG]

    See also: Immanuel Velikovsky. One of the things he believed was that Venus happened to be a comet, which swept past earth, rained down petrol deposits, and THEN became a planet.

    The meat and bones of the matter are; people believe what they want to. They sometimes come up with some really outlandish explanations as to what lead to something happening. Imagine what an Egyptian who ended up in our time would say, if he saw a modern believer in "pyramid power". It might go something like this:

    "THE FUTURE WAS INVADED BY A RACE OF ALIENS!......."

    ".........who seem to have a strange fascination for my country, I believe."

    It took 100,000 folks to build the great pyramid. That also took 20 years worth of time. Modern tech can build the same in less than 1 year. Mankind can do a lot if they just buckle down and haul their rear ends to it. Take it from me, if I spouted some theory that all the wonders of the world and ancient structures were megaprojects made by a vanished race of dwarves, I'd be dumped in a padded cell before you knew it.

    My two zorkmids on the matter.
     
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  14. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    The problem I have is not with people thinking that it's possible that aliens built the pyramids -- the problem I have is with people thinking that it is more likely that they did.

    Imagine us X centuries in the future with a lot more knowledge than we have today, maybe evolved into some kind of post-human beyond what we are now (assuming we survive that long). Travel to another star within a post-human lifetime is possible. How much energy would it take, how much of our solar system have to be strip-mined to gather the resources necessary in order to send even a solitary individual to another star? Might we do it? Yes. Would we build stone pyramids and bury natives underneath those pyramids with their posessions waiting for some kind of afterlife? Doubtful, but still let's put it out there. Would we not leave any technological evidence of our presence -- metal? plastics? Really doubtful.

    Or is it more likely that some superstitious natives decided that they wanted to send their kings into an afterlife with all of the luxuries of their real life because they couldn't envision that death is a real end?

    It's not me who's being close-minded -- by thinking that the more likely explanation is the one we should accept until there is evidence that it's wrong. It's the people who reject that simple explanation in favor of something that is far more exciting and adventurous-sounding who are being close-minded. I in no way reject the possibility that alien civilizations may be out there in the cosmos. But that's a long stretch away from claiming that they actually invented human civilization.
     
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  15. Loswaith

    Loswaith Member

    Thats a good point, though if you have everyone contributing, yet someone controling where or how the others contribute, it is likely you will get a fully done huge statue.
     
  16. banjo2E

    banjo2E Member

    By "huge" I mean "hundreds of feet tall" and by "end up" I mean "centuries later".
     
  17. Warlock

    Warlock Member

    Problem is, it didn't matter if you used stolen goods for a good cause in the day. There was one grisly legend about a revenue officer in the Siamese kingdom misappropriating money to enlarge old statues and build new ones, just because he happened to be..... very religious, let's keep it at that. When the king found out about it, the poor sod got gibbed. I think a statue of him can be found near the big Buddha he helped endow.

    The contribution method, if you ask me, was a brilliant idea, nevertheless. People are still giving their mite, IIRC, to help restore the ancient monuments of Ayutthaya in the same manner. People giving away what they could, in the name of religion. You know that Thai monks are among the best off in terms of temple clergy in that part of SE Asia? the country's so devout everyone makes sizable contributions to the wandering monks in charge of collecting alms, in cash, kind, and food. The food gets pooled together and served up to the monks when it gets collected, I think, for the whole day.
     
  18. banjo2E

    banjo2E Member

    Wait, you mean that nobody cared if you just stole a bunch of money provided that it ended up--

    ...How is this anything other than mildly disproportionate?

    Stealing for religious purposes is still stealing.
     
  19. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    On the other hand, stealing for governmental purposes is equ-

    ->) DAYNAB SMITE (<-

    I'm sorry sir!

     
  20. Aegho

    Aegho Member

    Well, we might be able to send people to other stars.

    It's just very unlikely we'll use any kind of rocket to get there. The old idea of using an ion drive to accellerate to a fraction of the speed of light(say 0.1C), coast for a while, and then decellerate when approaching the destination... would require more fuel than all the matter in the known universe.
     
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