duga

Yeah...why not? Believing aliens have visited the planet and believing they have a direct connection with the development of our species are two different things.

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Confusion will be my epitaph...

Dom

Oh yes, fair point. I see what you meant now.

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P A N

i would just like to interject with the idea that, yes, it's nice to come onto this forum and speculate on such topics as this with music lovers, but if one is actually going to have an opinion, they should do their research. AND, if it interests one enough to do that research, it should occur to said one that it might actually mean something.

it's been said here already that when imagining the goings-on of a species far more advanced than we are, the line between possible and impossible becomes quite blurred. in my own opinion, the impossible, many times, almost becomes probable.

as soon as a civilization creates its first tool, the inherently exponential growth of information and technology begins. it's also been said that we are a young solar system and that the last hundred years has proved humanity a formidable presence in the realm of information gatherers and technology builders... which is indicative of exponential growth when juxtaposed with the rest of what we know as human history. we just keep going faster. and anybody reading this knows just as well as i do that man alive will not allow that learning curve to stop. we've learned to build things to learn for us.

100 years ago, we didn't have things to learn for us. now, we've been to the moon. we have thousands of satellites orbiting our own planet and others in our solar system. we can take close-up pictures of the f*cking sun. mag-lev trains. the large hadron collider. solar panels. he even have the technology to drill giant holes in the ocean floor and create an oil leak which affect the world for a very long time to come.

so, imagine 100 years from now, being a part of the mass that never halted in its lust for information. hard, but perhaps possible to imagine.



how about 1000 years? your brain would just make stuff up.





100,000 years?

completely and utterly unimaginable.


so, being that our solar system is young, and the universe being so damn pretty big, 100,000 years is nothing. and if it so happens that there are species other than us, there's more than one, and you can probably bet some of them know every corner of the universe.

why?

because we would if we could.

EDIT: another answer to the why, is given that the nature of information's growth is exponential, it's almost impossible for the bearers of information to NOT become all-knowing.

noise

the lack of evidence against the existence of something by no means constitutes evidence for it. but the reverse is also true. i'm not saying interstellar travel cannot exist, i'm simply saying that because our current understanding of the universe makes its existence extremely improbable, it is prudent not to use it as the foundation for our interpretations of the past (which, after all, is the topic at hand).

besides, the whole idea operates on a fallacious assumption that ancient art should always be interpreted literally, that 'what you see is what you get'.

if this is true, then we have no choice but to assume that crocodiles and hippos roamed the American Southwest around 5,000 years ago:

Frolicking Animals on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

or wait - maybe those are aliens too!

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Guybrush

Well, yes - if you accept that there will be no constraints on what science can do, then your assumption should be valid. If you believe there are limits to what can be achieved, for example faster than light travel, then you have a constraint. If you believe creating a wormholes is practically impossible because it requires just about all the energy in the known universe to create one, then you have another constraint. If you take a picture of a quasar, that picture can show a galaxy which is actually billions of years old. You can almost see the start of our universe up there, that's how relatively slow information travels when distances becomes enormous - yet another constraint.

Based on your assumption, it sounds like we should've been visited by a whole bunch of extraterrestrial species already, but where are they? If we visited a different planet that had primitive intelligent life on it and a wealth of other organisms and resources, do you think we would've just left? I don't think so, I think we would've tried to use those resources for ourselves or, from a more positive perspective, at least nurture those resources. If these aliens visited planet earth, they left no proof behind that we've found like f.ex alien technology. They are not trying to stop us destroying our oasis in space either.

If you say we must have been visited by aliens, you should also come up with some answers to such questions.

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Dom

Ancient art is just one type of evidence proposed and is, in my opinion, the weakest case for it.

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Guybrush

To me, crop circles seem pretty pathetic. We already know very well that people make them and are devilishly clever and good at doing so. Over the years, people have come forward as the creators behind many of the most celebrated and most fantastic crop circles. Circles that UFO believers claimed had to be made with alien technology because nothing man had created was able to do the job was done with careful planning, planks and lengths of rope. Yet still, some people desperately want to believe that aliens also drop by and make these. These believers are in a dilemma trying to figure out which circles are real and which ones are made to play with their minds ..

To me, it just seems so depressingly stupid.

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Neapolitan

I watched this 5 part series on the History Channel called Ancient Astronauts. Ancient Aliens — History.com TV Episodes, Schedule, & Video I was taking ntes and was about to make a thread on it when I saw Dom started one already.

What I liked about it was that it was like a crash course on ancient civilizations. I wasn't fimiliar with a few of the archeoligical sites and historical events mentioned, which made it interesting for me to watch. I would highly recommend watching it if you haven't already. I would divide the material they present as either fact or speculation. Mostly they present real archeological sites, real historical events but then they interpret it to fit their theory of Ancient Aliens, which is nothing but speculation. Some where credible historians and some were conspiracy theorist but of the latter the worst was Giorgio Tsoukalos. He was incredibly annoying, like if he was to comment on this picture he would insist they were aliens in space suites, instead of thinking of something more obvious like the picture depicts a person wearing a headdress or mask.

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noise

yes, that's the problem with working backwards. if you choose your interpretation before looking at the evidence, naturally the evidence will fit. but it really doesn't leave much room for lateral movement...

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Dom

Yeah I saw a similar program before deciding to make this thread. It focuesed a lot on how precise all the anicient monuments were, for example how the Great Pyramid has an average error of about 2mm and is directly aligned with the Summer and Winter solstice (or something to do with Summer and Winter anyway).

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