I’m watching a History Channel show about alien visitors to ancient civilizations.
For the record, I find it staggeringly arrogant to think in an area as vast as the universe, the little rock we live on is the only one IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE with advanced forms of life dwelling upon it and equally arrogant to believe if such forms of life do exist somewhere, they couldn’t possibly be more advanced than humans and have developed technology that’s still impossible in our minds. I’m open to the possibility that our little rock may have been visited by such extraterrestrial beings at some point.
HOWEVER, watching shows like this makes me sympathetic toward those I generally think of as being arrogant and narrow-minded, who auto-reject possibilities that don’t coincide with their belief set, because these shows inevitably are platforms for complete crackpots.
“This little bronze sculpture has a cockpit and a fuselage and wings and an upright tail fin, EXACTLY LIKE a modern aircraft, which CONCLUSIVELY PROVES THERE WERE ALIENS in ancient India!”
Dude, no more (and probably considerably less) than it conclusively proves some sculptor with a lousy concept of avian anatomy made a bad rendition of a bird. Hell, maybe he really stunk and it’s supposed to be a shark. I don’t know, and neither do you—unless you have a time machine (no doubt given to you by the aliens who’ve been anally probing you at regular intervals since childhood) and went back in time (with an ancient language translator also fronted by the aliens), found the dude who made it, and asked him what he was trying to make. (Nicely, of course, so as not to damage his fragile artist’s ego with the news that nobody recognizes whatever “it” is.)
(For that matter, why does everybody assume every artifact found was created by a master craftsman? Yeah, sure, a palace or a king’s tomb, it’s safe to assume only the best people were allowed to work on it. But when they unearth a pocket full of random sculpture and pottery, why couldn’t that be the reject dump from an ancient art class? I imagine there’d be far more junk than master craftspieces in use in daily life, so when it gets buried and excavated later, most of the items discovered are going to be the ancient equivalent of Pier One crap.)
That being said, the architecture of the ruins they’re showing is incredible, and I think it would be really interesting for someone to try to recreate that kind of stonework to see if it’s possible to do it even with modern technology at their disposal. I don’t suppose anybody would invest the time, money, and labor just to satisfy my curiosity, though.
