Do you believe in paleocontact?

Quote:

Some writers have proposed that intelligent extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth in antiquity or prehistory and made contact with humans. Such visitors are called ancient astronauts or ancient aliens. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of human cultures, technologies and religions. A common variant of the idea is that deities from most, if not all, religions are actually extraterrestrials, and their technologies were taken as evidence of their divine status

No. It made a good TV show but it's not a good theory.

Why not?

Occam's razor. The construction of the pyramids, the sudden development of settled civilisation around 10,000 years ago and the development of organised religion at around the same time can all be easily explained without the extra-terrestrial hypothesis, which if true we would expect to find better evidence for.

Whitten wrote:

Occam's razor. The construction of the pyramids, the sudden development of settled civilisation around 10,000 years ago and the development of organised religion at around the same time can all be easily explained without the extra-terrestrial hypothesis, which if true we would expect to find better evidence for.

This.

Voted no purely on the shoddiness of most "ancient alien" theorists' work. In fact I've never read anything that was even remotely convincing. Interesting but not convincing.

No, just no.

No, I do not think that there is credible reason to suppose that extraterrestrial beings created human civilizations. In fact, some of those whom do believe this way are also neo-nazis. http://www.enotes.com/topic/Nordic_aliens It's as if they find it incredible that non-white peoples could ever accomplish any technological acheivement on their own. Now, I'm not claiming that all whom believe this way are racist, but it sure seems suspiciously suggestive of it to me.

It looks like a bunch of garbage. It is one piece of evidence of my theory that aliens are the new gods.

Maybe but to justify it with loose evidence presented as fact is like saying you have a doctorate in homeopathic medicine.

Comrade_Canuck wrote:

Maybe but to justify it with loose evidence presented as fact is like saying you have a doctorate in homeopathic medicine.

That made absolutely no sense.

It does make more sense than claims about alien contact in modern times, simply for reasons of probability.

The odds of two intelligent species making contact within each other's lifetimes are vanishingly small.

Why? That makes unjustified assumptions about the lifespan of an intelligent species. Why do you assume it is limited in the first place?

One should not argue with odds or chances in a sphere of infinate probability. No matter what the event of two civilizations intersecting each other at any point of time will always be at least once. Logically it would be far more wise to assume it might or has happened rather than hasn't or will not happen.

Whitten wrote:

Why? That makes unjustified assumptions about the lifespan of an intelligent species. Why do you assume it is limited in the first place?

Because humans have only been on this planet for what? 2 million years or something? Out of the planets age of some 4.5 billion years.

Even IF an intelligent species met all the conditions that permit them to travel over vast distances, the odds of this occuring in our extremely tiny span of time here are nearly zero.

It only gets worse if you consider that for them to have even detected us here, you have to take into account that we've only transmitted recognizable signals for a very short segment of our already brief existence.

Nearly zero in the concept of the universe is a very high number

Comrade_Canuck wrote:

Nearly zero in the concept of the universe is a very high number

Certainly. Nothing is impossible when you consider the sheer scope.

[/quote]Certainly. Nothing is impossible when you consider the sheer scope.[/quote]

Well, some things actually are impossible, and this idea is one of those impossibilities, the reasons being too numerous to list here. Any alien that did (somehow) make it to Earth would, first of all, be so completely different from terrestrial life that it is highly unlikely that it would even be able to leave its spacecraft once it got here. Having evolved under conditions unlike anything on Earth, the alien in question would be more different from us than we are from tomatoes, and would therefore have had to have brought the ability to terraform the planet with him/her/it, and terraforming takes time; a LOT of time. Centuries, in fact, so the aliens would have to be extremely (by our standards) long-lived, and unbelievably patient.

Then of course there is the not-so-small issue of the impossibility of actually travelling at light-speed (due to the reasons outlined by Einstein), which is what one would need to do to be able to make it from even the nearest star from Earth (Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years) within any reasonable (to us) time-frame.

Then there would have to be a strong motive to travel, consideration of the cost in time, energy and effort, knowing what conditions would be like on Earth before departure
(i.e. hostile, benign, conducive...) in order to not squander the aforementioned time, energy and effort...

I could go on (and on, and on, and on...)