Weirdly racist cloud.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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When I was younger I loved Erich von Dänikens Ancient Astronauts stuff, later I realized it's stupid racist drivel.
That is one of the things I'm uneasy about with shows like Stargate, despite how much I enjoy them.
Instead of just discovering the aliens on other worlds, or arriving in the present time, somehow they were here all along. Instead of humans creating and advancing civilization on their own, they were at best guided by outside influences with vast resources and technology advanced beyond what we even have today.
It also means basing your sciencey story on blatant lies.
I dislike it more when it's a part of time travel stories, where you basically have your main characters go back to take personal credit for something that real people actually did.
Don't worry!
Stargates aren't real, they can't hurt you.
Ancient Europe = basically mud huts = no ancient aliens
Rest of the ancient world = ancient engineering marvels = ancient aliens
What's the issue?
Yea, people just apply racism to everything instead of thinking about it for a second.
I never thought about it like this but it's so right 😭😭
Ok but why do people think the ancient aliens thing is racist or is demeaning? There are lots of episodes of the show that talk about Europe so it's not just "brown people couldn't build that so it must be aliens!" It's not even an offensive show. It's an interesting thing to think about. 99% of the episodes probably have no chance of being the truth, but is it really inconceivable that aliens visited earth? Or that they influenced our culture?
I think it's more the original theory than the show itself. They just perpetuate it. As far as I remember, the original alien theories directly descended from conspiracy theories that Germanic people must have actually built wonders of 'primitive' people. They just subbed aliens for Germanic people.
As for alien contact, why would a super advanced civilization interact at all? We'd be a similar cognitive level as ants comparatively. They'd just strip mine the planet or drain the whole oceans or whatever they wanted. Why would their contact be so tiny and limited to only things that are better explaned by similar cultural developments wanting monumental structures to demonstrate power that can be easily built.
but is it really inconceivable that aliens visited earth? Or that they influenced our culture?
Actually. yes.
Okay, so lets take this one thing at a time.
the solar system is actually quite boring. It's pretty typical. there's no surprising elements. there's no materials that we haven't detected in several other worlds and such. as far as we know, it's a pretty bog standard star, with a pretty bog standard system. the ONLY thing worthing noting- that makes this system unique is us. More specifically. Life. it has life. As far as we know, it's totally unique. (we don't know all that far.)
This means, we're the only reason any society would come here. it's easy to assume there are resources much closer to home, much more easily harvested and exploited.
now, establishing that, lets look at how they'd know we'd exist:
- the JWST is our most sensitive space borne telescope. it's capable of identifying atmospheric compounds of exoplanets. some of those compounds, we associate heavily with the presence of life; it's reasonable to assume any species capable of coming here would have such technology. It's detected such things on several worlds over the past year that it's been active; and has been answering questions and opening new ones for that year.
It's therefore possible that some hypothetical society could identify our presence from such a similar telescope. This gives the outer bound of detection of life at something like four million years. Lots of stars exist in that bubble. Lots. I mean, I don't know that we actually have a count on how many. JWST is finding more all the time
This assumes they're looking at it. maybe those 'earliest life' compounds are... how shall we say super common. Maybe they'r emore interested in say industrial pollutants? The industrial revolution started in 1760- about 250 years ago. Lets say those pollutants weren't really concentrated enough to be highly obvious, until 50 years after the start. that would mean 200 lightyears is the minimum distance to know that humans were altering the enviroment, specifically.
- alternatively, they could have detected our radio transmissions. We're a noisy species. the Arecebo message was sent to messier 13 in '74- about 50 years ago. it wasn't a serious attempt to contact anyone, but it's a powerful signal that could attract attention. We've been broadcasting into space for about a hundred years. here's a picture of just how small 200LY's is,
but that article fails to talk about detectability. Most signals we transmit would be indistinguisable from background radiation. probably the oldest signals that would reliably be detectable are military radar signals intended for detection of ballistic missiles.- creating a bubble with a 60ly radius. 40 for a steady stream of soaps and reality tv.
lets be honest hear. aliens watching Days of Our Lives Reruns probably get a bad impression. And lets not talk about all the, uh, premium, channels.
ALL THAT to say, it's extremely unlikely they actually know we're here.
Now, we need to consider would they come here. Hypothetically, they could be curious about us. Hypothetically, they want to know how Land Before Time Saga ends. (hey, the last one was in 2016. unless they're at proxima centauri, no chance they've seen it yet!)
it would be a serious undertaking to even have the ability to get here in a reasonable time frame... it would take a shit load of energy. Like, on the order of global annual energy consumption. And that's just for the payload. Forget about the size and mass of the fuel tanks necessary- and just to get up to speed. This doesn't include the whole 'slowing down so we can moon them' thing.
basically... any species capable of getting here, and motivated by curiosity about us enough to get here, is probably going to abstain simply because they have the ability to realize we're psychotic fucks who nuked ourselves. multiple times. It's extremely unlikely that any society capable of getting here won't have enough social control in place to prevent idiots from joyriding and mooning the psychotic primitive apes. because if you think nuking people is bad, we won't even need nukes. Just take their giant rocket and point it at the planet- no need to even slow down. (actually, it works better if you don't!)
Do I believe aliens Exist? I believe it's probable.
Do I believe they've come here- ever? Highly unlikely.
Ignore that other person. This was well written and interesting, I read it all the way through.
I also don‘t believe aliens already were on earth, however your entire argument is based on human physics and resources. It‘s entirely possible that aliens could come here, because maybe they’ve found a way to have basically unlimited energy (a human theory for example is a Dyson sphere or maybe something else). Just think about what technological progress we made in the last 100 years, now think about maybe thousands of years or more.
Physics are universal. The physical laws that we see would remain true for them
Could our understanding be a little off? Almost certainly, could it be incomplete? Absolutely.
It is, however, extremely unlikely that we’re wrong about relativity being a thing, and that we’re wrong about this universe being causal. Meaning that there is absolutely no chance for true FTL.
So if aliens exist… where are they? We’d be able to hear them talking- we probably wouldn’t understand, but we’d hear and see their signals.
I didn‘t say we are completely wrong, I am just saying that an alien civilization is maybe much more advanced than we are and is doing things that for us currently seem impossible. Just a few decades ago, what we are currently doing (internet/smartphone) also seemed impossible.
And there are theories about how aliens could‘ve visited earth, for example one is through a worm hole. Albert Einstein believed that worm holes exist and so far he has been right with pretty much every theory.
what we are currently doing (internet/smartphone) also seemed impossible.
Not really. Which is why TNG/ds9/voyager had “iPads” in the show, why TOS had cell phones (that worked from space!).
Is it marvelous to the average person? Sure. But I doubt very much the average person today even understands how it works. I certainly wouldn’t be able to explain a semiconductor.
The web was an interesting surprise… but it has never been without the dreamers and nerds who made it happen.
Your giving past humanity far too little credit- they were, throughout history, at least as intelligent as we are. If you look at the greats- Archimedes, or Pythagoras, or Capinuricas or Newton- none of their scientific discoveries were completely invalidated. Their observations refined, sure, but we still use Archimedes equations for buoyancy, pythagorean theorem is still taught in math; and such like.
What’s come before is what enables us to expand and refine our understanding of now. What we learn now is what enables the future.
And most of all, it’s all on the same rule set, so there’s not going to be anything suddenly new.
Man then don‘t think about the last decades, but 300 years ago. This is splitting hairs. A lot of things we do every day nowadays, seemed impossible in the past (whether it be 60 or 300 years).
Edit: Another example would weapons. Just show a medieval knight a B-2 stealth bomber. Also seemed impossible back in the day.
Just to clarify, you realize that archimedes designed mirrors that did take down Roman warships in the siege, and it was discounted because idiots until recently “couldn’t imagine it”.
And that is entirely my point: you are acting like their ability to understand is less because they’re from a different time.
Sure such an individual would need a primer, but their capacity to understand is still there. They’re at least as smart as we are today; which just have a leg up based entirely on their work.
If you went to newton and explained a rocket (that uses Newtonian physics to him,) he would be like “that’s cool”;
If you went to DaVinci and explained that his work in automation (the automaton knight,) would one day lead to the Boston dynamics robot, he might be scared of it, but he’d believe it.
If you went to Charles Babbage and explained that his Difference engine and analytical engine would one day lead to the modern internet; he might be disappointed with what we’ve done with it; it he would recognize it’s all just math, that his machine was as capable even if it would take it longer.
Like us, there was a broad range in individual capacity. And there will always be. But, all of this is quite besides the point: there are things that we can definitively say don’t exist. In order to build something that truly is FTL; we would have to literally rewrite and forget our modern understanding of physics.
There are ways around it- traversing a wormhole would technically not be. There is no handwavium that would allow aliens to get here by a process we cannot understand or guess at. Without a primer, it might take us a while poking and prodding, it we have the capacity to understand it.
Which is the single best argument for why aliens have not visited. Because there’s a non-zero chance that we’d turn into genocidal xenophobes and use their technology to blow up entire planets.
Hell, we have politicians that are scared of human immigrants; wanting to send the army in to stop refugees.
My point is that an alien civilization maybe has thousands of years (or more) of technological advantage to us. They‘d have things, we currently couldn‘t assemble. If we had the technology and could study it, sure, that‘s different. And again, we already have theories how intergalactic space travel could work (e.g. worm holes), so there is definitely a possibility that an advanced civilization already did this. I don‘t think they visited earth though, but still.
Edit: Btw, also maybe an alien civilizations has completely different or new resources, we haven‘t even discovered yet.