"What are you talking about? The first Captain America won the war, saved the world and uncovered the secret alien-tech which jump-started NASA, right?"
— Nick Fury, The Ultimates
"My fanon theory is that we recovered alien technology from the Roswell crash, which took some time to reverse engineer and led to the explosion of computer technology in the 90's...but this also means that the galaxy is populated by Greys who run UFOs on beige Pentiums with 800x600 displays, mechanical keyboards, trackballs and dial-up modems.
I have not yet decided if they also wear Garfield sweaters."
I have not yet decided if they also wear Garfield sweaters."
"It's impossible to invent anything new. Everything has either already been done or is occuring in reality."Hint
"Not that I got "sick of it", but it causes some thoughts...
Some days ago I watched another episode of Doctor Who — I love this show for long time and along with all the fans I look at what is happening to it with a grief. No, I won't talk about main character becoming a woman, about notorious "tolerance" — that's a topic for a separate talk, but here is what caught me in this episode.
As time traveler should, main hero (now heroine) meets historical persons from time to time. This time it was Ada Lovelace. For those who don't know, that's woman mathematician of XIX century, who made a description of a computing machine based on Charles Babbage project and wrote a program for it — basically, world's first programmer. So in this story, though Doctor "cleans memory" of the people of the past, to whom she opened mysteries of the future, you can read between the lines that the "cleaning" wasn't too scrupulous and the knowledge received at this meet has a direct relation to Ada Lovelace's future achievements.
Well, sci-fi is sci-fi and maybe, we shoudn't dwell on this episode, but there is one "but": such motives have become too frequent. Let's just look at Stargate — the movie and followup TV shows. All achievements of heroes are based on discovering legasy of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization (so-called "Ancients") and contacts with other, just as advanced aliens who still exist. And not long ago sci-fi heroes were creating starships, time machine and everything else on their own! But modern sci-fi writers more and more often make them get technologies from some good aliens.
This makes us think about other pattern. Mythology researchers know two historical types of a cultural hero myth: the older one, where the cultural hero steals various goods from gods, giants or someone else and the later one — when the cultural hero creates all this on his own. This reflects the progress logic: first type is related to hunting-gathering stage (when human only "stole" something from nature), second — with more progressive stage of planting, breeding and handicraft. So it turns out that progress of sci-fi (a peculiar modern analogue of mythology) now goes backwards?
The weirdest and scariest thing is that this really reflects the way of thinking of some of our contemporaries. Once I had a talk with one friend — she argued to me that Sergei Korolev and the rest could send a human into space only after World War II, because only then they got a hand on a work of Third Reich scientists.
I wondered, what was the principial difference between scientists of the fascist Germany and ours, and got an answer: Hitler's Germany researched the legacy of ancient civilizations which got knowledge and technologies directly from aliens... That's it! So, our contemporaries already believe that humans aren't able to create anything on their own? So what's happening to us?"
"Not that I got "sick of it", but it causes some thoughts...
Some days ago I watched another episode of Doctor Who — I love this show for long time and along with all the fans I look at what is happening to it with a grief. No, I won't talk about main character becoming a woman, about notorious "tolerance" — that's a topic for a separate talk, but here is what caught me in this episode.
As time traveler should, main hero (now heroine) meets historical persons from time to time. This time it was Ada Lovelace. For those who don't know, that's woman mathematician of XIX century, who made a description of a computing machine based on Charles Babbage project and wrote a program for it — basically, world's first programmer. So in this story, though Doctor "cleans memory" of the people of the past, to whom she opened mysteries of the future, you can read between the lines that the "cleaning" wasn't too scrupulous and the knowledge received at this meet has a direct relation to Ada Lovelace's future achievements.
Well, sci-fi is sci-fi and maybe, we shoudn't dwell on this episode, but there is one "but": such motives have become too frequent. Let's just look at Stargate — the movie and followup TV shows. All achievements of heroes are based on discovering legasy of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization (so-called "Ancients") and contacts with other, just as advanced aliens who still exist. And not long ago sci-fi heroes were creating starships, time machine and everything else on their own! But modern sci-fi writers more and more often make them get technologies from some good aliens.
This makes us think about other pattern. Mythology researchers know two historical types of a cultural hero myth: the older one, where the cultural hero steals various goods from gods, giants or someone else and the later one — when the cultural hero creates all this on his own. This reflects the progress logic: first type is related to hunting-gathering stage (when human only "stole" something from nature), second — with more progressive stage of planting, breeding and handicraft. So it turns out that progress of sci-fi (a peculiar modern analogue of mythology) now goes backwards?
The weirdest and scariest thing is that this really reflects the way of thinking of some of our contemporaries. Once I had a talk with one friend — she argued to me that Sergei Korolev and the rest could send a human into space only after World War II, because only then they got a hand on a work of Third Reich scientists.
I wondered, what was the principial difference between scientists of the fascist Germany and ours, and got an answer: Hitler's Germany researched the legacy of ancient civilizations which got knowledge and technologies directly from aliens... That's it! So, our contemporaries already believe that humans aren't able to create anything on their own? So what's happening to us?"
—A translation of a post
from Russian collective anonymous blog Zadolba.li
from Russian collective anonymous blog Zadolba.liJames Edwards: What branch of the government do we report to?
Agent Kay: None, they ask too many questions.
Edwards: So who pays for all this?
Kay: We hold patents on a few gadgets we confiscated from the visitors. Velcro, microwave ovens, liposuction. (holds up a tiny disc) This is a fascinating little gadget. It'll replace CDs soon. Guess I'll have to buy The White Album again.
