Did aliens really visit us in the past?

No one ever thinks the Great Wall is built by aliens. It's pretty amazing what humans could build if you're willing to throw enough manpower at it.

@69: In the setting I'm writing, when the Illuminati was covering up the existence of the paranormal, they stores most of such phenomena inside Florida. It soon became a Flock of Wolves.

I had a urban fantasy series with The Illuminati as behind the cover up but I admitted it only worked because in my universe, humanity was incredibly stupid.

You need an enormous handwave like that ala the Dresden files.

It's a lot harder to do when you have an unbroken literary tradition between the builders and the modern day. There's a reason why most of these occurs where the building cultures were either pre-literate (Stonehenge for example) or the writing system of the builders has been abandoned or supplanted by another one and the knowledge of how to read the previous system lost for a period (the Egyptian pyramids with hieroglyphs being supplanted by demotic scripts then the Greek alphabet and the Arabic script to name one).

If they thought for a moment they could get away with that alien bullshit in China that they pulled in Egypt, they would have done it in a heartbeat. They wouldn't have missed the chance to combine Fu Manchu Yellow Peril propaganda with aliens to make Chinese people seem even more inhuman.

On the question of whether galactic civilizations, and thus aliens flitting around stealing cattle, probing people's anuses, and building ancient wonders, are possible, I recently watched this video of a presentation by Matt O'Dowd, an astrophysicist who studies gravitational lensing and hosts the PBS Space Time channel on You Tube. (Note that this is from 2016, so our knowledge has undoubtedly increased since.)

Some of the highlights:

• It has been conservatively estimated, based on our current sampling of exoplanets, that our galaxy hosts around 11 billion Earth-like planets: planets similar in mass and composition to our own in the Goldilocks zone of a Sun-like star, and thus potentially suitable for life of the sort that we are familiar with.
• Based on various (admittedly subjective) standards, the maximum size of a "civilization" — a group of inhabited planets sharing a cultural paradigm, with some form of governance and social cohesion — is a radius of around 100 light-years. This assumes that FTL travel and FTL communications are impossible in our universe. Note that this means that the fringes of such a civilization would be 100 years behind the center in terms of information and 200 years in communication latency — assuming human-like life cycles, ten generations would elapse between sending a message and getting a response.
• The time for a civilization bound by the speed of light to spread across such a region can be measured in thousands of years, or a million or so if they end up populating the entire galaxy and forget about maintaining a cohesive society. As our galaxy is many billions of years old, there is a lot of time for this to have happened at least once.
• If our galaxy were filled with such civilizations, we would have found evidence by now, and not in the form of night-time visitations by flying saucers.

There's still room for a number of explanations of the apparent barrenness of our galaxy, including the possibility that we are (or rather, will be) one of the first civilizations to be capable of interstellar travel. It's also possible that there's a Great Filter ahead of us that we have yet to discover: a hard barrier against developing any further.

Regardless, there is absolutely zero data to support the Ancient Astronauts idea.

edited 4th Jun '18 1:33:28 PM by Fighteer

There is a video that has been floating around for a while now where a youtube poster does a rather decent job debunking the ancient aliens. However he falls off the wagon a bit in the very last segment of his 3 hour video. Other than though it is generally a pretty good video. He even highlights how the various civs and our collective ancestors built their monuments. If anything the various ancient peoples were rather very clever in using their limited resources to build on some rather impressive scales.

The video can be found here. It was an interesting watch when I stumbled across it and the guy obviously spent some time and effort on it. He even has a website IIRC somewhere affiliated with this video.

Again keep in mind this is a long video and his presentation is not perfect.

edited 4th Jun '18 4:10:25 PM by TuefelHundenIV

That video is made based on the debunking by Jason Colavito. I strongly recommend his blog, just search the name. He debunks Ancient Aliens episodes by episodes.

edited 5th Jun '18 8:42:19 PM by Blurring

I really don't understand why racists would find the idea of ancients astronauts appealing. After all, It's not as if the aliens are white...

Because it makes non-whites humans look inferior.

If it means they can look down on nonwhite people...it helps that the aliens are not around. And again...trying to apply logic to bigotry? An exercise in futility.

Technically, being a racist doesn't make you a specist. And some groups like the Thule Society actually do believe white people are half-aliens.

Wait. If white people are part aliens and they conquered most of the world, then they are actual alien invaders!!

Oh wait...my great grandfather was white

...now I understand how The Protagonist from The Shadow Over Innsmouth must have feel

edited 6th Jun '18 8:25:25 AM by KazuyaProta

Nuwabians and a few of the Nation of Islam followers follows the same warped logic. The racist alien believers of most stripes general follow the idea that the master race is some sort of hybrid or alien ubermensch while the "inferior" races are the primitive natives evolved or engineered from Earth creatures.

edited 6th Jun '18 8:44:27 AM by carbon-mantis

You don't even really need aliens for that if you follow certain creation myths to their logical extreme... aside from the "gods are really super-advanced aliens" idea, that is.

edited 6th Jun '18 8:45:34 AM by Fighteer

Like I said, trying to make sense of bigotry is a bit futile.

Nobody is Saying that they have a point. We're just saying how they think and having some cheap laughs

It'd be easier to laugh at this if it weren't fueling actual bigotry.

Also, it's funny that you brought up The Shadows over Innsmouth given the rather obvious "race-mixing is bad" message in it. Lovecraft was pretty damn racist.

edited 6th Jun '18 9:42:18 AM by M84

That's the joke

I'm not sure trying to relate to a guy who freaked out about his mixed heritage based on your own mixed heritage is a great idea, even as a joke. Particularly if you don't have a Joking Mode thing going.

It's kind of hard to tell when you're joking or being serious about things, TBH.

edited 6th Jun '18 10:02:07 AM by M84

Wasn't MC of the Shadows Over Innsmouth at the end like "And now I'm gonna return to the sea to be with my deep one brethren and I finally feel happy" with intended horror supposed to be reader's reaction to it considering how deep ones have been portrayed up to that point and mc changing his personality when he was previously horrified by them?

Like, I was surprised to learn end of the book wasn't like "Oh no, I have fish genes, I must now die" considering how racist the subtext of the book is .-. MC actually seems to be rather okay with it

I'm not honestly sure what that says about Lovecraft's racism ._. I mean, from in story point of view you get the horror of mind going through the change, but did Lovecraft mean that its horrible if you accept your mixed heritage?

edited 6th Jun '18 10:22:20 AM by SpookyMask

Don't forget that Lovecraft was also terrified of fish in addition to the idea of marrying outside of your race. I'm pretty sure he intended it as a Downer Ending and that we're supposed to pity the protagonist for falling into madness. Since one would obviously have to be mad to be happy about being part fish.

edited 6th Jun '18 10:24:14 AM by M84

I did use Joking Mode at the beginning of the post. Than and the context make obvious that I'm joking.

The logic was "if white people are aliens, that makes colonization being a IRL Alien Invation, and given that my ancestors were white, that means that I'm an alien too"

Now, if you forgive me, I'm gonna search something new to conquest

Sometimes, I'd imagine a version of the story where the guy is ashamed not for the Deep One genes, but rather of being descended from Rural people.

edited 6th Jun '18 10:41:26 AM by KazuyaProta

TBF, you only used Joking Mode in the first part of the post, the part with the aliens. So you made it clear you weren't really serious about white people being aliens. But you left the third sentence in which you identified with the protagonist of The Shadow over Innsmouth untagged.

When in doubt pothole all of your post to Humor Mode so its all blue