Why the pseudo-religion about ancient aliens?

[Correa Neto]

Then his sources and/or his knowledge have issues. Or maybe he was trying not to create problems with eventual hidden archeology / ancient aliens folks in the group.

Think about this- how many tours at castles include spooky tales?

 

[xterra]

<snip>

So what do I think of sacrifice? Maybe it's based on some previous racial memory of medical practices or dietary practices that got lost in translation somewhere in the proceeding thousands of years after the theoretical collapse of a society. All just speculation on my part, but it makes better sense than some prehistoric alien invasion to me.

Jodie,

Have you read Ryan and Pitman, Noan's Flood: the new scientific discoveries about the event that changed history, New York : Simon & Schuster, 1999?

I am not 100% convinced by their evidence, but I don't think it's woo either.

"Racial memory" usually means some sort of oral transmisson of lore. Whether that lore is based in fact, is a different question.

 

[pakeha]

This theory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

It seems to have been blown out of the water here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/06/020617074814.htm

and here:
http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=532690

For the amusement value of it, read this:
http://creation.com/black-sea-flood-may-evaporate-completely

 

[StankApe]

*waits for the inevitable hand waving*

 

[Correa Neto]

Is there any real need for a catastrophe as a template for myths such as the universal flood? I say no. Consider the following scenario:

[Add thousands of years ago and place of your choice here] some children and a grandpa were inside a tent, sitting by the fire and eating some rabbit. Its pouring outside.
Kid- "Can we go outside hunt rats?"
Granpa- "No. Its raining too much. Wait untill it stops"
Kid- "But granpa, what if it never stops raining?"
Granpa is a good story teller, senses the opportunity and then enters a universal flood myth.

Some myths, some inventions and some rituals may have been developed independently across the ages. No need for "racial memory", previous unknown civilizations, etc.

Want to show your king, chief, whatever, how much you respect him and eventually bribe his favors? Pay the regular tributes but also give him some extra gifts. Good gifts. The better the gift, the better will be the odds of receiving a reward or just not entering in the wrong list. Goats, gold, your daughter. Use the same line of thinking for whatever god you wish. Eventually you'll end up (re)inventing human sacrifice.

 

[Croydon Bob]

Is there any real need for a catastrophe as a template for myths such as the universal flood? I say no. Consider the following scenario:

Yes, but.

Consider that the biblical flood myth originated in what is Iraq today. A massive great flat area with two rivers (Tigris, Euphrates) winding slowly through it. Over the last few thousand years that area has flooded from horizon to horizon on hundreds of occasions. It's certainly not catastrophe on the scale that the believers claim, but it is more than just imagination. It more than explains middle eastern flood myths without the need to resort to biblical nonsense.

 

[erwinl]

An ice age would only be one factor to consider ( climatic change), usually societal collapse is based on multiple causes working together. The fact that there are plenty of deserted ancient civilizations located far away from the coastal areas is testament to that. However, if you have a global infrastructure that can no longer be supported for various reasons how long would an inland city be able to maintain the same standard of living and support it's population if dependent on outside resources? I wouldn't think it would be for very long. If stone was not used for buildings then I would think very little would be left to excavate unless it was something suddenly cataclysmic, like Pompeii, that would preserve the signs that buildings were once there. I have this on my "to read" list, maybe you've already read it:

http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X

Buildings, or places where buildings have been (there have bee a lot of old buildings found, which can only be detected by the discoloration of the ground where the wooden columns have stood) aren't the only things that remain when civilizations disappear.
Every civilization changes the surroundings.
If only because of that kind of rock over there, which should contain iron, lead, tin, whatever and doesn't.
Places where the coal has been depleted, where marble has a discontinuity in the way it is laid out.

It all points to a civilization which has been there, but isn't anymore.

 

[Correa Neto]

Yes, but.

Consider that the biblical flood myth originated in what is Iraq today. A massive great flat area with two rivers (Tigris, Euphrates) winding slowly through it. Over the last few thousand years that area has flooded from horizon to horizon on hundreds of occasions. It's certainly not catastrophe on the scale that the believers claim, but it is more than just imagination. It more than explains middle eastern flood myths without the need to resort to biblical nonsense.

Every now and then we'll hear about cultures all over the world with similar myths and other cultural aspects. Every now and then someone points towards a single source. I am saying it aint necessarily so. Things may have multiple sources, things may be invented multiple times.

In the case you pointed, note there's no need for an unique huge catastrophe like a giant wave creating the black sea or something else. Just floods. Maybe big ones, but nothing exactly unheard or unique. Or a tale built over the sheer extrapolation of seasonal floods. This could have happened countless times at countless places. Some tales might have survived through generations and maybe even later merged. Or interpreted as representing the same event by a biblical literalist, hidden archeology woo, ancient alien woo, etc. thousands of years later.

Myths are a fascinating pain. Just like that quote about the abyss. When you stare at them, they stare back and reflect you.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Not only it can happen lots of times in lots of places, but it actually does happen lots of times in lots of places. E.g., Tiwanaku was also flooded every year, and it's on the other side of the globe than the middle east.

 

[blobru]

I think one reason ancient astronaut theories become pseudo-religions may be that they're, in essence, fusing religious texts and artifacts with science fiction, a much more popular genre: suddenly, people who may have been bored stiff by a text as religion, are fascinated by it as science fiction (or rather, science fiction potentially become science fact, even more exciting!); what's more, the unscientific immaterial gods who were formerly so hard to believe in now seem to have a plausible, material, scientific explanation thanks to the AA hypothesis. Since a core promise of religion has always been special knowledge of God (or gods, super-beings), just replace super-beings with ancient astronauts, and presto! you've got yourself a [pseudo-]religion.

 

[asydhouse]

While I am fully in agreement with all of the OP's disgust with vapid New Age adoption of shallow fantasies (and with the practices of our psychotically-religious ancestors), I think there may be another as yet unmentioned (in this thread) source for the adoption by some modern people of the idea that advanced aliens might have been here in the gloaming of the deep past & left knowledge/hints of knowledge.

Forget a global influence. Pyramids are just the natural shape to build a heap of stone (& in any case, haven't I read somewhere that there are fundamental differences between the S. American pyramids and those of Egypt?). Also forget all-powerful aliens.

What if an alien scout ship crashed on the planet around 10k years ago, stranding the small crew on Earth, with no way to rebuild their wrecked engines/refuel? Before crashing they would have sussed that the Indus valley was the most fertile and likely for an advanced civilisation to begin there, and infiltrated the tribes... they were a new tribe that started passing around ideas, which are still buried in the hindu traditions that developed out of those philosophical ideas which could lead to quantum theory... and our species eventually arriving at the stage where we could reinvent the technology they needed to rebuild their ship and get back off the planet! They have been hiding amongst the Indians ever since, waiting for us to get scientific enough to marshall the resources they need.

I don't know if this idea is widespread, but I suspect that I'm not the only one to think of it.... Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics more or less leads you to that conclusion, and Roger Zelazny wrote a science fiction novel in the early 60s that showed the Hindu pantheon as a bunch of shipwrecked astronauts setting themselves up for a better life among the primitives: Lord of Light.

By this conceit, Gautama Buddha may have been one of the aliens trying to steer us towards a less bloodthirsty/supernatural philosophical outlook that could speed up our development to a properly civilised species.

I don't believe any of this scenario, but I reckon plenty of New Age "hippies" are on a positive-thinking trip looking for the apotheosis of our consciousness, and this sort of beneficent sky-daddy replacement for boring religions with a scientific spirituality is just the ticket they need. Having been in the tumult and chaos of India, having been penniless and real high for several months while I was there, I can easily see how a large subculture believing in a secret of aliens-among-us could be spreading, completely ignoring the von Daniken nonsense, fueled by spaced out western kids frolicking in the psychedelic disneyland that is India to our naive eyes.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, duly noted that you don't believe in that, and kudos for that, but for whoever does, the scenario has a whole bunch of problems. Some of which are those in my OP. Like for example those aliens would be powerful enough to shape religions and guide civilizations, yet utterly powerless to stop atrocities in ancient warfare, or later be utterly unable to even speak against burning widows.

But let's apply some thinking to the rest of the scenario.

For a start if we were talking about an ancient civilization for whom space flight to Earth and back home is trivial, cheap, and available to any inbred hillbilly tourists, then they have no reason to be stranded here. At that point their most rational course of action is to send a distress signal and wait for a rescue. Or even if they don't, some relatives or the travel agency would come look for what happened to that missing group of tourists.

So we're probably talking about a civilization for which space travel is a monumental government-backed effort. Sorta like Columbus on his way to America.

It would also need enough people for that group to survive all these millennia. You need at least some minimal genetic diversity for that, and they won't be biologically compatible with humans. (For interbreeding with humans to work, by definition they'd have to be the same species as the humans. I.e., they would have to be humans. But they ain't, as they ain't even from Earth.)

So we're talking a large expensive ship with some hundreds of aliens as crew.

That crew would include a few medical pesonnel, engineers (if nothing else, for damage control), technicians, maybe even a few scientists, since if you're going to pay that much for a ship, you might as well get more use out of it than just hauling soldiers back and forth. Between all those aliens there is a LOT of advanced science and technology in their heads even just to be able to do their job.

So this ship comes crashing down, hundreds of the crew survive, and again they have a metric buttload of science and technology in their heads. They wouldn't suddenly forget such elementary things as that:

- boiling water kills bacteria

- a ceramic filter is even better at keeping your drinking water bacteria-free

- a lightning rod keeps your house from going up in flames in the next storm

- don't crap near your water supply

- don't chuck corpses in the river that's your water source, if you didn't have enough money for wood to burn them completely

- how to have a good justice system, and that no, trial by ordeal is not it

- how to make a good yoke that doesn't choke a horse, so you can plough more efficiently

- how to smelt iron and for that matter steel, instead of depending on some unstable travel routes for copper and tin to make bronze

- currency

Etc, etc, etc.

Heck, they could even make a crude microscope in a pinch.

Yet we see that nobody told those things to the ancient humans.

 

[asydhouse]

Thanx Hans, that's a pretty good reminder that even trivial (to us) knowledge such as avoiding infections through boiling water (washing hands!), and the million other "little" things that improve quality of life and health etc, would have disseminated the same way our own innovations did, but right back at the dawn of history instead of in very recent times.

Initially as I was reading your post I was thinking, though, that it could be possible that a very different model of space travel could prevail, in which small groups (families?) might be sort of organic von Neuman machine-like diaspora-agents. They might have traveled in really small groups in small machines which sustained them in cold sleep or something. They might be very far from a thriving interstellar culture. Given the size and restraints of space, maybe they can never achieve a conglomerate style of civilisation in space.

But then, this argues against them being so helpless as a result of a crash, because their survival at all times would depend on their having very robust technology and the resources to service it.

I had been thinking that maybe they were stripped of all tech, and simply impressed with philosophical engagement of local leaders/priests, so that they could seed the ideas that they hoped would lead to progress more swiftly than otherwise would be the case.... but it really is a tenuous thread of possibility they would be trying to pull on if they were doing that... truly desperate. They would have been better off just pulling together some minions and building a powerful city-state that could have ploughed ahead developing their own technology.

I think we have enough ammunition with which to hole this idea below the waterline! Assuming a minimal amount of practical ability in the minds of the believers, any degree of logical ability should be possible to lead towards the common sense realisation that there's no real possibility this could have happened.

 

[Correa Neto]

Not to mention its a Star Trek- like plot...

It has one too many assumptions, like the aliens being able to breath our atmosphere, eat our food and care about us. The first two could be somehow solved by tech (if enough of it survives the crash), but the last one... IMHO its far from granted. They could ignore, not interfer or maybe even decide humans are tasty and a good source of protein.
There are also other problems, like gravity (can they do well at 1g?), tools to harvest the required ammount of natural resources, energy sources...

Depending on these variables and others I can't think about, the lives of these aliens could be a hell. Maybe the aliens would even become a protein source for early humans...

 

[Dinwar]

What if...

See, this is where it all falls down for me. Until you have evidence supporting the idea, it's inadmissible to science--"What if"s are fun in bull sessions at bars, and may direct research, but they are not and cannot be conclusions of any sort. And since we're talking about ancient humans, we're talkign archaeology, which is a science.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm not even saying it's unlikely--I'm not saying anything about the probabilities. I'm saying that there's not enough evidence to care about the notion. I know it sounds harsh, and I don't mean it to be, but that's where science stands on such issues.

 

[pakeha]

Since the thread is trembling on the brink of it, why not go ahead and mention Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives series?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus_in_Argos

 

[asydhouse]

See, this is where it all falls down for me. Until you have evidence supporting the idea, it's inadmissible to science--"What if"s are fun in bull sessions at bars, and may direct research, but they are not and cannot be conclusions of any sort. And since we're talking about ancient humans, we're talkign archaeology, which is a science.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm not even saying it's unlikely--I'm not saying anything about the probabilities. I'm saying that there's not enough evidence to care about the notion. I know it sounds harsh, and I don't mean it to be, but that's where science stands on such issues.

Precisely. But this thread isn't really about the plausibility of such a scenario, except as a necessary corollary of the subject of why people are generating a subculture of aliens-as-saviours. The OP is "Why the pseudo-religion about ancient aliens". It's not spreading because it's plausible. It's spreading because it's a perceived way out of the dead-ends so many aspects of our world culture seem to be heading into.

There's a definite undercurrent in western people of "instant gratification".... there was a meme of progress after WW2, and science was the engine and the flag. As a perceived instrument of the Establishment, confused radicals in the 60s began a backlash which was eagerly embraced by the xtians (ironically) who were threatened by their perceptions of the radicalisation of the world, even as the backlash against those radicals by the Establishment outlawed psychedelic drugs and caused the non-real retreat into fantasy trips using crystals out of the ground instead of crystals of chemistry in the form of LSD, and the whole sorry cart has trundled down the road towards the cliff of cultural collapse, as playing out in the USA today most spectacularly in the Tea Party etc.

Despairing young hippies find the sky-daddy aliens an exciting possibility that could free us all... with one leap, we will all be free!

That we need to climb an intricate mountain (the universe) using the crampons and ropes and teamwork of science, and that it will take a while and a lot of effort... that's what we must be ready to provide as the true escape route from the mess we (or they) perceive in world culture today.

That the chaos may be the seedbed for new forms of culture and community, a sign of future hope, is an outlook which would probably be more useful than wishful thinking... but from the midst of the chaos it can be hard to remain hopeful, even if you have picked up the concept that new forms can only arise if old forms make way.

 

[Dinwar]

It's not spreading because it's plausible.

Yeah, I get that--I'm just saying that it's no different than any other magical thinking, except in a few details. It's "We don't know, therefore I'm right".

There's a definite undercurrent in western people of "instant gratification".... there was a meme of progress after WW2, and science was the engine and the flag. As a perceived instrument of the Establishment, confused radicals in the 60s began a backlash which was eagerly embraced by the xtians (ironically) who were threatened by their perceptions of the radicalisation of the world, even as the backlash against those radicals by the Establishment outlawed psychedelic drugs and caused the non-real retreat into fantasy trips using crystals out of the ground instead of crystals of chemistry in the form of LSD, and the whole sorry cart has trundled down the road towards the cliff of cultural collapse, as playing out in the USA today most spectacularly in the Tea Party etc.

That's a very nice, neat, tidy narrative. Unfortunately, I don't think reality works that way. Particularly since your political biases are showing pretty strongly.

 

[asydhouse]

Yeah, I get that--I'm just saying that it's no different than any other magical thinking, except in a few details. It's "We don't know, therefore I'm right".

That's a very nice, neat, tidy narrative. Unfortunately, I don't think reality works that way. Particularly since your political biases are showing pretty strongly.

Oh agreed, it's much messier than that... which is why all CT stories are doomed to impossibility from the start...

And sure I've been "living on the front line" some of the time which makes my narrative wring true (pun intended ) for me... and it's a delta land, so there's lots of other through rivulets just as valid as mine... but I don't think my take is invalidated by that multiplicity of variations.

 

[Soapy Sam]

We know the northern hemisphere experienced some very large (and very rapid) flood events, post Devensian (and post Younger Dryas). There's no doubt people witnessed these. I don't think we have to look much further for the source of global flood legends. Then there's cultural copying, where Utnapishtim becomes Noah, or whoever. Everybody loves a good yarn and everybody lies that it actually happened to me and nobody believes them...

Not sure why anyone would conflate end glacial floods with aliens though.

I'd say the main contributor to a pseudo religion about ancient aliens is the "Stargate" TV series.

As for "losing" high tech civilisations, I'm with Dinwar that this would be damnably hard if it was recent enough to have involved people - even the sort of people that occupied Britain during the Cromerian (nearly 1 million BP).
You can't hide oil wells or mines.

Of course, probably the aliens did all their mining on the Moon and processed it all in orbit, as they would, and being eco friendly they took all their waste home with them.