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The mysterious mysteries of the Ancients!
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It does beg the question why the only people that tend to verify this stuff are scientists already involved with verifying this kind of stuff. You don't gain credibility by only working on fringe ideas that your credible peers can not verify.
Surely this must be another numerology-esque situation where if you look hard enough you can find patterns in anything.
Confirmation bias, what a show, confirmation bias, here we go. That's exactly it.
Here, do an experiment- next time you are having a 'bad day', keep track of every appearance of the number 13.
No. And i did not intent to. But it seems i have to.
1) No witness, no matter how credible will stay credible if he/she claims aliens landed in front of him/her. even if this is true. We have witnesses in the ancient past. And the concept of UFOs was entirely unknown to them. How credible can it get? For the record: i have not made such a claim ^^
2) There is no technology leftover... but there are indicies for interferance... i was getting to the cargo cult concept in any case.
3) True but it gets suspicous if people tell the same storys. I got a lot more examples here than i showed you.
1) Absolutely but there has been a progressive evolution of knowledge. Back in the time of Stonhenge people made cave drawings and not astronomic calculations. They had not even mastered writing. Same goes for the stonemasonery of Puma Puncu. Seriously: MELTING diorite? Making it laser accurate? With that level of technology? Thats a big no. If you have another opinion i want an explaination for milimeter-perfect boreholes in diorith and the molten repairs.
2) No. but sites wich require superior knowledge or technology to create wich was not aviable at the time are highly suspicious. Or devices.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
People are smarter than you thought and/or lucky. That's certainly a simpler explanation than aliens from outer space, isn't it?
People are smarter than you thought and/or lucky. That's certainly a simpler explanation than aliens from outer space, isn't it?
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How do you know they couldn't do astronomic calculations? Assuming you even need them, which you probably don't.
Doing stuff slowly and patiently over very long periods of time.
Great.
Do you even have a thesis? What are you claiming? When did they come, what did they do when they came, and when did they leave? To support this, what specific pieces of evidence do you have?
Do you see the questions up there? Those are the questions actual scientists ask. And they do that because those sorts of questions immediately weed out crackpot theories that are unassailable behind their vague, almost meaningless claims.
Take a step back and think. You are scouring the internet for examples of things from the ancient world that confuse or shock us, and using that to make a claim that aliens from space visited. Do you see how there is absolutely no way for us to disprove you? There will ALWAYS be things we don't understand about the past. It's a long fucking time ago and a lot happened. There will ALWAYS be things you can point to and say "curious, huh?"
THAT DOESN'T MEAN ALIENS DID IT
Nor is that how rational inquiry works. That's how crackpot theories work. That's how the fucking timecube guy works. Don't be the timecube guy. Please.
For instances, pseudoarchaeologists usually focus on the Great Pyramids at Giza as "evidence" of alien interaction. In doing so, they usually act as though these pyramids existed in a vacuum, that the pyramids were mysteriously built out of nowhere by people without the capabilities to do so.
But this simply isn't the case. Egyptians had been building monumental tombs for centuries, and the Great Pyramids are simply the culmination and most impressive example of technological achievements which had been advancing, slowly but surely, over a span of centuries, beginning with flat "mastaba" style tombs in very ancient Egypt. Psuedoarchaeologists never point to, for instance, the more deteriorated and eroded pyramid at el-Lahun as evidence for their claims; it would be difficult to claim an advanced alien civilization built such a structure because it's obviously suffered the effects of time much more than the Giza pyramids.
Pseudoarchaeological claims about other sites face similar problems. In short, if the work of ancient people surpasses our expectations, it simply means that ancient people were more advanced than we expected. It does not mean that aliens existed and interacted with these people.
I finally get to make a non-trollish, if perhaps not useful, post in this thread.
Shortly after the Mars and Me blog was started, Scott posted one of the pictures from the rover...HAZCAMs, I think. Anyway, I look at it and clearly see a bunch of bleachers and such maybe 10m from the rover, and think "oh, this is from some test/presentation," and note the caption says that it's one of the initial shots from Mars.
I'm thinking wtf for maybe 10 seconds before I realize that I'm looking at the underside of Spirit's deck, the edge of which was closely aligned with the horizon.
Can't find the picture anymore, but the point is...even skeptics are good at seeing crazy shit sometimes.
People tend not to realize that the ancient night was darker than most people, especially in the developed world, will ever see. You can do some pretty good astronomy when you can see so clearly into space and you don't have much else to do.
This is exactly what people are talking about, you knucklehead. Don't just say "suspicious devices" and then link a picture with the file name of "machine.jpg" and not say anything about where you found the picture, what it purports to be of, where it was found, etc. That could be a widget that fell into a bog 30 years ago for all we know or care.
And don't tell me to go to the site it's linked from, because it's in a foreign language and the front page shows pictures of people on a beach, dead spiders, and run down towns.
edit: Armoured Gorilla, that's the Antikythera mechanism. To be fair to ACSIS, he might think that because it was posted and talked about on page three, he doesn't need to re-identify it.
Why do you think people, even illiterate people, didn't pay attention to this? You don't think it's realistic for a human being to notice the positions of stars or planets like venus at the times of the year most significant to them (the shortest days, longest days, times of best harvest, deepest of drought, times of planting) as a simple side-effect of being a huge part of the observable world?
I think people have been far too dickish to you given that if they actually believe their arguments they should be trying to convince you, not belittle you (sadly your entrance into the no-FTL thread did bias people against you -I was one of the orion drive supporters / participants in that thread.) I'd genuinely appreciate it if you took a hard look at your personal opinions of humans in pre-history and addressed my question above so we all had more of an idea of where you're coming from.
I personally am a big believer in the idea that a lot of people in the past had a pretty good idea of how things around them actually worked as compared to the amount of knowledge we give them credit with today, and so from my point of view it doesn't seem surprising that a small percentage of humans even in pre-history britain would have noticed the patterns present in the sky and world around them and built calendars to that effect. Calendars surely were very important to ancient civilizations that struggled to survive from one year to the next, and it's kind of sensible for calendar systems to predate writing, isn't it?
Really?
You're going to point to an object that was used to make astronomical predictions using a geocentric model as evidence of alien interference? And that only tracked 5 planets? It's a fascinating artifact, and centuries ahead of it's time, but it's certainly not evidence of any outside interference.
I disagree. And besides: A tomb? Pure speculation.
You mean like your "aliens helped design it" theory that you ADMITTED was speculation?
Stonehenge
Antikutheyra Mechanism
Pyramids
Pick one, stick with it. This rolling non-debate is pointless.
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Magic Online - Bertro
The idea that the pyramids were built as tombs to house the bodies of the Pharaohs is not "pure speculation". As I pointed out earlier, Egyptians had been developing monumental tombs to house the bodies of their dead royalty for centuries. Early on, these were flat structures called mastabas. Eventually, as technology advanced, they began placing these mastabas on top of each other in increasingly small sizes, creating what is known as a "step pyramid", which in turn gave rise to the more geometrically and aesthetically pleasing pyramids we see at Giza.
Eventually the pyramid model was abandoned and they began cutting tombs out of rock, which are the sort of tombs we see at the Valley of the Kings much later in Egyptian history.
To some people, that means they couldn't have possibly been human-made, since the motivations of their construction are so alien to us.
But, in the context of an absolute theocratic monarchy, where the people believed that Pharaoh was genuinely a god, the effort makes much more sense. The workmen were literally laboring for the edification of their god. It's not surprising that, in such a context, they were able to build something so impressive.
Rigorous Scholarship
Plus we know the general time of the construction matches up to what happens to be a fairly powerful king who would have been able to make his people dedicate time and energy to building a huge monument to their god-king. People have recovered a few non-stolen valuable items buried right next to the pyramid. There is also the whole necropolis built around the same time next to it. There are also the smaller pyramids near by built in the same way that are known to have been used for the royal family.
And the reason they built tombs instead of palaces is because their religion said that the afterlife was where real life began. They wanted to glorify their leaders after death, not during life.
Basically, the pharaoh drafted Egyptian laborers to work on the pyramid during the agricultural off-season. It reinforced the central authority of the pharaoh and kept the population from getting into trouble when they were sitting around waiting for the Nile to flood, plus the farmers got guaranteed food and work, reinforcing social stability. Not a bad system, when you think about it.
I was just answering questions.
They also built the Valley of Kings. And there you find mummys. But what specific feature makes you belive the pyramids are tombs i wonder? Careful. This question is so obviously retarded that it should be easily answerable. It is not. And thats exactly my point.
Rigorous Scholarship
Not only that, but one can only imagine the impact it would have had on one's own population. Because of the corvee system, just about everyone would either have seen the pyramids or knew someone who had. Who could doubt the supremacy of a leader who had brought such things into being?
http://visopsys.org/andy/photo/img/egypt/1996/ja29-072a.jpg
I'm... not sure what you mean?
How is that strange?
No? I would rather expect inscriptions on a sarcophagus.