Ancient Astronauts?

When I was a kid, I got my hands on "Chariots of the Gods". It amazed me. As did the much more 'reputable' (that's being kind) Zacheria Sitchin books. Daniken's "CotG" was monumental in its day, but it reads almost like an infomercial with sensational exclamations and SUDDEN capitalizations and emphatic italics. Sitchin does much the same, but reads more like a thesis paper, or dissertation.

For a decade or more, one of the things that has bugged me more than just about anything else in this semi-pseudo-science field of study has been the flagrant disregard for other possibilities. For those who don't recognize the two names above, for the last few decades they've been proposing that aliens from another world came to Earth and twiddled around with our ancestors. Even the History Channel and Discovery Channel have fed into the pop hysteria, and produced some 'documentaries' on the subject.

My problem with it boils down to a central issue regarding human ability. Why couldn't our ancestors have done amazing things with our insanely large brains (compared to other species on our planet), ability to use tools, and tendency to trade, wander vast distances, and wage war?

When combined, monument building, out of time objects (oots), myth, and general human creativity, tend to offer many other possibilities than aliens. I feel it short changes the species as a whole to say these things could only happen with alien intervention.

When I get into conversations with people over this subject, (amazingly enough, I'm usually sober) they are usually thinking I am referring to Plato's Atlantis, or something similar. I'm not. Much like how most people think The Wright Brothers were the first aeronautical engineers, they weren't. A hot air balloon preceded them. The more modern version in 1783, and similar devices dating back to the third century AD in China, called Kongming lanterns (though nobody rode them, the engineering principles were the same).

People also are usually unaware of how far late Roman Empire technology had progressed before the Dark Ages. They had factories designed to utilize water power using paddle-wheels to operate bellows to stoke fires for the production of bread and weapons. They had carriages with leather straps that provided suspension systems. They had flamethrowers, and they had rapid fire javelin throwers that in practice were very similar to 19th century Gatling guns.

The Greeks had steam powered temple doors and elaborate stage magic-like entertainment and religious setups.

And the Greeks were borrowing heavily from Egypt at the time in regards to engineering and the like. Considering the wealth that was laid in the tombs of the pharaohs, and that their writings were largely upon papyrus, and their very, very strong religious leaning in their governmental structure, loosing what the Egyptians wrote about these things isn't as surprising as that there's anything left at all given grave robbers and early modern efforts at archaeology.

Frankly, the number one reason "experts" like to give about ancient monolithic structures being improbable for ancient humans to build is how difficult it is for even modern equipment to manipulate the objects. I lay down one little trump card that I think really puts this to shame. Modern man is fucking lazy, fat, and feels like it has better things to do. However, take a person who isn't lazy, has a fanatical devotion to accomplish something, and give him a Divine Mandate to do something when during the season when he isn't laboring in the fields and staying in shape, and give him a task and 'free' food to reward him, and they'll move mountains. Literally.

A lot of mythical figures, I feel, much like Ramses the Great (or Ramses II), who lived to be insanely old for the time, around 90, really existed and just got old. In a time when you were considered old at 30, this would have seemed like living to be over 200 today. Of course legends would be written about this. Legends would be written today if this was verified regarding a person currently living. Though that sort of legend in today's terms would be called a 'biopic'. Over time, their achievements would have grown with succeeding generations and been recorded as magical efforts when all they originally did was demonstrate an above average ability to lead, direct other people to accomplish their goals, and utilize, for their time period, cutting edge science. As the time period would have limited the rapid dispersion of new ideas, those advancements would have died a fast death, only to be stumbled upon decades, centuries or millenia later.

Though the Greeks were dedicated scholars and wrote down copious amounts of material, the likely-hood of Roman, Catholic, and Muslim (c.f. Moors) efforts to capitalize on their texts, and simple errors of transcription, have limited what survived. And that's in relatively recent times.

Imagine if a culture existed thousands of years before that and had managed to achieve a level of astronomy to enable them to travel from continent to continent. Or even something as simple as following a band of kelp forest in the northern Pacific from Asia to the Americas after the last Ice Age. A stepping stone, as they'd eventually want to go home to proclaim their achievements, and would have to figure out a way to get back home against the currents, in the wide open expanse of the lowest density of above sea level land on our planet. Some of this technology could survive in Polynesian navigational techniques.

The only problem with this hypothesis is the lack of direct evidence. However, the lack of evidence is almost expected, and I really don't plan on seeing anything saying anything one way or the other on a revised 'Atlantean' culture traipsing across the world thousands of years ago. I'm just offering another, much more realistic possibility to explain some issues with surviving monolithic structures and similar things that give enough ammunition to allow people like Sitchin and Daniken to continue make money cashing in on people who forget that people and culture really haven't changed all that much in the last several thousand years. Abductions by gods and delving into the underworld became run-ins with angels and entering hell, and abductions by fairies became abductions by aliens from other planets.

We all want something more from life than to live in a world where nothing really makes sense and other people dictate how we interact with this world. But putting ourselves into the hands of frauds and charlatans who tell us that the improbable is the only likely explanation is a disservice to the very probable answer which is that humanity is the most adaptable, intelligent, and ingenious species to ever walk this planet. We could have done these things that seem unlikely through modern eyes. And thus we can, and eventually will, do so much more.