Ancient Aliens

[janestarz]

The History Channel has aired this series since 2010, and when I mentioned to a colleague how I enjoyed Ben Vermeulen's "In den Beginne..." he gave me the first season on DVD.

Ancient Aliens sounds like a really interesting concept, but the way the series is just bludgeoning the viewer with piece after piece of evidence is just irking me. I don't

Comments

[nathreee]

3. the manna machine
The bible is not a history book. The story goes that the israelites were banished to the desert for a very long time. 40 years may not be the exact number. The manna story might have been a singular event retold many times, perhaps pulled out of proportions the way stories sometimes are. It may have been a metaphore to explain that God took care of them in the desert. I wish people would stop taking the bible so literally. I mean, that book has been translated over a hundred times, you cannot take it literally anymore.

If aliens did come to visit us, I think they were disappointed at how primitive and barbaric we were. Communicating with oral sounds and little drawings, destroying our own ecosystems to advance our culture. I think they took one look and thought: "Let's find other aliens, because we are not going to get along with these."

[twilightbanana]

The climate has changed significantly in the past four thousand years, as evidenced by certain rock paintings of elephants and giraffes in the middle of the Sahara. Manna may have simply referred to one of the foodstuffs they foraged.

The words 'desert' and 'wilderness' are used interchangably, if I recall correctly. While we now think of 'desert' as being an arid wasteland, this was most likely not what the Israelites faced.

[laiv]

As a teacher of scientific methodology it annoys me that there are two basic principles that these 'scientists' don't seem to use (or use in the wrong way).

1. Null hypothesis (they're stating that humans couldn't do it without alien help, yet they don't even try to prove that statement)

2. Occam's Razor!!

'nuff said.

[janestarz]

I love Occam's Razor.

[polomeus]

.5 great video! thanks for pointing it out

[kenshinichinyo]

@ 5 and others

[twilightbanana]

2) (checks the Wikipedia article) Huh. Sandstone. Much less impressive then than the granite I recall you mentioning. Easy to work even with stone tools, but in fact they had access to metal tools (see the cast bronze 'staples' they used). Certainly, making joins that fit so closely that even a razor can't fit in between is impressive, but not exactly impossible. And you'd hope for the aliens to warn them to stay away from the arsenic...

Not to mention that we can and do make super-smooth, super-flat rocks. We use bandsaws, and lots of water to lubricate. Plenty of office buildings are clad in the stuff, we just don't use them as our main structural component.