And if Buddhism is wrong?

That doesn't have much to do with appeals to emotion. In fact, it might even involve one, if you can't justify that idea with logic.

I must admit, I only saw one episode of this "History" series, when looking for related videos about "Iron Sky" on YouTube... and the award for the most hilarious part of that documentary goes to: Ancient Aliens helping the Nazis with their weapons programs...
One UFO researcher is quoted to have met Dr. Wernher von Braun, while revieweing de-classified UFO files, and when asking him about the fast achievements in the WW2 missile and later US space programs, von Braun allegedly looked at the stacks of files, and replied "You know, we had help..."

:D

That idea about Nazis on the Moon, returning at some point, suddenly gets a whole new quality. The scarier thought in "Iron Sky", though, is Sarah Palin being US president.

If you look at the Ancient Alien seies from a satire POV, it's a great laugh. In the aforementioned episode, they even quote from and refer to Indiana Jones movies, admitting that "while being fictitious, they bear a lot of truth" - referring in particular to the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. Ahh, what fun there can be in television.

Just in case, someone wants to watch this:

Aliens and the Third Reich (FULL) - YouTube

Wiggling bare toes, chuckling at parts of that "documentary",

~*Txim Asawl*~

... So, to those levels has the reputation of History gone :xD: ... actually hurting Iron Sky! (I have to watch that movie!)

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/4...orychannel.jpg

Discovery is just as bad these days though...

Why my T.V. went to the DUMP over a year ago. Now I have a flat screen that is for DVD's ONLY. I get the news and weather from the local T.V. Broadcast station over the net, and DON'T have to put up with Advertisements.
Niri Te

Hehe - the decline of american "educational" television. Soon it seems there will be only total nonsense on TV in the US - I am glad that Germany still has some "socialist" public television that is well funded and can show real documentaries with real people that are not bordering on being sent to a lunatic asylum.

Iron Sky - great movie by the way. Saw it when it came out and it is so much fun, especially the US reaction to the whole thing - and the peaceful space programs :P

That goes anywhere to some degree... I always say that a lot of education is creating users - people who can intuitively use the system that was created for them, but not people who understand HOW it works, who can improve upon it and build the new systems of the future. To most people, it just does and they have never thought about how. I guess it's the same with history.

It's been a loooooooong time since I last watched Discovery or History, this news brought my attention (and made me laugh, a lot!): BBC News - No evidence of mermaids, says US government

This is ridiculous!!! We are in the second year of the second decade of the 21st Century and all the valuable information that exists is being displaced by Ancient Aliens, Mermaids, Pawn Shops, conspiracy theory (like 9/11 was an inside job and man never went to the Moon). Sad, really sad.

Some people are really too stupid to exist... but really, it's the dumbing down of TV that certainly helps that...

There was another one a while back about the US government declaring that they don't know of any aliens. I think there's something else going on than just "People are stupid." :P

That's putting it simply, I guess. More accessible entertainment means a wider demographic and more big bucks.

I don't know if the demographic can GET any wider, but if it did, that would only serve to "Dumb Down" television even more, and I didn't think that was possible.
Niri Te

Well, they are showing it at Animal Planet (Latinamerica) right now. So far, it is "we don't know what it is" and some retrospective (with some dramatic speculation about how some hominids decided to go under the sea and became mermaids befriending whales and dolphins...). What I see is that they are forcefully trying to tie mermaids with unrecognizable remains rescued from a shark's stomach.

Let's see how far this goes. They have used the famous NOAA "bloop" recording, the (oh, surprise!) US Military with a sonic weapon (or radar), a photography by some german (??? don't remember that one) fisherman with a shadow amongst the ocean waves...

Well, if Discovery's attempt was to match History in what concerns Ancient Aliens, well, they have. I've just saw the "documentary" only to find out the same: Unknown thing => Fascinating scientific discovery => US Military => Ancient Civilization (Egypt exterminating the mermaids) => US Military orders to hide/destroy the evidence => Group of raged scientists going against the machine => Roll End Credits. Even with the tag "This is not real, it's SyFy" I think that turning away from the excellence they had in Science and Investigation to dedicate time to fabricated conspiracies is just an unnecessary embarrassment. This definitely marks the end of Discovery Networks as a Science-oriented network and the beginning of a battle for who's got the craziest theories about the Natural world and the search for the unknown. Hopefully, NatGeo still has a more decent approach for this stuff. I find some consolation when I remember that Bill Allen was sacked from National Geographic Magazine's Chief Editor role when he published the then unverified investigation of Archaeoraptor only to learn latter that it all was a forgery. Though Allen stated that he himself was furious when he realized it was a forgery at best (and that he would have stopped the publication even if it already was in the presses, losing about a quarter of million dollars to the Society for preserving its credibility) he had to leave the magazine due the implications of his actions. It is a pity that History and Discovery don't act like that anymore.

I think that most of the things we use nowadays are just too complex for anyone to truely understand. Instead we highly depend on specialization. No one fully knows how a computer works that operates a word processor. Some know the object oriented language that makes up the word processor, others know how to program (parts) of the operating system, others know machine language, others know how to design a processor or mainboard, others know how to manufacture a processor (or how to manufacture the machines that manufacture a processor) and yet others know how the physics inside a processor work (at least until you ask them what electricity or an electron really is and why it behaves like it does). But no one of them knows much about any of the things that the others know. So actually for this whole thing to work, everyone has to be a specialist who does not know how much of the things he uses truely are working.

That mermaid story - sounds so much like nonsense to me. But here is the problem:
This stupid idea to make "reality shows" that are in fact fiction and to make "fake documentaries" as a genre of fiction. This is fun if it is really running on the SciFi channel or something and one really knows that this is what it is. But on channels that also show real documentaries - this is making people confused. Especially if the credits and "all characters are fictional" run over the screen in record speed at the end.

Oh, look, a sensationalist statement without any support.

OK, HERE is some "support". (SORRY, HNM, but I have to QUALIFY the support,
as coming from what I experiences in the military).
If you could have seen the degree of specialization on military weapons systems, aircraft, avionics, and their associated subsystems, (the subsystems have their OWN set of specialists), you would KNOW that what Aurora says is correct.
There are specialists on Defensive radars, on Targeting radars, and on Terrain following radars, just to name three. The TFR has it's own set of specialists for the radar, and another set of specialists for the systems that "slave" the three axis control system into the radar "picture". THEN there is a set of specialists that deal with the electrical systems that ACTUATE the control circuits when told to do something by the "slaving" system that is reacting to the 3D "picture" that the "slaving" program receives from the TFR. and there are three OTHER systems that are also brought into play, just for the aircraft to fly 20 feet above the ground, avoiding both the terrain, and structures , at 600 miles an hour.
YES, things have gotten very VERY specialized. NO ONE sits back with ultra high tech equipment and views the entire system without being so superficial, that all they can do is to keep track of broad system failures, to give the specialists an idea where to look in the area of their expertise.

Yeah right, Isard, come on, tell me what chemicals in what concentrations are needed to manufacture a microchip. Or how the underlying operating system of the computer you are sitting in front of is working lets say at the level of the C++ source code - or the machine code under that. Or tell me how the copper is mined that is needed for it, how it is separated from the rock. I bet you can look it up on Wikipedia and then talk with some half-knowledge about it.
I am a person that really likes to know many things. But despite me learning about copper prospecting, mining, refining, processing - despite working in a microchip assembly line with high temperature ovens and various dyes and lasers - despite me configuring my own gentoo operating system and tinkering with hardware and software on my computer - I still cannot claim to know in detail even one of these things to a degree that I could actually do this by myself. In my work as a scientist I also learned,that while it is a good thing to stay a bit in the holistic setting of knowing about other disciplines and directions, one can only get good at something and publish a paper if one focusses on one single special issue.
This is even true for some of the menial jobs - The cleaning person only gets to be a good cleaning person if he focusses on that work and improves knowledge on that. He will not get extra pay if he learns how detergents work, how to manufacture them and how to collect the resources for them.

To deny that in the industrialized world, everyone is and has to be in some way a specialist and a "user" and that it is impossible to really know everything about the things we do or use to a degree that we all could really understand them - that is rather odd - but maybe Isard you can give me some examples of regular complex items that people can really understand how they could make it themselves...

Too complex??? Yes
For no one to completely understand them??? Certainly not.

All the artificial devices we can find in the world are the product of the imagination of engineers, designers, inventors or simple curiosity and imagination. There is not a single device that has been granted to us by some Ancient Alien.
Though, certain skills are needed to fully comprehend such things, not everyone have them.

That's high security military equipment. Compartmentalization to protect state secrets.


There are plenty of people who understand "how technology works". Aura likes to go on an on about how terrible technology is, and this "nobody even understand how it works anymore!" argument is just one more layer of bull****.


There are people who can build/program computers from base materials, it just takes time and energy. (This guy built and programmed an entire computer system in minecraft) Aura, just because you don't have the willpower to understand things in detail, please don't project that innability on the rest of us.

And if Aurora can't do it then neither can you!

Can someone tell me when the **** we haven't depended on specialization?

I thought someone was going to respond with "paleolithic eras" immediately. That's the answer in my book, anyway.

To that I agree - none of it has been granted by some alien. That is nonsense. But all these complex things are a product of MANY engineers and inventors who all only improved on something that existed before or that use parts that others already produce. An engineer worries about material strength, transmissions, electrical properties and the system he works on. He does not worry about how the materials he works with are produced, just that they have the properties he wants. He does not know geology to find minerals or flotation technology to separate the ore or the additives neededs to smelt it or how to build a freighter to get it to Europe where it is made into the material he uses. He may have some general knowledge on that, maybe even a bit of deeper knowledge on the steps closest to him (e.g. how the material gains the properties that he desires), but he cannot know EVERYTHING.

Do you really think that anyone on this planet, even the smartest guy living on Earth could build a computer at lets say the capabilities of my old C64 by himself? Given he has all his other needs met but is alone on an island that holds all the basic resources needed to theoretically do it? I would say no. If that is "terrible", I dont want to comment on, but I think it surely makes things very very much dependent on each other.
And there is a huge difference between somehow "understanding how it works" and really knowing how it works. I understand very well how a computer works in principle. I have built electronics as a teenager with soldering iron and transistors, I have modded my C64 and Amiga, I always assembled my PCs from parts I bought separately, I worked in a company manufacturing microchips and saw them baked and etched (I even dropped a few). I know how copper is found and dug up and that the ore is ground up and treated with flotation and then the purified ore is dissolved and treated with electrolysis to get copper for the boards. But that is all just a rough picture really - the details of it are staggering. Like exactly how long and with what concentrations the silicon has to be baked, what exactly is the composition of the photosensitive dye in the processing, what is the composition of the flotation chemicals,...etc - it is a huge amount of data.
Now the best thing you could say now is that with digital processing it theoretically is possible to collect all that data into a database and one person could then work through it step by step if he wants to do things. Still he would take a lifetime to create even the simplest device because of all the things that go into it. In practice, no one can really KNOW all the steps and details of creating a device and in practice no one can really create one by himself.

And to create a calculator in minecraft does not say otherwise - Minecraft operates on a highly sophisticated computer. If that guy would want to build such a computer from real trees and real rocks, he would so much fail. I could probably also build a calculator from transistors, resistors and other simple electronic parts and be proud of it, but I would not be able to build transistors myself.

It is not to say that humans are not capable of understanding a lot, of understanding the basic principles of technology or to say that we are not innovative. We are all that, obviously. All I said was, that the present level of technology and science is more than ever depending on a vast complex industrial civilization to a degree that prevents single persons to fully comprehend the preocesses and even to see the complexity. And i think this is problematic because the compartmentalization prevents people to really appreciate problems arising on a system-wide basis. Which is what is happening now with the (lack of true) "solutions" to planetary degradation.

This is proposerous. To tell this to me means you do not know me at all. If I talk to people, I usually get comments like "how do you know all that stuff" in respect to details about a variety of issues. So really - to tell ME, that I am just not interested enough is an insult. Of course I am not Einstein or McGyver, but maybe you can tell me in what topics you yourself have a lot of detailled knowledge, then we can talk on...

Indeed - This is definitely the answer to that question. Though I guess there are technologies later on that also work that way. And of course even at that times people depended on each other in other ways. Dependency is not really that bad, but I think the level of complexity in terms of society and technology has increased to a degree that is really making it hard to wade through it now. Which is why we NEED very narrow specialists and very sophisticated methods of storing information to just keep this show running. Without google and therelike, most of the knowledge would basically be not accessible anymore to people.

I dont know what this has to do with ancient aliens anymore though, so I guess we should stop going on about this topic.

Those ancient alien theories often base themselves in a similar theme though, namely that only a very complex technology could have built the pyramids, the Nazca paintings, Stonehenge or various other impressive monuments. And certainly these monuments are amazing with precision cut rocks that have been carried over long distances and it is a global phenomenon, too - so these societies had to have amazing capabilities and capacities to do these things. Basically this means they had to have a high level of specialization as well. Does not make it extraterrestrial though...

Perhaps they came here to learn about us and/or this planet. Perhaps they came here simply because they could. Maybe they know-and I wouldn't be sursprised-that if they contact us that we'll try to destroy them without thought. Maybe they just want to learn without causing disruption.
I think anything's possible.

Evidence is very circumstantial to be unambiguous. If they really came here, then they might have interfered with the natural progress of ancient Civilizations. I think that would be an unethical action unless we were quite pitiful to them.

They're space travellers. Of course we are.

Pics or didn't happen!

Seriously, why they haven't come back?

NAAAH, Pics can be photoshopped, face to face, or it didn't happen!!

You assume they left in the first place. ;)

Would we be surprised to learn, sometime in the future, that this actually happened???
(I hope History or Tsoukalos won't find this):

Here's what I watched three days ago :





This guy really knows what he's talking about, trust me.

Well, unfortunately (though there is still no definitive answer for those Bagdad batteries and the Antikythera mechanism is truly an out-of-place device) there are better explanations than Ancient Aliens for megalithic monuments, the alleged Egyptian light bulbs, helicopters and others alike:

trillions and quadzillions of stars, planets, galaxies, constellations, asteroid belts, comets, and other celestial bodies out there...and we're it?!!!!


i sure hope there is something better than this pathetic species out there.

Agreed! :)

Kill yourself, then.

Oi. Don't ruin our positive thinking!

I think there are others and if they are better, maybe they did the wise thing and not ruin their planets to build machines that bring them to other planets :P - meaning that I find it likely, that solar system hopping may be something that is beyond the capabilities of a species that also wants to keep a livable home planet. Maybe species would face a decision at some point if they build up a civilization - continue with a development of long distance space travel and ruin their own world in the process - or let it go and stay on the ground and focus on sustainablility instead. There is also the little problem that a civilization advanced enough to build spaceships is most likely also able to build nuclear weapons and unless they managed to form some sort of world government before that, they may just eliminate their space faring capabilities by that :( - I think both of these are factors in that famous calculation on the chances to find civilized life out there that are used to explain why we have not found any yet.

That antiochia device is very fascinating - I think they rebuilt it int he past years, havent they?