Ancient Aliens

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by applejuice

Too complex??? Yes
For no one to completely understand them??? Certainly not.
[...]There is not a single device that has been granted to us by some Ancient Alien.

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.

Originally Posted by Isard

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****.

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.

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.

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...

Originally Posted by iron_jones

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

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

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

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...