Rob4Hope wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2019 11:26 am
alas wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 1:23 pm
If alien abductions turn out to be real, I think I will join you in laughing MAO. It would be hilarious if the alien believers turn out to be correct. Scary, but hilarious. But with AA, I have never heard of outside corroborating evidence. Have you? cause it would be fun to hear some.
But from the skeptic side of things, of all the fringe stuff, AA seem to me to have the best scientific explanation that would rule against there being real aliens. And I tend to believe the scientists who say space travel to other planets is just too unlikely considering the constraints of time and space. But with all the fringe stuff, I am more in the category of “I don’t know” than I am in the category of “I know”. I said “I *think* AA are really SP” not that I am sure they are. Just that I lean toward that as an explanation. On OOBE and NDE, I lean toward, “we don’t have an explanation that really fits the evidence” so, therefore, I lean toward, “I don’t think they are just SP or hallucinations.” They may turn out to be SP or hallucinations. And all the corroborating evidence just coincident, but.... that is a lot of corroborating evidence that has to be explained as coincident. And as Gibbs of NCIS fame says, I don’t believe in coincidences. Even ESP, I tend to think there is something going on because connections between, say identical twins, are just outright creepy when one feels the pain the other is in. So, I tend to doubt alien abductions more than I doubt NDEs. Does that make sense?
Its unfortunate how much skepticism is out there where people "who know more" ridicule things they don't understand. I'm glad you spend time in the "I don't know" state Alas. It means you have a more open mind.
Most people don't have that. Not even a little.
Here is an example: Ignaz Semmelweis, who died in 1865, urged hand washing BEFORE dealing with patients in the hospital. In his own hospital, he cut death rates from infect significantly. After his death, his hospital went back to running 'properly' again, and "Mortality rates increased by a factor of six, but nobody cared."
https://www.famousscientists.org/7-scie ... lifetimes/
I have found this guy fascinating,...and it openes up the possiblity that maybe,...just maybe,...there is something more going on...
https://books.google.com/books/about/Fi ... &q&f=false
Hancock gets into archeology and explains the "Younger Dryas" that explains several things. He contends that there were advanced civilizations that existed before the recorded Babylonians came onboard. Archeologists are freaking over Globeki Teppi because its kindof hard to believe, IMHO, that some stone wielding ape people built that.
One thing I do believe in, and that is human beings. We are smarter and more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for. It is the idea that the people who built Globeki Teppi were as you say stone wielding ape people. No, they were very intelligent human beings perfectly capable of the technology to build such a place. In fact, I suspect that before life got cushy with all our modern science and culture that they were even more intelligent than we are today. We are evolving backwards because we have learned to keep stupid people from killing themselves or getting eaten by a saber tooth tiger because they lacked intelligence. When we allow the stupid among us to survive by artificial means and help from those who are much smarter, we evolve into a less intelligent species. We have reduced the survival pressure that caused us to be supper intelligent, and I don’t know how many thousands of years we can keep doing that are still have the native intelligence to figure such engineering problems out.
Now we have set instructions on how to move huge rocks we the heavy equipment we possess. That intelligence to follow instructions given by culture and written in books is a different kind of intelligence than the kind it takes to figure out from scratch how to move big boulders with just people, ropes, animals, and other primitive tools. It is like the computer “experts” who setup computer security, who follow known procedures and get rid of all known ways to hack into the system. They have the “book” kind of intelligence. Then they get a bunch of kids who know computers, but don’t yet know what they cannot do, and turn them lose and it takes them 15 minutes to hack into the voting machines that it took the engineers years to develop. That is one kind of creative intelligence going up against the book kind of intelligence.
It is the same with these “impossible” things to build. With several of them, like Roman arches, like the ceiling of the Pantheon, they put creative people on the task, and they quickly come up with away it can be done without any modern technology.
Did ancient people have good enough boats to get people to Australia 65 thousand years ago. Well obviously they did because people got there.
So, rather than explaining such ancient things as “they had to have help from intelligent aliens” who had the technology to move huge boulders, I can just believe that the ancient people themselves were smart enough to figure it out. Ancient people knew a lot that we do not give them credit for knowing.
My answer to “ancient aliens”. But obviously, I have watched some of the ancient aliens programs and then looked for alternate theories. So, I am not saying the ancient aliens theories are wrong, just that there is not so much evidence as they think there is that they are right.
I am first a skeptic, then I examine the evidence and sometimes I lean one direction toward belief and sometimes I lean the opposite. But until all the evidence is in, I really don’t know. But I do think the human mind is capable of a lot of things that we don’t give it credit for.