Friday, February 25, 2011

Common sense is the least common of the senses...

Why don't people use common sense?  Do they even have it?  And yes, I do use it.  And I am smarter than you.


Let's take the Ancient Aliens theory.  If you're not familiar with this, it's a bunch of people that believe that aliens came down and taught the Egyptians how to build the pyramids, among other stuff. Here's a quote from Wikipedia (I know, this is supposed to be about using common sense, and here I am taking stuff from Wikipedia, but it's late, and I'm tired) about a show on the topic: 


"The pilot presents the views of author Erich von Däniken who theorized that advanced beings from another world visited primitive humans, gave them the knowledge of the solar system, concepts of engineering and mathematics, and became the basis for their religions and cultures as evidenced by ancient monuments such as the Nazca Lines, the Pyramids of Giza and the Moai statues of Easter Island. "


So, there are people who think aliens came here and taught us this stuff.  OK.


Let's put on our common sense helmets and think about this.  Let's say NASA figured out how to send people to Mars and back in a reasonable amount of time, say 3 months there, 3 months back.  When we get there the astronauts find little organisms living on the surface. What would they do?  They would capture some and bring them home and analyze them. The scientific community would go nuts.  We would want to go back and get more, and see what else is there, and what could be on other planets.  Now let's say we were so advanced we could get to other planets outside of our solar system in a reasonable amount of time and we get there, and there is human-like creatures there.  But these creatures are pretty simple.  They live in wood huts, they hunt and gather, they have set up a simple government, etc.  What would we do?  We would take pictures, samples, leave stuff with them, we would come back many, many times.  And we would teach them stuff.  But what would we teach them?  All the things we've learned in the past 2,000 or so years.  


But back to the ancient aliens theory.  People believe that there was a civilization that had such advanced technology that they could come to our planet, and they taught us to build shit out of ROCKS?  They didn't leave any pictures of their buildings, they didn't bring a TV and show us things?  They didn't teach us about electricity?  They didn't leave us books, they didn't build things for us?  They didn't take over the planet?


If we got to another planet and found a primitive civilization, would we tell them the best thing you could do is to spend 30 years or so building a big pyramid out of 2 million rocks?  Or that they should build statues out of rocks and point them toward the water?


Are these people thinking?

1 comment:

  1. Hahaha, well said!! Maybe the aliens are so advanced that they don't need pictures, books and tv to remember things?? LOL, jk...

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