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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made:

- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.

- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?

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> Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?

The supernatural beings are a way of explaining a world that is not completely understood. Even today we don't completely understand it but we have dismissed the idea that something intelligent is behind the inner workings of the world around us.

Now if you have supernatural beings it is not quite a big leap from going from supernatural to just technical advanced. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For us modern readers this removes the supernatural part while it keeps them for our ancestors.

I wouldn't call it a random meme. But it was an excellent fit at a time where we started to explore space and could even imagine becoming ancient aliens to other civilizations in the future.

I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.

I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.

Yes it is: If those civilisations could "develop the long and hard way", why couldn't we?

One take on this - those rare few who did the "long and hard way" were not as lazy / stupid / warlike / etc. as us mere humans. And maybe they took 750k years, or some other really long https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HardWorkMontage stuff.

But a related take - if you just move the "seems inexplicable" stuff further away in space and time, then most people magically see it as being less inexplicable.

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