Rant

Wasting time watching one of those "Ancient Aliens" shows on the History H2 channel, and beyond all the other absurdities of such woowoo speculation lies one simple question: Why would beings scientifically advanced enough to defeat the speed of light limitation, with untold numbers of galaxies to explore, waste their time playing deity to backwards savages, building pyramids and mounds and all sorts of other mysterious structures beyond the capabilities of the savages they instructed, on an obscure planet circling a run-of-the-mill sun way out on an undistinguished arm of a commonplace galaxy?

It's particularly disheartening to me to see such garbage on a channel that supposedly seeks to enlighten its viewers about history when the preceding program on H2 was a two-hour exploration of the engineering marvels of ancient Egypt, with thoughtful explanations of precisely how those long-ago people -- supposedly unable (if you buy the ancient aliens theory of antiquity's achievements) to have constructed their massive monuments without starfolks' assistance -- went about doing just that despite their lack of modern machinery. Turns out that those ancient Egyptians were endowed with the necessary smarts and skills to do it all themselves.

And I guess that's what really pisses me off, when you get right down to it -- the underlying idea that human beings, especially those not blessed with all our modern apparatus, were simply too dumb and incompetent to figure out anything more complex than mud huts; that "primitive" peoples were -- and still are -- lesser beings than our smugly smart current selves. So Neolithic man wouldn't have a clue what to do with a computer? Big whoop -- your average modern man wouldn't have a clue how to survive, let alone thrive, in the Neolithic world. It's just different skill sets, not a quantum leap in intelligence.