Ancient Aliens

[Deckerd]

Is it important what the ancient Egyptians looked like? I mean aside from the umpty million drawings of them, that is.

 

[Lonemagpie]

Is it important what the ancient Egyptians looked like? I mean aside from the umpty million drawings of them, that is.

I guess it is when some people still say (and I mean in general, answering this specific question, as I haven't followed the last couple of pages of who said what) "black primitives couldn't have built this stuff, so it must have been aliens or white Atlanteans."

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I'm just going to quote wikipedia here:

Since the second half of the 20th century, scholarly consensus has held that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. The 2001 Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt states that "Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study.”

That was kind of what I was saying above. The Egyptians didn't really identify themselves by race and it's quite possible they weren't one "race" in modern terms. They had a shared culture and shared gods and were ruled by a shared Pharaoh. That's what was really important to them.

 

[TIN_MAN]

Because if you were, you would have contributed something constructive by now on the subject other than pedantic half-objections.

Translation; I would agree with you because, of course, all modern archeologists tow the PC party line about no Europeans or middle eastern types in Egypt during the old kingdom.

We don't even have scientific proof that he was HUMAN.

Oh, so now your conceding that he may have been and alien? But at least we agree there is no proof.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I'm pretty sure I know what it means, but just to be safe I looked it up anyway, and here is the first definition that popped up, which is typical of the others; “of, pertaining to, or of the nature of a dogma or dogmas; doctrinal. 2. asserting opinions in a doctrinaire or arrogant manner; opinionated.” The bolded type was –with variations- a common theme, so I think I’m safe.

So it seems you may be the one who doesn’t know what it means? But I guess you are referring to the strict literal definition, pertaining to religion? But it seems to me that your pretense to certainty applies to that definition as well, all of which is why I chose to use it.

I take it you've never seen a black man with blue eyes before?

Oh come on! You’re making this way too easy. Of course I have, green & grey eyes too, and they all have European ancestry (at least the ones I’ve met), which was exactly my point.

Self evident fact is self evident fact. Nothing personal about it.

Now this is an asinine statement. That’s what people said about the "self evident fact" that the Sun moves around a stationary Earth, to believe otherwise is a matter of personal opinion. Things aren’t always as they "self evidently" seem.

Because there is no evidence of the existence of aliens ever having visited Earth. There IS evidence of scientific racism having a profound influence on the way European archeologists approached (and in some cases, STILL approach) their analysis of ancient civilizations.

Sez you. But actually, I agree with you on the second sentence.

Or wait, don't tell me... you need scientific evidence of the existence of racism too?

You keep missing the point, nuff said.

 

[TIN_MAN]

I'm just going to quote wikipedia here:

Since the second half of the 20th century, scholarly consensus has held that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. The 2001 Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt states that "Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study.”

That was kind of what I was saying above. The Egyptians didn't really identify themselves by race and it's quite possible they weren't one "race" in modern terms. They had a shared culture and shared gods and were ruled by a shared Pharaoh. That's what was really important to them.

I agree, and this is an undercurrent to my main point. Regardless of how one chooses to slice and dice the human pie, there is tons of evidence that the Egyptians were -right from the start- a combination of many cultural, ethnic, racial and other influences.

If this is indeed true, as seems likely, then it just goes to show what can be accomplished when diversity flourishes; the result being one of the, if not the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen!

To insist, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that the black race alone was responsible for the greatness that was ancient Egypt, and that it only began to decay with the late influx of (white) immigrants, is to prefer one form of racism over another.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'm just going to quote wikipedia here:

Since the second half of the 20th century, scholarly consensus has held that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. The 2001 Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt states that "Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study.”

That was kind of what I was saying above. The Egyptians didn't really identify themselves by race and it's quite possible they weren't one "race" in modern terms. They had a shared culture and shared gods and were ruled by a shared Pharaoh. That's what was really important to them.

I get that, of course. It's not much deeper, though, than Castellan being puzzled as to why Cepheren/Khafra "looks like a black woman." Which immediately begs the question "Were you expecting him to look like a WHITE woman?"

More significantly: "black" isn't a race. "Black" is a physical descriptor for a dark-skinned person of distantly African descent and the set of characteristics they could be expected to have. The RACIAL identities of black people is a lot more complicated, but apparently distinct enough that people familiar with them can tell them apart (e.g. the Hutus once attempted to exterminate the Watutsis from Rwanda, much to the bemusement of white people everywhere). It's a pretty broad set of characteristics one usually finds among Africans, and with only a few notable exceptions (the Berbers, for example) those characteristics were a lot more widespread in the centuries before the Macedonian and Persian empires.

Translation; I would agree with you because, of course, all modern archeologists tow the PC party line about no Europeans or middle eastern types in Egypt during the old kingdom.

From what I know of ancient history, the old kingdom being ruled by a European family is only slightly more likely than it being ruled by aliens.

Oh, so now your conceding that he may have been and alien?

I'm conceding that at the level of your objections he could have been a trained monkey. But that would require an explanation as to why the Egyptians would have attempted to train a monkey to rule their empire as a Pharaoh, which would be just as hard to come by as an explanation for how exactly a foreigner managed to ascend the throne of Egypt in 2400 B.C.

Maybe it's like "Last of the Mohicans" or "The Last Samurai" or even "Avatar", one of those situations where an indigenous society thousands of years old nevertheless falls under the sway of some random white guy who just got here an hour ago?

I'm pretty sure I know what it means

I'm pretty sure you think you know ALOT of things. For example:

Oh come on! You’re making this way too easy. Of course I have, green & grey eyes too, and they all have European ancestry

And SURELY you expect me to believe you've actually traced the ancestry of all of these people.

Now this is an asinine statement. That’s what people said about the "self evident fact" that the Sun moves around a stationary Earth...

Or the "self evident" fact that all men are created equal. In BOTH cases, it took a huge amount of research by a lot of very interested people to prove otherwise, and research in the latter case came to be known as "scientific racism."

Just because a fact is self-evident doesn't make it wrong. It means that you had better provide some compelling arguments to prove that the most obvious explanation isn't the true one. Unfortunately, it remains the case that if you gather enough data and compile it the right way, you can prove or disprove just about anything and then slap an authoritative label on your findings.

ETA: I had heard about this before but forgot the name of the group. I've been told that blue eyes is an unusually common trait for the Denka Bor tribe in Sudan (couple hundred miles south of Egypt). Also unable to track down the study I used to have a bookmark for that the mutation for blue eyes occurs in 5 to 12 percent of West Africans (higher or lower figures depend on whether the trait is associated with other conditions like Waardenberg Syndrome; IIRC, 6% of the time it's associated with nothing at all).

 

[TIN_MAN]

I get that, of course. It's not much deeper, though, than Castellan being puzzled as to why Cepheren/Khafra "looks like a black woman." Which immediately begs the question "Were you expecting him to look like a WHITE woman?"

I thought it was the Sphinx he said looks like a black woman?

Just because a fact is self-evident doesn't make it wrong.

Well, if something’s a fact then it wouldn't be wrong regardless of whether it's self evident or not, Right? It's our assumptions that something is self evident, and therefore doesn't need proof, that can be –and usually are- wrong.

ETA: I had heard about this before but forgot the name of the group. I've been told that blue eyes is an unusually common trait for the Denka Bor tribe in Sudan (couple hundred miles south of Egypt). Also unable to track down the study I used to have a bookmark for that the mutation for blue eyes occurs in 5 to 12 percent of West Africans (higher or lower figures depend on whether the trait is associated with other conditions like Waardenberg Syndrome; IIRC, 6% of the time it's associated with nothing at all).

Interesting, do you remember whether in the individuals with this mutation for blue eyes, had both eyes blue, or just one eye?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I get that, of course. It's not much deeper, though, than Castellan being puzzled as to why Cepheren/Khafra "looks like a black woman." Which immediately begs the question "Were you expecting him to look like a WHITE woman?"

I thought it was the Sphinx he said looks like a black woman?

The Sphinx, which is presumed to be a likeness of Khafra. Castellan says it sort of looks like a black woman; my reply to has been, essentially, "Since Khafra himself (most likely) would have been black, why is that surprising?"

Just because a fact is self-evident doesn't make it wrong.

Well, if something’s a fact then it wouldn't be wrong regardless of whether it's self evident or not, Right?[/quote]
To the extent the validity of any fact depends on known data -- i.e. other facts -- yes. It is, for example, a FACT that I have a three year old son who is right now sleeping in his favorite Buzz Lightyear sleeping bag. This is, to me, self-evident, since I can take the most obvious evidence of what I see and what I understand about the world at face value.

Now, on closer examination, my son could turn out to be a manifestation of an ongoing Fight Club style psychotic episode; one could make a pretty compelling argument from logic and/or supposition that this was the case, that I don't really have a family at all and just imagined the whole thing. But supposition alone isn't very convincing in the face of the obvious, and if someone was going to try to tell me that my family was imaginary, they'd have to provide some pretty convincing evidence of this for me to believe it.

That's kind of my problem with YOUR objections. You're presupposing that there's no "scientific proof" that Khafra was black or could be identified as having phenotypically common African features. I find that a bit silly, almost on the order of someone claiming that there's no scientific evidence that I have a son. I see a statue of Khafra, I see the likeness of the Sphinx, and I see an African nation that had little or no contact with Arabs or Europeans until 2000 years after Khafra's death. So who am I supposed to believe, you or my lying eyes?

Interesting, do you remember whether in the individuals with this mutation for blue eyes, had both eyes blue, or just one eye?

Both eyes, usually, though different eye color in one or the other does happen to.

 

[Deckerd]

I still wonder why it's important.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I still wonder why it's important.

It's not.

Folks, let's keep this thread about the original topic and stop with the weird detours into racial theories.

Who cares whether the Egyptians who built the Pyramids and Sphinx were black or something else? Who cares what the race of the Pharaoh was? I think it's been well-established in this thread that European concepts of race are meaningless in discussions of Egyptian history.

And regardless of the skin color of those Egyptians, what difference does it to make to whether aliens had a hand in it? None at all, from what I can see.

Let's please circle this thread back to the original topic and save the personal barbs. Thank you.

 

[Redfern]

Black, white, middle eastern, who cares? Nefratiti was a fox regardless. If that "bust" statue is anywhere near accurate to her actual features, forget about the straight guys; gay men and straight women would be tempted to "sleep" with her!

Besides, you gotta' love their fashion sense!

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[BillJ]

I think What the Ancients Knew is a great show and is on the Science Channel. I think anyone who believes in Ancient Aliens should sit down and watch the show on the construction of the pyramids.

 

[RAMA]

I think What the Ancients Knew is a great show and is on the Science Channel. I think anyone who believes in Ancient Aliens should sit down and watch the show on the construction of the pyramids.

Humans beings don't give human beings enough credit...we often suck but we're also pretty amazing too...our brains condition us for survival, to seek and find the negative, but as natural selection has basically disappeared, and humans have our own evolution in our hands we can certainly do something about our mistakes. Pyramids are child's play.

RAMA

 

[RAMA]

I still wonder why it's important.

It's not.

Folks, let's keep this thread about the original topic and stop with the weird detours into racial theories.

Who cares whether the Egyptians who built the Pyramids and Sphinx were black or something else? Who cares what the race of the Pharaoh was? I think it's been well-established in this thread that European concepts of race are meaningless in discussions of Egyptian history.

And regardless of the skin color of those Egyptians, what difference does it to make to whether aliens had a hand in it? None at all, from what I can see.

Let's please circle this thread back to the original topic and save the personal barbs. Thank you.

White bodybuilders created us...don't you know?

 

[RAMA]

The human species is an evolutionary inflection point..."I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe," Davies writes. "If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature."

By Paul Davies, a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University

Basically a book about many of the concepts and possibilities I've shared with you on this board in the recent past:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...nt=Google+International#.UJc3MwP5xWk.facebook

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The human species is an evolutionary inflection point..."I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe," Davies writes. "If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature."

By Paul Davies, a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist

What is it about theoretical physicist/cosmologists that leads them to believe they are in any way qualified to speculate about subjects totally unrelated to their area of expertise?

Basically a book about many of the concepts and possibilities I've shared with you on this board in the recent past

A book about theoretical evolutionary paradigms, written by a physicist. It should be about as useful as a book on high energy particle physics written by an archeologist.

 

[RAMA]

The human species is an evolutionary inflection point..."I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe," Davies writes. "If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature."

By Paul Davies, a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist

What is it about theoretical physicist/cosmologists that leads them to believe they are in any way qualified to speculate about subjects totally unrelated to their area of expertise?

Basically a book about many of the concepts and possibilities I've shared with you on this board in the recent past

A book about theoretical evolutionary paradigms, written by a physicist. It should be about as useful as a book on high energy particle physics written by an archeologist.

As I pointedd out in other threads it hass been far more common in the last 3 to 4 decades for scientists to comment on interdisciplinary topics than ever before, partly because of convergence on many subjects (biology is in fact related to physics and planetary science) and because science has been popularized in general by some writers outside their disciple, Asimov and Sagan pretty much got the ball rolling there.... It is useful more than ever for researchers to involve those of other disciplines to get a complete picture of their specialty.

As for Davies, if you'll note he also an astrobiologist. And also because of this:http://beyond.asu.edu/

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The human species is an evolutionary inflection point..."I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe," Davies writes. "If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature."

By Paul Davies, a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist

What is it about theoretical physicist/cosmologists that leads them to believe they are in any way qualified to speculate about subjects totally unrelated to their area of expertise?

Basically a book about many of the concepts and possibilities I've shared with you on this board in the recent past

A book about theoretical evolutionary paradigms, written by a physicist. It should be about as useful as a book on high energy particle physics written by an archeologist.

As I pointedd out in other threads it hass been far more common in the last 3 to 4 decades for scientists to comment on interdisciplinary topics than ever before, partly because of convergence on many subjects (biology is in fact related to physics and planetary science)

No they don't. Biologists do not comment on matters of physics OR planetary science for the same reason archeologists don't comment on economics or psychology; the only reason the REVERSE is true is because members of the latter discipline are used to people respecting them as Really Smart People and never questioning the validity of their claims.

People ASSUME those fields have a certain overlap, but this is only true on the purely superficial/philosophical level where science fiction writers generally operate. The actual study of theoretical physics and evolutionary biology are so fundamentally different and involve such hugely different data sets that the experts in either field know almost nothing of consequence about the other (or else they would be experts in BOTH disciplines, which no human really has time for).

and because science has been popularized in general by some writers outside their disciple, Asimov and Sagan pretty much got the ball rolling there...

Yes, because they were science fiction writers. Sci-fi writers don't HAVE to know what they're talking about, they just have to sound like they do, and that's easier to do if you have an actual science background.

Physicists need to get over themselves and realize that a doctorate in theoretical physics isn't a license to make shit up and have people believe you.

As for Davies, if you'll note he also an astrobiologist.

Of course he is. And I'm a professional dragon slayer.

 

[RAMA]

Here's some news that's related to some of my posts on self-replicating machines. The first tentative steps to such technology, already being developed by a culture barely 200 years into a technological age out of 10,000+ years of human history.

NASA's self-replicating 3D-printed spacecraft

http://dimensionext.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/3dprinted-self-replicating-spacecraft.html

Except for the fact that Von Neuman devices are impractical for interstellar exploration, that would be true.

Not true really, traveling at 0.1c replicated spacecraft could colonize the Milky Way in 500,000 years, without breaking the laws of physics. Compare that to the existence of the universe, 13-15 billion years, or geological time, 4.5 billion for Earth, and the timeframe is quite reasonable. This might mean there are no intelligent species with spacecraft older than 499,999 years.

RAMA

 

[RAMA]

What is it about theoretical physicist/cosmologists that leads them to believe they are in any way qualified to speculate about subjects totally unrelated to their area of expertise?

A book about theoretical evolutionary paradigms, written by a physicist. It should be about as useful as a book on high energy particle physics written by an archeologist.

As I pointedd out in other threads it hass been far more common in the last 3 to 4 decades for scientists to comment on interdisciplinary topics than ever before, partly because of convergence on many subjects (biology is in fact related to physics and planetary science)

No they don't. Biologists do not comment on matters of physics OR planetary science for the same reason archeologists don't comment on economics or psychology; the only reason the REVERSE is true is because members of the latter discipline are used to people respecting them as Really Smart People and never questioning the validity of their claims.

People ASSUME those fields have a certain overlap, but this is only true on the purely superficial/philosophical level where science fiction writers generally operate. The actual study of theoretical physics and evolutionary biology are so fundamentally different and involve such hugely different data sets that the experts in either field know almost nothing of consequence about the other (or else they would be experts in BOTH disciplines, which no human really has time for).

and because science has been popularized in general by some writers outside their disciple, Asimov and Sagan pretty much got the ball rolling there...

Yes, because they were science fiction writers. Sci-fi writers don't HAVE to know what they're talking about, they just have to sound like they do, and that's easier to do if you have an actual science background.

Physicists need to get over themselves and realize that a doctorate in theoretical physics isn't a license to make shit up and have people believe you.

As for Davies, if you'll note he also an astrobiologist.

Of course he is. And I'm a professional dragon slayer.

Again you are wrong, in fact they DO comment on such things, they just simply are not working in that particular field. I've read more than enough articles on books from such scientists to know you are completely wrong. Yes, there are sci-fi authors who fit the description, but I'm not talking about those or their fiction.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but many scientists these days also are part of groups outside their chosen field, Davies in particular started one that I linked to which does more than pure science or theoretical research, but speculates on lots of big questions through the gamut of science, and I see no problems with gathering intellectual thought into such speculations, and in that spirit, Davies wrote his book and validly so.

http://beyond.asu.edu/

RAMA