Sometimes it kind of scares me what people believe. I was chatting with two separate people from work and I was so dumbfounded by the things they were saying it was all I could do to offer the polite nod and smile accompanied by a "that's crazy man!"
It was two separate conversations with two different people, but the essence was the same: aliens are the cause of humanity's ingenuity and technologies. The first guy "hella trips out on sometimes" how aliens must have made contact with ancient civilization and shown them how to build things like the cities and monuments leftover from ancient history. "No human could ever imagine that" is the common thread. Oh, and gold. The aliens want our gold. From the ancient ritualistic offering of gold to the gods, to "that 200 million dollar gold plated satellite we just sent to mars." It's the same shit, apparently. Humanity has been influenced to give up our gold. Because earth is the only place in the universe where gold is found.
I made a pretty sad attempt to describe the legions of slaves required to build to things like the pyramids and brought up the point that earth is hardly the only place in the universe where elements are found. But I was quickly cut off with "you can generalize anything, man." Each incoherent theory is always followed up with a "I saw it in this show or documentary.. I forgot the name of it, but you have to check it out."
The second guy was even more distressing. He was talking about flash memory. "Those little chips in your phones where did they come from? They didn't exist a few years ago, and now I can just put some DVDs on this little thing? No human could have invented that. I'm telling you, the government found a spaceship with those things inside.. that's how I think of it at least. And like, pagers.. How did they even get the signal back then? There was no Internet." I did my best to explain the general gist of what I know of semiconductors and video compression, but was quickly met with "see even you're struggling with it.. How could anyone invent that?" I tried to explain how usually it's not just one eureka moment of a guy in a lab but usually decades of research and progress built on top of one another with tens of thousands of minds touching the problem along the way but he just wasn't interested in hearing my viewpoint. I made a point using Apple as an example, that it can be a group of 40,000 people working to accomplish a goal and how there really isn't just one person who wakes up at night in a cold sweat and jostles something in a notepad and then six months later we have SD cards. That no one person can know all these things. And somehow that led into perhaps the most baffling part of the conversation. He said "Take Einstein for example. We don't know where he came from, he could have been an alien. He wasn't even American, right?"
Both these conversations happened independently and within an hour of each other so I found them particularly noteworthy. The thing that really stuck with me was how.. fervent their beliefs in these things are and how my inability to eloquently educate them on computer science or astronomy in the heat of the moment was further proof for their beliefs. It made me fear my own physical well-being in some strange way. It really really bothered me. Just something about the inability to understand the way shared knowledge and progress works mixed with the willingness to attribute these things to what is essentially just fucking magic really scared me. It made me wonder what it must be like to inhabit a mind like that. How scary the world must me and how personally strong you'd have to be to go on believing that. A person without doubts is horrifying to me. It honestly kind of made them seem like animals.