Whoa.

I'm convinced that there are aliens out there somewhere, but I'm equally convinced they haven't visited us yet.

There was a book called Chariots of the Gods? written by a hack named Erich von Däniken in 1968 that claimed the aliens visited us in ancient times and were responsible for the construction of the pyramids, Stonehenge, the stone heads of Easter Island and others.

The book was extensively rewritten by its final editor, Wilhelm Utermann, who had been a bestselling Nazi author. The book also claimed that the Old Testament, other ancient religious documents, and countless other folktales and legends were also inspired by visits from aliens in ancient times.

The key to the book's claims of aliens constructing various ancient wonders revolved around the idea that the wonders were far too technologically advanced to have been built by ancient peoples. That's just plain wrong. (I wrote about how the pyramids were built—in my first ever blog post.)

Every single one of von Däniken's claims of that nature can be rebutted fairly easily. Simply put, our ancestors were incredibly smart and innovative.

Unfortunately, von Däniken's ideas are still floating around in the form of that, ahem, television show “Ancient Aliens,” and it still relies on the ridiculous idea that our ancestors couldn't build anything on their own.

For example, crackpot theorists frequently claim that the Nazca lines are landing instructions for aliens. I’d say the aliens would’ve developed better methods for setting up landing strips. (Not to mention that the terrain around the Nazca lines would have made terrible landing strips. Landing on or near the lines would have utterly wrecked the delicate constructions.)

Also, if aliens had visited us in ancient times, do you think they could have given us better gifts than big stone monuments? You know, like plumbing, the germ theory of disease, democracy? Even just some nice farming tips?

Oh, yes, and I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving.

_________

Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: I hear—and choose to ignore—your challenge for a holiday-relevant Thanksgiving quotation. Me, I remain blog relevant.

“I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.”

— Stephen Hawking

Yikes . . .

We have three million shipwrecks littering the ocean floor. We've found perhaps one percent of them. And of those shipwrecks we've found, we've sent divers to survey maybe 10 percent of them.

Why have we found and visited so few?

First off, there's not much of a budget or incentive. Only a small number of shipwrecks contain sunken treasure. (Bummer, as my grandkids say.) Of course, that “small number” contains an estimated $60 billion in treasure.

The main reason to look for sunken ships is for the purpose of avoiding collisions. Even if there was more of a budget, the ocean is HUGE. At maximum, we've explored 5-10% of the ocean floor. While we have a good idea about the general geology and geography of the ocean floor, our knowledge of the smaller details is surprisingly sparse.

The good news for shipwreck hunters is that the vast majority of shipwrecks are near the coast. Countless ships have sunk while entering dangerous harbors. For example, Oregon's Columbia River is guarded by the dangerous Columbia River Bar, which has sunk at least 2,000 ships since 1792. The high danger level is largely due to the fact that the Columbia doesn't have a river delta—it just pours straight into the ocean.

This is, incidentally, also the reason there isn't an abyssal trench off the Pacific Northwest Coast: The Columbia fills it with sediment. Of course, it also has buried many of the shipwrecks within it. Similar threats around the world are responsible for a huge number of the shipwrecks throughout history.

One of the main strategies for future oceanic exploration is the construction of robotic mapping vehicles, an initiative that’s being funded with competitions similar to the Ansari X Prize.

Still, I can't imagine we'll ever find even half of the shipwrecks on the ocean floor, which is much, much more massive—and much less hospitable—than all the land on earth.

_________

Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: my quote selection this week is absolutely titanic...

“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”

— Voltaire

Seems that bad movie science is something we just have to live with. It's as if the writers spent thousands of hours, over years and years, learning to write instead of becoming scientists.

We can't forget the contributions of novelists, comic book writers, and videogame creators, but the film writers are the most visible ones.

A few of my favorites:

• Acid will dissolve solid objects: Not usually, no. Most acids are relatively weak and get used up as they react. There are “superacids” that do behave somewhat like movie acids, but they're so dangerous that we can't actually store them in anything except Teflon. And even superacids don't eat through metal as fast as movie acid (though fluoroantimonic acid comes close). Of course, if you're talking about eating through sponge or a person, that's another matter.
• Volcanoes can erupt at a moment's notice: Well, sure, if by “a moment's notice” you mean a matter of months. Scientists are getting pretty good at predicting eruptions—not to the point of pinning it down to a specific day or time, but they can usually give you a heads up that something is likely to happen weeks or months ahead. Also, a volcano definitely WON'T be forming in Los Angeles any time soon.
• Magic cures: Vaccines generally take years to develop. One guy certainly can't cook one up in a few hours.
• Diamond swords: Diamond may be the hardest naturally occurring material on Earth (other than Lonsdaleite, which is basically a diamond variant), but this does NOT mean that diamond would make a good material for a sword. While it is hard, diamond is also incredibly brittle and would probably break the first time you hit anything with it.
• Literally anything involving computer hackers: Hollywood hasn't the foggiest idea how computers work, far as I can tell.
• Movie fires are all smokeless: In real life, fires in an enclosed space produce so much smoke that you can't see a thing. Even a small fire in an oven will blind you completely with the smoke. Trust me on that one.
• Planets that only have one climate: Wouldn't actually work in real life. A planet with an atmosphere will always have different climates. There's an enormous list of reasons why, ranging from the obvious (temperature variations by latitude) to the obscure (lack of sufficient oxygen production in certain biomes, like deserts, to maintain a breathable atmosphere).
• Lasers that move at visible speeds: Nope. Just nope.

_________

Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy...are you star struck?

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

— from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Thinking 'bout making a rich sandwich

Have you ever made food from scratch? If you said yes, you're probably thinking of cooking bread from flour and yeast and so on.

You probably aren't thinking of growing the wheat, harvesting it, milling it, and all that jazz. One guy in Minnesota, however, decided to actually cook a chicken sandwich from scratch. It took him six months and cost him $1,500.

Little bit ridiculous, right? We’ve evolved our modern society toward specialization in order to reduce the workload on people and prevent us from having to do such outrageous things.

The most interesting aspect of this is, of course, the salt: the guy from Minnesota had to fly to the West Coast to harvest his salt. If he wanted to be a purist, he would have needed to either walk all the way to the ocean or build his own airplane from scratch.

Obviously, that’s too much work for a YouTube video.

If he wanted to be even more of a purist, he would have needed to build all his tools himself. No stove; rather, an open fire. And no metal pot; he would have needed to fashion his own cookware instead. You can see how quick the absurdity things would’ve gotten.

So where am I going with all this?

I made me a sandwich…for $3.45

Believe it or not, I wanted to talk about survivalists. The typical survivalist strategy is to master a certain number of survival skills and to accumulate massive amounts of resources for survival purposes.

The missing ingredients? Almost everything, really. Our society has accumulated unbelievably huge quantities of knowledge dedicated toward merely keeping civilization running, mostly in the form of working professionals.

If someone were to make all of society's doctors disappear, we wouldn't be able to just set a bunch of people to the books and expect them to become doctors in a decade or so. Civilization reconstruction is a problem of a magnitude more significant than assembling a sandwich from scratch.

Any society emerging from survivalists in the wake of the collapse of civilization is going to be fairly primitive, by necessity.

And just to reassure Maggie and the kids and my gaggle of grandkids: I'm not investing in survivalist gear. Modern civilization is pretty durable. Gambling on it failing seems like way too much of a sucker bet to me.

_________

Quotable

Hey, Yard Ramp Guy: you might want to put one of your loading docks in a safe bunker, just in case…

“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.”

— Aristotle