by tete | 2026-01-12 15:15:22+00:00
Like many I also read his and related work as a young child. It's fantastic stories.

Later I also learned that he is a charismatic dude that can also laugh about his work, which is something I will always appreciate in people. I think he believed bits and pieces he wrote or at least found them interesting overall. A lot of it is just also viewing ancient cultures from different angles.

It's very different from people today that turn everything into a cult and is "us vs them".

Something I cannot stop to notice is how a lot of actual science (not pseudo-sience like what Däniken does) have very fringe ideas nowadays. There is that weird "advanced civilization" context that feels like humans will turn into weird "philosophy robots". The whole "they will make themselves robots" with the idea that somehow that brings eternal life when most even more simple machines don't last as long as humans. There is that weird idea that it will be fine to go on generational ships. There is the idea that people will be fine with simply freezing themselves completely abandoning any contact with any human they ever interacted with. Very weird concepts, but somehow they are essentially "aliens must be like that" when empirically... aliens have been drinking, partying and enriching themselves, waged wars, plundered and raped for thousands of years with essentially no sign for change. You have horrible times (middle ages, world wars) and you have good times (post napoleonic times/long peace, post WW2 and times during Pax Romana). People for thousands of years dream of some world, be it mythical creatures or aliens that somehow are just philosophers and scientists.

This seems almost as absurd. Yet there are people that call themselves scientists and believe those things almost considering them for granted. (the whole Kardoshev Scale is essentially fringe science as soon as you consider it anything but a completely arbitrary scale)

But that's not bad. In fact it's good. The whole dreaming up stuff to motivate to explore more is a strong driver for science. Doesn't matter if it's discovering a new continent, dreaming up machines that allow for global communication, or what could lie hidden in a pyramid. The channels on Mars might have been imaginations, but I am certain if that fascination wasn't there astronomy would be a lot poorer.

And while Däniken had a lot of imagination and didn't apply the scientific method I think that he made a lot of people interested in both the stars and ancient cultures.

I really wished that in today's society there would be more space between science, fantasy and what is essentially charlatans, cults, sects and so on.

Being curious can and should exist outside of academics. And disagreeing and questioning things should exist outside of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccers.

And maybe it should be more than some video game or Netflix series lore.

And I mean curiosity that isn't just endless YouTube video watching, but something a bit more active. There is nothing wrong with challenging truths. Like there is nothing wrong with finding good arguments for abstruse ideas (earth being flat or something) to learn something new. Nothing wrong to come up with "science" behind vampires and zombies.

It's just bad that suddenly you wake up in some weird cult and are shunned for thinking a bit out of the box and using imagination. And for not making clear lines and distinctions.

I hate how a lot of that makes people part of groups or something and how they somehow find their way into politics. It's bizarre and given that this seems to be a somewhat new development I think it's also completely unnecessary. Even with "futurists" and scientists the whole "fusion vs fission vs other ways of power generation" is sometimes a bit weird to watch.

I think a bit more imagination would be a good thing in today's world. Viewing things from different, even fantastical angles would be beneficial. Imagining where things could go doesn't have to be left to hypothetical alien civilizations. There was a time when people thought Esperanto would mean that people could all talk to each other on equal footing. There was a time when the US, Europe and Russia were building space stations together. There was a time when national borders seemed to become less important. From today's perspective a lot of these things seem like fever dreams, and it feels like we're heading into the dark ages yet again.