by DonHopkins | 2026-01-12 07:07:49+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert

FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it.

It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy

>Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6]

A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy

https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]

Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?".

For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year.

They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer.

https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-as...

https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/su...

It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit!

>[then someone took issue at my use of "FYI" and tries to argue that we should respect irrationality and racism: "How about IMO rather than FYI ? We can make up our own minds."]

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]

Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it.

No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat."

I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return.

"Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc

To pretend otherwise feels like humoring a small child who still believes in Santa Claus.