Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [102]
VISITS
And if extraterrestrial civilizations have visited Earth and have, on principle, left us to develop freely and undisturbed, might they have visited Earth so recently that human beings had come into existence and were aware of them?
All cultures, after all, have tales of beings with supernormal powers who created and guided human beings in primitive days and who taught them various aspects of technology. Can such tales of gods have arisen from the dim memory of visits of extraterrestrials to Earth in ages not too long past? Instead of life having been seeded on the planet from outer space, could technology have been planted here? Might the extraterrestrials not merely have allowed civilization to develop here, but actually helped it?* It is an intriguing thought, but there is no evidence in its favor that is in the least convincing.
Certainly, human beings need no visitors from outer space in order to be inspired to create legends. Elaborate legends with only the dimmest kernels of truth have been based on such people as Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, who were completely human actors in the historical drama.
For that matter, even a fictional character such as Sherlock Holmes has been invested with life and reality by millions over the world, and an endless flood of tales is still invented concerning him.
Secondly, the thought that any form of technology sprang up suddenly in human history, or that any artifact was too complex for the humans of the time, so that the intervention of a more sophisticated culture must be assumed is about as surely wrong as anything can be.
This dramatic supposition has received its most recent reincarnation in the books of Eric von Däniken. He finds all sorts of ancient works either too enormous (like the pyramids of Egypt) or too mysterious (like markings in the sands of Peru) to be of human manufacture.
Archeologists, however, are quite convinced that even the pyramids could be built with not more than the techniques available in 2500 B.C., plus human ingenuity and muscle. It is a mistake to believe that the ancients were not every bit as intelligent as we. Their technology was more primitive, but their brains were not.
Then, too, all that von Däniken finds mysterious and therefore suggestive of extraterrestrial influence archeologists are convinced they can explain, much more convincingly, in a thoroughly earthly manner.
The conclusion, therefore, is that while there is nothing inconceivable about visits to Earth by extraterrestrial civilizations in the past, even in the near past, there is no acceptable evidence that it has happened, and the evidence deduced for the purpose by various enthusiasts is, as far as we can tell, utterly worthless.
Yet even the visits of ancient astronauts are not the most dramatic suggestions of the sort. There are endless reports of Earth being visited by extraterrestrial civilizations now.
Such reports are usually based on the sighting of something that the sighters cannot explain and that they (or someone else on their behalf) explain as representing an interstellar spaceship—often by saying “But what else can it be?” as though their own ignorance is a decisive factor.
As long as human beings have existed, they have experienced things they could not explain. The more sophisticated a human being is, the more widely experienced, the more likely he or she is to expect the inexplicable and to greet it as an interesting challenge to be investigated soberly, if possible, and without jumping to conclusions. The rule is to seek the simplest and most ordinary explanation consistent with the facts and to allow one’s self to be driven (with greater and greater reluctance) to the more complex and unusual when nothing less will do. And if one is left with no likely explanation at all, then it must