• Wollff@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    So… what were they mistaking the aliens for?

    Ghosts. Spirits. Dragons. Or any other mythical creatures, or mythical phenomena of your choice.

    If there were aliens, those are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And those are the descriptions I would expect in basically all the world, almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today.

    • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So it couldn’t be Americans mistaking ghosts for aliens? Or bigfoot, a creature that we haven’t been able to verify because their culture advanced past ours and is able to cloak themselves and occasionally go on joyrides in their more advanced technology and forget to turn on the cloaking device? We have just as much evidence for all of these things.

        • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          No, I’m pretty sure I fully understand you. I’m just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don’t understand as fantastical things. There aren’t ghosts, spirits, dragons or aliens that have secretly visited earth but choses not to make actual contact. My point is that all of those things are equally unlikely. I assumed my over-the-top absurdity made that clear.

          And I feel like you might be underestimating literally all of the world if you think these things are actually aliens. You’re implying that they would assume something they don’t understand is some mystical nonsense. That “almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today” is superstitious and wouldn’t know what aliens are.

          • Wollff@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I’m just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don’t understand as fantastical things.

            Yes.

            As I said: If there were aliens, those fantastical things, are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And in most non US places. After all, aliens are a modern US legend, invented from Americans, for Americans.

            I didn’t say that there were any aliens anywhere. Or that there were any other fantastical things anywhere.

            That “almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today” is superstitious and wouldn’t know what aliens are

            Didn’t we just establish that aliens are superstition? I think you are overestimating how many people share “aliens” as the most popular superstition which comes to mind first.

            Most of the US shares that. A lot of other places probably don’t. Don’t underestimate how many strange stories about strange things in the night are out there :D

            • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Ya know what? I misread this interaction. My bad. I didn’t realize we were arguing the same point. The last week has shown a lot of people on this site arguing fervently for the case of aliens visiting earth, and I made assumptions. I’m sorry buddy.

              • Wollff@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                No worries! I hope I was not too much of a dick in my response, and I totally understand why and how you would read things the way you did. I’ll just try to express myself more clearly in the future. You know, this communication thing? It’s a never ending struggle! :D

                • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  It sure is. In my life and job I go out of my way to be very exact in my language, but that was a skill I had to learn after years of interactions like this, where I’ve been on both sides of the misunderstanding. And I still struggle not sounding like a robot when I explain things clearly. English is an expansive language with a lot of utility, but the flipside is that meaning can often be ambiguous and require lots of words to be clear.