When I was a young child in middle school, I loved watching this show called Ancient Aliens. Yes, I know that the show comes with extremely heavy skepticism, but middle school me cared little for the skeptics. You see, I was totally obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial life and the possibility that they might have visited Earth in the past (an idea I’m all but gotten over now). I would watch these shows every chance I got, sacrificing cartoons to learn about how the Pyramids were secretly built by the aliens how or the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan resembles a circuit board. Looking back, these ideas seem far fetched, but the episodes were clever enough to make it all sound very convincing. Seriously, look at the side to side comparison of Teotihuacan to a modern day circuit board.
However, as one would expect, any show preaching wild alien conspiracies would be debunked, and Ancient Aliens was no different. Just search “ancient aliens debunked” on Google and a million different articles will pop up, such as this one written by a Scientific American blogger. As I grew older, I started taking information show with a grain of salt rather than falling into every fallacy woven by the show writers, but the damage had been done. I’m now extremely interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and even though I might not believe there are green men on Mars anymore I’m still open to the idea that we are not alone in the universe.
In my opinion, the universe is way too big to not be able to sustain extraterrestrial life. The Milky Way has hundreds of billions of stars, and over 2,500 of those have planets orbiting them. And that’s just in our own little galaxy in our corner of the universe. When we factor in the billions of galaxies in the observable universe, and then the galaxies beyond that, well, the number just becomes too high to count.
Ancient Aliens may be mocked for everything, from it’s wildly unscientific and inaccurate portrayal of evidence to narrator Giorgio A. Tsoukalos to the point of becoming an internet meme, but it does occasionally raise interesting questions and ideas to ponder. And when I truly think about it, not the conspiracies but the idea of other life out there, I get a feeling that I don’t feel anywhere else. It’s a feeling of wonder and captivation, a feeling of pure giddiness and excitement. It’s a feeling I don’t want to stop experiencing. And so, the question I’m leaving behind is:
