Heres is a grim perspective from me, take it with a grain of salt since it have no base but fits the main agenda. This article require reader to accept that there are life out there. If you think there is no life out there/not found yet/no basis/no evidence, I simply ask to read this as a fiction and quoting the Time Machine way
"Who are you to deny 13 billion years of evolution ?"

Sit back and think - where are the ancient people go ?. They build granite city, look and measure stars, improving for few thousand years and suddenly kapoof with the wind ? The only thing we got is Mahabrata, Ramayana, Abrahamaic religion, superb granite cities and incomplete history jigsaw puzzle. I wonder if theres a city so old yet we still use it and the language preserved - Sanskrit, Tamil, Bushmen and Hebrew are good choice though.

How about this -
We are being breed, multiplied and later to to be harvest, destroyed and the cycle will start over spanning about 10,000s years, complete restart with about hundred thousands "survivor seed". The kapoof with the wind.
It might be too far fetch, but in this universe, nothing is impossible - except time travel (if time travel ability reached, you are god/singular supreme being).

Heres is a scenario:
We are all geared for WW3, it happen and suddenly "Holy Intervention" in shape of spaceship coming to "rescue part of the world", would you go with the spaceship or not ? You will be cyrogenically treated until you reach the new planet.

If you go, you are meat/protein/carbohydrate/biological stock, if you dont go, you will write another Mahabrata for the next cycle and this time no more granite, its concrete. You will write about nuclear fallout in a language that nobody will use anymore and the cycle repeat for another 10-30,000 years. Compounded by the inability to type or write, the leftover children might resort to - stone.

With current 1% vs 99% agenda, pretend that you are the 1%,
you can and have everything you want already,
you need nothing because you already have everything,
more people = more powerful, more people = more employee/ worker slave for you,
yet you want to destroy it all until 1/3 of the world so you can rule it ?
Isnt you already ruling it ? Doesnt make sense.

Unless...

You are shown "who is the boss", lets say the boss is really "powerful" and in return for your wealth/power/control, the boss order you must follow the plan - multiply and massive war at peak so the "Disclosure" and "Holy Intervention" can occur.

Give this a thought - The universe said to be 13billion years old. It took us only 300 years to go to space, what if theres a few populated Coruscant type planet that need food supply ? giving them 1 million years head start and we also might get the same thing. How to feed all these people ?

Sure, farm cattles, dinosaur even, but which is better ? A food farm that take care of itself or roaming dinosaur that need to be herded ? A food farm that clever enough to prosper without care yet stupid enough to call things from sky "God" sounds good.
Have few of these on planets and we can support a few Coruscant type planet.

Advance civilization cant be that cruel ? they can produce food alternatives ?
Yeah, right and we breed cows and we claim we are civilized too, we need to feed the city, they feed the planets. Afterall, humans, I mean cows, are useless lower species.
Humans multiply and take care of themself, cows uhhm... feed and need to be herded. See the similarity ? We have lots of "junk" DNA, what if we are just a strip down version ?

I will stop my rambling here so you guys can give back some input. For non believer/skeptic, its a fiction. For the curious, no need to afraid because its thousands of years cycle, yet I see no way out if this is true. We do not have "telepathy", that is the sign of lower breed race, until we reach that, I guess we are food, either to the worm or them.

Originally posted by NullVoid
Sit back and think - where are the ancient people go ?. They build granite city, look and measure stars, improving for few thousand years and suddenly kapoof with the wind ?

Well its a nice theory but the premise is flawed. Cultures and civilizations do not simply go 'kapoof.' It is a gradual process. During periods of colonialism and war in both the extant and ancient worlds, where they are not completely destroyed which has happened, cultures are generally absorbed by the colonizers/conquerors wherein aspects of their culture, history, religion, art etc. are carried over.

This fact alone can be seen in the widely diverse borrowings of religious events and ceremonies...ever wonder what the # rabbits have to do the resurrection of Christ? Time and time again it can be shown with enough research that cultures have not vanished metaphysically, there is a real world causal factor. Namely other people.

Followup. star for you, it is obvious that you have thought a great deal about this and its always good to engage in some discourse. cheers.

I give you a star for thinking out of the box.

I never considered that and it is as plausible or more so than many theories out there.

Good readable theory .one of many and completely possible.
Shocking and unlikely but any thought we have must be based on something that is or will be reality,or its not available to be thought of

Yes this is an old classic line of thinking in Sci-Fi. It showed up in the SF mags of the 1930 and in the early 1960 TV shows; probably existed prior to that also. Unfortunately unless we are particularly tasty, raising other animals or grains will provide much more food. If it were just our taste then pork would do just fine. Other variants of this them have 'them' harvesting, 'souls', brains, body parts, etc, etc.

Ties in with the 'we're a aliens kids science experiment' idea too.

Archaeologically the evidence doesn't point to those types of cycles - what we see in the record is quite different.