When aliens find the ruins of our civilization, they'll think we worshiped....

...something called "The Economy"

To them, the people of earth seemed to fear this horrible monster and sought to appease it endlessly, but they'll find no evidence that such a thing ever actually existed.


**This is not my original thought. I took this from a fellow named MindOST here: www.gamefaqs.com... With his permission**

reply to post by Socrato


No doubt they will think that we put money ahead of almost everything (maybe everything) but surely they will know that the economy was not preceived as a physical being to whom we try to appease. That is if you are being very serious with your post.

reply to post by underduck


Well, why not? We often look at various ancient civilizations and think they considered their "gods" as physical beings who needed to be appeased, and often we have little evidence of what these entities actually were.

reply to post by Socrato


That's good, got to give you a star for creative perception.

reply to post by Socrato


We have more records detailing exactly what our language is and how we communicate with eachother. Any future civilization will benefit from this documentation and easily be able to determine what the word "economy" was and what it meant ... I hope anyway.

I thought you were going to say, The Television.

Look at how we decorate our homes, we set up the living rooms to face the idiot box, like it's some kind of throne or shrine. We decorate the area around them, and spend most of our free time watching them. I'd call that worship from an outside perspective.

reply to post by Socrato


... and we burned whole villages as sacrifices to our paper god. Future archeologists will dig up all the scorched bones and call us barbarians.

I had a nightmare thought where the only recording left would be of Jersey shore and they'd all think we was tanned drunked idiots and snookie was somehow a godess

The dollar god is the #1 god in the US and, like tentacles, enveloping the world through globalization.

The economy IS God. RIGHT NOW.

Thing about money, it's an artificial creation.
I would wager, from a speculative standpoint, no alien civilization will have a reference point to even understand this concept of trade based on perceptual or conceptual value.

Were aliens to discover us, methinks the concept of money might even freak them out a little once they grasp the idea, if they can at all.

If the "information+technology age" continues unabated, all our data about language will be stored electrically and magnetically and will be able to be completely wiped out.

reply to post by Socrato


If all digital media was wiped out and they were forced to rely on printed text I still think it is only a matter of time before they uncover the majority of how we lived. What we fail to realize is how little actual evidence we have of these ancient cultures. The only reason we have so much on Egypt is because we have been able to decipher the language on the HUGE amount of writings we have access to of theirs.

Originally posted by Druscilla

Thing about money, it's an artificial creation.
I would wager, from a speculative standpoint, no alien civilization will have a reference point to even understand this concept of trade based on perceptual or conceptual value.

Were aliens to discover us, methinks the concept of money might even freak them out a little once they grasp the idea, if they can at all.

so you think beings that are inteligent enought to travel light years through space wont be able to grasp a barter/value system?

really

reply to post by Meekbot2000


Why do we suppose that beings who travel light-years through space have to be super intelligent?

Originally posted by Socrato
reply to post by Meekbot2000

 

Why do we suppose that beings who travel light-years through space have to be super intelligent?

because they would have to be, there is no alternatives, the technology requires it.
perhaps not 'super' intelligent in regards to earthly concepts such as money,
but extraordinarily intelligent in universal matters such as space travel.

Originally posted by JibbyJedi
I thought you were going to say, The Television.

Look at how we decorate our homes, we set up the living rooms to face the idiot box, like it's some kind of throne or shrine. We decorate the area around them, and spend most of our free time watching them. I'd call that worship from an outside perspective.

Television [TV], the one-eyed god is the main household god
like the lares and penates of the roman syncretia

due to recent reforms it's being merged with Radio/Music Player[formerly CD, formery Record]
[and in some parts with Game Console] to create the syncretic [new and improved] Media Center

not much has changed since the egyptians,greeks and romans
who did this sorta thing all the time with their religion, deities and myths

Maviss posting in a ATS topic spawned from PotD.

I disagree though. TOo much information is readily available, they would learn about us enough to know thats not the case. Just like we did we ancient civilizations. Unless the vast majority of the information we have disappeared, it wouldn't happen this way.

So true

Originally posted by Zcustosmorum
So true

This picture is a gross misrepresentation of the things we've built in the last 200 years >_>

Originally posted by yourmaker

Originally posted by Socrato
reply to post by Meekbot2000

 

Why do we suppose that beings who travel light-years through space have to be super intelligent?

because they would have to be, there is no alternatives, the technology requires it.
perhaps not 'super' intelligent in regards to earthly concepts such as money,
but extraordinarily intelligent in universal matters such as space travel.

what if they stole their high-tech from a more advanced yet naive species and only have a rudimentary grasp of it?

On topic:

what records/relics left of the present order of things for human or alien archaeologists
would depend on the degree of destruction of the collapse and aftermath.

efforts by individuals and organizations to erase and re-write the past and their degree of success have to be factored in as well