If There Really Were Ancient Astronauts, What Kind of Evidence Would We Find?

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Now that I have finished my movie "Summer's Too Short" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk4tVFfgSP4, it is time to embark on a new project.

For many years I had an interest in the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Unfortunately, I have not found the kind of credible discussion that I want to see. I will try to start on that path myself and see where it takes me.

When I first heard of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, over 40 years ago, I was immediately fascinated. At first I was firmly convinced. But as I dug into the "evidence", it just dissipated in a puff a smoke. Nevertheless, I was still fascinated with the idea, albeit, disappointed there didn't appear to be any real evidence.

I think it is plausible that aliens visited Earth in the past. I  looked for people who have done a serious investigation, but only found vague comments about some speculation by Carl Sagan. That left me unsatisfied.

If there really were ancient astronauts, what kind of evidence would we find?

I have not seen any evidence that would convince me that the ancient astronaut hypothesis is valid. Old stone monuments can be easily explained by the skills people in the past could draw on. I am also uncomfortable with the implied racism inherent in some of the evidence.

I need to decide what kind of evidence would convince me. This is not a simple question.

Before we can speculate, we need to explore some other questions.

Where are they from and what is the level of their technology?

This could be two questions, but I think they need to be linked. The further away they come from, the higher their level of technology would be need to be. The more advanced their technology is, the harder it would be for us to recognize it. Their level of technology would affect how many of them there were and if they sent robot probes instead of living beings.

Why did they come here?

If they came here for scientific study, the evidence would be much different than if they came for colonization. Would Earth have been their primary goal, or might it be a way point on their route to their final goal.

Were they successful?

This is related to why they came. If they accomplished what they came here for, the evidence would be different than if they had failed. Between full success and abject failure there is a wide range of out comes.

When did they come?

Aliens who visited Earth billions of years ago would be much harder to detect than aliens who visited after human civilization arose. A closely related question would be how long did they stay. Did they ever leave?

How did they interact with humans?

If aliens visited openly, then evidence could be found in the cultural materials of ancient societies. If they visited clandestinely, we would need to look elsewhere. They might have engaged directly with humans or may have simply ignored them.

I suspect that there are many more questions that could be asked. For now though, I will cogitate on these as fodder for future blog posts.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

"Summer's Too Short" Now On-line

After more than a year in the making, my new short movie, "Summer's Too Short" is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk4tVFfgSP4

I began work on "Summer's Too Short" on March 12, 2014. I took a single photo of my garden every day until December 9, 2014. Over the last month I have compiled these photos into a short movie.

I did a couple of posts on my blog about the movie:

<i>“Summer’s Too Short”</i> Should be Done Shortly http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/summers-too-short-should-be-done-shortly/

and

A Little Work on a “Short” Project http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/a-little-work-on-a-short-project/

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

"Summer's Too Short" Should be Done Shortly

I made good progress on "Summer's Too Short" this week. I think I have most of the work out of the way, so I just have some tidy up work to do.

I finished aligning all of the images. That is slow work.

When I took the picture, I tried to always use about the same position. Unfortunately, even slight shifts in position distort the image a little. I think I could use a image distortion tool in Premiere Pro to improve the match. That would add a lot of time, so I decided to stick to shifting up or down, left or right, or by rotation. That still left some mismatch, but I don't think it is a big problem.

When I watched the video, I thought I could see a couple of images that are still out of alignment. I will look into that more next week.

I tried to take the pictures at about the same time of day, but never got that exactly right. The colour tone varied from day to day as well. Some of the images are very blue. I may see if I can do some colour correction to reduce that variability.

I developed a sound track to the movie. I had a pretty good idea what I wanted; a sort of Doppler shift sound effect. I felt it would catch the sense of the rapid passage of summer. I tried to create the sound from scratch in Audacity, but wasn't happy with what I produced. Instead, I found a short clip of a jet fly past at http://www.freesfx.co.uk/. It was a little too short, so I stretched it out a bit in Audacity. I altered the pitch to compensate.

I produced a preliminary video with the images, titles and sound track. I think it looks pretty good. Not that I'm biased or anything. I want to leave it for a few days, then have another go at it. If all goes well, I should have it on-line by the end of the week.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Website Infection Removed

I didn't get far on my projects this week. My wife's health, of course takes precedence over all other things. Besides that, I had to deal with a malware infection on my website.

Website

My website got infected with malware last week.

Nick Wernick, whom I know through my involvement with the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, warned me that WordPress had a bug that scammers had started to exploit. Unfortunately, my site had already been compromised.

The company who hosts my site, Netfirms, had detected the malware and shut down my site. I wasn't sure at first what I had to do, but their support team was helpful. All the same, it took me a couple days to get the site back up.

They do offer a service that protects your website from such attacks, but it is quite expensive. The mid level protection is about the same as I pay for hosting, while the top level is more than five times as much. The low level protection is cheaper, so I may go for that.

"Summer is Too Short"

I had hoped to work on "Summer is Too Short" this week, but didn't manage to get anything done. I did open up the Premiere Pro file and did a little fiddling around, but no real work. Hopefully I'll do better next week.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

A Little Work on a "Short" Project

I started to work on "Summer is Too Short" this week. My editing went well and I am hopeful I will get this done soon.

I shot "Summer is Too Short"  last year, but hadn't cut it together yet. It is a time lapse movie. I shot one image a day for about 9 months, which gave me about 280 images.

I didn't have a time lapse video camera, so I used a still camera. About a third of the way through, my still camera stopped working. I borrowed my wife's camera for the rest of the movie.

I hand held the camera, so the images jump around quite a lot. I expected this, but since I had to deal with a similar problem with "Contingency" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sPbUoD9zM), I felt confident that I could work around it.

I use Premiere Pro to edit the movie. I imported all the images and added them to a time line. The process I followed to line up the images was to over lay one image on either the previous or following image. I made the top image semi transparent. I used the motion controls to get the images to line up.

The adjustments were rather tricky, but I got better at it as I did more. I found it more difficult to deal with images that were at a different angle. Again, I have gotten better at  that kind of adjustment.

I am about half way through aligning the images, so I think I'll have that done next week. However, some of the images will need some colour or brightness adjustments once I have them aligned.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Return to Blogging

My wife was in the hospital from mid December until a week ago. I dropped all of my other activities to help her. Now that she is home, I think I can get back to my creative projects.

Wife's Health

When my wife went into the hospital last December, my top priority was to help take care of her. I dropped all work on this blog, my films and my writing projects. While she is home now and things are stable, we still have a way to go before she is healthy again.

While she was in the hospital, I visited her every day. I took her home cooked food; the hospital food was not to her taste. I know I am fortunate to be able to drop every thing else and just focus on her. Many other people don't have that luxury.

Now that my wife is home and more capable of taking care of herself, I feel I can start to work on my creative projects again.

Normally at the start of the year, I write a blog post about my plans. It is well past new years, but it is time for me to do that again.

Blog

I want to get back to my blog with a post every week. Until last December I had only missed a few times since the beginning of 2010. I hope to keep to that schedule again.

My Most Difficult Case

http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/my-most-difficult-case

This project has been on my to-do list since the early 1990s, and I finished it last year. It is nice to be done with it. I do need to try to promote it. I have it posted on a pay per view site. I think that is the way to go with my films. This is an experiment to gain some understanding of the process.

Website Theme

In December I started to work on a new theme for my website. The old one was not mobile friendly and a bit clunky. It was a version of the Core theme that I had fiddled around with. I set up a test site using Bitnami. I did some preliminary work, but didn't get far with it.

A few weeks ago I discovered that someone was injecting a spam link into my main page. I didn't have time to fix it, so I tried a different theme: Candour. It took care of the mobile friendliness and the injection problem. It doesn't look exactly the way I would like, but I don't see a need to do anything with it for a while.

Summer is Too Short (and the Rabbits Ate All the Seeds)

This is a short movie I worked on last year. Everything is shot, but it will take a lot of post production to get it ready. It will be finicky work.

Felix

I had started a rewrite of this story, but have left it for a long time. I had planned to do that anyway. It is time to get back to work on it.

The Barrier

http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/the-barrier/

I have a version of this movie done (version 0.6), but I want to do some more work on it. There are some changes I'd like to make to some of the dialogue, but the big change is to replace the "robot" voices with actors. Xtranormal can do that, but the status of the program is still up in the air, so I'm reluctant to start.

I don't think a movie about transportation planning will find a large audience, so I don't want to spend too much money on it.

Pete's Plan

I'd written this short short story a couple of years ago and submitted it to a few Science Fiction magazines. I had rejections from all of them. I had planned to submit to some others, but got side tracked onto other projects. The main comment I got was that it read like a treatment for a story rather than a story. While I like what I did do, I think I should try a rewrite in first person. I'm inclined to post it on my website rather than try to submit it to magazines again.

Bright Freedom

I'd done this as a movie script, but then decided to redo it as a novelette. I got a 17,600 word draft done and started to make revisions to it, but put it on hold. I'd like to get back to it and get it into shape to have some other people read it.

Another Story

When I reviewed where I left off on my projects I came across a post: http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/another-story/. I talked about a new story idea, but didn't say anything about the story itself. I could not remember anything about it. I managed to find the material I wrote up. It is a short detective story.

A New Transportation Planning Story

About a year ago I did some work on the outline for another transportation planning story. I'd forgotten about this one too. I had a look at the outline this week and developed it a bit further. It still needs work, but I think it has potential. For a story like this, I think I should spend much more time on the outline than I do on the story itself.

Ancient Astronauts

When I first heard of this idea I was convinced it was true. Later, as I learnt more about it, it all seemed to evaporate in smoke. There was nothing there.

I still find the idea intriguing, but there seems to be very little serious study of the idea, even though it is plausible that aliens visited Earth in the distant past. The field has been taken over by people who recycle old claims that have been debunked.

I would like to do something with the concept. Initially I want to write an article that takes a serious look at the idea. Then maybe I can develop a story.

My Priorities

My wife, of course, is my top priority.

I find it hard to pick one of these projects to work on first. As a start I think I will do some work on Summer is Too Short and then work on Felix. Then we'll see where that goes.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

My New Website Theme: As The Goals Change

I made some progress on the new WordPress theme for my website this week. I ran into a few snags, but got past some of them. I've changed my mind several times about what my goal was.

Changing Goals

While I over came many of the snags I ran into, I gave up on the search for solutions to the others. This caused me to rethink my goals several times.

At the start of the week I had planned to create a entirely new theme that incorporated a new look and support for mobile devices. As the week progressed, I saw that this was a difficult goal to meet.

I wanted to make the theme more flexible and dynamic. I decided that rather than trying to make everything flexible, I should just hard code the template files. It is a bit clunky to do it that way, but at least it works. I only really need to have a more flexible theme if other people want to use it, and I don't plan to do that.

I think I need to identify a series of versions that I want to do, so that I can start using what I've done. My new plan is:

• (release 1.80) Create a new theme that replicates the look of my current theme. In this theme I would keep the code simple and avoid any fancy dynamic features. In this theme I will include an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plug-in which isn't compatible with my existing SEO data.
• (release 1.90) Upgrade the new theme to be mobile device friendly.
• (release 2.00) Change the look of the theme.
• (release 2.01) Convert the old SEO data to work with the new SEO plug-in.
• (release 2.02) Upgrade the theme to make use of dynamic features.

Final Thought

Although I felt I make progress this week, and learned a few tricks, I'm not sure I can remember what I picked up if I want to go back and make more changes later.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog