Finally saw ep1, pretty good.
Dunno if this is covered in any of the episodes... but has anyone considered the possibility that any assistance we may have received from advanced beings... was actually assistance from ancient humans and not ET's? Look how much we have advanced in let's say the past 2500 years. It's a tiny fraction of time, but the advances have been immense.
Is it possible that humans had advanced similar to where we are today, but were wiped out in some calamity... whether a global pandemic disease, an impact event, or mass extinction caused by geomagnetic reversal (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal) lets say 5000-10000 years ago?
Is it possible that some small group of advanced humans managed to survive this in some shelter... isolated from the rest of the world while pockets of survivors in the wild degraded back to a more primitive lifestyle and lost their knowledge?
The small group of sheltered survivors could have come out to try and help the "wild" population many years later... and would have appeared as gods and miracle workers... curing the ill, imparting advanced knowledge, flying on machines, etc.
Why don't we have evidence of such an advanced civilization and ancient humans? Well for starters, they would still have been homo sapiens sapiens, so we would not expect to find any bones or fossil records that would trigger a flag.
The bigger question for me is how long do we think our structures and knowledge would remain if there were a global catastrophic event? If we lost the ability to generate power, and people were focused on just staying alive, I think we would lose our current knowledge in a few hundred years and devolve into a baser civilization.
But what about the structures? Surely all of the stuff we have built from granite/marble/iron would still be around (maybe buried... but waiting to be found). This is the part that makes me question this hypothesis .. if there were ancient humans that were more advanced, then surely we would have some evidence of their structures?