Should we become God?

[Jumpin]

deskpro2k3 said:

pretty sure ancient civilizations from all the way back in 4000BC would think of us as gods, and people from 100 years ago would think of us as wizards.

We’re less advanced today, in many areas, than people 100 years ago expected we would be. This time period would be in the middle of the FW Mader era and post-HG Wells. Aldous Huxley and isaac Asimov are just around the corner. So I wouldn’t go so far as to assume they would think we’re magical rather than more technologically advanced.

4000 year old civilizations, I would say it depends who you talk to. While less advanced, the average intelligence potential was slightly higher among our ancestors. Also, in 4000 BC, we wouldn’t look like they would have expected gods to look, we would look like people who have trouble speaking; the more human resembling gods came a little bit later in history (and even then, most of the intellectual community among Greeks and Middle Easterners acknowledged that gods were only depicted as anthropomorphic for convenience sake (Xenophanes, writing in the 5th and 6th century BC, has a good writeup on how men depict gods in their own physical image for convenience, and that the true image of gods doesn’t resemble people)  - in addition, our technology still looks like gadgets rather than the sorts of control that they believed gods had. For the lower intelligence people, you can convince people today that you’re a messiah or a god, and Pharaoh’s did it in ancient Egypt, so it’s possible - but depends on the culture, and it also depends how you slot yourself into it; the Pharaoh’s most certainly would have acted the part significantly better than any of us would be capable of.

I think it would be WAY more difficult than you think to convince even 6000 year old primitives that you’re a god: as some evidence, we have come in contact with tribes recently who were even more primitive than 6000 year old settled areas, and even they didn’t think we were gods - although there is an island where they decided that Prince Philip was a god; but that has mostly to do with the fact that they recognized as the Patriarch the British people, even though he is technically of lower rank than Queen Elizabeth II. I think it’s more likely that they would see us as human.