4 ms·
The idea of uncontacted tribes - still in existence - is awesome. ...but it's a little scary too to consider the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote "any sufficientl
by idm 16y ago
The idea of uncontacted tribes - still in existence - is awesome. ...but it's a little scary too to consider the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Sure, these tribes may not have been contacted, but what mythologies have evolved to explain the strange, huge bird in the sky that circles around them from time to time?
- m_myers 16y agoHow do they know it's huge? From their point of view, it could be the size of a bird. The story goes that the Huaorani called Nate Saint's plane a "woodbee" before he landed near them. After all, it flies and it buzzes.
- BoppreH 16y agoThey have two eyes with slightly different perspectives, and there's also the atmosphere to color blue things that are far away, so they have some idea of how far is it. Knowing how far and how big it looks like, you can estimate the real size. It's part of how our eye-brain interface works.
- m_myers 16y agoYes, but it's hard to judge things that you have no reference frame for. There's another story about the Grand Canyon. Apparently the first Spaniards to reach it estimated it to be a couple hundred feet deep, and thought the part of the Colorado that they could see was about six feet across. It was a mile down and 200 feet across, but they had no concept of a canyon that big.
- billswift 16y agoA better example might be from Colin Turnbull's The Forest People where one of the Pygmies accompanied him to the edge of the forest and refused to believe a distant "bug" was really a buffalo.