Yesterday I was in a taxi on the way to a BBC studio to chat about Decoding the Heavens on the BBC Radio Scotland show Radio Cafe (you can hear it here until next Monday) when I had an intriguing conversation with the driver. We started off wondering why a lot of people seem so desperate to attribute any ancient achievements they don't understand to aliens. The Antikythera mechanism has suffered from this a lot, starting with the Swiss author Erich von Daniken, who wrote about it in his books Chariots of the Gods and Odyssey of the Gods. In his view, the device was clearly a navigational instrument used in alien spaceships, which "tells us how little we know about the wisdom which the gods whispered into the ears of their darlings". Funnily enough, von Daniken didn't offer a single piece of evidence for his amazing claim that the device was made or influenced by aliens, or for why the aliens would have inscribed it in perfect Greek! The closest I can find is his argument that because the mechanism was made to be a portable size, "it could easily have been transported from one 'god's' palace to another". Ancient history is amazing enough, I really don't understand how someone could have so little faith in human ingenuity that they feel the need to invoke such a crazy theory. Still, von Daniken has sold millions of books, and his championing of the Antikythera mechanism may be one reason why it was ignored by mainstream historians for so long.
That's not to say intelligent alien life couldn't be out there somewhere, of course (there just isn't any evidence that such beings have visited Earth). So the taxi driver and I got on to what intelligent extra-terrestrials might look like. I reckoned that we can't just assume we would even recognise them as life-forms - exotic types of aliens that have been proposed include everything from gaseous clouds communicating via radio waves to beings based on spin configurations in a sea of liquid hydrogen. My driver was much more pragmatic, though. He argued that if there's one thing intelligent life forms would have that's similar to us, it would be their hands. To build a civilisation you need technology, he said, and for that you need to be able to manipulate the environment around you. That's something no other life form on Earth can do anywhere near as well as people. You're not going to build computer chips with fins or tentacles or giant insect feet. It's an interesting point. Even among robots and other technology, is there any design that can manipulate objects with as much dexterity and versatility as the human hand?