In the current climate of anti-intellectualism and alternative facts, things like pseudoarcheology are more dangerous than ever. As we can see with climate change, people thinking that somehow their opinions invalidate scientific fact can have serious detrimental effects on the world around us. As the state of our planet worsens, there are still people who flat out refuse to believe that climate change is real, not matter how obvious it seems to everyone else. These types of people have been led by certain media outlets, and by internet echo chambers, to think that somehow their misunderstanding of climate change makes it not real, and that’s totally fine. These people will carry on, full steam ahead, chopping down every tree in their way and running over the environment with a car bigger than their ego, all while completely happy to ignore the truth because to them their opinion is truth. This sort of dangerous misunderstanding leads to inaction. In some cases it leads to flat out racism and hate, such as building the wall because all immigrants are somehow both incredibly lazy, leeching off taxpayers money, while simultaneously stealing every job that they can find. Even though the people espousing this terrible rhetoric don’t want those jobs to begin with.
Misinformation and pseudoscience lead to the brainwashing of the proletariat into thinking the broken, dirty, capitalist machine is the best thing ever, and with a little work they too could be as affluent as the upper class.
As for claims that all of humanities accomplishments, the growth of ancient societies and the skills that these people had, can all be swept under the rug by saying “aliens did it.” These claims have a basis in colonialism, where the original though was “these people couldn’t have done it.” Modern day shows like Ancient Aliens remind me of the Myth of the Moundbuilders. This myth was pushed heavily in the 19th century by people who flat out refused to believe that Native-Americans could have built mounds like the one at Cahokia, so much so that these people believed they were built by a superior lost race that was driven out by the Native-Americans. These sorts of myths, the belief in a superior race or a race of aliens, devalues everything that ancient humans have accomplished. It also spits in the face of the actual work that goes into archaeology, as if archaeologists just pick up something and base their opinions on nothing else. People who make wild claims like this with no real evidence to back them up are part of the reason scientist aren’t believed and it’s lunacy.