If Douglas Adams had the lathe, it'd be something out of the Hitchhiker's guide. Like all of them drones that were originally intended to provide towels on interstellar cruises, and as soon as we invent FTL they're gonna suddenly go active and visible and pierce the hull of the first ships pushing towels in the face of the poor astronauts.
That's an angle that's interesting to explore. Maybe include in it clues that hint at the society's demise, with a hint of veiled contemporary social commentary.
Only problem with that is it is unlikely that the only thing that survived from them were drones flying around, which would suffer wear and tear and run out of fuel no matter how advanced or efficient they are. We would expect to see the remains of infrastructure found beneath the earth, and if they used fossil fuels at any point in their society's development, we would be able to see the remains of that in the soil (and possibly ice cores if they were recent enough)
People who peddle these sorts of conspiracy theories unironically forget that societies build a lot of stuff, and produce a lot of rubbish, so any ancient advanced society would be recognised by that long before any advanced craft they built.
Plus there's the elephant in the room about these sorts of "ancient aliens" claims, they always say that the aliens have an advanced form of technology known to us right now. Con artists in the 50s and 60s talked about the aliens operating rockets and wearing big bubble helmets and wristwatches, these days drones are the advanced tech, so they talk about aliens having drones.
Sorry for the rant, but it is a pretty short journey from "Ancient advanced civilisation" to "Ancient advanced Aryan civilisation" to "The nazis were right all along!"
I've seen too many people fall for this stuff, because the entry to the pipeline is just "harmless speculation" then 6 months later they're looking up nazi UFO videos and insisting that the "wrong side" won ww2.
One of the fun theories I read once is that the UFO are drones from a long dead society.
If Douglas Adams had the lathe, it'd be something out of the Hitchhiker's guide. Like all of them drones that were originally intended to provide towels on interstellar cruises, and as soon as we invent FTL they're gonna suddenly go active and visible and pierce the hull of the first ships pushing towels in the face of the poor astronauts.
That's an angle that's interesting to explore. Maybe include in it clues that hint at the society's demise, with a hint of veiled contemporary social commentary.
Only problem with that is it is unlikely that the only thing that survived from them were drones flying around, which would suffer wear and tear and run out of fuel no matter how advanced or efficient they are. We would expect to see the remains of infrastructure found beneath the earth, and if they used fossil fuels at any point in their society's development, we would be able to see the remains of that in the soil (and possibly ice cores if they were recent enough)
People who peddle these sorts of conspiracy theories unironically forget that societies build a lot of stuff, and produce a lot of rubbish, so any ancient advanced society would be recognised by that long before any advanced craft they built.
Plus there's the elephant in the room about these sorts of "ancient aliens" claims, they always say that the aliens have an advanced form of technology known to us right now. Con artists in the 50s and 60s talked about the aliens operating rockets and wearing big bubble helmets and wristwatches, these days drones are the advanced tech, so they talk about aliens having drones.
Sorry for the rant, but it is a pretty short journey from "Ancient advanced civilisation" to "Ancient advanced Aryan civilisation" to "The nazis were right all along!" I've seen too many people fall for this stuff, because the entry to the pipeline is just "harmless speculation" then 6 months later they're looking up nazi UFO videos and insisting that the "wrong side" won ww2.