I think people are trying to take what they can perceive, and then come up with answers based on those perceptions. As science takes on different questions and gets better at answering them, and as technology improves in unrelated fields, it becomes easy to take one thing and extrapolate it as an answer to something else.
So, be it aliens seeding planet earth, or we're all in the Matrix, or we sprung from apes/chimpanzees/monkeys, the theories will keep flying as long as people are searching for answers using the observable physical evidence around them.
Lately, however, I think there's more wishful thinking than science being introduced in some of these theories. If everything is programmed, then the burden of choice and being accountable for decisions is essentially lifted. It becomes fate, the way things are, rather than something that can be controlled or changed. In other words, it becomes an easy way to get rid of blame for one's wrong actions.
When we look around and see order on a magnitude that makes it difficult to believe that we came from a cosmic accident or chaos, that there must be some kind of intelligence behind it, but we prefer to believe in aliens from a distant planet being responsible for it, rather than, say, a God who is our Father and is proving us so we can return to His presence, we're still believing in something that we have not seen, have no actual proof of existence or means to verify, other than ambiguous sightings and dubious testimonies.
I don't think we're programmed virtual avatars running around in a digital world. I think we do have free will. I do think we are as real as real gets, in whatever capacity such a definition allows us to be unique, responsible beings with the ability to overcome and change, improve, and collectively make things better.
Thank you for your reply.
I fully agree with your vision of thinking.
Really childishly looks like all theories of science.
In the last decades, we have discovered that science has made just preconditions until today, without any proof, and most of it is not even a scientific fantasy. This is completely absurd.
But we have time when children learn from the already destroyed theory and that is like self-destruction.
The most important thing we move away from nature, from a normal different gender family to where we can still find the answer.