>But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Its an unproven hypothesis.
It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.
When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.
Why do you need evidence to write books about a hypotheses you have? Many people do that. And I think he never claimed to know the truth about it, he was just presenting his ideas of how it could be.
You don't have to agree with it. But the lack of evidence doesn't disprove the hypothesis. Yes it doesn't prove it either.
You can write as many books as you like. But if you spend all your energy trying to convince people of your unproven hypothesis, rather than testing and proving that hypothesis, no one has to take you seriously.
Some things can't be tested (easily). There are many string theory scientists that wrote many books about a completely unproven theory. I guess you take them equally seriously.
Sure - it was considered a near certainty planets orbited other stars given all that was known about the formation of our solar system.
That said, it's still an extremely low probabilty that life from other systems came and visited our particular rock some time in the past million years (and interacted with humans).
Some things you can easily dismiss with the proof of the opposite or something conflicting. But some parts of the hypothesis can't be either disproofed or proofed.
You could personally dismiss it, but you can't proof your point either. Like general archeology says humanity is only as old as the oldest evidence of it ever found, and some pseudo scientific hypothesis might say humans are older. You can't prove or disprove that. But you can't prove or disprove either that humanity is exactly as old as the oldest evidence we have. But when some older bones are discovered then you have proof that humanity is at least that old.
So yeah, absence of evidence doesn't disprove the hypothesis.
But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about
EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"