Reinventing the ball

Samsung may have rattled through a number of new technologies in its CES 2020 keynote, but Ballie quite simply stole the show.

The very next day, Downtime interviewed several etymologists to try to get to the bottom of the rolling robot’s unusual name, and many speculated it could have derived from the fact that it’s a ball.

Our fascination with balls can be traced as far back as Costa Rica’s Diquís times (700-1530 AD), when over 300 stone balls were sculpted and dotted around the houses of chiefs. Brain-damaging History channel alien conspiracy show Ancient aliens has deemed these spheres too perfect to have been created by human beings, but when you look at them now, you just wonder why these supposedly super-intelligent aliens weren’t able to make them follow people around and tell them when to go for a run. Ballie can.

Say aliens really did make those stone balls. We’ll let them have it. But haven’t they been resting on their laurels ever since? Maybe they were smarter than us once, but we’ve come a long way in the past few years. Any alien at CES would have seen that.

At this point, what is it that extraterrestrials are meant to be able to do that we can’t? It’s always said that they’re watching us, but we can only see one species sticking cameras on its balls.