Anti_Burglar wrote:masukuma wrote:the biggest issue i have with these alien stories is that the aliens in them look like disfigured humans! like really? if life was to evolve on other planets - who says it would follow the same path as ours?
you know? primordial soup... RNA, DNA e.t.c.? and the odds of that happening... why would we think it would replicate itself almost to the letter and end up with bipedal organisms with "heads" and "brains" in their heads, 2 eyes e.t.c. UNLESS life is actually planted ... Kinda like what what Star Trek Alluded to ... we may have the same progenitors who embeded "seed" genetic code to guild the evolution of us and the aliens we thing are out there into the humanoid form we know (2 hands, 2 legs, torso, head, brain, eyes e.t.c)
You have not realized that everything came from the same thing that exploded? Why then would they be different?
On what could you possibly base your wild imagination that life on planet x should be different from life in planet d? When they all came from the same big bang of that thing that exploded?
The biggest issue you have should be with your brain.
since if the theory is sound... it's chaos theory ok... Let's assume the 14 billion years the visible universe we know has been around had exactly the same thing conditions at all pockets on the universe - ok? So our story goes something like this...
1) we circle an average sized star
2) we are located in the goldilocks zone of the system of planets revolving around this average sized star.
3) this means the conditions were right to do a cosmic rolling of dice over and over again over the hedean and archaean period to create life over and over again
4) the DNA we have had to created does random mutations and what decides whether the mutated DNA gets a chance to spread is
- is the mutation useful in the environment it is exposed? for example a mutation that would produce photo sensitive organs called eyes would make the creature survive better than the creatures that didn't get this mutation.
- a mutation that would create a parasympathetic and neural network possible would fare better than one that does not
- a mutation that would create a 3rd leg would essentially make the pack of DNA that houses have locomotional challenges.
- a mutation that places eyes in the front of a herbivorous pack of DNA would make it a sitting duck when it is in the midst of it's other herbivore kin who have eyes on their side. It would have little chance to spread this DNA mutation forward - Unless its too big or in an isolate island somewhere where there are no carnivores. A mutation that places eyes on the side of a chase and hunt carnivorous pack of DNA would end up impeding it and making it uncompetitive to a mutation that places eyes in the front of a chase and hunt carnivore.
- but it's possible to have no mutations and find a condition that just works for you
5) it's not just local conditions... we have global events like cooling of the planet to combine with these mutations
- we have conditions such as volcanoes exploding on one side of the planet causing climate change on another part of the planet
- we have some other random things such as earth quakes due to tectonic plates that cause tsunamis that sweep these packs of DNA into the sea and kill them.
- we have shifting of magnetic poles and climatic changes that follow
6) Not just local... but we have an asteroid belt not so far from us that is throwing projectiles all over but we also have a big brother called jupiter that takes hits for us from these rock and others doing rounds around the average sized star and when it misses (or is located at a location where it's gravitational pull cannot rein in a rock heading our way - we have events similar to what happened at the Yucatan peninsular 65 million years ago. that gives a chance for smaller warm blooded creatures to populate the earth which means if it didnt strike the optimally evolved reptilians would have eaten them and not given them a chance to grow.
7) all these are random events that have butterfly effects that have repercussions on such a thing as you having eyes.... or having 2 hands or having hair. think about it - what would have happened if termites had eaten the tree that the creature that had the 1st modern brain was born on? and it fell to it's death in it's childhood? or a snake would have scared the parents and let it fall to it's death? Kinda like what would have happened to you if your grand pa one day decided to use a different route back home and got bit by a snake before he got your dad? Or if your dad didn't read exactly as he did and went to the school he went and saw your mum in a music festival? Or Or if Tom Mboya did what my grandpa who was in the same school did - leave masomo early and not finish to become who he became and organize the 'Student Airlifts' that enabled Barak Senior deciding to go to the US and not hold his horses and getting married to a young american girl and get a young man who is president now? butterfly effects my friend! butterfly effects!
So let's assume all these 7 conditions can be replicated butterfly effect after butterfly effect on different areas of the universe as we know it - ok? Except for 1 condition time... let's let make an error of -+ 1/14000 - that is 1 million years...considering humans have not been around for 1 million years... what happens if this cosmic crapshoot takes place 1 million years earlier somewhere else and the 'humans' on that planet have 1 million years ahead on us. Considering we invented shoes 40k years ago and have done most of everything that is written in the last 10k years (society and religion and laws) and created 90% of all our data in the last 12 months and youtube that is 10 years old has over 400 years worth of videos (you would take something like 400 years to watch all videos on youtube as of TODAY). Let's assume these creatures follow script and discover E=MC*C just like us - will they have political conditions similar to us? considering a country like the US was colonized due to things like explosion of Mount Tambora? Will they have morality and religion that would prevent themselves from finishing each other? Let's assume they do all these things and somehow pass each of these tests - they pass these tasks 1 million years before us.... what kind of conversations would they have with us? I reckon they would do the same thing you do with maize... you cultivate maize - you don't reach out to maize and try to communicate with it! do you talk to monkeys? Can we concieve what these creatures would be capable of? All these are just from the top of my head...looking into the future... what can they be capable of? Can we just look back a few years ago ok... say the 30's to see what the creative minds thought the future would look like
or maybe the 1865 (less than 250 years ago) that had ideas of a trip to the moon looking like this
Or Star Trek of the 60s-70s with guesses of the year 2364
Facinating!!
What is 1 million years? can we conceive what 1 million years of human development is like? or should we accept that in the short run the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative when they materialize? what is 1 million years?
My take... while it's possible to have life in the universe - it would be naive to think that this life would follow exactly the same path as ours to produce creatures like us at the exact time as us for both sets to find it interesting to communicate...
As Arthur Clarke once said... there are only 2 possibilities : either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying!
All Mushrooms are edible! Some Mushroom are only edible ONCE!