Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:
Why do you have such great faith in that if we leave nature alone, everything will be alright?
1. I just know.
2. Nature is but a franchise for Life on this planet---untold eons of experience perfected its checks and balances, far beyond our comprehension. It knows what it's doing. Left alone it works fine.
3. We are ego-driven control freaks---Nature 'looks out' for everything; we look after our interests, only.
4. It's not a matter of it being 'alright'---it's an issue of naturality. Human settlements have come and gone over time---we're unearthing mounds and sites all the time, at some point manipulated to fuck by humans, rendered asunder for one reason or another---and every time Nature returns in these places, bringing life and balance back to it.
5. The quest for it to be 'alright' is part of our problem.
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:Nature has a tendency to decay, but nature has also given us intelligence, which we can grow and survive.
Sure, it does. Decay is a natural part of the cycle of life; death is as vital for life as much as "life" is for life. (With our beserk engrossment in "saving" life we've overpopulated, tipped the scales, made quite the mess.)
Frankly, what we praise ourselves with in terms of "intelligence" seems to me an oxymoron.
Every other species on this planet, well, each that hasn't been conquered and enslaved by us, is far wiser.
Our ultra-consciousness is both our doomsday curse and greatest hope.
But then again, we're still an infant of a species, "babes out of the woods," and civilized humans in particular think they know far more than they actually do, severely limited by ego, arrogance. So, I'm not a humanist masculist; I'm a naturalist masculist. Humans are rather pathetic and predictable; natural creatures are far more sound and deserving of my respect, as is the masculine---the last bridge between what was natural and what is unnatural.
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:
Fires, left alone with insufficient fuel being added, tend to burn out. Why would you think our sun is any different?
I don't. Stars die, others pop up. Life has 3 or 4 billion years left here, they say, barring some catastrophic occurance... then it's gone, maybe stuck dormant in some chunk of rock, adrift in space until its seeds get planted elsewhere.
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote: What if our sun used to be larger - Earth would have been hotter, molten - like has been suggested that the earth once was before human life "developed" here. A planet in our solar system further away from our sun would have had an atmosphere more like what Earth has now. A planet further away - like Mars, which they are discovering used to have a habitable atmosphere,
Oh, sure---I don't doubt that. I think
there is life on Mars right now. Our definition of life is fairly pale and small, limited; we have no clue what's out there. Some of the satellite photos I've seen of detailed surfaces of Mars gives me a sense that why we're letting geologists control Mars investigations and study---and not biologists or exobiologists---means that others suspect life is still extant and afraid of how that will weigh on humanity's arrogant, self-absorbed little mind.
Most scientists agree: where there is water, there will be or already is life. Frozen or no. Insects can be frozen for long periods of time and re-animate themselves once thawed. Simplier forms of life survive even more harsh, severe, brutal conditions---to think there
isn't life on Mars is
silly. Bacteria just refuses to be contained, controlled, or wiped out. Here is a superior form of life.
(Once Sol begins to go nova/supernova, engulfing Earth, it's estimated that Mars will be habitable again for a few million years. So, even if humans never make it there, whatever is there might get a second shot at evolution.)
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:and they are finding things that look suspiciously like civilization might once have been there... What if we came from Mars, but when that planet was dying, there was only enough ability to evacuate one ship, or maybe there were more ships that opted for different destinations, as no one knew for sure if Earth or any other place would be hospitable enough for the human race to survive (maybe we took some plants/animals with us, too - who knows the details at this point). Maybe it was so last-minute (humans have a tendency to go into denial that a major catastrophe could actually happen) that most of the records were lost, and at the beginning of our habitation of Earth, survival was so much more important than knowledge of the past - and parents probably wanted to protect their children from knowledge of the horrors of the past and our lost home planet - so the children could adjust better, and maybe also because the adults were not strong enough to talk about it. We might have brought a little something with us - like the Vedas - but mostly it has been day-to-day living for the past few thousand years, so by now much of that time period would be lost.
The Vedas isn't that old. Anyway, it's not like I haven't thought all that before---life could have come here from meteorites (before Earth's atmosphere was complete, our planet looked very much like the moon, bombarded constantly with stellar debris), or formed independently from inorganic compounds.
It's quite possible Mars once had a civilization; I've examined all this so-called evidence (and "the face"), all of which can be explained, except for a five-sided, symmetrical "pyramid"---
this thing---that never sat right me as a naturally occuring rock formation. Too smooth, too symmetrical. And it's possible that's where homo sapiens came from originally. No proof, but it's interesting to speculate about...
We'll never know by sending stupid robots there, however.
(Or maybe an alien stopped here long ago for a camp-out and took a crap somewhere and that's how life began. It's as possible as any other theory.)
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:
As for Lucy and the "missing link" - as far as I understand the origins of HIV, it was passes on to the human species through contact with apes. Apes are closely genetically related, so maybe some kinky human/ape sex produced some offspring. Maybe the reason they can't completely trace the development of humans is because the true origins are on Mars - or maybe even some other abandoned planet from another burned out sun.
The Infinite has been around forever, so it's reasonable to assume there was a lot that happened that we don't exactly know about.
Yep. (Katy covered the HIV bit.) I wouldn't argue against any of that---again, though, you're completely homocentric here and only looking at life in terms of bipedal types like us. Might as well be called "Star Trek Syndrome"---every species worthy of interest looks exactly like us (except with wrinkled noses or funky foreheads). What limited imagination...
Well, I guess a species as awry as ours needs something to feel good about...