Monkeys or Aliens?

[afrawfraw]

And they WERE gods when they had power over us.

The sun, the rain, the earth, the seasons, the everything.

It all used to matter to us.

My children matter a great deal to me. They are not gods. My wife matters a great deal to me. She is a goddess because I made her one in my head. She is a human female. Forces of nature may be gods because you prey to them, but in fact it is just Nature doing nature.

We used to RESPECT nature. We thanked animals for there contribution. We took our trash and used it as fertilizer. We revered the oceans because of great power. Now we are delusional. Crazy ass people running around saying, "This was made for me!" We're the reason for the universe being here." I'm sure Guy Incognito will agree that 99% of the Universe as we understand it today, snuffs out life in a millisecond. If this is "here for us", why is it so destructive and dangerous and void of recognizable life to us. Why will it take thousands of years just to understand the boundaries of our universe!? Perfect world my ass hole.

 

[guy incognito]

There were gods.
The wilderness.
Fire.
Weather.
The ocean.

We have conquered all, and taken most of their power though.



I know.

Then I said.
There are planets, where it is the SAME AS WATER.
It isn't IN its gas phase.
It is in OCEANS, and RAINS from the sky in clouds,
It runs downhill,

It's water in that atmosphere.

You're dense.

What do you mean "the same as water"? You mean it is liquid? You mean it is in liquid form and follows the laws of physics like gravity and such? No one ever disputed that. You do realize that even though it is liquid, and will pool in oceans, and will run down hill, that is in fact nothing like water? It will not be polar like water and will not disolve anything. It will also be at an incredibly cold temperature which inhibits chemical reactions. Not just biological chemistry, but all chemical reactions will be reduced by many many orders of magnitude compared to water.

 

[afrawfraw]

What do you mean "the same as water"? You mean it is liquid? You mean it is in liquid form and follows the laws of physics like gravity and such? No one ever disputed that. You do realize that even though it is liquid, and will pool in oceans, and will run down hill, that is in fact nothing like water? It will not be polar like water and will not disolve anything. It will also be at an incredibly cold temperature which inhibits chemical reactions. Not just biological chemistry, but all chemical reactions will be reduced by many many orders of magnitude compared to water.

According to what we currently know about reactions, you bet.

 

[cannabineer]

All of them. Why doesn't a lion kill when he's full? After the family has eaten, they watch Zebras drink, even come to the water hole to drink across from prey. Why doesn't it attack? Why not stock up on calories?

SOMETHING posses it to still it's instinct to kill. Something we don't have. Why don't lions rape? Why don't they wipe out other prides?

Lions have evolved into their niche.
Hunting prey is DANGEROUS ... typically lions die of wounds received either taking down or defending their kills. Lions would most definitely prefer to scavenge, just like the other apex predator of the savanna, the hyena.

Lions do rape.

They make game efforts to wipe out other prides if the lion density gets too high.
Lions are animals.

Their decisions not to hunt, enter combat etc. are evolutionary optima of behavior refined through many iterations of dead lions.

Afrawfraw, what i am seeing in your posts is a value judgment that humans are bad. I can live with that, even if I don't unconditionally agree.
However I also see a parallel argument, that humans are unnatural. This I contest by saying we're made of, in and by nature. We are a natural phenomenon, as animals.

I don't know if I have this correct, but my take on your principal moral objection to humanity as it exists today is ... koyaanisqatsi, a life out of balance. Our technology has led to a resource- and energy-dense lifestyle by a huge population. This is unsustainable, barring new technologies to keep pushing the malthusian frontier back into ever bigger numbers. These technologies are by no means assured. but my point is that our ways, fueled by the technology of matter and politics, is moving way faster than the homeostatic effects of natural selection, which shaped a lion's idea of reward/risk management.

We've outraced Darwin and are perhaps out on a limb in terms of mid-term sustainability.

However the idea that we are somehow outside of nature, or specifically outside of nature (the romantic idea of a perfect ecology) is one that I won't endorse. I don't buy into the crypto-animist concept of Gaia or a superorgansm or the virulent wrongness of a camaro on a four-lane blacktop. Our cities, our refineries and ghettos and rainforest logging operations and organotin plumes and possible climatic noisiness ... all these are nature being natural, through us. Jmo.

The Darwinian feedback loop WILL catch up with us, and it will probably be spectacular. But i have great faith in nature's power to put things right, given time, and many many dead humans.
cn

 

[cannabineer]

i was just using a reference point


honestly we cant tell if life is out there even in the remedial form

untill we get out there

and as a species we have too many problems at home to take care of before we start moving outward

just what the universe needs a bunch of hill billys on the move from rock to rock lol

At the beginning of every great radiation of new forms ... were wandering hillbillies; tough, unrefined survivor types. If you look up the lystrosaurs of the early Triassic, that'll illustrate the metaphor. cn

 

[afrawfraw]

Lions have evolved into their niche.
Hunting prey is DANGEROUS ... typically lions die of wounds received either taking down or defending their kills. Lions would most definitely prefer to scavenge, just like the other apex predator of the savanna, the hyena.

Lions do rape.

They make game efforts to wipe out other prides if the lion density gets too high.
Lions are animals.

Their decisions not to hunt, enter combat etc. are evolutionary optima of behavior refined through many iterations of dead lions.

Afrawfraw, what i am seeing in your posts is a value judgment that humans are bad. I can live with that, even if I don't unconditionally agree.
However I also see a parallel argument, that humans are unnatural. This I contest by saying we're made of, in and by nature. We are a natural phenomenon, as animals.

I don't know if I have this correct, but my take on your principal moral objection to humanity as it exists today is ... koyaanisqatsi, a life out of balance. Our technology has led to a resource- and energy-dense lifestyle by a huge population. This is unsustainable, barring new technologies to keep pushing the malthusian frontier back into ever bigger numbers. These technologies are by no means assured. but my point is that our ways, fueled by the technology of matter and politics, is moving way faster than the homeostatic effects of natural selection, which shaped a lion's idea of reward/risk management.

We've outraced Darwin and are perhaps out on a limb in terms of mid-term sustainability.

However the idea that we are somehow outside of nature, or specifically outside of nature (the romantic idea of a perfect ecology) is one that I won't endorse. I don't buy into the crypto-animist concept of Gaia or a superorgansm or the virulent wrongness of a camaro on a four-lane blacktop. Our cities, our refineries and ghettos and rainforest logging operations and organotin plumes and possible climatic noisiness ... all these are nature being natural, through us. Jmo.

The Darwinian feedback loop WILL catch up with us, and it will probably be spectacular. But i have great faith in nature's power to put things right, given time, and many many dead humans.
cn

Close. I'm just stating we're another epic failure and the reason is we branched from all other life forms by creating societies. Lions do NOT rape! They are however Bi-sexual, Sans the Alpha male. If a female lion does not wish to mate, she simply drops to the floor. The male releases his grip on the neck and will circle for another go. If the female does not receive by standing, he sleeps on the couch.

 

[afrawfraw]

Foul have forced copulation. Some say Dolphins do as well. Don't confuse forced copulation with RAPE.

 

[cannabineer]

We may or may not be an epic failure.
We might possibly be the incubator for the next step ... something as far above animal life as we know it ... as it is above pre-Cambrian unicells.
I'd like that.
However, assessing that will be left to the historians, assuming any survive andor emerge if things go south.

But it is my belief/thesis that this is all nature acting naturally.

In re pretechnical humans living in harmony with nature - what we are seeing are survivors. Plains Indian tribes who didn't learn economy were wiped out by a bad season or two.
The Easter Islanders certainly (almost?) extinguished themselves in a vicious spiral of overstraining their local ecology.
Pretechnical (more properly, preindustrial. The spear is a technology.) humans aren't (weren't) inherently more moral than the strip miners.
The problem is, Plains Indians were brought to their current (or remembered, by anthropologists) harmonious lifestyle by natural selection. There hasn't been enough time yet for strip miners to show the naturally-selective feedback loop reach up and bite them on their Diesel-driving butts. cn

 

[afrawfraw]

We may or may not be an epic failure.
We might possibly be the incubator for the next step ... something as far above animal life as we know it ... as it is above pre-Cambrian unicells.
I'd like that.
However, assessing that will be left to the historians, assuming any survive andor emerge if things go south.

But it is my belief/thesis that this is all nature acting naturally.

In re pretechnical humans living in harmony with nature - what we are seeing are survivors. Plains Indian tribes who didn't learn economy were wiped out by a bad season or two.
The Easter Islanders certainly (almost?) extinguished themselves in a vicious spiral of overstraining their local ecology.
Pretechnical (more properly, preindustrial. The spear is a technology.) humans aren't (weren't) inherently more moral than the strip miners.
The problem is, Plains Indians were brought to their current (or remembered, by anthropologists) harmonious lifestyle by natural selection. There hasn't been enough time yet for strip miners to show the naturally-selective feedback loop reach up and bite them on their Diesel-driving butts. cn

Oh, we'll fail. That's evolution. We're on the same page, just different sentences. It would be nice to think that we will evolve into star dust flying on a wave of light. More realistically, we will wake up one morning, and the news will say, "We fucked it up this time."

Dinosaurs failed. At least it took them 135 million years. 10,000 years warrants an Epic in there somewhere.

 

[afrawfraw]

Maybe a Thunder Dome scenario is possible, but I doubt it. We're too efficient at killing. Humans have developed more ways of killing than doing anything else. Sad fact.

 

[cannabineer]

Maybe a Thunder Dome scenario is possible, but I doubt it. We're too efficient at killing. Humans have developed more ways of killing than doing anything else. Sad fact.

"Two men enter. Nobody leaves."

Maybe.
But you'll have noticed how far the "environmental" movement has come in just one lifetime. We're responding already to the evolutionary pressures that made for stable aboriginal populations. The difference is twofold -
1) the technology that makes us so efficient at ecocide,
balanced against
2) considered conscious feedback into our decisions and actions.

Imo THIS is the Thunderdome. What wins ... our destructive side, or ourcapacity to find anor create a new path? My faith in mankind is still so intact (or naïve) that I'm laying money on option 2 winning out. Maybe, just maybe ... deus est machina. cn

 

[afrawfraw]

"Two men enter. Nobody leaves."

Maybe.
But you'll have noticed how far the "environmental" movement has come in just one lifetime. We're responding already to the evolutionary pressures that made for stable aboriginal populations. The difference is twofold -
1) the technology that makes us so efficient at ecocide,
balanced against
2) considered conscious feedback into our decisions and actions.

Imo THIS is the Thunderdome. What wins ... our destructive side, or ourcapacity to find anor create a new path? My faith in mankind is still so intact (or naïve) that I'm laying money on option 2 winning out. Maybe, just maybe ... deus est machina. cn

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! You have faith in Humanity. Roger that.

You can be Mad Max, I'll be The postman. ROFL.

As for "Going Green", I think it's laughable. A couple million years will turn US into oil. It's a little arrogant to think we will have a lasting impact on this rock in the long run, for the good or bad. But in the near future, it will effect the species now, which effects the species of the future. To me it equates to what shape the scar will be of a bullet wound. Different shots and calibers will effect the scar, but it will be just that. A memory of an injury.

 

[cannabineer]

Have you read "The Postman" by David Brin? It's a pretty good book from one of my favorite sf writers. It also ends on a note of real hope.

So different from that disaster of a flick. What that oik Costner did to the book in movie form is just so very wrong. Of course, that was a guy who thought "Waterworld" was a story worth telling. It wasn't, even with Jeanne Tripplehorn nekkid. cn

 

[afrawfraw]

Have you read "The Postman" by David Brin? It's a pretty good book from one of my favorite sf writers. It also ends on a note of real hope.

So different from that disaster of a flick. What that oik Costner did to the book in movie form is just so very wrong. Of course, that was a guy who thought "Waterworld" was a story worth telling. It wasn't, even with Jeanne Tripplehorn nekkid. cn

I concur. Hollywood Murders literature. Jurassic park for example. I wish they did a Stephen King's Gun Slinger series as a movie. That would be epic. I CALL THE VOICE OF THE TRAIN!

I used the reference because I would be the lunatic Atheist in a postman's uniform passing off TERRIBLE Shakespeare as performing art!

 

[afrawfraw]

When I was 10 I bought an old paper back from a store in Cambridge. It was about a post-apocalyptic world. Small villages had started, and new religions were starting to take hold. A traveler, with a wooden cart, containing all the writings of all the major religions which were apparently the cause of the "Dark Times" wandered from village to village, showing the errors of religion. I lost it in the move back stateside. It was a real piece. I am ashamed to have lost it.

 

[Finshaggy]

My guess, which follows natural selection, is that a new Homo-species will develop, and then attack and kill off the old, inadequate species. We did this to a phew Homo species over the years. I feel complex emotions will HAVE to be removed from the equation. Simple Psychological traumas are important (Baby sees mommy ripped apart by lions=Don't fuck with lions, run when you see lions), but beyond that you just cloud Rational Logic.

Anti-Social behavior is being studied in depth for this reason. If a DNA link is found, you can bet the farm the governments will try to eliminate it. Humans who are NOT compelled to seek approval or feel, could never be controlled in a civil or humane manner. Western Psychology in general is YIKES to begin with, however I see a great value in logical, emotionless people.

I don't think that being emotionless is the next evolutionary step.

That's just Star Trek hopes.
There are so many more important things than being reasonable.
Being reasonable is for when there is no struggle, and evolution happens in the midst of struggle.

I think the next step is more...Separation from time.

 

[cannabineer]

I've read a lot od sf but don't recognize that story. What hooked me into sf was finding a copy of Niven's "Neutron Star" when I was twelve.
And the Lensman series!! With modern cgi, that would make some cool film! Babylon 5 meets a de-hippied version of the Jedi. cn

 

[Finshaggy]

My children matter a great deal to me. They are not gods. My wife matters a great deal to me. She is a goddess because I made her one in my head. She is a human female. Forces of nature may be gods because you prey to them, but in fact it is just Nature doing nature.

We used to RESPECT nature. We thanked animals for there contribution. We took our trash and used it as fertilizer. We revered the oceans because of great power. Now we are delusional. Crazy ass people running around saying, "This was made for me!" We're the reason for the universe being here." I'm sure Guy Incognito will agree that 99% of the Universe as we understand it today, snuffs out life in a millisecond. If this is "here for us", why is it so destructive and dangerous and void of recognizable life to us. Why will it take thousands of years just to understand the boundaries of our universe!? Perfect world my ass hole.

If you can see your wife as a godess, then you can understand.

Imagine your wife was a queen of an entire country. And everyone there felt about her as you do. And she was the reason the apples bloomed in fall.
THAT is a real god.
And THOSE used to be real.

Not in actual human form.
But they gave them personalities, and so loved them like humans

 

[Finshaggy]

What do you mean "the same as water"? You mean it is liquid? You mean it is in liquid form and follows the laws of physics like gravity and such? No one ever disputed that. You do realize that even though it is liquid, and will pool in oceans, and will run down hill, that is in fact nothing like water? It will not be polar like water and will not disolve anything. It will also be at an incredibly cold temperature which inhibits chemical reactions. Not just biological chemistry, but all chemical reactions will be reduced by many many orders of magnitude compared to water.

You said it wouldn't work as a gas.
So yes you did dispute it.
I was never saying it was gas.
I was saying that there are planets with liquid methane.
Which you now seem to understand

Life COULD form there, similar to how it did in water.
Since it is liquid in some places, which you WERE disputing.

 

[afrawfraw]

I've read a lot od sf but don't recognize that story. What hooked me into sf was finding a copy of Niven's "Neutron Star" when I was twelve.
And the Lensman series!! With modern cgi, that would make some cool film! Babylon 5 meets a de-hippied version of the Jedi. cn

Oh I don't remember the author, It was just a striking story about rising above general lunatic practices.