It's a great big universe and we're all small and puny.
If there were dinosaurs--one species among the many--who were a heck of a lot smarter than we know--could there have been some sort of civilization a hundred million years ago that we don't even have evidence of? I mean, suppose they made things of wood that doesn't fossilize so well? Could there have been intelligent beings before us?
Maybe it's not that humans are late to arrive, but that we are early in the human race. Have you heard of the anthropic principal? It one incarnation it says that if life is rare in the universe, anyone around to worry about such things must live in one of the super rare places. But suppose that intelligent life is inherently short-lived. Anyone smart enough to make a civilization is smart enough to destroy their world. If intelligence is by nature short-lived, the anthropic principle says that anyone intelligent enough to worry about it is going to live in the first few hundred millennia of that intelligence, and remark on how long the world went without them.
Physics, the order of the universe, seems to follow laws that are best understood by people with borderline autistic/aspbergery mindsets. Perhaps this means that God is really autistic, in that he created a universe along the lines of a geeky numerical obsession. But of course, we all create God in our own image.
Perhaps we have already learned how to appease that cosmic interplanetary god. F'rinstance, It demands that we eat or we will weaken and collapse. God demands that we eat. And that we sleep. And drink. This things It demands of us.
Eternal torment for not appeasing a deity seems to be a human invention. I can't take it seriously. Besides, would we even be ourselves after an eternity of torment. Would our eternal souls suffer senile dementia after a few centuries?
I think it was George Carlin who pointed out that it's presumptuous of us to think we can destroy the planet. We can fuck things up, sure, and wipe out places we love, or species we appreciate, but if a vandalous human race set off every atomic bomb, and opened the flow on every oil well on the planet, we might kill ourselves, and we might creat an impressive mass extinction, but life will remain, and evolve all over again, and the planet will keep spinning and orbiting with no perceptible change. We aren't as powerful in the face of nature as we'd like to think.
And, of course, I'm as full of shit as the next guy, and my beliefs are wrong. In fact, a fair fraction of what I've proposed isn't really my belief anyway. You just got me thinking about stuff and junk.
no subject
If there were dinosaurs--one species among the many--who were a heck of a lot smarter than we know--could there have been some sort of civilization a hundred million years ago that we don't even have evidence of? I mean, suppose they made things of wood that doesn't fossilize so well? Could there have been intelligent beings before us?
Maybe it's not that humans are late to arrive, but that we are early in the human race. Have you heard of the anthropic principal? It one incarnation it says that if life is rare in the universe, anyone around to worry about such things must live in one of the super rare places. But suppose that intelligent life is inherently short-lived. Anyone smart enough to make a civilization is smart enough to destroy their world. If intelligence is by nature short-lived, the anthropic principle says that anyone intelligent enough to worry about it is going to live in the first few hundred millennia of that intelligence, and remark on how long the world went without them.
Physics, the order of the universe, seems to follow laws that are best understood by people with borderline autistic/aspbergery mindsets. Perhaps this means that God is really autistic, in that he created a universe along the lines of a geeky numerical obsession. But of course, we all create God in our own image.
Perhaps we have already learned how to appease that cosmic interplanetary god. F'rinstance, It demands that we eat or we will weaken and collapse. God demands that we eat. And that we sleep. And drink. This things It demands of us.
Eternal torment for not appeasing a deity seems to be a human invention. I can't take it seriously. Besides, would we even be ourselves after an eternity of torment. Would our eternal souls suffer senile dementia after a few centuries?
I think it was George Carlin who pointed out that it's presumptuous of us to think we can destroy the planet. We can fuck things up, sure, and wipe out places we love, or species we appreciate, but if a vandalous human race set off every atomic bomb, and opened the flow on every oil well on the planet, we might kill ourselves, and we might creat an impressive mass extinction, but life will remain, and evolve all over again, and the planet will keep spinning and orbiting with no perceptible change. We aren't as powerful in the face of nature as we'd like to think.
And, of course, I'm as full of shit as the next guy, and my beliefs are wrong. In fact, a fair fraction of what I've proposed isn't really my belief anyway. You just got me thinking about stuff and junk.
Wheeee!!!