3 ms·
>the amount of things that happened to allow homo sapiens to evolve is staggering Yes.. but.. one perspective is it's only so staggering if we look at it in th
by mrlala 7y ago
>the amount of things that happened to allow homo sapiens to evolve is staggering
Yes.. but.. one perspective is it's only so staggering if we look at it in the frame of "Look at all the things that had to happen in order for us to specifically develop"
If you remove what we consider "us" from this equation, I'm not sure it's all that staggering. Well, it is of course, but maybe not really. With the absolute insane amount of time that has passed and all the matter everywhere interactive, there is so much going on that I'm not sure it's much of a wonder that something happened.
By something, I suppose I mean the very beginnings of what we call life. And where it goes from there is just an absolutely infinite number of possibilities. But we somehow look at just ourselves and think "wow look at all the stuff that had to happen to make me" but there are an infinite number of ways that "me" could have been.
I'm not sure I'm explaining it all that well... I suppose my point is over so much time it's not so surprising that something happened. We are just one possibility in billions, so there are so many ways the entire of our planet could have played out.. or not at all. And it's the same all throughout the universe.
Speaking of which, does anyone have any articles or books on what other similarly intelligent life could actually be like? I try to think, what if we were intelligent sea creatures. Would we have been able to do as much being mostly confined to water.. would we have been able to come up with basic technologies to get out of the water and harvest resources, or maybe we would have just found ways to mainly use resources found in water. But could we have developed enough technology? What if we were shaped completely differently, is there something about our form that has been efficiently evolved over time, or are there countless other sizes/shapes that would have allowed us to be at the state we are now.
I've really always thought that any intelligent life on other planets would probably be so ridiculously foreign it would probably scare the shit out of us. There's no reason to think they have the same "emotions". That's just an evolutionary trait to our planet. Would they have humor? The same sense of happiness and sadness? I don't see why a brain would naturally evolve in a similar way given a completely different set of evolution, although I have no knowledge in this area.
Well thanks for the existential crisis.
- baq 7y agoseems like you need to read some good scifi. i'd recommend the culture series.