[Ian] people are thinking very very hard to "conceive" of any conceivable thing we might call life existing.
[Arlo] yes, many have suggested that the evidence of extraterrestial life is there, we just don't see it as such because we have a narrow preconceived notion of what it should look like. to paraphrase pirsig, "e.t. comes knocking on the door and you say 'go away, i'm looking for e.t.', and so e.t. goes away. puzzling." one sci-fi book i read once (forget the title at the moment) had the earth "buffered" by extraterrestials to prevent the earth from contacting/finding other life forms until it matured enough to make such contact beneficial. sort of like the prime directive of star trek combined with a dampening field to prevent the interception of extraterrestial transmissions. so maybe our "aloneness" is because we are bugs in a jar. god knows, look around, do YOU think humanity is ready for contact with another world? so my jury is (as always) out on the final verdict as well. [Ian] That's not what I'm saying - some anthropically-convenient-creationists are maybe. It's not about me, my ancestors or even humans .... that is just "happenstance" .... its about an existing living thing of any kind [Arlo] And, as I've said, the only evidence we have of life existing outside Earth is contested evidence of microbes on asteroids. Until we find some evidence, ANY evidence, it is unavoidably presumptuous to claim that the cosmos "is perfectly balanced to support life". What we have by evidence is a vast cosmos entirely devoid of life except for on one small planet in one small arm of an otherwise unremarkable galaxy. And that to me suggests just the opposite, that the cosmos is NOT balanced to support life, but that in very, very rare occurrences it may happen despite the otherwise indifference of the greater cosmos. I'll go out on a limb and say that the next big "Copernican revolution" will involve the discovery that we are not alone in the universe. And maybe this will be something like E.T or maybe something like ID4. Maybe we will find out we share consciousness with other evolved beings, or maybe we will find out that to these other beings we are no better than ants are to us. Either way, next big revolution. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
