Thread: My view on... Everything?

First off why would anyone want to visit earth from another planet? They just going to pop across the universe to say hello to an inferior life form. Assuming they can actually get here we probably look like an ape to them. Would you waste your time visting a planet that could be months, or years away just to see some stupid apes?

As for technologly, thats an easy question. Technological growth is exponential. Its hard to advance when you have say poor tools. We advance more in one year today than we did in 10 years back 20 years ago.

But how is it that it's just in the past century that we started develping these tools? When the human race has been around for atleast tens of thousands of years... I'm not saying I believe any of this stuff... Just theories... Because I don't believe many things about this world... But I lmpw that many of the vast truths that people believe are not true... But I myself don't know the real truth... These are just theories...

We didn't even have electricity untill just recently. And even if we had electricity its not worth much if we didn't have a way to move it from one place to another. Or what about gas? Sure a long time ago oil practically boubled out of the ground but we couldn't get it out like today. And even if we could, we didn't know how to make it into gas.

Go out into the wild with nothing on you and try to build a computer. You can't its impossible. Lets just look at a computer, what do you need to build it? Well you need electricity, a way to store energy and a way to produce it. You need to know how to drill for oil and how to make plastic out of oil, and how to shape the plastic. You need to know how to dig out all kinds of metal and to proccess the metal then to shape the metal into wires and stuff. Then you need lots of time to be able to learn how to build the computer, which means you have to have better means of getting food than going out to hunt all day.

It takes a long time to build up all that stuff. How about trying to go out into the wild with nothing on you along with 100 people and try to build a computer. It may take you, your entire life to build a computer and you have the huge advantage that you already know 1000's of times more than people did back then.

OMG You type a lot...

Important to note: Saying humans evolved from apes is a correct statement, but it can also be misleading. We split off from the apes, creating a new branch in the family. So the existing apes didn't actually become humans, they split off into two branches and became separate species. Also, to quell a common misconception: Humans are not "more evolved" than apes. Because of the afformentioned splitting, humans and apes are EQUALLY evolved. In fact, a human is no more evolved than a mouse or a dog or a strain of bacteria. It's a misconception stemming from the idea that evolution is somehow a measure of progress. Evolution is no such thing, if anything it's a measure of how readily adapted a species is to its environment. You can say that humans are more intelligent than other species and be perfectly correct, but saying we're more evolved is NOT correct.
Apes are still around because we are merely a branch off of their family, a result of divergent evolution. We are no more and no less than great apes. Exceptionally intelligent, but rather bald apes. I'd suggest reading The Origin of Species, it's always a good place to start when reading on evolution. Or if you don't have enough time, try browsing through The Index to Creationist Claims. Or, more specifically, read this article on why apes are still around.

To add a little to what Tsen was saying (which is all spot-on), it's easy to fall into an anthropocentric trap whereby people judge how much other creatures have evolved based solely on their intelligence, communication skills, tool use and ability to innovate. Why those characteristics? Why, it's because those happen to be the skills humans possess to a greater degree than any other creature - and since we're the best thing on god's green earth (right? right?), creatures who fall behind in those categories must be less complex, important, evolved, and meaningful in the grand scheme of things. False.

Intelligence won't do you a lick of good if you're caught 1,000 meters below sea level in nothing but your skivvies; tool use won't get you anywhere when you're on the arctic tundra facing off against a hungry polar bear empty-handed; a Shakespearean vocabulary and masterful oration will get you diddly squat if you're stranded in the desert. In each of those instances you'll find that the native fauna seem to stay alive far better than you; are, using Tsen's definition, much more evolved.

Basically I wrote this post in my head before scrolling down to see Tsen had already concocted it, but I felt like really bashing the point in anyways.

Originally posted by Alric
They just going to pop across the universe to say hello to an inferior life form.

Why not? One must assume that every advanced technological race was at one point in time a fledgling spacefaring nation just like us, trying to answer the exact same question of extra_______strial life (replace _____ with the made-up latin root for their planet of origin) as we are. If we're already tentatively trying to probe the depths of space for ETs, then how hard is it to believe that ETs are trying to probe the depths of space for us?

And if they are significantly more advanced, well: depletion of resources is a problem we're already facing today, and an advanced society would surely face the same problems eventually. Earth if nothing else is a fertile ball of minerals rich for the mining, as well as a pasture of erect monkeys ripe for the picking (and probing).

They say people came from apes but you don't see people many people going into the forest to say hi to them. Then again maybe they do come and take people away for some zoo heh. Actually if you want to see it like that it does make the most sense. A few scientists may happen to visit earth every once in a while. Assuming there isn't other stuff just like us that they have already seen before.

Who knows maybe they took some people away and started a human farm to grow people then in biology 101 they dissect humans instead of frogs.

Originally Posted by kaotic169

But how is it that it's just in the past century that we started develping these tools? When the human race has been around for atleast tens of thousands of years... I'm not saying I believe any of this stuff... Just theories... Because I don't believe many things about this world... But I lmpw that many of the vast truths that people believe are not true... But I myself don't know the real truth... These are just theories...
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If you know a good library or don't mind paying money you could try to find the book called A Brief History of Progress. It's definitely not a difficult read, it's somewhat humor-based, and would provide you with a neat perspective. Another good book is For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformation, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, but it's much longer and more technical. However, if you don't want to, there are just a couple relevant points which could suffice, assuming these belief aren't ingrained into you. I haven't read either of them myself, actually (who has time to read these days??? ) but I'm familiar with the concepts they describe.

People are simple. Nature is... really complicated. On top of that, people are generally dumb, unless they're educated or brought up in an environment which encourages their minds, but that's not usually the case. Anyway, for much of the history of man, people didn't think science was possible. The idea that nature would follow the same laws everywhere all the time to them... didn't occur to them. Science, rational systems developed from observation, was something which people would never have considered way back when. And science didn't develop into anything special until several hundred years ago; you know the stoy of that guy who dropped a book and a feather and concluded that heavier things fall faster. The concept of air resistence was... bizarre, to them. In fact, so was the concept of air! It's the ether, it doesn't have substance, does it? Err, yeah.

Well, anyway... The truth is, once people start thinking critically, and using quality experimentation, science began to develop very, very quickly. A heavy influence on that happening was... Christianity, as a matter of fact! Which isn't so surprising, considering Christianity has been a giant influence on Western culture, and the West really brought science to where it is today. You see, while Einstein was the first one to say it overtly, early scientists were influenced by the idea that God doesn't play dice with the universe (Creation isn't random). In spite of the common myth that the Church was hunting down and murdering scientists, they really weren't, just the ones who were contradicting them (which wasn't that many, relatively speaking! most scientists expressed Christian opinions, with mathematicians and natural scientists the most Christian, actually, and down the ladder for the most part (with the definite exception of anthropologists, lol).

Anyway, nowadays have a great systems in place, and millions of scientists around the world working on things. The quality of life has improved immensely, and we're in higher numbers that ever before. All the energy we got from the sun over the past few billion years that got stored into oil is helping out a lot, too, you know. It's true that a few geniuses looking in the right places have advanced the natural sciences a lot, actually, so if you wanted to argue they were the aliens I'd just have to shrug my shoulders and just say that somebody else would have figured it out, or was in the process of figuring it out as well as was often the case. Well, I'm not an expert on any of this, so consider checking out either of those two books.

I can be a bit paranoid when it comes to these things aswell, kaotic. It may even be possible that I'm the only one in existance, in a long sleep, surrounded in this "life" by humans and other creatures created by some machine or my own mind. This is a thought I can have pretty often, which can be a bit depressing at times.

There is no way to prove anyone's existance but one's own. I can't know for sure that my mother exists, my father or anyone else for that matter. No matter what anyone else say or do, they cannot make me 100% sure they exist.