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Life as we can't imagine it 
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Post Life as we can't imagine it
Humans are highly prejudiced. When we search for life outside of our planet, we look for biochemistry like ours. It's all we know apparently, and not only that, we've only known about our own biochemistry for a relatively short moment.

Other chemical foundations for life may be more common than ours in the universe, but we have no knowledge of them. Our ignorance blinds us in our search for knowledge.

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Why are scientists attempting to apply our limited ideas of life to the universe? Surely this is a big mistake. -- source

Well, yeah, but we have to start somewhere, and what little we know is about the best starting place we can choose.

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Arthropods include some of the most diverse species in the world such as insects, spiders, crustaceans, etc... These species also have Hemocyanin blood and have a exoskeleton. These species are perhaps the most radiation-resistant lifeforms on Earth. Cockroaches can survive in radiation levels several million times higher than radiation levels which kill a human being in seconds.

Is there a hard rule that upright, walking and dexterous beings like us must have red blood? Perhaps one such life-form might be a praying mantis as tall as a man. Many alien abductees have seen these in charge over other alien life-forms. -- source

So we have this massive and expensive SETI program that hardly makes sense searching for life as we in our limitless ignorance know it, and SETI never finds anything, but we turn a deaf ear to alien abductees who have direct experience with mantis beings?

Are we insane?

If you answer "No", please give detailed reasons for your response.

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Sat Sep 06, 2014 7:05 am
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Post Re: Life as we can't imagine it
"Life as we can't imagine it" also applies to our own environment. We use carbon dating to calculate the age of anything that is carbon-based. There is a whole set of assumptions behind the science, such as the ratios between isotopes of carbon, the rate of radioactive decay, etc. Most of these assumptions are derived from what we see today and are based on the assumption that the way things are today hasn't changed much through time. But we know the only constant is change! Things change, and here is a possible example of that:

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In the authors' words: Our research indicates that the entire Great Lakes region (and beyond) was subjected to particle bombardment and a catastrophic nuclear irradiation that produced secondary thermal neutrons from cosmic ray interactions.

The neutrons produced unusually large quantities of ^239 Pu and substantially altered the natural uranium abundances (^235 U/^238 U) in artifacts and in other exposed materials including cherts, sediments, and the entire landscape.

These neutrons necessarily transmuted residual nitrogen (^ N) in the dated charcoals to radiocarbon, thus explaining anomalous dates.

Some North American dates may in consequence be as much as 10,000 years too young.

The authors claim that the burst of radiation from a nearby supernova, circa 12,500 years ago, not only reset radiocarbon clocks but also heated the planet's atmosphere, melted ice sheets, and led to biological extinctions. -- source

So carbon dating may not be as accurate as we presume.

And could it be possible that the source of the neutrons was not some distant supernova, but might have originated right here on Earth, perhaps from a nuclear war?

The quote below is quite astounding, as it is easy to visualize a classic nuclear explosion as we know them from the 1940s and 50s:

Quote:
Gurkha,
flying a swift and powerful vimana
hurled a single projectile
Charged with all the power of the Universe.
An incandescent column of smoke and flame
As bright as the thousand suns
Rose in all its splendour...
a perpendicular explosion
with its billowing smoke clouds...
...the cloud of smoke
rising after its first explosion
formed into expanding round circles
like the opening of giant parasols...
..it was an unknown weapon,
An iron thunderbolt,
A gigantic messenger of death,
Which reduced to ashes
The entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas.
...The corpses were so burned
As to be unrecognizable.
The hair and nails fell out;
Pottery broke without apparent cause,
And the birds turned white.
After a few hours
All foodstuffs were infected...
...to escape from this fire
The soldiers threw themselves in streams
To wash themselves and their equipment.

Ancient verses from the Mahabharata: (6500 B.C.?) -- source


But wait! Is that really an ancient verse from the Mahabharata? Perhaps not.

Can you see why it is important to question everything, and dismiss nothing? How many of us do that? Almost none. Instead we cling to our certainty ( 1 2 ) that we know how the world really works.

:ugeek:

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Sat Jul 11, 2015 4:58 am
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Post Re: Life as we can't imagine it
One of the reasons life is as we can't imagine it is because we are all idiots. Here's an example:

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... is it possible for primitive brick structures to remain erect, the way it is found in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, after a nuclear blast ? The other possibility is that the bomb used, killed only biological things and left the infrastructure intact. But that’s the stuff that science fiction is made up of. -- source

The implication is that science fiction is entirely fiction and thus has no connection to reality. However, science fiction often imagines possibilities that later become reality. Dismissing the possibility of bombs that kill life but leave structures intact as "science fiction" is the behavior of an idiot, especially when we have such bombs in our arsenals right now.

And compared to most people, the author is far from being considered an idiot. That's how bad it is.

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Sat Jul 11, 2015 9:36 pm
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