What if we met life on mars and we were the intelligent ones...

TeddyTedson

BillyMitchel wrote: »

Ted would you do an alien??

Male or female?

BillyMitchel

TeddyTedson wrote: »

BillyMitchel wrote: »

Ted would you do an alien??

Male or female?

Entirely up to you ted. I'd go female myself

CSU

Typical - who cares where they come from or what they do, our first contact question should be "Are Ya's riden'?":pac:

TeddyTedson

BillyMitchel wrote: »

Entirely up to you ted. I'd go female myself

Is she a looker?

BillyMitchel

TeddyTedson wrote: »

BillyMitchel wrote: »

Entirely up to you ted. I'd go female myself

Is she a looker?

I'd hope so, I'm sure I've done worse.
Maybe she'd be a slimy and wet so it be grand or with a bit of luck be like that chick from the film species but in the human form of course.

Wacker The Attacker

A nice bit of extra curricular alien snatch is the order of the day

Wibbs

Enkidu wrote: »

Well think of Aliens this way.

You land on a planet with a huge magnetic field and low gravity, notice structures in the distance and head toward them. On the way you encounter the planet's sentient life, an 80ft tall carbon-magnetite based object that looks like living rock and communicates by locally altering the planet's magnetic field and with some of their moral code based around the "purity" of one's magnetic alterations.

Though job to know what to do!

Going on previous I'd be emailing you...

(Also, since you can't travel faster than light, the Earth you left has been gone for thousands of years.)

I dunno, I suspect some day we'll figure how. Though I personally suspect empty space between solar systems is anything but empty. That empty space is mostly found within solar systems as the planets hoover up all the stuff and even if we could get near speed of light travel chances are we'd hit something.

crazy cabbage wrote: »

Yes we understand evolution of plants and animals and even our bodies but not our brains and consience evolution. And it has to be something 'odd' otherwise it would have happened to many animals along time ago...

What I meant by intelligence being odd is that of all the myriad box of tricks to survive(and it's about the best of them) intelligence only came along once compared to the others.

Go on so. What caused our brain to develope at a rate 10 times that of everything else around us?

Dont try and tell me that 'oooo we learned how to throw stones and and to predict where they would colide with target. this is what caused brain growth and as luck would have it we have enough brain power left over to do some quantam-mechanices and send a rocket to mars.' that is laughable imo

And dont try the route where, 'oooo we learned some basic communication for hunting ect. I am not denieing that but that is what got us to the point of being higher primates. Nothing more.

OK, well for a start most of our higher primate evolution in brain size came before the plateau. Long before we were considering culture and quantum stuff. That came late to the party. Homo Erectus brain capacity ranged between 900 and 1100 cc. NOt that much lower than modern human range. Indeed some populations today can be just above the 1100 cc. Neandertals were actually larger brained than us on average. Hitting nearly 1600 cc at times.

Question now has to be what caused this very unique change that we were able to harness but all the other animals were not?

I'd reckon a couple of things led to modern human uniqueness. Admixture with archaic humans, both genetically and culturally, plus competition with same. Domestication of the dog. *wacky idea* A drive towards a domestication of sorts with modern humans themselves(domesticated animals become more gracile, more playful as adults, more accepting of outsiders). Being scrawny buggers who had a tendency to pile on the pounds with too much food. We needed fewer calories and stored fat more than muscle(the latter has higher calorie needs). This in turn made us more resilient to food shortages and gave us the edge in having slightly more kids. More people means more vectors for transmission of unique ideas. Ideas that may well have flowered with previous archaic humans, but came and went when the individual or isolated tribe came and went. A Neandertal Plato or Leonardo or Einstein probably came along, but if no one but his/her family ever knew him/her, his/her ideas would likely die with them. My own wacky notion adding to that lot would be schizophrenia. A worldwide and relatively common condition. Given it tends to present in adolescents(IIRC it used to be called dementia praecox/early madness?) which would make one think it would have died out quite qickly given it strikes at or before the reproductive peak. I suggest the genetic fault that causes it, also causes modern human's ability to imagine beyond what our ancestors might have done, but when it goes wrong you have the condition. An evolutionary biological "genius is close to madness" kinda thing. Indeed I'll lay bets that when they narrow down the gene(s) responisbile and check their genetic clock it'll a) come out at around 80,000 years ago and b) will come as a result of a mix of modern and archaic humans.

My 3 cents anyway.

Capt'n Midnight

JohnMarston wrote: »

"The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one," he said

But still they come

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite

Capt'n Midnight

crazy cabbage wrote: »

Wat are the most common ingerents in the universe in order? Hydrogen, heliem, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. (i am excluding dark energy and dark matter)
What are we made of in order? hydrogen and oxygen, carbon and nitrogen.
This matches the universe exatly with the excaption of heliem (which is chemically inearth)

The earth's crust is 47% Oxygen, 27.7% silicon and 25.3% for everything else (most of which is Aluminium 8% and Iron 5% - titanium and fluorine are more common than carbon so shouldn't we have evolved as Terminators ? )

and yet silicon is only used by a few species and even at that for defensive structures

Basicly what you are asking is how did our brains develope? They doubled in size in aprox 2 million years. This is 10 times the rate of normal evolution and something unheard of. This is something that no scientist has a clue about. No current theorys stand up to scruttny. We were higher primates and had reached the plattoo of our evolution. Something very unique most of happened to set the scene for the unpresenedated (in any animal anywhere, ever) evolution of the brain. We dont have a clue what happened. We were just in the right place at the right time with the right tools and far enough along the evolutionary ladder (we were higher primates) to harnes whatever change happened. There is some 'strange' ideas that fit the picture but not accepted by the scientific community.

10 times the rate eh ?
have you heard of punctuated evolution

plenty of examples of fish evolving rapidly in a new environment
about 10,000 years ago Hungry was flooded - lots of freshwater shellfish , again with rapid evolution into a new environment

cats, rats and mice have done very well by piggy backing on humans so you don't need to be 'far enough along the evolutionary latter' (whatever that means)

Jammy Donut

Sure It's a Rover, probably blow the headgasket in a few days time.

--Kaiser--

Wibbs wrote: »

I'd reckon a couple of things led to modern human uniqueness. Admixture with archaic humans, both genetically and culturally, plus competition with same. Domestication of the dog. *wacky idea* A drive towards a domestication of sorts with modern humans themselves(domesticated animals become more gracile, more playful as adults, more accepting of outsiders). Being scrawny buggers who had a tendency to pile on the pounds with too much food. We needed fewer calories and stored fat more than muscle(the latter has higher calorie needs). This in turn made us more resilient to food shortages and gave us the edge in having slightly more kids. More people means more vectors for transmission of unique ideas. Ideas that may well have flowered with previous archaic humans, but came and went when the individual or isolated tribe came and went. A Neandertal Plato or Leonardo or Einstein probably came along, but if no one but his/her family ever knew him/her, his/her ideas would likely die with them. My own wacky notion adding to that lot would be schizophrenia. A worldwide and relatively common condition. Given it tends to present in adolescents(IIRC it used to be called dementia praecox/early madness?) which would make one think it would have died out quite qickly given it strikes at or before the reproductive peak. I suggest the genetic fault that causes it, also causes modern human's ability to imagine beyond what our ancestors might have done, but when it goes wrong you have the condition. An evolutionary biological "genius is close to madness" kinda thing. Indeed I'll lay bets that when they narrow down the gene(s) responisbile and check their genetic clock it'll a) come out at around 80,000 years ago and b) will come as a result of a mix of modern and archaic humans.

My 3 cents anyway.

There's a new theory as to why we are so different to other primates (with whom we share up to 99% of our DNA) and why we seemed to have evolved quicker than other animals. It's from a book called Us and Them . The crux of the argument is…..we were predated and raped by neaderthals (predation being a massive driver of evolution). Recent evidence shows that Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis did interbreed, but that genes were only passed down by human mothers….indicating that neanderthal males bred with human females but not vice versa. Neanderthals ate a largely carnivorous diet and were also sometime cannibals. Seeing as they were about 6 times stronger than us we would have been easy prey for them. The author also asserts that, despite common anthropomorphic depictions, neanderthals were covered in thick fur to deal with the cold, northern Europe they evolved in (there’s no evidence that they wore clothes). He uses his theory to explain certain aspects of humans that heretofore have had shaky or uncertain reasonaing such as hairlessness and hidden oestrous.

Interesting read

ScumLord

crazy cabbage wrote: »

Wat are the most common ingerents in the universe in order? Hydrogen, heliem, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. (i am excluding dark energy and dark matter).....

So we are not unique based on what i just said above.. We are made up of the most common stuff that is out there for gods sake. If we were made up of some rare isotope of thulium, then maby you would have a point in saying that we are 'a one off'

Your taking Wibbs up completely wrong there. Everything in the universe probably shares common building materials. Just like if I had a load of different coloured paints and threw them at a wall it wouldn't be the same as the frescos on the Sistine chapel. Humans are a completely unique version of a living organism. We're bog stand animals in many ways, if you where to put a man beside a rat while they'd look very different they probably have more similarities than they do differences.

Basicly what you are asking is how did our brains develope? They doubled in size in aprox 2 million years. This is 10 times the rate of normal evolution and something unheard of.

Unheard of in one sense maybe but dinosaurs went from walking to flying in the blink of an eye by universal standards and that's an even more bizarre evolutionary leap.

This is something that no scientist has a clue about. No current theorys stand up to scruttny.

There are many but the most obvious one and one that always leads to evolutionary changes is an environmental change. Our forests turned into grasslands and we had to find alternatives sources of food. We started eating meat which caused some pretty major biological changes which had some unique side effects.

We dont have a clue what happened. We were just in the right place at the right time with the right tools and far enough along the evolutionary ladder (we were higher primates) to harnes whatever change happened. There is some 'strange' ideas that fit the picture but not accepted by the scientific community.

We didn't have the tools though which was the problem, we had no place on the grasslands, our mouths and bodies where incapable of either eating the vegetation on offer or the animal food on offer. We went to the brink of extinction and where very lucky we survived. This is all recorded in DNA and soil samples.

crazy cabbage wrote: »

Yes we understand evolution of plants and animals and even our bodies but not our brains and consience evolution. And it has to be something 'odd' otherwise it would have happened to many animals along time ago...

We do in a way have records. One thing that humans had over Neanderthals was culture. We traded with humans outside of our family group. Humanities greatest yet weirdest trait is that we get along with each other for the most part. Despite genes, despite cultural and racial differences humans everywhere traded with each other. That's downright weird in the animal and plant kingdom.

Go on so. What caused our brain to develope at a rate 10 times that of everything else around us?

Meat eating and the need to conserve water.

Wibbs wrote: »

I'd reckon a couple of things led to modern human uniqueness. Admixture with archaic humans, both genetically and culturally, plus competition with same. Domestication of the dog. *wacky idea*

I'll agree dogs where one of the best things to happen to humans but I think the theory that we didn't so much domesticate dogs as enter a symbiotic relationship is a good one. It's likely wolves domesticated themselves through trying to access our food waste. Dogs benefited as much as we did to the point the bastards have more or less retired. Look at the life of your average dog and it's easy to see they as much domesticated us as we did them.