Blog Post Number 46 Written: 07-19-2021 Uploaded: 02-10-2023
I made my list of blog topics a long time ago, one of them, you guessed it is weird facts about human evolution, and Aliens. What I had in mind when I initially wrote that single sentence, I will most likely never remember, maybe I should seek out some sort of clairvoyant or hypnotist to help me figure that out. What I can tell you, is what it means to me know, that’s why I bother putting dates on these posts. Dates when I wrote them, not dates when I posted them. So, you can take everything I say, or write, with a grain of salt.
So, let me think about what I know, about human evolution. I am no professor, not a specialist, not a Ph.D. of any kind, no formal knowledge on the subject other than an odd class or two I took in college. I have a couple of associate’s degrees in electronics and avionics technology. So this was or is a very casual unprofessional opinion. To start with, humans are weird, humans are wrong. But not in the way most people expect or think when I say that. Sure we are the only creatures with opposable thumbs, and hair in some places but not others, we don’t have big pointy teeth or sharp claws or anything else like that. Humans have done and become a whole bunch of things that technically aren’t needed by evolution. For a species to propagate all we really need to do is eat and reproduce.
Why do we have such complex social structures, why are we all equals and don’t have a caste system with genetic differences like ants or termites for different members to fulfill different roles. Why do we make tools? Why do we war with each other, and commit such terrible actions like murder? That doesn’t help the species? Why do we feel compassion for, and take care of the sick, the needy, the infirm, and the disabled? Why bother helping someone with a broken leg, or born with a disability, it doesn’t help the species survive. It doesn’t help us eat more, it doesn’t help us reproduce, it slows us down, makes us more vulnerable to our predators. We are the only creatures to have made up such fictions and constructs such as time, as math, as the greatest evil in all the world, some fiat thing that doesn’t exist other than in our minds, something we all universally accepted, and only exists because the whole world pretends its real, money. Why do we create literature, art, poetry, painting? Such leisurely things don’t help us eat, don’t help us breed, don’t help us survive. So why, what purpose do those things serve? Why do we do that?
There are other critters besides humans that have the intelligence to use tools, to plan ahead, and bring tools with them to help them achieve their premeditated goals, not just chimps using sticks to dig for ants, but octopi carrying coconut shells for temporary shelters while walking across flat open ocean bottom to get from one reef to another.
But humans are the only ones that seem to meddle. Take what we have done to dogs for example or horses. We’re the only creatures to manipulate others, to use them. To make them do work for us. I remember from my North American Anthropology class, talking about the different breeds like the Mexican Hairless and the chihuahua. How they were bread to do things for us, to help the people on the trade routes between Central and North America and all the routes of trade the Native Americans had all along the coast up into the new England area long before the Europeans arrived, back when they were all mound builders and the like.
So let those examples illustrate that humans are weird. Lots of things we have and do, don’t help us survive, they don’t help us eat and breed. They’re superfluous and take up energy that could be better spent on eating and making babies. Why do we do it? Why do we have it? Why have we been doing it for thousands of years, why are their philosophers? Why did we make up math? Or is math already in everything and we have simply discovered what has always been? Are numbers the universal language, the language of the gods?
Okay, ignore the part about math, that’s a very different topic that would need to be discussed all on its own. Many creationists will argue these kinds of points though to say that humans were created, that we did not evolve, and I’m not against that either, but rather than the biblical god, I would be more inclined to believe in some sort of ancient aliens uplifting thing, but that too, is a different discussion for a different time. This is just to illustrate that humans are weird. We’re the only ones with such complex, vast and intricate social structures and subject ourselves to such tyrannical things like taxes, government, and war. Sure other creatures fight battles, but they don’t fight wars with each other as we do.
Now… for the second part of that statement, aliens. We have no idea what aliens may be. This will tie back in with the fermi paradox a little. Are aliens incapable of advancing like we have because humans are some unnatural freak accident on a runaway evolutionary path with all these things we don’t need? Perhaps the aliens are near identical to us because the only way to evolve intelligence is through a narrow gap in which humanity fell, and all the others have to fall too. Maybe the aliens never get more complex than single-cell blobs trying to engulf and devour other single-cell blobs. Perhaps the aliens are on a whole different level and will be as confusing and unfathomable to us, as we are to those single-cell blobs. Giant sentient clouds of electrically charged gas floating silently and alone in the depths of the cosmos with exponentially more electrical connections than the human brain has, with life times measured in eons to develop the truly important answers to the big questions.
I don’t know, and until we find those aliens, if, we find those aliens then no one will know. But I have done my speculation for the day and clipped this post down to a quarter of the length I wanted it to be. So, I ask you to ponder the subject, to think about each sentence I have typed and its implications, the possibilities related to it, and all the colors on the wheel that I haven’t used, but that I wanted to, and I beg you, leave a comment, let’s have a conversation about this, about humans, and evolution and our superfluous actions, traits motivations, and the tyrannical organizations we have become so fond of. And perhaps, what aliens are doing some place else, at the same time as we are.
Chace Randolph 