About Aliens

Eukaryotic life is unique and circumstantial. It is not a step to take to become multicellular, intelligent, or successful. It is a unique story of life on Earth. It is most likely that any other life in the universe has not developed the same way we have. If other life exists, then they have their own story.

It was circumstantial that Eukaryotic life evolved the ability to symbiose and evolve new things such as multicellular specializations, fast locomotion, better energy production, etc. We should not be so ignorant to think that other life in the universe, evolved independently, has the same composition and is taking the same steps life on Earth took to evolve. The chance for new life to evolve is extremely low. The chance for evolved life to become like us is even lower. Evolution is a unique journey full in circumstances of death, survival, and intermingling depending on the environment. And no environment is exactly the same to another.

Additionally the point of Eukaryotic life is important. Its ability to combine with other lifeforms is extraordinarily unique and allowed the generation of gigantic living environments capable of holding another level of life. Such is the case of complex motile multicellularity.

On Vertebrate Elitism

Imagine you are a sentient sponge. A unique and amazing organism full of mystery and evolutionary wonder. Curious humans harvest you from the ocean. Some poke at you and eventually use complex biological research methods to figure you out. They declare you a primitive animal.

“That’s rude” you say, “I’m not primitive! I’m a god damn modern masterpiece.”

The humans scoff. “You’ve barely reached multicellularity and have little to no specialization. Of course you are primitive.”, “You don’t even have a nervous system, or muscles, or adaptive immunity, or symmetry!”

“You don’t even know me! You’re only pointing out what I don’t have.”

What the humans didn’t know is that the sponge held many interesting and new developments since they diverged from the last common ancestor. New features unique to the spongy kingdom. Funny things those humans. They always look for primitive versions of themselves that they ignore unique developments in modern life. Plotting a path along the tree of life that perfectly fits human evolution.

How did our brain evolve? Let us look at the descending path of nervous systems from ape to mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, lamprey, amphioxus, etc. While these guys may hold remnants of the primitive brain, it is easy to forget that these are all modern organisms. They may have evolved new features that we ignore because we are looking for genes and physiology homologous to humans.

Keep in mind: Biologists use MODEL organisms. Not the original ancestor. The further down the tree of life we go, the more chance there are new and unique features. But if we are only looking for homology, we will overlook those features. This the idea of hidden biology. Created usually by a bilaterian, vertebrate, or human centric view of biological research. Here is a neat visual:

Read this paper

We Are the Same Age

Let’s assume the physicalist’s worldview, as this is where age is defined.

Most would say your mom is older than you right? However, you are your mom and father in a physical sense. A lineage of their cells combined. If you trace the physical connections at a cellular level, you will find that all life is connected in a space-time sense. Four dimensions. Consider time and your object as one lovely space worm. Here I claim that we are the same age. Since I’m the owner of this website I get to set the rules on how age is defined and how we use it. You must also consider that my views of Life and multicellularity are unconventional.

It’s odd but I consider all of Life on Earth as one organism. A four-dimensional organism. I am one prong of that organism; like a leaf is to a whole tree. The nature of life is that it physically changes with respect to time. It is also cellular based. It seems necessary to keep a self-replicating mechanism compartmentalized or the machinery will float away from each other.

Birth to death is practically and legally useful to define age. Realistically it is problematic. Would we start at conception? When two sex cells meet? When you exit the womb? Multicellularity has clouded judgement of ‘being’ a living thing for all human history. Physically you were two separate sex cells. The egg technically split at a separate time the sperm was. Those created by germ cell lineages from your mother and father, whose lineages can be further traced back to more parental germ cells. In practical terms, we divide ourselves in separate human body chunks of time. That is extremely useful for our mental existence. But just because you are separate from your parents now, does not mean you aren’t physically connected.

Just to further drive my point, let’s try to define the age of a single-celled organism. A paramecium. Do we begin as soon as the sister cell splits and to when it dies? Or when the DNA is replicated? Is the new DNA part of the new organism? Sometimes it is jumbled up. A bit of new and old together in a new and old compartment. Technically it has always been living before its DNA was replicated and before it splits from its sister. When it ‘dies’, it probably already replicated into a hundred more cells. The nature and machinery of Life persists by making more of itself. Thus, more bodies (or compartments) are made that further replicate themselves. Are they separate beings because they are not physically connected at one slice of time? The border between coming into existence and not existing is arbitrary when you look between the beginning and end of all Life.

I define age as the span of time a four-dimensional object begins and ceases to exist. If Life is our object, then we must consider its beginning and its future demise. I claim we are all one 4D organism. Physically derived lineages, theoretically rooting back to a common ancestor. Connected in space and time through the lineage and nature of persisting replicative compartments that at the time of replication, can physically change. All I did was redefine what age refers to. Rather than the age of one prong of the 4D organism, I refer to the whole. It makes sense in a weird way that everything living at this moment is the same age. Say something goes extinct. The prong of that something stops its age. But the living 4D organism remains the same age, like a tree losing a branch. The tree is still alive.

In a non-physicalist framework, we can’t truly know the age of ourselves. The philosophy here is extensive and I don’t know it. Is our state of being separate from the irrelevant vessels of our cell-based bodies? A biologist harrows at the thought of that. The idea of an individual mind and its existence as “being.” We can’t know the age. As it is probably outside of time like God. Ageless is the state of being.