RE: Mind-Boggling Questions
November 12, 2012 at 9:43 am
(This post was last modified: November 12, 2012 at 9:50 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(November 12, 2012 at 7:15 am)Hitch96 Wrote: Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)
Depending on how much of that you allow me to trim off, a strong and resounding "yes", it -could have-. Whether or not it did, meh, we don't know. Doesn't seem to be the case here on this rock.
When we go out into the space around us looking for life, for example, what we're really looking for is "life like our own" - carbon based life, with a heavy emphasis on liquid water. Since our own brand of life is the only type we know of we might be able to excuse this bias practically....we have to start somewhere, and if we don't narrow down what we're looking for all we get back is noise (especially considering the vastness of the searched area). On the other hand, we may have set ourselves up to miss vast amounts of life teeming right under our noses at some point by narrowing our definition a bit too much. 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics...hmn, I don't know, how would we even be able to detect something like that? Our instrumentation (including our biological machinery) relies on the physics we "know", the dimensions we are privy to (maybe read flatworld for some interesting thoughts on this though - there's a small teaser from Carl Sagan about it on youtube). But something not carbon based or reliant on liquid water...well, one can imagine a scenario where that flies "under the radar" so-to-speak...since thats what we have the radar tuned to detect, in this instance. The folks who wonder about this sort of thing professionally are engaged in something called hypothetical biochemistry, and it is absolutely fascinating (imho). I wouldn't write it off as the irrelevant musing of a 16 year old mind...because if you spent the rest of your life wondering about this and come to any conclusions you will have done our species (and the advancement of knowledge) a great service. Now, suppose that there is no other form of exotic biochemistry, no shadow biosphere, after all we have no evidence for it so that's a safe assessment of the situation for the time being. Understanding how life might have arisen by other means still gives us insight as to why it arose through the means we are familiar with. It gives us something to compare our own biochemistry with, even if it's firmly hypothetical.
No dumb questions...and all that jazz.
(if nothing else the notion has spawned countless Sci-Fi greats)
Why is life the way it is? Because square pegs don't fit round holes.
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