one thing i miss very much about san jose is how the lack of things to do lead its people to engage in four-hour conversations. getting caffeinated and having a conversation was considered an activity.
in san francisco, getting caffeinated is only a necessity prior to running around the city doing a million things that might not even be half as interesting as one san jose conversation. and most people are only half-listening because they have somewhere else they need to be.
the other day, alex (san jose porch veteran) facebook-messaged me a short debate regarding the anthropic principle: that humans can only really imagine things within the boundaries of what they already know. sort of like how people used to believe flight would not be possible unless your aircraft was lighter than air. or, as kyle once explained, the native americans could not understand what they were looking at when they first saw ships because their minds had no way to make sense of it. they just thought they were magical creatures.
we used to debate about this sort of thing endlessly on my porch, back in san jose. and i miss those days.
you see, it wasn't always used for smoking weed and
making mouth-farts.
my theory, in line with the anthropic principle has always revolved around aliens-- particularly our earth-centric view of the idea. it may be the fault of films, but we don't quite think outside of the box when it comes to imagining extra terrestrial life. the mere fact we expect we could see an alien life-form is ridiculous-- after all, eyeballs are earth-talk. and, even on earth, we can't see half of what's going on-- take ultraviolet and infrared.
an alien could be sitting on my shoulders as i type this post and i would have no reason to realize it. why should my body be designed to perceive bodies from other planets?
we have defined life as needing water and oxygen and having the ability to eat and reproduce. the second part may be true, but the first half is more earth-talk. saying life requires oxygen and water (on an oxygen/water-filled planet) is the same as fish saying i need fins though i live on land.
in my mind, the only thing we can say about life on other planets is this:
1. the sun is relevant to their lives.
2. so are cycles (or circles.)every planet is a sphere, rotating in circles, and orbiting another sphere in a cyclical manner. and the sphere we all orbit is the sun. that is the only commonality we have with the other planets and the only thing we can base the idea of "life" off of. water and oxygen are not deal-breakers--
we need it because we live on earth, where life is coordinated with it. places like jupiter may very well have a different form of life that doesn't require either because neither exist.
in fact, it's possible jupiter's life-forms are gaseous and that weird storm that has always existed on the planet is merely a jupitarian café, where all the citizens go and congregate to debate about life on earth. to be honest, i think that makes a lot more sense than a tornado that has been ongoing since 1665.
our theories on extra terrestrial life are too human.
anthropic principle. we need to get away from the question of whether or not a planet has water. all we
truly have in common is circles and the sun.
but here lies the problem: given the galaxy works in circles (i.e. orbits, seasons, waste and fertilizer) we, as humans, need to work toward creating things that coincide with that pattern. we need to remember that anything we create should be designed to come full-circle-- in other words, we need to have an idea of how our creations can end where they've begun the same way nature and everything else works.
but, we're show-offs. we like to create rays, rather than circles; we like to say, "let's see how far and how fast this fucking thing can go and who cares what happens!"
plastic is one of those rays. it was brilliant at first-- revolutionized the way things were made in the fifties. but we weren't thinking about how it could come full-circle; we weren't thinking about the fact it cannot be broken down without damaging the planet. and now what?
air-conditioning is just the same: an amazing idea with no end because why end something amazing?
the problem is-- despite what we want to believe-- the galaxy worships the sun and circles. and if we create a ray, the galaxy will do whatever it can to destroy our ray and bend it back into a circle. and if we resist (which it seems we plan on doing), we'll be bent out of that circle and our species will just disappear so the rest of the galaxy can continue on.
but back to aliens.
my initial thought was that we had them all wrong-- that we were looking for them in a way that was too human and would naturally never find them because of it. but what i've realized is we are
not looking for aliens and probably never were. we're looking for planets our species can survive on. we're looking for a planet to house us when we've officially fucked the earth.
and that means we are still thinking in rays, rather than circles.
even after we realized we've messed up, we aren't looking for solutions that work cyclically like everything else in the milky way-- we're just looking to keep moving forward till there's nowhere else to go. we don't hope to save our planet, we hope to ready mars in time for our move-in.
and when mars dies, hopefully we'll be ready to move to venus.
if i were an alien, i'd be really pissed at humans.
in fact, it may have been from the same notepad of debauchery. tasty.
