On Thursday, September 27, 2018 at 9:42:06 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:

On Thursday, September 27, 2018 at 6:27:20 AM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

Yeah, and in the nursery where our sun was born, we may have been quite
close to one or two of those. Our DNA may be shared with a whole swarm
of stars spread all over the galaxy. Or maybe the biblical account is
not so far off: that old, old civilization may have planted us :-)

The notion of life being seeded on Earth by an alien civilization is
something used in a lot of science-fiction stories, and, for that
matter, in some of the flying-saucer literature.

There are basically two forms this notion could take.

One is that aliens put *man* on an already-living planet.

Now that we know how similar humans are to chimpanzees genetically,
the idea that we have alien DNA is hard to take seriously. Plus, of
course, there are fossils of H. erectus and of various forms of
Australopithecus.

Australopithecus skeletons strongly resemble those of chimpanzees,
but with adaptations to walking upright, and larger brains.

Yeah, I don't think that one will fly.

The other is that life is what the Earth was seeded with.

If so, except for ensuring the Earth had life on it, the aliens would
not have had much influence on what type of life it had. The
development of life from its earliest forms took place on Earth -
slowly, over billions of years. This is recorded by fossils in the
ground.

John Savard

The aliens took their time, kind of like the pan-dimensional beings in
Hitchhiker's guide :-)

I suspect that ALL life will have the same DNA.

Why?

See the argument I gave Chris P.

Some forms of life on Earth actually code for proteins slightly
differently from most, and so even if DNA were the only way to store
genetic information, the genetic code would be completely different
in life that had developed independently.

Yes, IF it developed independently.

Out of MILLIONS of civilizations, all that's needed is ONE to survive.

I have no quarrel with the statement that it is possible, and it even
seems likely, that there should be aliens far more advanced than humans
out there.

Now, of course, somebody has to be first, and the fact that aliens
don't seem to have made themselves obvious in the Universe could be
taken as evidence that they don't exist. But that is projecting our
own behavior on them.

Indeed. We are children in an adult universe.

Yes, it's a universal characteristic of life to expand as far as its
environment will allow. And, at the moment, humans don't really show
that much sign of behaving differently than aphids or yeast in this
matter.

Aphids don't build spaceships.

That we could grow up, and limit our reproduction for the sake of
responsible stewardship of our world, however, is not something I
would characterize as impossible; indeed, it would be a necessary
condition for long-term survival.

If there are limits. Certainly, there are limits to growth even in the
solar system, but that's way beyond where we are now. Could some of
these maverick planetary systems with weird worlds be terraformed?
Maybe "terraformed" isn't the right word since we may not be as we
now appear.

No, my quarrel is far more simple. Those you speak of are in the category
"elder brother", not "father"; we should heed their greater wisdom, but
not worship them in the place of God.

John Savard

Some call Jesus Christ "Elder Brother" and they worship Him :-)