Historical Arguments and Debates

[heydaralon]

042684425

Ok now just a few more questions about your high school, first pet, and mothers maiden name and we can really determine how smart you are..

Windermere High School
Goonie -- python, went missing
Rodham

Did you actually have a python? That's pretty cool. I've always loved reptiles and amphibians, but never owned any except a few frogs. Did you feed the python live rats?

[brewster]

Did you actually have a python? That's pretty cool. I've always loved reptiles and amphibians, but never owned any except a few frogs. Did you feed the python live rats?

Got a boa in the 4th grade, we bought my son a bearded dragon when he was 6. Reptiles are great pets, go out and catch a garter snake, they're the best! Easy to feed them fish chunks and they don't get too big. One lesson my kids and I learned though catching stuff then releasing them a year later, if it's nasty when you catch them, they'll stay nasty. One garter we kept for a year was a lunatic. Other garters will calm down in your hands right after you catch them once they realize you're not going to eat them.

Best was a baby snapping turtle. Dumbest creature on earth. A shark with a shell. Tap on the tank and he'd strike the glass shooting himself backwards, then do it again. You could feed him anything, hamburger, worms, crickets, whatever.

[Speaker to Animals]

Ok now just a few more questions about your high school, first pet, and mothers maiden name and we can really determine how smart you are..

Windermere High School
Goonie -- python, went missing
Rodham

Did you actually have a python? That's pretty cool. I've always loved reptiles and amphibians, but never owned any except a few frogs. Did you feed the python live rats?

No, man. I was just joking around. I did have a savannah monitor until the commander said I had to get rid of it because it attacked everybody else and my girlfriend refused to feed it while I was deployed.

[brewster]

I did have a savannah monitor until the commander said I had to get rid of it because it attacked everybody else and my girlfriend refused to feed it while I was deployed.

Them be nasty critters, and like iguanas get big and hard to manage. Had a buddy who would give his 1/4 chicken pieces. Nice thing about beardies is they only grow to about 20", and once adult eat mostly veggies, with crickets once a week. They're also pretty smart and interactive.

Ours was orange like this one

[TheReal_ND]

Woh

[Ph64]

To be totally honest I doubt that aliens are traveling around in space. The scale is too big. The way I envision interstellar colonization is on a different level. I can see us in the future sending out large pods into space, with the mission to impregnate other worlds with earthly life. I see us doing this in waves over millennia. Like a flower, sending out its seeds. The first pods are for terraforming any potential candidate. Other waves come to introduce new organisms by manipulating the DNA that has taken hold on the new planet. Giving it a nudge. Maybe also removing unwanted organisms. All of this will be totally automated. Driven by AI. The pods will drift around in space just waiting for something to trigger them.
This probably happened to earth and explains what we perceive as explosions in evolution and mass extinction events. Also the gaps in the fossil records.
The last waves of pods will contain frozen human eggs and sperm and artificial wombs. They will drift around in space looking for one of the worlds we hope will have been started by the previous waves. When one of them is encountered the pod will land and start growing babies. The first generation will be brought up by robots, similar to human parents. They will be taught by them but in a generic way that we hope will be useful in most environments, but in the end, the pod will run out of resources and like a seed it will pop open and let the humans out in their new world. It will be up to them to adapt and to start civilization again.

There you have it. My elevator pitch for a sci-fi book series, movie or TV show.

More likely - the aliens were flying by, stopped to see what the planet was like. While here, one of them had to take a shit (or however they defecate), and thus left some bacteria in an environment they could thrive in... Toss in a few hundred million years and voila, a planet teaming with life and eventually human beings.

They're not checking up on us because who the heck goes back to check on the steaming pile they left in some bushes at the side of the road when nature urgently called?

[Speaker to Animals]

I think, if life is not traveling around on comets and asteroids, that habitable worlds were seeded by self-replicating machines. A machine arrives in a star system carrying a payload of engineered biotics. The machine takes samples of the various biotics to seed the planets in the habitable zone. It then proceeds to make a copy of itself by mining materials from asteroids and gathering whatever else it needs from planets. Then it divides it's remaining payload in half to share with the copy. They gather fuel and whatever organic materials they need to feed the biotics from comets. Maybe they seed some comets too for good measure, and adjust their orbits to hopefully strike the planets in periods to reboot the infant biosphere if it didn't take.

[heydaralon]

I did have a savannah monitor until the commander said I had to get rid of it because it attacked everybody else and my girlfriend refused to feed it while I was deployed.

Them be nasty critters, and like iguanas get big and hard to manage. Had a buddy who would give his 1/4 chicken pieces. Nice thing about beardies is they only grow to about 20", and once adult eat mostly veggies, with crickets once a week. They're also pretty smart and interactive.

Ours was orange like this one

That is pretty gnarly! Snapping turtle also sounds like an awesome pet. I like how resilient reptiles are. Iwould like to have a pond enclosure and have a gator or croc as a pet. How would your lizard interact with you? Do they respond to commands or know their name?

[heydaralon]

I think, if life is not traveling around on comets and asteroids, that habitable worlds were seeded by self-replicating machines. A machine arrives in a star system carrying a payload of engineered biotics. The machine takes samples of the various biotics to seed the planets in the habitable zone. It then proceeds to make a copy of itself by mining materials from asteroids and gathering whatever else it needs from planets. Then it divides it's remaining payload in half to share with the copy. They gather fuel and whatever organic materials they need to feed the biotics from comets. Maybe they seed some comets too for good measure, and adjust their orbits to hopefully strike the planets in periods to reboot the infant biosphere if it didn't take.

This is not quite what you and Hastur are getting at, but the Prometheus and Alien Covenant films kind of hinted at this scenario. A lot of people hate those films, but they are some of the best scifi I've seen in theaters in the last few years. Great movies. They also have a religious undertone which makes them interesting to me as well.

[Speaker to Animals]

I think odds that the alien life we find is DNA-based are much, much higher than otherwise.

Personally, I place the odds that life just happens naturally so fucking low that it almost never happens. Any intelligent species is far better off suspecting they were seeded somehow than life just happened from nothing on their planet.