Stars and Rocks
There's no reason to doubt that at some time or another and in at least a few of the other innumerable, farflung galaxies, life in some form that would be recognizable to us has similarly gotten a start. and has similarly produced creatures that aren't all attached to rocks. But Is it also possible that on at least one of those other planets life has evolved in such a way that its forms, whether simple or complex, don't have to depend on consuming other life forms for their sustenance?
In a skit that Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner did a while ago, called "The 2,000-Year-Old Man," that ancient is asked what people used for food in his earliest days, because there couldn't have been much around. He answers that actually there was plenty, because mostly they ate stars and rocks.
In the interest of an intrinsically non-dog-eat-dog existence, why can't things sometime somewhere be ordered in such a way, even beyond vegetarianism, that that isn't just a joke? Why couldn't there be a planet on which beings at least a little like ourselves could live, for instance, precisely off of sunlight and stones, a diet that could be varied in a number of ways and would never be exhausted because every day more would be arriving, like manna falling from outer space?.
Or is life itself, wherever it occurs, just a limitless variety of acts of savagery and killing?
If that is so, it could explain why the groups that reach such a stage face such huge and probably insurmountable difficulties in hooking up with each other. In that respect at least, the universe is much more benign than it ordinarily appears to be.
In a skit that Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner did a while ago, called "The 2,000-Year-Old Man," that ancient is asked what people used for food in his earliest days, because there couldn't have been much around. He answers that actually there was plenty, because mostly they ate stars and rocks.
In the interest of an intrinsically non-dog-eat-dog existence, why can't things sometime somewhere be ordered in such a way, even beyond vegetarianism, that that isn't just a joke? Why couldn't there be a planet on which beings at least a little like ourselves could live, for instance, precisely off of sunlight and stones, a diet that could be varied in a number of ways and would never be exhausted because every day more would be arriving, like manna falling from outer space?.
Or is life itself, wherever it occurs, just a limitless variety of acts of savagery and killing?
If that is so, it could explain why the groups that reach such a stage face such huge and probably insurmountable difficulties in hooking up with each other. In that respect at least, the universe is much more benign than it ordinarily appears to be.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 9:10 AM
1 Comments:
Hmm. It is my understanding that the pursuit of food was the primary driver of the evolution of intelligence in humankind's ancestors... more intelligence supported better cooperative hunting. Intelligence is by no means inevitable in the course of evolution... it is one of those contingent realities of which the late great Stephen Jay Gould wrote and spoke... but if it does occur somewhere else than Earth, I'd imagine it would still be driven by the need for food (energy, whatever you want to call it). So I doubt that nonviolence is ever natural.
I say that as one who has chosen to be a lacto-ovo-vegetarian... and chosen a course of nonviolent action. Intelligence can have strange consequences. :)
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