Other Forms of Life (Evolution)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Wednesday, November 26, 2008, 10:39 (5637 days ago) @ BBella

Ideas about other life forms being involved with our origin or evolution have of course been imagined at length by numerous science fiction writers. The speculations of theologians are in much the same category. - I recall a short story, but I forget the exact details, which ended with the discovery that we are really Martians. - A classic is Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" in which an alien race, who bear a resemblance to devils, act as midwife to the transformation of the human race to a new form. - But my favourite are the mice in Douglas Adams' "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which are in fact the manifestation in our world of multidimensional beings who have been conducting experiments on us, while deceiving us into thinking we were performing experiments on them. - Even the Fantasist Royal, Sir Martin Rees, speculated in his TV Series "What we still don't know", that we, and perhaps our whole universe, could be a computer simulation by some advanced beings in a parallel universe. - The "anthropic" question of how the parameters of our universe were set to just the right "goldilocks" values for us to evolve, has also been ascribed to super-scientists in a previous universe setting them to the optimal values. - None of these speculations of course answers the ultimate origin question. I quite like Lee Smolin's conjectures about evolving universes being born from black holes. - However my preferred answer, as I've expressed before, based on the logical principle of Ockham's Razor, is that the universe appeared as a "fluctuation in the void", involving no pre-existing intelligence.