MadScientist

I think we can forget about life on the land evolving back to the water, since Opiolite pointed out that it's already happened with the whales... So that just leaves the species that stayed in the water evolving into something more advanced than the octopus. I assume I am right to assume that the octopi are the cleverest of the marine based life forms, disregarding dolphins since they're mammals... So if the octopi are the primates of the aquatic world, a more advanced species would be based on their form. It's logical, to me anyway, that a more advanced species would evolve from those. I've still not convinced myself they'd turn into something as technologically advanced as we have, if they used any tools at all. So what would it take for a species of octopus to develop an even more advanced brain?? Would that even be biologically possible?? If one species evolved a more advanced camofauging system, one that changed very quickly so it didn't need to rest on a rock bed and slowly change its appearance. It could just glide over the rocks and change as it did so. Giving it an even better chance of evading predators. Then if they evolved primate type behavior of living in groups, so they hunted in packs giving them even more of an evolutionary advantage. Are there any comparisons we can make between the primate evolutionary path to the octopi's evolutionary path to predict the existence of a more advanced species?? I look at a chimpanzee or something similar using a stick to "fish" out ants from the inside of a nest and think "They might evolve into something more advanced like we did." I think the same think when I see an octopus showing off its skills.

I was forgetting about dolphins, I didn't do it on porpoi.. Nahhh I won't do that joke.. Thanks for the info though, I'll do some reading up on my whales.

I didn't know whales and dolphins evolved on land and migrated to water. The only whale that can really be classed as a predator is the killer whale, isn't it?? The rest just collect plancton don't they?? And YT2095 I wasn't thinking of life as advanced as the Abyss type life, they were aliens visiting Earth anyway weren't they?? All I mean is some kind of advanced octopi type species that doesn't use any tools but it's so timid and lives so deep.. If it saw the lights of a submarine from far away it would scarper straight away. A species as "sentient" (??) as ours or just far more advanced than any other sea life. Maybe they can communicate with each other though, giving them a large advantage over other sea life. If they could outsmart all their prey so much and evade predators well enough they wouldn't need to evolve much more, would they?? I was just wondering if there were any reason why it couldn't happen or have happened.. There is one thing I just realised. Large areas of land used to be under the sea and we haven't found any fossils, maybe they never lived in those areas though.

The force is strong with this one... The line Usually when a switch is DOWN it means it's on, that's how it works in the UK anyway. Faulty wiring, is the switch near the door, did you bang the door or maybe your head recently?? Is there a CCTV camera in the room or another light switch that someone might be using to wind you up with?? I'd have some fun with people if I were a security officer and could control the lights in a room from my office. Are there switches on the door?? School teachers often leaving the lights on at the end of the day, maybe it's some kind of energy saving system that turns them off after there's no movement in the room for a while. Lying SOB!!! Next you'll be telling us your fridge magically lights up or even your car when you open the doors.. When I tap the side of my head everything blacks out and I hear a kind of a popping sound, could this be related somehow?? I'm not mad you know!! My psychiatrist is though, she says she's a man but I can tell she isn't, the beard gives it away see!!

Is there any reason why life on land couldn't have evolved to the oceans?? I don't mean life started evolving on the land. Something like a bird that lives off fish evolving into a "fish bird" thing. Like the penguins, evolve from life in the sea, evolve on land for a while and become air breathers but since their prey is in the sea and they have to spend so much time underwater. Wouldn't evolution mutate them into water breathers again?? Or would the predators already in the oceans force them to stay on land?? Considering these facts.. I recently watched a documentary David Attenborough IIRC saying we've only explored around 5 percent of the Earths oceans. The fact that our ocean exploration methods aren't too fast or manoeverable. I consider the octopusses (octopi??) to be the primates of the seas, pretty clever creatures. And life's been evolving in the oceans for longer than on land. Is there some reason why a far more advanced species couldn't have evolved down there a long time ago?? They'd be fast enough and clever enough to evade detection by us. And I'm not talking about mermaids/men here either or an advanced civilisation that can build cities, they'd never have discovered fire for a start. But couldn't a species evolve that had more intelligence than octupuses or doplins??

The way I see it - if you make a cake then reduce it to its smallest elements, remove just some of those elements and try to make the exact same cake, you couldn't.

I thought about this, you need a universe that repeats itself. Either everything collapses into black holes or bounces off the edge of the universe or whatever. Just find a way of surviving that and the big bang and you're set. Small problem though, if the matter you and your ship are made from aren't present during the next big bang it won't happen like it did the time before. So the Earth wouldn't be formed. Which kinda messes things up a little.

Under THEIR bloody houses!!

So many sheep, so little time.

Must've taken you WEEKS to type this then, "What word... How shall I phrase.. Should I put a comma there or start a new sentence..." So that's that excuse about every decision you make gone straight away, something tells me it didn't take you weeks to type this. Now you know you can make decisions. In other words, look around at the things you do daily and how you choose whether to do them or not. Simply stuff like "Shall I go to the toilet or carry on with what I'm doing for a few more minutes?" It's not, it's stressing YOU out and shortening YOUR life span!! YOU are worrying YOURSELF to DEATH!! And if you know you can make good decisions almost all the time where's the problem?? Learn to trust yourself to make good decisions. You probably spent ages deliberating over whether to post this or not, I'd say you made the right decision - to get help. Dunno if this'll help, next time you have to decide what to do with your free time and you get that stomach churning feeling or whatever it is, forget about the decision and think of something that was intenseley satisfying get back to that feeling it gave you for a while. Then go back to the decision for a while then back to the memory. It's called swish patterning BTW. Why can't you just do nothing with your free time?? Free time... The devil makes work for idle hands. Did that set alarm bells off?? Where you once in an environment where all your decisions were made for you, prison, armed forces, parents?? High stressed job or one where you have to make important decisions for others??

I'm surprised that no ones mentioned hypnosis, I have one for speed reading which gets me to sleep really easily. Isn't whale song supposed to be good too or a gentle rythmic thud thud of a hearbeat. Or try counting sheep but how many can you fit into your bedroom?? You'd need a quite few to bore yourself to sleep.

So looking at the evidence from a wider angle and coming up with somethig Ophi didn't mention is ignoring that evidence?? Doesn't sound like it to me. And how is agreeing with Ophiolite but showing him that other wide angle view changing the subject of his post?? I don't think it does. So what's wrong??

Nice but "Your mind you must open a little more young Jedi..." Did life start on Earth or did the seeds arrive from space. It doesn't matter, step back and look at things, the earth itself came from space. So you're right to go for the ET option.

Totally agreed but I see the following as fine details you left out. Evolution gives us intelligence, self awareness and a LOT of questions that need answering. One of which is "Why am I here and how did I get here??" They look around themselves and see how much "stuff" there is and deduce - "Whatever made all this and this powerful thing I am must have been far more powerful than anything I can see. So it must be something I can't see. I've seen enough of the world to know there's nothing here that can do it.." Sorry Ophi, didn't read your post before but I might as well leave this in.

Nice one!!! Not knowing enough about evolution I have to ask a couple of questions... Are you taking into consideration things like your main prey disappearing, environmental changes that cut you off from your prey or.. I suppose you must be because obviously those affect your ability to get that prey. This one got me thinking!! Simple bacteria have simple DNA, I'm pretty sure that's correct. And genes are sections of DNA, right?? Don't simpler life forms have simpler DNA/genes?? That's what I remember being told anyway. So an amoeba doesn't have the genes to turn some cells into eyes and others into ears.. If a rat has simpler DNA than ours but more complex than an amoeba. That's got to mean that as a species evolves it mutates new genes that can turn things into eyes and ears and complex brains.. I'm pretty certain that's basically right, right?? So isn't there every chance our genes might become even more complicated than they already are?? What's the thinking on that one?? Will it definitely happen or is there some limitating reason as to why our DNA can't improve itself again?? What I was thinking was, if a simpler form of life suddenly gets a bit more DNA and develops simple eyes. If you didn't know about that gene for some reason you couldn't predict the evolution of eyes. And that ruins what I was thinking about above. What about genetic engineering then?? Couldn't we experiment on simpler DNA to give those life forms some new "features" and any good ones we could add to our own?? Is that something we know we'll never be able to do or something we might be able to do?? Even if it means altering the state of the atoms.. Because if you could find some useful new "feature" and put it into human DNA, that would then be in the evolutionary make up for humans, wouldn't it??

I just gave it a thought from another angle and came up with this.. I'm pretty certain I've no psychic abilities and I assume nobody in here has either, the lack of psychics proving they're real psychics. But for us to evolve these abilities the universe is going to have to apply pressure or another kind of reason for us to evolve them. The composition of the human brain can't have altered all that much since we evolved into uprighters. So why haven't we already evolved pyhcic powers?? If psychic powers are possible wouldn't it have been more advantageos for the earliest forms of life too?? Wouldn't even the earliest mammals have needed it, if something "strange" told them there were predators around the next corner, they'd have evolved that strange sense, wouldn't they?? If a shark can detect those minute electrical impulses from prey or other animals can read the magnetic fields. Natural psychic abilities must require something far more advanced than those strange senses. Quick typo for some humour, psychics, psychicks, psy chicks... Wouldn't it be crazy if we (as males ) found out that women had psychic abilities and were a much more highly evolved species than men. They'd evolved this ability to work as a single consciousness that made our individual male brains look like empty peanut shells. So they had all their reasons for never telling us too much about them, being "psychicks" they can stop any women who wanted to tell a man the truth. Think about that the next time you're in close proximity to a psychick.

Abloodygreed... I HATE the way they end some of these series. The worst thing is when they just axe a series after leaving a cliff hanger ending or even part way through the damned thing. I could never get into Crusade, that's the one with the bald headed guy who was a technomage or something like that. I think they told him to overact that role a little too much. Babylon 5 was good at the start but to me it's like they're all trying to do Star Trek. And we all know ST is the future so anything similar must be wrong. For a sci-fi to be good these days it's got to be very different to the Star Trek universe. Stargate SG1/Atlantis Farscape Red Dwarf Those are the only ones I can think of right now. Maybe it's just me but that's why I think those series/universes are good enough to rank up there with Star Trek or Star Wars. I'm 36 though so younger generations might adopt Crusade as their Star Trek...

I chose the name MadScientist because I didn't want people to take me all that seriously on everything, maybe it was a bad decision but... When I look out I see all these people bickering about things like "science is right" "No it's not the Bible is right." but people seem to be so fixed on what the universe is showing them that they forget they can step out of it and look for other possibilitiies or new ways of thinking/looking at things. Some of these new things I come up with are too far fetched to fit into the conventional models so they can't be possible, can they?? So I use those for story ideas... So no offence taken at all. I have to take up the issue RE evolution though, because you said I don't fully understand how evolution works, AFAIK I do. So I have to take it up so I can find out where my model is broken, so... Evolution, survival of the fittest. All life has evolved to the level where it's about to burst onto land. Plant life has moved onto the land because their environment carried them onto the land, those with mutations that enabled them to survive in this new environment did survive, evolving into plants and trees.. The fish evolved legs because they'd moved into the swampy coastal areas, they didn't evolve legs to walk on land but because it was easier to get through the dense swamps to either evade predators or catch prey.. So either a certain mutation of a species will become more predominant than the rest of its species, by surviving better giving it more of a chance to breed meaning its mutations spread more and its offspring help further this new species.. Being a predator or prey governs how your species will mutate, faster to evade or faster to capture... Another driving force will be things that allow the species to replicate more efficiently. Sex drive being one of them, those mutations with low sex drives will be a disadvantage to the survival of the species. It's easy to see that the next generation won't be as polluted by its mutation than it will be by those with high sex drives... That's basically my model for evolution.. And if telepathy is real or starting to become real it fits right into that model just like sex drive and the ability to speak or write does, doesn't it?? That's an example of me stepping back from the models most other people look at and seeing things from a wider angle. It doesn't fit into any of your models so I can't convince the rest of the world to see it so I'd have to use that as an idea for a story that people would see and think "Hey, that could happen." The guys who came up with original idea for The Matrix type story did exactly the same thing. And if you look at another thread that I started, I can't find any evidence to prove our universe isn't like that but no one or not many people will ever bother to examine the universe in that manner.

Yup, I totally agree with you Jake. I reckon it's just a matter of finding out how these entangled particles work then we can use the mechanics of that to communicate instantaneously. But it's kinda irrelevent here because even though there might be other reasons for us having telepathy what we need to find is something that occurs in this universe that could never occur in a simulated one. Otherwise there is every chance our universe is just a computer simulation of a simpler version of their own universe. I don't think it's anything to get paranoid enough over to change our lives, there's nothing we can do about it so... And there's every chance they pull us out of the simulation and give us a life in their universe. The thing is, even that fits into this model because it becomes heaven and hell. If you've the kind of mind that's not "nice" they'll probably not want it roaming about in their world. So this might even be their way of reproduction, clone a body then choose what kind of consciousness to put into it. And most of the the evidence in our (or mine at least) tells me they want people who don't harm their fellow men in any way. So nothing in the Bible proves otherwise, our god is those people running the simulation but there's nothing to say they don't follow that same god. So our god is their god so even that fits.. And if we can't prove this isn't a simulation and we start looking at it in more detail as that kind of universe we might find some different kinds of things out. So long as we don't abuse those "things" and stay "nice" they might not turn the simulation off or reset it and fix those things we found.

I STILL don't know what you mean. The laws of physics as rules for the universe are obvious, gravity, speed of light, etc.. I don't understand why these would need to change over time... I can see two other layers of rules though. The rules of the program itself, how it has to present/deliver some data it has. To send a simulated mind a picture it has to split it up into individual packets (photons) then send those values to the corresponding part of the mind that deals with visual information. Then the next layer is the rules the simulated minds create like "I can't ask her out because she's out of my league." Or are you imagining this VR as The Matrix or 13th Floor. I don't know how much you know about programming but... The video shown in a video game is only a graphical representation of the data inside the program. If you wrote a game that had no visual feedback, it'd be a bit boring but the game would still run along with the soldiers shooting their guns at each other or whatever. That's what a simulated universe would be like, the soldiers wouldn't physically move anywhere, their x,y,z variables would just get updated as they "moved". Then when they needed to be told they could see this computer monitor in front of them it would have to send that image into that simulated mind so it thought it was looking at the monitor. That's what I mean by altering the laws of physics so when light passed through the right materials it got refracted so the computers can get away with using the old visual data by shifting it to the left and putting the new data in the centre as you looked to your right. Their computers might not have the speed so they have to limit the visual information each mind (on each computer) has to deal with at any one time. Maybe the rules you're talking about don't fit into my concept of how they'd run the simulated minds. Can you give me an example of your 2nd layer of rules?? I still want to find some bugs in their system that I can take advantage of. Cheat codes would be nicer but... ;)