I's from afar...
After a long day at work, I was munching pineapple topped pizzas at the local pizza hut. Benevolent (and empty) as they usually are at 10 in the night, I could choose my own channel on the large television. I flipped through entertainment channels where anchors with excited, shocked and fake look expressed wonder at the revealing clothes, susprise at secret liaisons and dismay at non-public personas; past sports channels that made a habit of selling games where there was a lot of walking on a grassy field with trees and little shot-playing, where most of the players just stand and watch while the hitter gets ready to tackle a ball that is thrown as fast as possible, where a bunch of crazy fellows try to mow down another equally crazy bunch in their quest for ball possession (actually, I ought to confess that I like American football).
Increasingly disturbed by the lack of a suitable channel to hold my interest over dinner, I finally stumbled upon history channel that showed something interesting about the civil war... no, wait... the next in line is discovery. And DC was showing some spectacular animations of life on other planets as scientists imagined them.
Most of it was quite unimaginative -- a beetle that makes cat sounds and can swim underwater, a video-game like monster whose nostrils are extended and let out its breath backwards (cross between an elephant's and an ant-eater's nose pointed rearward), a mini koala with an ugly face and claws in its hands to climb trees rapidly, a group of animals which move quickly but keep fighting with each other and so on.
One particular creature was brilliant though. The planet in question is a barren landscape with very little water. There was some moisture on the ground but it was not replenished regularly. Hence, trees found it hard to survive until they struck a symbiotic relationship with an animal! The trees grew on the back of the animal -- which buried itself in sand. The animal was HUGE -- so the trees can comfortably grow on its back. The animal absorbs the moisture and donates it to the tree. The tree makes food and sends it back to the animal. Once the moisture ran out, the animal just got up, moved to a better location and buried itself.
These organisms were designed to replicate all that we see on earth. The basic components of life -- the sense of touch, smell, sound generation, vision and hearing were mixed and matched with the ability to maintain symbiotic relationships with other organisms to create these supposedly new extra-terrestrial species. Most of it lacked novelty, they were unimaginative and failed to challenge the minds of the viewers.
There are other organisms, even here on earth, which use sonar (bats) to navigate and ultra-low frequencies (whales) to communicate. Before we figured out sound waves, we would not have imagined anything like that. So who knows, there are organisms which use bio-generated radio waves for survival? How will they look like? Are there other senses we are unaware of (because we cannot detect them?) -- these are questions I would have liked tackled. To answer them is a large undertaking but hey, they could have atleast tried.
Now what of organisms which have figured out other senses or can do things which are utterly unexpected? I dont know what they could be. I could only come up with organisms which can transform themselves from a mass of matter to a long thin rope, quickly, to help them slip past cracks while predators approach; or of organisms which have cleverly learnt to convert sand into glass and stick them on their bodies to reflect the surroundings thus camouflaging themselves; or of organisms which can rapidly reduce their body temperatures while predators approach so that they freeze immediately and become unfit for consumption. But as Darwin predicted for the case of the Malagasy orchid, if this organism exists, there must be a predator with the patience of a rock to wait until our fast-freezer thaws back to normalcy!
"I" am an organism that inhabits this planet. Are there others elsewhere in the universe? I am certain there are organisms far away pondering about the very same question, searching for us, waving at us and wondering what we look like; Maybe, their world is dark, and they have not realized the beauty of it all; maybe, they are explorerers like us fantasizing about a ship that can travel faster than light through black holes and across universes hoping to come across one like them, longing for that one lonely embrace from beyond the galaxies. Whilst in these moods, I feel the universe to be a lonely place without too many friends. Isn't it?
Increasingly disturbed by the lack of a suitable channel to hold my interest over dinner, I finally stumbled upon history channel that showed something interesting about the civil war... no, wait... the next in line is discovery. And DC was showing some spectacular animations of life on other planets as scientists imagined them.
Most of it was quite unimaginative -- a beetle that makes cat sounds and can swim underwater, a video-game like monster whose nostrils are extended and let out its breath backwards (cross between an elephant's and an ant-eater's nose pointed rearward), a mini koala with an ugly face and claws in its hands to climb trees rapidly, a group of animals which move quickly but keep fighting with each other and so on.
One particular creature was brilliant though. The planet in question is a barren landscape with very little water. There was some moisture on the ground but it was not replenished regularly. Hence, trees found it hard to survive until they struck a symbiotic relationship with an animal! The trees grew on the back of the animal -- which buried itself in sand. The animal was HUGE -- so the trees can comfortably grow on its back. The animal absorbs the moisture and donates it to the tree. The tree makes food and sends it back to the animal. Once the moisture ran out, the animal just got up, moved to a better location and buried itself.
These organisms were designed to replicate all that we see on earth. The basic components of life -- the sense of touch, smell, sound generation, vision and hearing were mixed and matched with the ability to maintain symbiotic relationships with other organisms to create these supposedly new extra-terrestrial species. Most of it lacked novelty, they were unimaginative and failed to challenge the minds of the viewers.
There are other organisms, even here on earth, which use sonar (bats) to navigate and ultra-low frequencies (whales) to communicate. Before we figured out sound waves, we would not have imagined anything like that. So who knows, there are organisms which use bio-generated radio waves for survival? How will they look like? Are there other senses we are unaware of (because we cannot detect them?) -- these are questions I would have liked tackled. To answer them is a large undertaking but hey, they could have atleast tried.
Now what of organisms which have figured out other senses or can do things which are utterly unexpected? I dont know what they could be. I could only come up with organisms which can transform themselves from a mass of matter to a long thin rope, quickly, to help them slip past cracks while predators approach; or of organisms which have cleverly learnt to convert sand into glass and stick them on their bodies to reflect the surroundings thus camouflaging themselves; or of organisms which can rapidly reduce their body temperatures while predators approach so that they freeze immediately and become unfit for consumption. But as Darwin predicted for the case of the Malagasy orchid, if this organism exists, there must be a predator with the patience of a rock to wait until our fast-freezer thaws back to normalcy!
"I" am an organism that inhabits this planet. Are there others elsewhere in the universe? I am certain there are organisms far away pondering about the very same question, searching for us, waving at us and wondering what we look like; Maybe, their world is dark, and they have not realized the beauty of it all; maybe, they are explorerers like us fantasizing about a ship that can travel faster than light through black holes and across universes hoping to come across one like them, longing for that one lonely embrace from beyond the galaxies. Whilst in these moods, I feel the universe to be a lonely place without too many friends. Isn't it?
posted by littlecow at
9:07 AM
4 Comments:
Even I have found depiction of aliens and other futuristic stuff on TV to be very juvenile and bordering on ridiculous. Other senses we are unaware of is a pretty interesting concept. But me is not able to come up with anything - maybe a more sensitive sense of hearing able to detect vibrations from afar!
Dude,
I imagine some organisms using nuclear power to feed from. After all, the sun is a fusion reaction and if we can use it from afar, somebody might be able to use it from closer... The basic point is what senses they have n what they need to live on will depend obviously on the resources they have to tap and so, you would have imagine the environment before you can imagine the organism. Organisms are after all open systems.
Symbiosis is seen as one of the truths of evolution though. There is a saying in English which goes as "One person's junk is another person's treasure." Symbiosis seems to be being discovered everywhere within Earth atleast.
The question of life in other planets/galaxies. I am sure it exists. The laws of physics are such that self organization is pretty much a truth of life. Even snow flakes have such beautifully complicated structures that self organization need not be just for organic matter and hence, I am sure there is life elsewhere just as self organization is universal. While we are on this topic - Define Life. Its not easy. To know whether life exists elsewhere, you need to define life first. You can sense what is alive but it is difficult to give a single unambiguous definition for life even for scientists in the field.
@janani: some organisms are able to do that as well. aren't there hypotheses that claim animals can detect earthquakes (goldfish) before it hits us. these are probably low frequency rumbles...
@b.a.l: many good points. the question of what is life became all too confusing to handle after a while. i started with a simplistic explanation-- whatever creates a difference in its environment (count only those instances when it has a choice to create more than one type of difference) is alive. but then, a river has a choice to move in any of the directions depending on the scale at which you view it. so does a stone!
the nuclear power stuff is good--especially coming in the wake of desktop fusion research which is all too hep nowadays.
why would you say self-organisation is evident from physics equations? to me, its not. perhaps, we deal with so many non-linear systems that it is bound by chance that we stumble upon organization somewhere?
@little cow,
I should have clarified. I dont mean that we understand complexity from the laws of physics we know of. What I mean is that if we see nature all around us, self organization is so abundant from snow flakes to crystals to micro organisms, that I think we will one day think of self organization into complex structures, one of the laws of physics. Check out http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/zd-Ch.20.html for more good stuff on this.
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