What if aliens are boring?

[Anonymous No.6950292]

so I've been thinking... If you think there's life other than us in the universe (and you should rightfully think that) what if we are the first, or what if we are the last?

And what if when we find life, they are all human like us? Not like there isn't fish or giraffes but that we are the final configuration?
Every path eventually leads to us.

[Anonymous No.6950295]

>>6950292
These are possible but there is no reason to assume that they are the case.

[Anonymous No.6950298]

>>6950292
would their laryngeal nerve loop around the major artery? what about the vas deferens, do they have 0, 1 or 2?

[Anonymous No.6950312]

What

Why

No

[Anonymous No.6950337]

>>6950312
Explain

[Anonymous No.6950360]

>>6950292
Would they know why kids love cinnamon crunch?

[Anonymous No.6950438]

>>6950292
>what if we are the first
>what if we are the last
>what if when we find life
What if you learn to ask a coherent question? What then, eh?

[Anonymous No.6950451]

>>6950292
There are big enough variations among humans that it makes this seem very unlikely. Imagine if the West somehow never encountered China and Japan until the 21st century. There are your aliens right there. Think Chinese food and Anime exploding into our culture all at once.

Few things are really impossible, but boring is one of them.

[Anonymous No.6950461]

>>6950451
>Few things are really impossible, but boring is one of them.
This, our own shit we have on our planet is already interesting as fuck (I was randomly watching a penguin documentary during gym, it was good shit). Whatever culture they have will be interesting.

[Anonymous No.6950641]

>>6950451
Anime and China wouldn't exist.

[Anonymous No.6951277]

>>6950292
There is no single path or end goal to evolution. We can't be the final configuration because there is no final configuration. Even we ourselves are still subject to natural selection and are still changing over the generations.

Any other intelligent life out there would have been evolved from different ancestors and adapted to different environments and different pressures. The fact alone that they'll have different sexual selection than us will make a ton of difference. They may not even necessarily be based on carbon or use DNA to hold genetic information. If we ever went out and found aliens, and they even remotely resembled us, I'd become an immediate believer in intelligent design because the odds of evolving along the same lines are simply too low.

[Anonymous No.6951285]

>>6950292

Wait wut? I don't even...


NO!

[Anonymous No.6951335]

Nice meme philosophy questions

[Anonymous No.6951377]

>>6950292
>And what if when we find life, they are all human like us?

Yes Op, let's image that the whole universe is inhabited by humans, just imagine what this implies.
Now imagine that it turns out they're all muslims. Checkmate christfag.

[Anonymous No.6951379]

>>6950292
It's possible to deduce intelligence lives if we look how common is the frequency the genes are in which humans gained their intelligence.

[Anonymous No.6951384]

>>6950292

It's pointless to assume that alien life forms would even remotely resemble a human.
Human creativity is essentially taking something you're familiar with and enhancing it / mixing it with something different. Every depiction of demons, angels and mythical creatures in general (nobody has ever seen things like that) is based on a mix of humans and/or animals.

That's creativity in a nutshell. That's why we imagine any extraterrestrial race to be similar to us. (pic related)

We don't know what they look like and I don't believe that we will every encounter any alien civilization. Perhaps they already found us (which is very unlikely) but we aren't capable of interacting with them.

>semi-relevant article about Fermi-Paradoxon
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-theories-on-why-we-arent-visited-by-aliens-yet

[Anonymous No.6951436]

The universe is only 13.8 billion years old. I don't think we are the last. Maybe we are the first.. but we don't know whats out there, so this can't be answered.

[Anonymous No.6951452]

Even microbial extraterrestials would be very exciting.

Go back to reading your Star Wars fan fiction.

[Anonymous No.6951488]

>>6951436
The big bang is a theory why are you stating things as fact?

[Anonymous No.6951489]

ayy lmao

[Anonymous No.6951494]

>>6950292
Do you think the human aliens calculate the coordinates of earth, or do they have their own Mecca?

[Anonymous No.6951495]

>>6951384
This is why I believe were the most advanced thing in the universe or at least in a gargantuan radius. Its pretty fucked up that we have shit like wifi considering we were monkeys on all fours 5 million years ago with 4 million bc being the first confirmed bipedal

[Anonymous No.6951502]

>>6951384
evolution is bound to happen, though, not simply an accident. Just about every multicellular organsim shares some common properties like symmetry, 4 limbs, 2 eyes, mouth, anus etc.

You have no grounds to speculate in but direction but neither do I. Your idea of really different fuckin 5 eyed 9 octopus dicked aliens stem from your retarded fallacy of thinking you're too smart for the petty unimaginitive hollywood anthropomorphisms. Planets, suns, rocks, galaxies all follow general patterns and distributions and it's not far fetched to think that this may also apply to self replicating organisms to some extent

[Anonymous No.6951503]

>>6951488
Gravity is a theory. Bacteria is a theory. Heliocentrism is a theory.

Learn English.

[Anonymous No.6951535]

>>6951502
>Planets, suns, rocks, galaxies all follow general patterns
Because they're confined by gravity

>Just about every multicellular organsim shares some common properties like symmetry
ok
>mouth, anus
Gotcha, need a way to absorb nutrients and expel waste. None of this is leading to a humanoid form, though.
>4 limbs, 2 eyes
AAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHA HOLY SHIT HE'S ACTUALLY SERIOUS

Insects, arachnids, mollusks, etc all outnumber the rest of life both in terms of diversity and total biomass. This is a beetle's world, we're just living on it.

[Anonymous No.6951552]

>>6951502
>multicellular organsims
>4 limbs
Insects have six, arachnids have 8, crustaceans vary, mollusks have none
>2 eyes
Arthropods may have more than one pair of compound and/or simple eyes, many mollusks have none
>anus
Mammals separate solid & liquid excretions, birds & lizards have claocae, sea cucumbers & I think octopi have multi-purpose orifices.
>symmetry
I'll give you this one because it seems like an emergent trait of many procedural generated systems.

[Anonymous No.6951559]

>>6951552
>Aliens are breathing, eating, talking and pooping from the same hole
>at the same time

[Anonymous No.6951579]

>>6951277
>They may not even necessarily be based on carbon or use DNA to hold genetic information
What the fuck? I know fairly little about the subject, but isn't DNA universal to life in that all life starts with a self replicating molecule?

Pls explain.

[Anonymous No.6951584]

>>6951579
Well for one, DNA is not a self-replicating molecule. It needs enzymes & shit to split & copy it, or something (last biology I had was in hs). Second, that's just life on earth, which we think all rose from a common single-cell ancestor that used DNA. If life on an alien planet arose from a single-cell organism that didn't use DNA, then life there wouldn't be DNA based.
Guess how many examples of not-Earth life we have to study.

[Anonymous No.6951587]

>>6951579
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid

[Anonymous No.6951610]

>>6951584
So after googling a bit I found a theory which fits what I thought about.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis

This seems to be the most widely accepted theory explaining how life started. I mean it kind of makes sense if you think about it: life couldn't have begun from even something that could be called a single cell organism. First we have to understand that life is ultimately just a very complex self replicating chemical process. Once this is understood it is only logical that life could've begun from a single molecule that happened to reproduce itself.

>>6951587
So basically it's still DNA only it's called differently because it's synthetic and as of now lacks the ability to interact with a biological organism?

[Anonymous No.6951635]

>>6951584
>>6951610 here again
What I was trying to say with my post is that there is no way for life to have been developed even on other planets other than a simple self replicating molecule, which is the basis for DNA.

[Anonymous No.6951650]

>>6951635
Well yeah, but it doesn't have to end up in DNA. Could be that life on another planet isn't even cell-based, just that those replicating molecules wound up as something else. I've always thought some kind of crystal-based life would be cool, but never put much thought into how it would work.

[Anonymous No.6951654]

>>6951650
Well if it's not cell based and remains just a self replicating molecule or a growing body of a matter then I doubt we can call it life. Though eventually it can evolve into life, and probably will, given enough time.

[Anonymous No.6951683]

>>6951654
But why cell based? That could just be Earth.

[Anonymous No.6951693]

>>6950292
humans (as a whole) are arrogant and self centered. Most cant get their head around anything outside of us. If it's not us then it has to be like us right? There are many paths going in every direction. They can't all lead to us. In such a huge place the possibility of the samething happening(our existence or an exact duplicate) is remote. Possible but highly unlikely.

it is an interesting thought tho.

[Anonymous No.6951706]

>>6951683
Isn't cell the smallest part of an organism, and simultaneously the smallest possible type of organism?

I mean, what cell is, basically, is the minimal amount of parts required for the processes to sustain a living organism. If there indeed were an organism the size of, say, an insect, for example, and it would not consist of repeating elements, then it would be safe to call it a single cell organism. Therefore, I assume, it is also safe to say that there are no lifeforms without cells.

[Anonymous No.6951708]

watch space dandy op

[Anonymous No.6951721]

>>6951706
>Isn't cell the smallest part of an organism,
Depends on what you mean... even a cell has constituent parts and organelles.

>simultaneously the smallest possible type of organism?
We don't know

>>6951610
>So basically it's still DNA
from the article:
>As of 2011, at least six types of synthetic sugars have been shown to form nucleic acid backbones that can store and retrieve genetic information.
>Although the genetic information is still stored in the four canonical base pairs, natural DNA polymerases cannot read and duplicate this information. Thus the genetic information stored in XNA is “invisible” and therefore useless to natural DNA-based organisms.[2]

It would be useless for any forms of DNA-based life, but so far we know of at least 6 types that can store information. We're still working out all the details, though. It's one of the biggest reasons scientists would absolutely love to get some microbial samples from Mars or Europa or elsewhere, to see if they also use DNA and other familiar tools or if they've evolved along their own unique path.

[Anonymous No.6951791]

>>6951721
>Depends on what you mean... even a cell has constituent parts and organelles.
What I meant was that cell is the smallest element in an organism that doesn't consist only of repeating elements, meaning you cannot divide it fully into smaller elements (except molecules). Since the word has a very loose definition I think mine is better for this context.

Hence if we to find an organism which seemingly lacks cellular structure, we may simply reach the conclusion that were dealing with a single cell organism.

>We don't know
Well with this definition, we would.

>The rest of your post
As I said earlier I lack any advanced knowledge on the subject, so when I was saying that every organism must have a DNA I actually meant that every organism has to have a molecule which stores all the genetic info required.

By the way is the difference between DNA and what you posted merely in what they consist of or is it a fundamental difference (e.g. structural or maybe even functional)?

[Anonymous No.6951812]

>tfw op is the apex of the universe

[Anonymous No.6951852]

>>6951791
All cells on Earth follow similar structural patterns, and are mostly defined by their membrane structures. If this is a more universal constant or just unique to us, there's no way to know. Using a strict definition, it's possible other life may not use cells as we know them. But using the loose definition in your post I'd say it's safe to assume they will have some sort of cell or analogue. They would need cells to carry out basic biological functions, as far as we would know them.

>DNA I actually meant that every organism has to have a molecule which stores all the genetic info required.
They could use something other than DNA to serve that purpose. From the paper that's cited in the article, it seems some of the alternatives created in the lab follow a double helix structure while others don't. The ones hat follow the double-helix are obviously the most useful to us since that's what we're familiar with, but we don't know yet if the helix is inherently superior to other forms or not. At this point we're delving into highly theoretical and uncharted waters since we're still making baby steps in the field.