Random thoughts are collection of thoughts that are pretty incoherent, unordered and chaotic, that I mostly think of and think to myself. Many of these are just collections of random opinions heard from someone, may be from reels or podcasts and then a few opinion pieces of mine from here and there. Do not try to find any scientific reasoning here.
Before we delve into the topic of life any where else, lets thinks of how did it originate on earth. Summary of the process… well the first thing that comes to my mind is the opening song of the series, Big Bang Theory:
"Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait
The earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to drool
Neanderthals developed tools
We built a wall (we built the pyramids)
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries
That all started with the big bang (bang)."
Well, to my memory, it all started when the earth cooled down and the first single celled organism came out of the primordial soup. All this according to me has been a result of chaos that beautifully constructed itself to life. I believe so much in the capabilities of chaos that I have often quoted, it:
And its with this belief, that I feel, that life, if it were to arise anywhere else in this universe, will arise out of chaos.
The next question that arises in me, maybe in most of us. “What would life look like ?”
We as humans are so limited in our imagination of this because we view everything from a human point of view. There are scientific theories and scales to define the kind of civilizations that might exist like the Kardashev Scale but in all its complexities and nuances, it would be far far from what we can imagine of. For us the very definition of life are the ones that are “Carbon based life forms”. What if life somewhere else hasn’t gone through (and that’s for sure) the same filters and processes that we went on earth. I don’t know may be these life forms would be based on Sulphur (or something that’s toxic for us). May be they would be floating around like jelly fishes or would they even have physical forms (we will come to that). We don’t even know if we ourselves are an advanced civilization or not; or the scarier thought that if we have crossed the Great Filter or not.
What would constitute an advanced civilization. I personally think that,
- they would have a very very elongated lifespan (I had recently watched Season 2 Episode 4 of Invincible and it did talk about the perspective of life from a species whose entire life cycle finishes in a year, falling in love with a civilization whose lifespan is almost in many centuries).
- they would be formless, and would have gotten rid of the body. One of our religious text books (I don’t know which one), says “शरीर नश्वर है पर आत्मा अजर-अमर ” which translates to ‘The body is mortal but the soul is immortal’. No matter if the body is made of organic matter, it will (and definitely will) age, decay and wither away. For an advanced civilization, the only path to immortality is to upload their consciousness, have a mechanical body and keep finding ways to fuel and repair it. In this sense an old and advances civilization, for me is more believable to be in the form of Transformers than the average alien that you keep seeing the movies.
- they can move between dimensions. This concept is very hard to wrap our head around because we always lived and existed in this finite three dimensional space.
- they would see the flow of time differently. (this is a very vast topic, some other time)
- they would be able to tap maximum energy from their surroundings and the entropy would be maximum.