Re: SF writers vs. Fantasy

Aqua wrote:
Bill Swears wrote:
Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
In article <12a3v5feidissae@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bill Swears <wswears@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm thinking, we get into exploring the solar system, and we meet humanoids. They don't look much like us, but enough, so among other threads is the effort to figure out when we split off from each other, and whether that makes earth the original home, or the creche.

The trouble is that these questions are trivial to settle (actually
the second one is settled already, by the way that we are related to
other Terrestrial life). Unless the creche started with one-celled
life, we are natives here.

Supposing our genetic cousins come from a planet with equally diverse biosphere, and yet carry markers we don't share with a number of terrestrial species? Parallel evolution is still far less likely than some more direct connection. You are the genetics expert, you can pose the question so it makes internal sense.

As another who works in genetics: no, actually, I can't. I'm not sure you appreciate the complexity and depth of the evidence we have that we belong here, solidly among other Earth life, and particularly, are a recent branch of primates.

Essentially, your question is very similar to the question I ask myself when two students submit identical answers, and the writing style and word use is similar to what I've seen of one of those students' previous work. It's not hard to figure out who plagiarised who.

Aqua

Let's look at a couple options. One, life on Earth and Protozoa II, for want of a better name, both started at the same time, about 3.7 to 13 billion years ago. This early "life" was really just chemical soup. sometime a couple hundred million years ago, it organized into multi-cellular organisms using complex DNA/RNA strands.

In my unscientific opinion, any life form that uses DNA is related to us, very closely, because I'm willing to believe that other chemical compounds could have reached that level of complexity and organization given billions of years, and I'm not willing to think we're going to find that RNA forms on every potential biosphere as a function of some natural law of the universe.

Then, over some hundreds of millions of years, both planets develop vertical plant growth climbing quadrupeds. We've now established two coincidences that almost can't be coincidental. Now, these quadrupeds find our solar system and are living in the area when we establish our early colonies in the solar system, which may very well constitute an unreasonable coincidence in timing of development, considering the geological ages involved.

This option requires ongoing manipulation by some third party over several geological eras. Perhaps a culture that exists that long, perhaps a group who are using some sort of suspended animation to allow them to conduct a long term experiment with occasional forays into the subject biosphere's for manipulation, but for who are they conducting the experiment?

Second option, an advanced set of multicellular organisms are placed on earth and Protozoa II at a stage when there are no amino acids at all, and the organisms have an as yet undiscovered chromosomal template already installed that predisposes them to similar developments. In the absence of other competition, these advanced organisms spread to encompass the entire range of evolutionary sequence that exists, both evolving to higher life forms, and deteriorating to leave the stamp of fields of early amino acids, not destroyed or ingested, not because there aren't more successful lifeforms already in existence, but because the more successful lifeforms don't have the population density to destroy them before they've been encapsulated by geophysical processes. This allows for a much later introduction of life than currently believed possible, but still in the hundreds of millions, or small billions of years.

Either option makes Earth a creche, and also the natural home of our entire biochemical family. Either option involves huge sweeps of time, creative explanations of long term developments, and an interesting backdrop to tell a story that could involve the sweep of civilizations, or the meeting of two star crossed lovers, one of which has hair growing all over her body, and the other of which uses a plated exoskeleton to support his massive body, which looks remarkably like the thing from Fantastic Four, save the armored tentacles for manipulators, and the fact that it uses a chlorophyll alternative to augment the lungs in providing oxygen to the system, allowing him to think fast and move his one ton bulk around with the same kind of speed, endurance, and dexterity we get with lungs and anaerobic respiration alone.

Either story is yards easier for a geneticist to tell with verisimilitude than it would be for me, since you'd already be familiar with the areas where you'd need to research, and the loopholes in current theory that you'd need to go through to keep the story "real."

That is just two options, I'm sure there are others.

Bill

--
Bill Swears

Ever Inappropriate, always contrite, and now... Ironic! How cool is that?
.

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