I woke up today with a strange thought , real strange

[blues90]

I have always wondered why there were different continents with different races and physical characteristics , you known black people , brown , yellow , red , whatever . Different languages and cultures .

This was something that lasted some time before man figured out a way to cross oceans and seas and forge into strange lands .

What came to mind was this .

What if , and to be sure this is a stretch , what if we all came from other planets and due to being social outcasts were dropped here on earth as a grand experiment . Now that thousands of years has passed we can see how some people are born with a set of morals and try to do the right thing whatever the definition of right may be nothing other than treating other humans as we ourselves choose to be treated . Some created religions to try to make sense of our existence or purpose and to find hope that the physical shell was just part of a journey because to not exist was beyond comprehension .

Now the entire experiment is rapidly coming to the end because by and large we have allowed the criminal greedy to take control as we followed them into this end .

[fenriswolf]

1. almost as good as

god getting pissed at us for building a tower and changed us and our languege so that we cannot understand each other.

[Deja Q]

8. Oh come now. The Tower of Babel is a lego kit compared to market "globalization"...

[Warpy]

10. But not nearly as good as the bit in "Hitchhikers Guide"

where all the useless people on a planet: the telephone sanitizers, PR agents, corporate yesmen, and assorted middlemen were told the planet was about to be destroyed and loaded onto a spaceship bound for a new colony. They arrived, but not until a virus spread by contaminated telephones had wiped out the population on their original planet.

[truedelphi]

19. God I do miss Doug Adams

I'd love to thank him for all the fishy jokes that made me laugh so hard

[Mnemosyne]

24. Bad fenris,

:spank::spank::spank:

[Lone_Star_Dem]

2. I know it's not as interesting as your theory but...

But I'm a firm believer in plate tectonics and climate adaptation.

[bobbolink]

17. Love your "make poverty history" graphic!

Some of us are making poverty history... by being extremely poor.

:(

[Lone_Star_Dem]

22. Sadly, that is more the reality than history in the sense my graphic means.

The artwork is by Julian Beever. It was commissioned by Live8 for the G8 summit.

:hug:

[Mnemosyne]

25. Hear, hear!

:hi:

[Canuckistanian]

28. And here is the same drawing from the "wrong" viewpoint

[warrior1]

3. How it all happened - with a blurb

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v25/n4/full/ng0800_379.html

Once upon a time, a Neolithic man named Tegumai and his daughter Taffy were spearing fish for dinner, when Tegumai broke his spear. Having neglected to bring a spare, and being too far from the village for Taffy to run back to fetch another, Tegumai went about repairing the broken one. Meanwhile, a Stranger-man, who spoke a different language, came up to Taffy, so she commenced to scratch out a picture on a piece of bark, illustrating her father's need for another spear. To emphasize the point, she included lots of spears in the drawing. The Stranger-man interpreted the child's drawing as indicating that Tegumai was in imminent danger of attack (surrounded, as he was, by spears in the drawing) and wanted reinforcements, so the Stranger-man hurried off to the village with the picture.

The villagers interpreted the drawing as indicating that the Stranger-man had killed Tegumai (all those spears, you know), but before chopping off the Stranger-man's head, they took him to the river so he could show them what he had done with Taffy. The villagers were quite surprised to find Tegumai alive and well and spearing fish with his newly repaired spear; Taffy was quite surprised (and annoyed) at the way the Stranger-man had been mistreated; and Tegumai was quite surprised to find the entire village descending upon him, ruining his fishing for the rest of the day. But soon everything was sorted out and put right, the Stranger-man cleaned up and made an honorary member of the village, and Taffy was congratulated for her great idea of drawing a picture to communicate information (never mind that the message wasn't properly understood by anyone). And that's how writing was invented.

[Vanje]

4. 42

The answer is 42.

[zabet]

5. I cannot even begin...

to ponder that.
I still have not
figured out if I am
real or just a figment
of my own imagination.
:crazy:

[stellanoir]

6. I've a colleague who's long described our planet as

"the out patient ward for the universe."

Seriously though I think this planet is an experiment in free will gone amuck.

The plan was "Let's put them on Earth and let them believe they have free will and are alone in the universe and see if they destroy themselves."

So far. . .we're not doing so great.

Time for some galactic intervention I reckon.

Yikes.

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. Please do not be offended but LOL I cannot believe in this any more than I can believe that

5000 years ago God was so pissed at the world he killed everyone but 8 people, who after the flood went their separate ways and founded the different human races.

[daninthemoon]

9. The idea of race is a modern notion, and the idea that Noah's sons

were the beginning of racial disparity is not Biblical, but a much later view used to validate things like the African slave trade and Native American genocide. No matter how badly Biblical folks treated each other, they never considered each other as anything but human.

[RainDog]

11. hmmmm... earth=australia?

sorry aussies...

actually, the idea of race is tied to exploration by ship, etc. if you go from England to Africa without stopping a lot of places along the way, then you think the differences are distinct. However, if you crossed the channel and went by land from France to Spain to Morocco to Libya to Uganda, you would see gradations, not distinct differences. Or go to Italy, Turkey, Russia, Mongolia Thailand, India... you get the idea.

Sadly, I think that fear of want, and thus hoarding, are human anxieties that show themselves in their most negative aspects as greed and prejudice.

However, it is totally true that we are part of everything else that exists in the universe because we all came from matter that has been recycled over billions and billions of years so that we went from the big bang to the big bust that is BushWorld.

[alfredo]

34. Race as we know it is actually adaptations to the local climate.

What if a Bantu community moved to Canada and didn't interbreed with the Euros and Inuit. Would their skin eventually lighten and features change to deal with the meager sun and cold?

[Warren Stupidity]

12. What if you don't smoke quite so much before you post? nt.

[ret5hd]

15. Killjoy. Partypooper. Downer. (Sorry, but you just gave me a contact low)

[blues90]

18. LOL . if I had smoked

Then this would have have been pages long and really out there .

This was one of the thoughts that rushed through my mind before I was fully awake but it stuck in my head .

[truedelphi]

21. S F Chronicle let a reader write a column and he choose the topic

Of the time he took some LSD and came on to the drug just as he was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise on a weekend.

A cop pulled him over and said to him: "I have to stop you because of your speed. How fast do you think you were going?"

The columnist said, "Jeez, I don't know" All he can think is that he was going like ninety and his speeding ticket based on speed over 45 MPH will be tremendously huge.

"You were going three." said the cop. "Three miles an hour"

[Uncle Joe]

13. Genetic evolution, as people adapted to their different environments after

the Earth's major continent broke up, creating isolated regions.

[zippy890]

14. we may be an experiment

I have thought something like your idea.

Now don't laugh, people, just open your minds for a minute.

here is the Earth about a million years ago, give or take 1/2 a million. mammals and all sorts of animals, fish etc. perfect environment for a genetic experiment. so the visitors did some experimenting with DNA.

But OMG when they returned and saw homo sapiens and what they had created they left never to return.:rofl:

An experiment gone wacko, thats what we are!

your on to something about the need to create religion- trying to put our different consciousness in context.

[ret5hd]

16. So what you're saying is: We are the Chinese takeout left in the fridge for 6 months...

and now everyone is afraid to go in and take us out to the trash. Is that about it?

[zippy890]

23. kind of

more like something that grew out of a petri dish left in the lab.

the lab got contaminated and things got out of control .

Run away!

}(

[Dawggie]

20. Reminds me of an old Theodore Sturgeon story which name I forget

in which a scientist basically starts a society under glass which eventually destroys itself.

*It's been years since I read this, if anyone remembers the title, I'd be grateful to hear!

[hyphenate]

26. Being a science fiction reader

for most of my life, I want to reassure you that your "strange thought" has been explored many, many times in the annals of SF. It's not unique, and has managed to be discussed often.

If you watch Stargate Atlantis, they actually used the idea last season with an episode called "The Game." The game was essentially SimEarth, with two distinct groups on one planet, controlled by the Lanteans starting about 10,000 years in the past. In the episode, when the Lanteans disappeared, the people on the planet were left largely on their own, until Rodney McKay and John Sheppard came along and began to make changes on the planet, not realizing they were controlling conditions on a real planet, and not actually playing a Sim game.

The main reason this scenario has been shut down is that human presence on earth has been procedural and gradual over several million years. If someone accepts ID, this idea fits right into the ID theory, except that aliens are substituted for a "god." If we emerged as complex organisms out of thin air, this would have been a potential argument. Otherwise, it can't hold water in that form.

Rather than plant human beings in the ecosystem of earth, however, another theory has been suggested: aliens coming to earth at specific times over the millennia and influencing civilization in development and growth. Our society would have benefited from those influences on an ongoing basis--advances in medicine, astronomy, biology, literature (Shakespeare was an alien? :)) and more. If one wants to look through our history, they might notice specific jumps in technology or knowledge, and could point to meddling by someone--someone more advanced. Again, this is a common SF topic as well, and the basis for Stargate, among others.

Theory about our beginnings rests squarely on whether we are fully formed beings, or as evolutionary beings. The notion of "Survival of the Fittest" uses the theory that throughout our history, those who were physically or mentally superior gradually replaced anyone who was unable to adapt to their circumstances. For instance, someone who might have migrated to a colder region had some manner of protection against the cold, whether it was thicker skin, a mind that could build or develop shelter, or other ability to stave off the cold. During the evolution of that group, certain characteristics developed: extra fat deposits to keep the cold from harming them, fairer skin because they received less sun, and more. Those who dwelled in the equatorial region got darker skin (to protect them against the sun's heat and damaging UV rays), taller, thinner and other characteristics. In fact, one interesting note is that "we," as homo sapiens, were not the only developing group of people on earth, as Neanderthals developed on a different path at the same time--the theory is that homo erectus, our predecessor. managed to cause the end of Neanderthals through a mixture of brute force and more complex skills, such as the ability to make weapons. If Neanderthals had survived, that element of savagery would have been tempered by the Neanderthal less aggressive behavior.

As these changes were largely done before mankind became what we know it as today, there was and is no single instance of a jump in our evolution that makes anything other than an evolutionary beginning plausible.

However, science fiction fans have enjoyed discussing such topics for a very long time, and will continue to do so even if they have a conviction that evolution is the true answer of our particular civilization. :)

[blues90]

35. I don't buy into ID .

I believe in evolution . I'm not much of a science fiction reader though there were a few books or authors like HG Wells that I liked and a few of the older movies made in the 40's and 50's .

I have sort of given up on trying to make alot of sense when I see the reality of this mad crazed government and how people can somehow accept it .

I think about back when JFK was around and how the public would react if he did anything even close to what's happening now and I know most of the politicians then if they acted like todays members they would have been dragged away or at least forced to leave .

[lumpy]

27. We all came from a distant planet. They cleaned out their

insane asylums, loaded the inmates into space ships and dumped them on planet Earth.

[bobbolink]

29. Nope, insane people are kinder.

[lumpy]

30. OK, so they dropped off an insane bunch of thugs and misfits

also

[bobbolink]

32. I repeat, insane people are kinder.

Conflating insanity with criminality is not only wrong, it's CRUEL.

BASTA!

[lumpy]

31. OK, so they dropped off an insane bunch of thugs and misfits

also

[EstimatedProphet]

33. And, we all have to fight each other until there is only one left

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!