Life Will Find A Way

[Wertbag]

I was watching a documentary by David Attenborough about the Galapagos Islands and was amazed at how great life is at taking hold in really harsh environments.  The islands are 600 miles off the South American coast, and yet the winds have carried birds, seeds and even spiders across to start new colonies.  The birds delivered more seeds and nuts, but you also had mangroves floating in and debris rafts delivering lizards and other plant life.

The first plant life had volcanic rock to grow on, and yet it found a foothold and as each generation of plant died it became soil in which to grow larger and more complex plants.  Thousands of years later and the desolate volcanic fields are covered in forests with an abundance of bird, insect and lizards.

 

What made me bring this up was another Christian saying how perfect Earth is and how slight changes would make life impossible.  However this really doesn't take into account just how hardy life is.  If you travel in the frozen wastes you will find bears, seals, walrus', seas teeming with fish and penguins surviving in blizzards.  If you travel the deserts you will find scorpions, snakes, birds and camels.  In fact everywhere from the crushing depths of the oceans, to the toxic boiling waters around volcanic vents you will find life.

You won't find human or mammals in many of these areas, but complex life forms will be everywhere and knowing that surely you cannot  say that small changes to Earth would have made life impossible? 

 

In fact looking at humans we are actually one of the worst creatures in a natural environment.  We can't survive too hot or too cold, our children are not able to fend for themselves for many years, we have no natural camouflage, no natural defences, no ability to hunt as we have no natural weapons.  We burn in the sun and freeze in the winter.  We aren't good swimmers or climbers, we have limited senses, we have no armour and therefore injure easily.  I think my design for Human 2.0 will be more like crab people, armoured with built in weapons, egg laying, keep the opposable thumbs, put eyes on stalks and move us up to the top of the food chain.   

[older]

For Human 2.0, I'd also include a brain that is hard-wired for logic and common sense.

[sdelsolray]

...

What made me bring this up was another Christian saying how perfect Earth is and how slight changes would make life impossible. 

... 

That is a common Christian apologetic based on lies, misrepresentations and well-cultivated willful ignorance.

[ExCBooster]

Absolutely, Wertbag. And the things that are armored, with built in weapons, lay eggs and eyes on stalks, with senses we can only dream about? Arthropods, especially insects. They truly rule the Earth. The few things humans do really well are tools, culture, communication, and distance running in hot climates. We're operational at temperatures that would give other animals heatstroke. It's the skin we're in: we have sweat glands all over for cooling, not just scent marking. Melanin deposited all over gives us natural sunscreen. We're just about the scariest thing in the bush.

 

You're being chased by a human? They have culture that has taught them to read your tracks, even when they can't see or hear you. They don't have to smell you to find you. There's never just one, they work in teams, and in freakish coordination. Their tools like throwing sticks, spears, arrows, and rocks, can kill you, and they don't even have to close to biting distance. It could be high noon, on the kind of day that makes the air shimmer with heat, and they'll still be coming for you. They're not going to quit until you're dead. 

 

Outside our tropical savanna comfort zone, though, our culture and the tools that go with it means that we can adapt to new, hostile environments far quicker than our bodies can keep up. Move toward the poles? Team up with the cold weather endurance champ - wolves. No fur for insulation? Get somebody else's. Outer space? Bring it on. 

 

But, yeah, life will find a way. Even inside Chernobyl, there's a fungus starting to adapt to living on hard radiation. No kidding. Worries about the Earth becoming uninhabitable aren't for the sake of Nature, because Life will evolve. It's for our sake... can we change fast enough to avoid making the planet uninhabitable for ourselves? There's seven billion of us, arguably already too many. If we can't maintain an environment friendly enough to our food sources and resource load, we're done. So sure, we can live in hostile environments, but not at these densities without agriculture.

[Guest Furball]

 The islands are 600 miles off the South American coast, and yet the winds have carried birds, seeds and even spiders across to start new colonies.  The birds delivered more seeds and nuts, but you also had mangroves floating in and debris rafts delivering lizards and other plant life.

 

I thought god made all these creatures and plants just magically apprear