Watch this funny video to the end, history of the entire world. It tells the history of the earth as a series of “ponctuated equilibriums”; long eras of stability connected with quick leaps, phase transition.
From all the major leaps mentioned, all allegedly self-organized, I can believe in the autonomy of the most farfetched ones:
– It is believable that one day a cell finally learned to benefit from the economy of scale and thus shaped organs and animals so quickly to the extreme extent of the Cambrian explosion (2′:51″).
– We can believe the destination of technological singularity (19′:17″) that we are experiencing live, is taking place on its own as an emergent property of our civilization. Calling it the artificial super-intelligence, the transcendental object or as in this video “the thing inventor inventor” point to the same concept. It is currently unfolding before our eyes and it doesn’t seem to be guided remotely, by a typical interventionist conscious God, through any dashboard or something equivalent.
– It is also believable that the sudden increase in the brain size of the human ape and the advent of the double-articulated language (and thus the human mind – 4′:11″) has happened without an alien intrusion.
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But there is one mysterious transition. A leap too strange to claim it has emerged on its own and on the surface of this planet:
– The geological to biological transformation of the earth (2′:17″). How come as the planet cooled down and in a sense became fertile, cells appeared so quickly? Every good story that I have heard skips over this leap and ignores the magnitude of such transition by fast forwarding to the next episode.
So, how did cells – such extremely complicated machines – evolve on a geological planet like ours in such a short geological moment and where did the instruction sheet of all living organisms appear through rocks? All that advanced DNA computation and dataflow pipelines, where did they come from?
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I am certainly not searching for a God or an alien in this story, but as a punch line let us remember one of the oldest archetypes of human culture for further investigation:
Mother Earth ain’t a virgin!
So, what do you think? Was is the meteors?