Alien intrusion

Yesterday was Wednesday, yet today is Friday. Someone has done something with Thursday! I'm in the early stages of investigating this matter, and I call on my readers for help.

Does anyone anywhere have a memory from Thursday? I'll bet not. It's obvious there has been alien interference in human affairs. They took Thursday! If we don't do something about this now, who knows how many other days they may steal!

Search your recollections. Do you remember anything about Thursday, November 8, 2012? I know you don't...and I'm getting chills as I consider the implications. Damn! I hope they don't steal Sunday. I need my football fix.

Intelligence not required

There's a story today on physorg about the mental abilities of bees. Here's an excerpt:

The team's findings suggest that bees are able to solve complex routing problems by learning, without needing a sophisticated cognitive representation of space. Dr Lihoreau explained: "Despite having tiny brains, bees effectively used gradual optimisation (comparing several different routes), to solve this famously complex routing problem which still baffles mathematicians 80 years after it was first posed."

A tiny bee brain that we wouldn't assume is capable of very much, and yet it can outpace us in this area. I love that the bees managed to learn and come up with this routing solution without a large brain. That's so cool.

I sometimes wonder if intelligence is the holy grail that we think it is. My favorite kind of sci-fi books are the ones about alternate, alien sorts of intelligence. Peter Watts' "Blindsight" went wild with this notion. If you enjoy the idea of varied concepts of consciousness, pick up a copy. The book even asks whether intelligence requires a self. Could there be another kind of intelligence, almost the opposite of a human's? His answer is fascinating.

Consciousness and intelligence are insanely interesting topics. Remember, folks: we don't even know how our brains create the illusion of "selves" -- or for that matter, what these "selves" are. It's just wild that we know so little about what we are.

We are truly an infant race. Here's hoping we reach adolescence.

Just a thought

I don't know about you but I detest doing chores. Anything I have to do repeatedly gets my dander up. I try to be all Ghandi about it but it doesn't work. I do not want to be making sandwiches, cleaning, setting up the coffee pot, doing laundry, etc. These tasks drive me crazy.

And you know what's the worst thing? An odd feeling I sometimes get when I'm taking care of a chore -- a feeling that I've always being doing the chore. Like I'll be putting pills into those damn plastic pill-popper things and I'll think, "Wasn't I just doing this, like five minutes ago?" When this happened recently, a thought occurred to me.

What if that's the truth? What if I've always been putting pills into pill-holders, and the rest -- my supposed life -- is just a dream? Maybe some aliens want pills put into plastic holders so they got a slave, me, and, to keep me happy they inserted some code into my brain that makes me think I have a life. But really all I do is put these stupid pills into these stupid plastic slots.

Does this strike a chord within you -- a scary, Twilight-Zoney chord?

New approach to E.T.

Okay, so we sent a golden record into space aboard Voyager -- a message for sundry aliens out there. It has sounds and photos and music and other information and it'll probably be fun for aliens to analyze if they can figure out how to play it on their alien machines.

But you know, I can't help but notice that when we make friends with another species on Earth we always do it the same way: with food. How much would our dogs love us if we didn't feed them?

So what I'm thinking is this: next time we send lasagna. Oh no, wait. Maybe they don't eat meat. Okay, so we send a spinach quiche. Doh! They might be vegan. Wait, let me think. I know, I know! We'll send a vegan pizza with nice veggies on top. And we'll package it freeze-dried inside a microwave that heats it up when the outer seal is broken: instant pizza, instant galactic friends! Oh no, wait! Vegan pizza? What could I have been thinking? Jeez, I don't know what-all to send them. Any suggestions?

And then we'll just have to hope that NASA reads this post and follows the comment thread closely. For all our sakes.

Are there religious aliens?

Anyone with a lick of sense knows life exists throughout the universe. It's everywhere (that it can be). But the size of the universe means it's going to be a long, long time before we meet intelligent aliens. When that day finally comes, do you think they'll be religious?

I think if they haven't been around for much longer than we have, there's a good chance that religion will play a role in their society. Let me say the same thing another way: if they're as primitive as we are, they may well believe in gods.

They might even have similar god myths. After all, like us these aliens exist because of evolution. They will have traveled a similar, bloody path from primitive life form to their current existence as intelligent beings. And all along that route, like us, they would have tried to explain reality to themselves. And that means they might have invented gods, especially in their most primitive days.

After all, what are gods but a way to try to understand what we fear and cannot otherwise explain? I'll bet even dogs have wild notions about reality drawn from their basic lack of understanding of the world around them. Does Fido believe in a god (other than his owner)? Maybe that's pushing it but I'll bet there's a corollary.

Primitive = religious. So could an alien race that arrived in a spaceship be religious? Probably not. Their arrival in such a vehicle would imply an advanced understanding of science and likely the ability to travel at some high fraction of the speed of light. I figure a race like that would have thrown off notions of god long ago.

Of course, the worst nightmare would be if they were religious. If we can't handle the minor differences that exist between our religions here on Earth, can you imagine how we'd deal with alien gods? I can just see the Fox news coverage now!

Maybe I'll write a short story about this. Fun idea.