hihi24522

While I agree about this being pretty on par for earth, you are wrong about us having no idea what aliens would look like.

I get that maybe you were using hyperbole but seriously if physics is consistent across the universe, we can make pretty good guesses. Also science fiction is definitely not just based on life on earth and I can provide an example.

First, life according to nasa is any self sustaining chemical system that can undergo Darwinian evolution.

Basically if a thing can make more of itself and those “children” have the chance to be at least slightly different from their parents, it is life.

Well guess what, the universe tends to disorder. There is only one way to be the exact self replicating thing you are. Ergo, given time, you will stop working unless you are able to fight entropy which requires the production of entropy (see the second law of thermodynamics).

Basically all living things MUST take in some form of energy and output it in a more disordered form. Every living thing must eat and every living thing must produce waste.

Now this doesn’t have to be in the form of chemical energy. It should be possible to create an organism that can sustain itself by taking in quanta of high frequency light and emitting more quanta of lower frequency light.

However, that is strictly to stay alive which is only part of the definition of life and not even the real important one. The important aspect of life is that it can reproduce itself and equally important: reproduce itself not always exactly the same.

Building a copy of yourself requires more elements and moving any amount of mass requires applying a force (newtons laws). Now you could simply sit around and let diffusion bring nutrients to you. In which case you either need to be a machine that simply slowly build itself by chance, or you could be a cell with a semipermeable membrane that uses ion channnels to create an electrical potential across said membrane to facillitate your acquisition of those building blocks and outcompeting the former kind of life. Which one is more likely? So which one will become more complex and possibly large enough to be seen as an alien life form and not alien bacteria?

Anyway if you do work via diffusion, you’ll want surface area but you don’t want volume because force over distance is energy, so bigger than necessary means loss of energy, means getting out competed. This forces life which relies on diffusion alone to become more round shaped though it’s not a big loss since that’s how most simple membrane materials want to be anyway.

Now if you eat something, you need a way to turn that food into work you need done. This means you need to have (or parasitize) some chemical machinery that takes food and does something useful. If you need to replicate yourself then you also need a machine or machines that create more of each part of you. In most cases specialization of machines reduces waste, so a living thing will produce little units that each do specific tasks rather than a single protein that does everything because that’d would require more order and thus more energy. Instead the cell becomes a little factory that does the same stuff in a way that doesn’t require perfect rigid order because that’d be a waste.

Ta da, we have earth like life. If it’s beneficial for these units to work together, they will. Maybe they’ll merge into a single cell like thing like slime mold. Maybe one will use the other like a mitochondria. Maybe they’ll stay separate but signal each other as a colony. Maybe multiple colonies will combine to form something like a man o war jelly fish. Maybe a cell will be able to differentiate itself later allowing it to form a more complex multicellular organism with different systems specializing for specific tasks.

This is where structure becomes a diverse thing, but see we already know what a living thing needs and these structures will be built to facilitate those. You need a system for acquiring food and possibly a separate one for removing waste. And you need a system for reproduction.

All life needs this and we’re familiar with it because that’s how life on earth works.

Now depending on what energy you eat, things get a lot more diverse but they follow from physics so we can predict them. 

You eat light from a directional source? Then you want broad structures that face that source.

You need nutrients from diffusion? Then you want a network of tubular shapes to maximize surface area and minimize volume.

Need to trap prey? Build a net, build a harpoon gun, grow prehensile limbs and claws to grab them. Trap them with slippery walls or sticky substances. Immobilize them with venom or vapor and then enclose them for digestion. Grow legs or other methods of propulsion and get after them. Grow fangs to stop them from getting way.

All of those things are things life on earth uses. Because they’re the options that work and guess what: they will work anywhere else in the universe.

Are your oceans made of ammonia? Maybe kerosene? Who cares. If there are life forms in it that are small, filter feeding will be the optimal strategy for life. If there are big ones then direct predation with teeth will be efficient.

Need to move through a fluid? Fins will be the best option. Need to move through a really viscous fluid? Spiral propulsion systems like flagellum with be the way to go. Have to move along the ground and can’t propel yourself by the means above? Well you’ll develop a foot of some kind to use friction to move.

If physics is at all consistent across the universe, there will be similarities between life across its entirety because that’s what life is. Life is optimizing physics, optimizing energy/resource use to reproduce more life. Sure maybe there are weird situations we don’t have here on earth so we don’t have life adapted to that but that’s the entire idea behind science fiction.

Does Hank Green count?

Furthermore, by your definition of rock, basically all crystals are not rocks. Quartz is a single mineral. It is also considered a rock. As are all other gemstones which are a single mineral. If you think impurities count then again water counts because it has minerals like fluoride and carbonate and halite (salt) in it.

Now one could make the argument that lava is specifically molten rock extruded from beneath the surface of a terrestrial planetary body to its surface. In which case, water on earth doesn’t typically fit that description unless it’s like melted permafrost that melted before getting drawn to the surface or something.

However, on a very cold terrestrial planetary body which was comprised partly of ice, thermal vents / volcanoes would produce water and it would fit the definition of lava. Water is certainly lava in that context.

Considering that physics is assumed consistent across the universe, water viscosity would have the same range regardless of where in the universe it was. Ergo, the water you drink may not be earth lava but it is the exact same viscosity as the water that is lava.

So you still know what the mouthfeel of lava is even if you’ve never ingested any “real” lava.

Sidenote, if you really do want to figure out how silicate lava feels, you could probably find the dynamic viscosity of a certain lava flow and then create caramel under the right conditions to get approximately the same viscosity. Eating butter and sugar might not be healthy but it definitely is less immediately damaging than pouring 700°C fluids into your mouth.

Ice is a mineral. Thus, water is lava. Hence, you eat lava every day, and it is not the texture of thick honey. QED.

“Be yourself” five minutes later “why are you acting like that?”

The bourgeoisie (parasites) pay the bourgeoisie (parasites) to make their service worse in an attempt to extract more capital from you. You give the bourgeoisie capital… to stop them from making their service worse in order to take your capital?

This is a lose lose for you and a win win for corpo scum. Use an Adblock, take to the seven seas, use platforms that are decentralized. Then it’s a win win for you and, added bonus, it’s typically parasite free.

You are not alone. I tend to be the “sorry I can’t do anything today I scheduled an appointment four days from now” kind of person. Meds have helped but still takes effort to be like “I seriously do not need two hours or more to prepare to go to the fucking dentist.”

Amazing game. I have a bit of a rant to go on about certain a character’s actions.

Wow we’re getting close to cyberpunk 2077 if the police are actually adding “slander against a corporate rep” to a criminal’s rap sheet

Wouldn’t that basically just be graphite?

Oh I hear that kind of stuff too! And like the charger blocks for phones and things, and everyone thinks I’m insane.

Some days I can stand it or don’t even notice but other days it’s the auditory equivalent of sandpaper on my brain.

The other day, my mind decided to let me smell the entire fucking universe all at once for the whole day. I literally almost broke down on the train to school because there was too much going on. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve recovered yet and probably won’t because it’s finals week…

No emotions are communicable as emotions are qualia. However you can describe an experience or experiences that give you similar emotions, and if the other person feels quallia for those experiences they will assume you have the same.

Is your red the same as mine? We cannot ever say. But does your red happen when you see something I’d also call red? Most likely (unless you’re color blind).

The same is true of emotions. Maybe when you lose a loved one, you feel the feeling I do when I’ve accidentally hurt someone in a way I feel I can’t undo. Both are pain, but we will never know if the pain we feel for any specific experiences are the same because all feelings are incommunicable.

Now emotions typically have physical effects too and it is likely that people with similar bodies have some sort of qualia you can reference using the experiences that are associated with them “I feel cold” “I feel weak” “my body feels heavy” etc. Or maybe someone already can predict that they’d feel a specific qualia if they went through what you describe, but that’s never guaranteed.

Unfortunately you don’t have the option of verbal communication with a cat, but you do have physical effects. Furthermore, emotions arise from experiences yes? Remember how you can assume someone has a qualia for cold because they’re human and you’re human so if you experience a qualia corresponding to cold then likely so do they?

Well ennui is listlessness caused by lack of stimuli yes? We most likely feel it because we’re “predators” and have the desire for stimuli and engagement. The same can be said of cats. Ergo, it is entirely possible they could feel an emotion corresponding to it just like us. I would be more surprised if most animals did not feel boredom.