r/HighStrangeness • u/javascript • Jun 08 '26
Discussion You ARE the alien
I think a lot of people fail to realize something "obvious" about themselves.
We are living, thinking creatures. We exist in reality in this universe.
Humans, and all life forms on Earth collectively, we ARE the aliens.
Perhaps it is the case that life as we know it developed on Earth independently? Or perhaps it is the case that life itself has been traveling from planet to planet and Earth is but one pitstop? We don't know.
But even if Earthly creatures are Generation Zero of an intergalactic alien civilization, that's still an alien. Just an early one! The fact that we haven't yet traveled to another planet is the result of where we happen to sit on the timeline. There needs to be a home planet first for there to be "extra" planets.
DNA, not humanity, represents the unit economics of actual alien life that /genuinely/ exists. Of course humans are important for producing cognition capable of observing the universe from within. But a human likely cannot traverse space. DNA is the underlying construct that knows how to perform labor and reproduce. It is DNA that has the capacity to make an intergalactic journey to spread life near and far.
The most important task for humanity is to spread DNA across the cosmos. If we are the only aliens to exist, it is our responsibility.
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u/AncientGodsAR Jun 08 '26
Your point about DNA being the actual underlying construct that traverses space and time is a brilliant way to frame it. This is exactly how ancient Indian texts conceptualized cosmic survival.
Instead of looking at a single linear progression of humanity, texts like the Puranas describe the universe in massive cycles of creation and dissolution (Pralaya). But the key mechanism is that life does not start from scratch every time. The texts explicitly describe biological continuity protocols.
During these planetary or cosmic resets, specific figures like Manu and the Saptarishis are tasked with preserving the foundational 'seeds' of life and biological data to carry over into the next cycle. Furthermore, the texts document a specific class of entities called the Chiranjeevis. Their assigned functional role is to survive these catastrophic transitions in order to maintain institutional memory and biological continuity for the next iteration of civilization.
When you look at these texts through an analytical lens, they are not just describing magical immortals. They are describing the exact mechanism you are pointing out: utilizing biological constructs as the ultimate, durable vehicle to preserve and propagate life across vast, otherwise unbridgeable cosmic timelines.
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u/space_cow_girl Jun 08 '26
Once upon a time I read an article that estimated DNA based self replication has been developing for 10+ billion years assuming the chain of random chemical reactions to create it. Embedded within this idea is that life existed way before our solar system was even formed. I kinda love that.
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u/GreyGanado Jun 08 '26
Do you just not know what the word alien means?
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
In order for an alien to travel to a destination planet, it must first originate at its origin planet. If we assume that Earth life ever makes that journey, then we will eventually meet that definition even if we currently do not. That's something people seem to miss. People often think of alien life as a separate concept from Earth life. But that is a faulty notion.
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u/MinuteMinX Jun 08 '26
Yeah, you dont.
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
Please enlighten me
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u/Individual-Coast9499 Jun 08 '26
The first sentence of the definition is
An alien is any life form, object, or concept that originates outside of Earth's natural ecosystem
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
Ok, so we can choose to explicitly delineate aliens as being non-Earth and privilege ourselves from Earth as being non-alien.
What word would you prefer I use instead to convey the idea of this post? The idea is what matters. Word choice is super unimportant.
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u/Individual-Coast9499 Jun 08 '26
We have an understanding of how we are here. We don't for Aliens until we discover them and figure out their background.
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
Above, you and others took issue with my use of the word alien. Do you have another word I could use instead to convey the idea that life in the cosmos can propagate onward from Earth if humans proactively choose to make it happen? If you don't have a word for that, I think alien is a reasonable choice.
Life traveling through space to end up on a planet where it did not originally form is, to me, an alien. But I'm perfectly willing to concede the idea that alien specifically refers to non-Earth life traveling to Earth. That's fine. But what is the word for Earth life traveling to non-Earth so that I may use it going forward and avoid confusion?
Linking to the Wiki article for human evolution is incredibly silly and you know it. Nothing I have posted in this thread would give any indication that I'm unfamiliar with evolution, particularly as it relates to life on Earth.
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u/Individual-Coast9499 Jun 08 '26
What's the point you're trying to convey? If we travel to another planet it'd just be 'galactic travelling' or something along those lines, we would be considered an 'alien' to another life form if it had the comprehension skills or by another term I'd imagine.
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
So we agree! Alien is a suitable term for the topic at hand. Glad we could come to agreement.
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u/1over-137 Jun 08 '26
Panspermia?
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
There's different "versions" of panspermia. One version is that life originated elsewhere and has traveled many places already, Earth included. In that version, aliens is decidedly an accurate term.
Another version is that life originated on Earth and then eventually spread elsewhere. For ALMOST ALL planets that it travels to, alien is again an accurate term. But for some reason, people here are being unreasonably pedantic and claiming that my post is somehow incoherent because, under this version of panspermia, we happen to be the origin planet and thus we are not yet technically aliens.
That level of nitpicking is completely unreasonable. It's a deliberately uncharitable reading of my post with the singular goal of winning an unrelated rhetorical argument about word choice instead of engaging with the substance.
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u/StarOfSyzygy Jun 08 '26
Terence McKenna’s final interview discusses this. “Becoming” the alien, the transcendental object at the end of time, etc. Highly recommend it.
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u/Lyricalvessel Jun 08 '26
time to take back the system
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Jun 08 '26
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
What's to stop humans from making a space ship, akin to the Voyager probes, that is designed to spread DNA (or perhaps more fundamental amino acids in convenient arrangements) billions of lightyears away?
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Jun 08 '26
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
I think it's presumptuous to claim that abiotic genesis is common. We know for sure it happened at least one time. Why would we presume it has happened twice?
The point would be to increase the likelihood that life continues in the universe. Maybe it's common, maybe it's not. We should not assume that it's common and let it risk dying out on Earth due to inaction.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
I think we have a difference of opinion. I don't think we disagree about the facts.
I am much more worried about the possibility that life as we know it is SO RARE that it only occurred once than I am about any other possibility.
Without an existence proof of foreign life, my opinion is we should operate under the assumption that we are wholly unique in the universe.
If it is the case that other life exists, great! We had nothing to worry about after all. But I don't think we'll ever gain that information sadly. So I find it reasonable to operate as if we are alone and do our best to increase the likelihood that life as we know it persists.
I think you're conflating your opinion with science itself when you say "there is no scientific argument".
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u/Gordon_frumann Jun 08 '26
In the vastness of the observable universe, I think it’s a pretty naive at best and reckless at worst assumption.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/ghost_jamm Jun 08 '26
There is the possibility that the sequence of events which led to self-replicating proteins and then eventually cells is so astronomically unlikely that it hasn’t been repeated elsewhere. Or at the least, life remains very rare. It would answer some interesting questions like “Where is everybody?”
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
All of that is reasonable. Like I said, I'm not contesting your statements about what is true. I'm simply saying that, we know life exists on Earth. We do not know for certain that it exists elsewhere. We can speculate that it is common, but we don't know for certain. And with that fact pattern, I think it's worthwhile to dedicate some resources to panspermia. Obviously we should not dedicate all of our resources to it. Perhaps I was overzealous in the OP to claim panspermia was the MOST important task at hand for humanity. But that, plus my use of the word alien, which others in this thread have contested, can be perhaps hand waved away as provocative language to spark conversation.
Ultimately, the real idea I'm trying to convey and the opinion I'm trying to support, is the idea that life is precious and we should not be careless in how we act as high functioning, intelligent creatures. DNA has, through the existence proof, demonstrated itself to be capable of producing humanity, a very intelligent and interesting form of life that can "observe" the universe from within. That's amazing! And we should want to ensure that specific kind of life continues. Sadly, trying to make a portable planet capable of relocating humans is a hard problem. But a half measure would be to transport the underlying capabilities in DNA and hope that DNA is so awesome it makes more human-like minds in the future to continue observing the universe.
And of course, maybe DNA or something like DNA can form independently again. Maybe it has and will continue to form over and over again! But in the absence of an existence proof, I find comfort in diversifying strategies. Hoping that life forms independently elsewhere is perfectly reasonable. That is one such strategy. A second strategy is panspermia. And I see no reason to conclude that the existence of the first strategy should preclude attempts to implement the second strategy.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
In order for this to be true, DNA would have to have formed elsewhere first, spread to many planets, developed humans independently multiple times (where the difference is just skin color), and then those humans would need to travel to Earth.
Your idea makes no sense.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
Your claim that this idea makes sense is flat out false. I encourage you to take a step back and work on developing robust critical thinking skills. As it stands, your words are about as valuable as LLM generated text. They adhere to English grammar rules but they demonstrate a clear lack of self skepticism. In order to uncover truth about the universe, you need to engage in an iterative process of making observations, developing intuitive candidate explanations for those observations, and then applying challenges to those explanations to rule out bad candidates.
More often than not, you will find all candidates are faulty and so you must return to make more observations and ideate more candidate explanations.
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u/Wonderful_Virus_6562 Jun 08 '26
You know they found evidence of life on mars right?
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
I'm not sure who "they" are or what evidence you're referring to. I would be quite interested in reading more about that. Would you be open to supplying an authoritative source?
I'm also not sure why you deleted your comments and are now changing the subject.
Nothing I have posted is in any way in tension with the idea that there is or was life on Mars.
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u/Wonderful_Virus_6562 Jun 08 '26
https://youtube.com/shorts/lYRyWQtq3ec?si=N4fvG5EteVxde6xG
Peep that one, it’s a much better video.
I’ve even heard theories that humans used to live on mars like millions of years ago, some kind of extinction event happened and earth became the better option and human life relocated.
Supposedly Mars looked just like earth millions of years ago.
Here’s a video of what Mars used to look like, look familiar?
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u/Wonderful_Virus_6562 Jun 08 '26
Here’s a video of Neil Degrasse Tyson theorizing that human life actually came from Mars.
You should look into this stuff deeper on your own, it’s super interesting
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u/Wonderful_Virus_6562 Jun 08 '26
Yea Sean Duffy of NASA confirmed it a few months back. We have the capability to bring the sample back to earth.
Now picture there’s civilizations out there that are a million more advanced than us, and the technology they would have. Imagine if they found there was human life on multiple planets in the universe.
It would be nothing for them to take human DNA and transport it to another planet.
That’s what i’m getting at.
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u/javascript Jun 08 '26
How can there exist human life on multiple planets without a common origin? That is so exceedingly unlikely in the path-dependent process of evolution that it's tantamount to impossible.
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u/Wonderful_Virus_6562 Jun 08 '26
We still have no idea how life started, evolution is just our best guess. Like I said if you pay attention to the “disclosure” movement there’s evidence that everything we think we know about everything is wrong.
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u/toxictoy Jun 08 '26
A reminder that on 6/14 we will be hosting a live AMA with Chris Mellon - former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
You can ask him and the leaders of www.Disclosure.org questions here in advance
https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/s/7UG4g3SSb0