Couple notes to point out on otherwise awesome article.

Earth is poisonous to life

Let’s take all the oxygen into the air into account. The greatest poison for life to exist out there. Yes… we’ve developed as a bunch of life forms that can incorporate the poison into how we handle our stuff. This is much like the life forms that can live and function in arsenic.

We like to think that all life is just like our own style of life. We do ignore that we have plenty of life forms on this planet that reproduce via explosion (mostly plants and fungus) and others that function by creating conditions that are inclined to draw large fires into the area to wipe out other competing life forms, while the fire will only mostly kill them.

If you remove your own bias towards how you expect life to work — you learn that your existence is horrifying in its nature, and you are a destroyer of many other worlds (don’t think about it too hard).

God does not have a universal definition

People tend to talk and comment about how there is only one true definition of vampires — and then not actually agree upon that definition. Does sunlight kill vampires, or only make them weaker. Perhaps the sunlight makes them into sparkely git and they just avoid the sunlight out of embarassment of “oh shit, I’m going to look like an asshole if I go into direct sunlight”. Does taking a steak from the Ash tree kill them (first step: figure out how to cut a steak out of an Ash tree)? Does any sharp wooden object kill them? Does it need to be blessed from a specific faith? Do objects of faith work merely by just being something you put a lot of faith into? Or do only certain faiths work for objects of faith?

We also have people arguing about the true nature of Zombies. Talking about whether Zombies are capable of running. If they do run, are they then not able to walk? Does sunlight slowly have them rot quicker? Can they do basic speech? Is it magic, a virus, mind control, etc. that has them created? You even have some purists who insist that zombies are incapable of climbing stairs.

In the case of the definition of God… it is also a similar lacking in universal appeal. Go through read about the various different stories of the Bronze Era Gods — which mostly just seems to be the same Gods, but different cultures impressions upon them. Including them appearing in Norse Mythos as the “Fire and Ice Giants” and the Greek Mythos as the Titans. Uh… but with some changes from the original material (which was pretty varied to begin with). Look at the Vedas of Hinduism. The Kami of various Eastern religions. Then there are the Greek Gods, Norse Gods and all that themselves. They all have their own rules and styles of operation.

Those are just the ones that are easier to find out about — due to it being really hard to look up various cultures from all over Africa.

Then… there is the stuff HP Lovecraft wrote…

Humans are not a universal definition

Let’s take this further: we are VERY terrible at spotting life that is different from us on Earth. Hell, we are very terrible at figuring out the communication methods other humans use — nevermind other humanoid creatures — much less creatures that are not human looking.

If we are this bad at spotting life that doesn’t like our living conditions on Earth… and communicating with life that doesn’t have pretty looking human faces… there is a good chance this will continue on as we try to look away from the Earth.

There is also a good chance that we could run into alien life, and not even be aware we’ve run into them, with very little knowledge we’ve ran into each other. Just some weird stuff that happens, that we don’t even really notice.