Earth May Have Been Terraformed

Hello ATSers,

I don't know what got me on this train of thought exactly, but I think ultimately it was the recent revelation that there may be 8 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. The Earth may well have been terraformed.

We live on a young planet, in the ultimate scale of things. Yet here on Earth life is around 4 billion years old. That is also, to our knowledge, about how long it took advanced civilization to form.

Imagine the multitudes of similar star systems, or even older star systems...if we here on Earth have already realized that we need to find another world to live on eventually, and are even forming plans to do so, imagine the number of civilizations out there who have realized the same thing...

As the number of habitable worlds increase, the likelihood that life is SEEDED throughout the cosmos also increases.
If one starts from the hypothesis of Earth being a terraformed planet, what would be some evidence we should expect to find?

If Earth was a terraforming project, it fills in gaps for our religious histories. It also explains why we seem to have an outside presence (call it aliens or whatever) that seems more interested in observing our growth than actually interacting with us.


Anyhow, just a thought I thought some may enjoy discussing.

reply to post by JayinAR

If one starts from the hypothesis of Earth being a terraformed planet, what would be some evidence we should expect to find?

Life.

Its not from here.

reply to post by intrptr


Well yes, but that's a bit obvious, right?

What other evidence is of course what I meant.
We should expect all life on this planet to be traced to a single origin, I would think for starters.

If this is the case, i would like to know who erased our hard drives and why...

reply to post by JayinAR



Just look at the Fjords, that should tell you all you need to know. 42

I'm glad this was moved to skunk works...it takes my evidence (aliens watching our development without interacting) as granted.

Thanks guys!

reply to post by JayinAR

What other evidence is of course what I meant.
We should expect all life on this planet to be traced to a single origin, I would think for starters.

The original greenhouse, you mean? I know. Well look at it like this. What better package to transport over interstellar distances than say… a seed? How a bout an egg? Or embryo?

I would go so far as to include some kind of device that grows life forms…

maybe a "tree of life"?

Animal husbandry would follow, the same as today. Same with reproduction of plants. Of course once they were let free they would… carry on.

If the whole earth was volcanic soil like all you would need is a few wind blown seeds to start up. What happened at Mount St. Helens?

Being advanced they would of course know the seasons and the prevailing winds and begin where soil was the most fertile. To insure success the symbiosis and food chain would have to be instated…

We have mostly lost the ability to farm or even grow a garden. I used too. I imagine the very first garden on earth was a sight to behold.

Thats what I mean by "terra forming". And it is that simple. Gardening I mean, not life . DNA would be out of our league.

This is, and has always been, one of my favorite theories to meditate on when on long walks....for a while I thought terrestrial transports (cars, trucks and so forth) where help keeping the atmosphere in check through various emissions...for example, we could combat global warming by having engines that ran on fossil fuels, but produced breathable emissions. And modern engines are definitely cleaner than some of the older vehicles.

I still believe there is a lot of merit to the Terraformation Hypothesis.

dollukka
If this is the case, i would like to know who erased our hard drives and why...

I am not suggesting that we are aliens ourselves, although that is possible too.

There could be other reasons for terraforming a planet for a sufficiently advanced civilization.

Say for instance some time in the distant future our own species is out traipsing through the galaxy and we find a rocky planet devoid of life. We may decide to go ahead and drop off some amino acids, carbon compounds and water so that in the future, WAY down the road, we can use the entire planet as a gas station.
Ultimately you are creating fossil fuels through the decay of advanced organisms.

Just one possibility comes to mind.

Carbon is a very unique element. It forms itself into rigid patterns with ease. Life, it seems, develops pretty easily.
If we terraform Mars, I'm pretty confident we will create advanced life, if given enough time.

GENERAL EYES
This is, and has always been, one of my favorite theories to meditate on when on long walks....for a while I thought terrestrial transports (cars, trucks and so forth) where help keeping the atmosphere in check through various emissions...for example, we could combat global warming by having engines that ran on fossil fuels, but produced breathable emissions. And modern engines are definitely cleaner than some of the older vehicles.

I still believe there is a lot of merit to the Terraformation Hypothesis.

Hey General Eyes!

I haven't seen you on here in a coon's age! Hope all is well. Wouldn't it be crazy if in, say, another 10 billion years some scientist discovers that Earth and Mars have been seeding life on each planet back and forth for the last 15 billion years?

It boggles the mind.
And again, as the number of habitable planets increases, this possibility increases as well.

Abiogenesis is all well and good, but it takes time.
Eventually there are going to be multitudes of civilizations out there creating life whenever the opportunity arises.

Good to see ya.

Interesting concept for consideration. Just curious, have you ever wondered if the oral histories as recorded by some native tribes is older than our world?

Some native american tribes state that their origin may from a given star cluster, or even from within the planet itself. I've just wondered sometimes if parts of their origin stories might include events that occurred either on another planet or another realm of the earth.

Divine Strake
Interesting concept for consideration. Just curious, have you ever wondered if the oral histories as recorded by some native tribes is older than our world?

Some native american tribes state that their origin may from a given star cluster, or even from within the planet itself. I've just wondered sometimes if parts of their origin stories might include events that occurred either on another planet or another realm of the earth.

Are you speaking of the Dogon (?) tribe?
If so I'm pretty sure that has been debunked.

But yeah, the idea seeks to join these ideas.

If we terraformed another planet and complex life resulted, we would be the "Gods" of that planet. Rightfully so, too. So then say we check in from time to time...

Well, before the primitive people have developed a system of writing, we could interact with them as much as we wanted; tell them whatever we wanted. Wouldn't make any difference, because by the time they got around to figuring out how to accurately record history, it would all be a "myth".

It makes sense.

reply to post by JayinAR


Take a look at venus for one of the more odd coincidence in the solar system, it is almost exactly the same size as the earth, has ocean basins and continental highlands and possible techtonics but the oceans boiled away long ago, it rains sulphuric acid but it never reaches the ground as the temperature is so high that lead exists as molten fluid and the mountains are covered with a metalic snow, the pressure is as great as our deepest oceans at its lowest areas of the surface and a run away green house effect prevents it cooling down, now how is it really alien, well the sun if you could see it would rise in the west and set in the east, the day and the night are about six months long and it is just inside the area called the goldilocks zone, a little further out and an alien life form may have had a chance to develop there or maybe even us, the sun has increased in magnitude since the early solar system and it is not inconceivable that venus may have had liquid water and a tropical climate in those days while the earth was actually often too cold with ice ages which reached as far as the equator (snow ball earth theory).
What gets me are the techtonics on venus though as it would probably require a moon for them to form and venus shows evidence of continental drift with two major land masses or continental highlands, of course as the earth succumbs to slow but steady drag from solar wind and particles it will in about 3 or 4 billion years be in the approximate orbit of venus while venus will also have moved closer to the much hotter and swelling sun so a sophisticated time travel experiment could percievaby go wrong and push the future earth back in time to be known as venus (Twilight zone fan here).
Still the earth was terraformed but maybe not by humans on that I believe you are correct.

Or is being done Now.

Since we have no idea, some tiny bits of info on our DNA. How Did the info get there in the first place? Was their some timeframe in the DNA to change when the actions of said Planet, Heat, Cold, even a virus could actavate something in the DNA>

Some die really fast, some do not show and signs at all! So somehow the t-cell had to come from somewhere. Say Mars did have Life, we were there and sucked it dry so fled to Earth long ago.

Would explain some ideas of our History left out. Too many Leaps and no records of it. I for one think it is about time for Man to evolved or ?????? Even being Seeded would have one to ponder the actually reason why.

Just how long does Man have really if the Mars idea was real? How many Planets does one need to distroy to find this out? Or somehow the ones who did get seeded were the good ones to carry on, not all good seeds grow so it goes with my ZOO idea!

Earth is nothing more then a Zoo, or a Test for Life forms to advance into the next form. Ones who do go else where while the ones who do not stay till the End. If you tear apart the book of Rev in the Bible and change things around some.

Crazy ideas no?

reply to post by LABTECH767


In regards to tectonics on Venus:

Surely it would require more than a moon, right?
Being the second planet from the sun, Venus will be subjected to even less direct meteoric impact than Earth. Plus it had a thick atmosphere. It is unlikely that Venus gets hit hard very often at all.

I would think it would need a moon + oceans + sufficient impacts to form the plates to begin with.

Venus is a unique place for sure.
If life can somehow survive there (unlikely), it would be relatively safe, eh?

Well it Terraformed naturally. If you look at earth it has all it needs to sustain stable complex life. The right ammount of gravity for air and water, water, the right distance to the star throughout its year, and liquid iron core to form a magnetic field. A stable orbit and the moon causing the tides which probably helped life to migrate from the sea to the land.

You would have to compare other worlds which have the same condition to conclude that life on earth developped unusually fast.

reply to post by JayinAR


Well unless it is silcone based Doubt anything lives there as the water is now gone though we have organisms living chemosynthetically near hydrothermal vents they require water, life however may have existed if and when venus was cooler whan the sun was younger and of lower magnitude.

The other thing that makes me think your hypothesis is correct is the presence of the moon, it is unique and we live now it is now at the right distance to be a perfect eclipser of the sun as seen through our eyes, it regulates the earths rotation around its axis (without it there are varying estimates but the seasonal swing would increase from between 45 to 90 degrees meaning the climate would go to pot), it regulates the vulcanism and keeps the earth core alive driving the carbon cycle and maintaining our radiation shield the electromagnetic field of the earth, it regulated womans menstrual cycle so was seen as a female form in many cultures.

The earth exists at just the right place in the solar system, the famous goldilocks zone, not too hot and not too cold.

There is another goldilocks zone to consider and it is because of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy, it turns out the elements necessary for life and the radiation levels are just right at our distance from the galactic core and though we may find other earths they may be too radioactive or have a pausity of elements.

If not terraformed then miraculous if not both.

reply to post by JayinAR


Continue, intriguing thought patterns.

Merinda
Well it Terraformed naturally. If you look at earth it has all it needs to sustain stable complex life. The right ammount of gravity for air and water, water, the right distance to the star throughout its year, and liquid iron core to form a magnetic field. A stable orbit and the moon causing the tides which probably helped life to migrate from the sea to the land.

You would have to compare other worlds which have the same condition to conclude that life on earth developped unusually fast.

Well of course the prevailing theory is that it was "terraformed naturally"...all I am suggesting is that it could have been done artificially.
It seems to make sense, or at least jive with our histories.

The main point here is the likelihood that the number of worlds artificially terraformed increases with the number of advanced civilizations in the universe.

Abiogenesis, or even "natural terraforming" (if you'd rather call it that) takes a long time. A comet depositing water here, a meteorite dropping off amino acids there, etc. Eventually you will get a planet with advanced life. (Don't forget in our case we need that moon).

But an artificial terraforming project pretty much nips it all in the bud.
It is vastly more efficient in terms of seeding life in the universe.

antar
reply to post by JayinAR

 

Continue, intriguing thought patterns.

OK. How about this...

Let's look at the IDH. I have heard it suggested that perhaps gravity is the "weakest" of the four fundamental forces because it permeates throughout all dimensions, holding the whole shebang together.

If that is the case, then other than gravity we can expect everything else to be up for grabs in the other dimensions, right?

Well here in our world, fossil fuels are the norm. Exotic stuff like Lazar's "115" are only created in labs. Well, what if in another dimension, fossil fuels are the key to advanced propulsion?
Create the ability to jump dimensions in a lab, terraform a world in an alternate dimension that is designed with the sole purpose of creating fossil fuels... Earth.