life

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Quote For The Day 5-31-2021

“Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

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Question Of The Week 5-26-2021

Do you think aliens exist?

It depends on how you define aliens. Merriam-Webster says:

Definition of alien

 1a: belonging or relating to another person, place, or thing : STRANGE an alien environment

b: relating, belonging, or owing allegiance to another country or government : FOREIGN alien residents

c: EXOTIC sense 1 alien plants

d: coming from another world : EXTRATERRESTRIAL alien beings an alien spaceship When it comes to knowing what alien life forms might be like, we don’t have any idea.— Kate Shuster

2: differing in nature or character typically to the point of incompatibility ideas alien to democracy

We all know, don’t we, that in this sense we are talking about beings from another world. Really, however, all the definitions above could pertain to extraterrestrial life. But why do we have to go extraterrestrial? We are looking to the stars when we should be looking around us at all the ‘alien’ – ‘differing in nature or character typically to the point of incompatibility’- life around us.

Think of the octopus. It is one of the most intelligent forms of life and yet how alien is the little guy? The Blue Whale? Or the Dragon Fish which lives in the deepest depths of the ocean? How about Poison Dart Frogs? Or the jellyfish?

Even closer to home there are spider monkeys and gorillas. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Sure monkeys and lions aren’t considered alien, but then again, if they were on another planet and we’d never seen them before….. alien. Isn’t it just what we don’t consider to be like ourselves that we consider alien? If we saw lions on another planet, they would still be lions, but if we saw an octopi, what then? Would we wonder how long aliens had been living unknown on our own planet?

If this doesn’t convenience you, think of all the insects in the world. Many of them look alien to the core. I think we have enough aliens living here among us that we don’t need to look at to the stars.