Life as it Evolves

The following is the nine page final paper I wrote for my Star Trek class

For hundreds of thousands of years, man has looked to the skies in awe of their majesty and wonder. They have gazed into the stars and begged the question “Are we alone in the universe?” Only recently have we been able to gaze beyond the stars, and still we have not discovered a proper answer to this query. It is at times like these, when humankind feels loneliness biting at its very core that we are least apt to think of it being remotely possible. In all the infinite vastness of space, is there truly only one planet lucky enough to be blessed with life giving terrain and atmosphere?
First we need to focus on what makes a planet life giving. Air, water, food and shelter are the first options that come to mind when we think what is needed to sustain life. On the other hand, how do we know what we need is what every creature needs? Air is merely defined as the part of the atmosphere that is breathable; isn’t water the air to fish and creatures of the sea? So we can eliminate air as negligible and we are left with water, food and shelter. To revisit the fish, who obviously get their water from the water they live in, we can notice that air and water can be interchangeable, but water seems to be the basic necessity, at least for earth creatures.
For food, let us look at the Star Trek creature, the Horda, and its earthly counterpart, worms. Much like the Horda, worms move through an essentially solid environment, taking in all their basic nutrients from the dirt and soil. How they move and how they live is how they eat. Worms are the oldest and one of the most basic forms of life on earth, so there is much to be learned from them in regards to the origins of not just our life, but life in general. All creatures do need food, water, and air, but worms seem to prove that all categories need not be separate. It seems that it boils down to two basic groups; a need for nutrients and a need for shelter.
Imagine a nitrogen world: the atmosphere is primarily a nitrous oxide, liquid nitrogen fills the oceans, and the soil contains traces of dangerous nitric elements. To us, this world would be deadly, toxic, and uninhabitable, but perhaps not to an alien life form. The same could be said for the Horda, that silicon based life form which moves and breathes through solid stone the way we do through our air.
A long story short, a lot of the reasoning behind being alone in the universe comes from the misconception that all living creatures need air and water, like we do. Life at a cellular level even on earth has taught us that creatures can be surprisingly adaptive to hostile environment; bacteria growing in boiling hot water, krill shrimp in the arctic oceans, et cetera. Following the logic that all earth life began from cellular life forms and molded to fit the environment it was given, life could just as easily start, evolve, and become dominant in a nitrogenous or stone environment. For all we know, there could be an entire planet with bread dough for an atmosphere and the local inhabitants would have no problem going about their daily lives.
Humans and most living creatures get nutrients from multiple sources: once again, those sources are air, water and food. Dolphins likewise need these three basic sources, and they are the second most intelligent creatures on planet earth. A close third are crows and ravens, birds of the corvid family. It seems intelligent, sentient life forms have more complex needs in order to move forward in evolution, and those are the type of creatures that we hope to encounter.
Back to the nitrogen world, where we can now see the planet has everything it needs to form a sentient life form. Imagine a creature, we’ll leave it formless for now, just a creature. This being walks through a landscape of sharp, acidic dirt towards a steaming, glimmering pool of liquid nitrogen. Its lungs fill with and expel noxious gasses with every breath. It stops at the pool to take a drink of the deadly, freezing cold liquid, and is unharmed. It sounds like a scene from a horror movie, but from what has been stated before, this could just be a scene out of everyday life in the nitrogen world.
What sets human beings apart from dolphins and corvids? One could argue that it is communication, the way we speak to each other and know what another human is saying. However, dolphin clicks and whistles have been used to attract the attention of other dolphins, and even relay the location of a food source or enemy. They have been cries for help, or more commonly a cry to mate. Crows are no stranger to a mating call or a call for help, and most animals know to make noise in order to remind another where their territory lies.
If we flashed back a couple million years, we would undoubtedly find Neanderthals and early man grunting and snorting at each other to relay information. “Ug ug oog” and “Urg, guh grug” could mean nothing to us, but to a Neanderthal it could be a statement, an invitation, who’s to say? The point being, we make these sounds naturally and know how to respond to them, we have always had communication, just as dolphins and corvids have their communication.
Back on the nitrogen world, we see yet another creature appear, walking up next to the first to take a drink. The first turns, growls, and barks out a few guttural noises which to our ears would probably ring something similar to “Xvek Xen Xvelll.” The other creature immediately backs away, a demeanor of shame brought to its form. The first triumphantly stands, having reminded another intruder just who is the owner of that pond.
Once again, the question begs, what separates us from corvids and dolphins? Surely they are just as intelligent as us, if not as advanced in society and form. However, with language comes a society of sorts. Through communication we have built up social relationships and fleshed out our own personalities. Society is, however, much more than mere conversation; it is composed of rules of interaction and social conduct, society is the oppressing force which tells us how we act and what we do.
In our modern human society we have been taught right from wrong, good from evil, et cetera. The reason we know it is wrong to swear in church or start fights in public is because society deems it inappropriate. On the tangent of church, religion is also socially enforced. Religion was created by humans who could not comprehend the existence of life without some divine creating force, who couldn’t understand an existence without a clear meaning. It was meant to give hope in regards to what happens after the end of a life and, to a more obvious end, to enforce laws of right and wrong, a code of ethics; a scare tactic to promote goodness.
The creature on the nitrogen world has quenched his thirst and now lumbers off into the distance. It approaches a valley, filled with caverns and boroughs in the hills, homes for creatures such as itself. It dares not enter one of the unfamiliar caves, as doing so will usher forth great distain and an assault from the one dwelling within, so it knows that doing so would be wrong. It instead makes its way up the hill to a higher cavern and settles in on some form of local vegetation, which to us may seem like a bed of moss. Before it closes its eyes to sleep, it takes three stones beside its bed and stacks them one atop the other, bowing its head and closing its eyes, a way of praying to its deity. It knows this pleases the god, for creatures such as it have been worshiping the stones in this way as long as it can remember.
Now we come to the more important issue; how do living, fully evolved creatures look? On earth we can all agree that most creatures need some basic attributes in order to survive on our landscape, and the same ones will often come to mind; eyes, ears, mouth, heart, and lungs. However, not all of these are required nor are they even an advantage over lower forms of life.
Amphibians are an excellent example of how lungs are often unnecessary. The way they are built, they can either absorb oxygen through their skin directly into their bloodstream, or rely on their lungs for dry land. Creatures like newts and frogs, even the lesser known axolotl breathe this way and have survived for millions of years.
Bats have incredibly weak eyesight, and still they manage to find food with the greatest of ease. This is because they let out loud screeches so loud that the sound waves bounce sharply off objects and are translated in their minds as images based on the location and distance of their echo. Echolocation, as it is called, is used by many other creatures such as dolphins, some shrews and toothed whales, as well as a few blind cave bugs.
Barring a few other exceptions, the world could agree on the most universally necessary attributes for living creatures; a circulatory system for the transportation of nutrition throughout the body, an immune system to ward off infection and disease, a muscular structure to allow for mobility, and a skin structure to hold everything together and keep it contained. It is worth noting that most successfully evolved creatures also contain skeletal structures, reproductive systems and complex digestive systems. Although they are not particularly necessary for life, they do make prolonged living much easier and in some cases more enjoyable.
From the basics we can look at more intelligent, more highly evolved creatures and analyze their features that they adapted in order to survive in the landscape they were given. Dolphins live entirely in the water, but have to raise their heads above the water to breathe air. Their lungs are able to hold more oxygen and process it slower than land dwelling mammals. They also have flippers and a long finned tail for maneuvering in the water, and a sleek body which cuts down on resistance so that they can swim at high speeds. Crows are creatures of the air, evolution has given them wings for flight. In order to achieve flight, however, their bodies need to be as light as possible, so their bones are completely hollow and they eat very little. More close to home we see humans, who have evolved to live primarily and entirely on land. It’s not so much that our bodies have evolved a certain way, humans at first glance are not the most physically fit to be the dominant species of a planet filled with so many other more powerful beasts. However, our minds have evolved to the point where organized communication and tactical, strategic thought is possible, giving us the ability to outwit and overtake any potential predators.
So, we can plainly see that the more physically fit a species is, the better equipped they are to survive and evolve to the point of intellectual superiority. This, however, does not necessarily exclude certain species from accelerated mental evolution; such is the case with humans. Dolphins and crows have been evolving to this point over hundreds of millions of years, while human minds developed in a fraction of that time.
Let us now flesh out the appearance of this semi-intelligent, caveman like creature of the nitrogen world. It wakes up from its soft plant bed and arches its long, knobby spine, an attribute that makes it less desirable for larger creatures to chomp down on quickly, least they harm their own mouth. It stretches two muscular forelegs before itself, cracking four dexterous fingers that appear in a ring around an open, concave palm; a hand that is all thumbs for better gripping and holding of the craggy rock surfaces it lives in. Its mouth opens wide in a yawn, revealing two rows of teeth; the foreteeth dull and used for gripping, the hindteeth razor sharp for tearing its food piece by piece. When it closes its mouth, you may notice its severe under bite as the lower lip settles atop the upper one, making the sheer size of its mouth nearly invisible in order to surprise its prey. Its hind legs, quite like the forelegs, also crack and stretch, giving it the appearance of an elongated, four legged spider.
It flexes a few times, stretching before it begins its day refreshed and awake, and then clambers out of its cave in search of food. Four eyes, two on the front of its head and one on either side, scan the horizon in order to better search for its primary land dwelling prey. The powerful side-eyes make up for its lack of hearing ability, able to see the subtle vibrations made by sounds and ‘hear’ through sight, a sort of reverse echolocation. Today it has spotted a small, reptilian creature some fifty yards away, and it bounds in its direction with great vigor, its specially cupped feet and strong frame allowing it to run almost totally sideways across the edge of its mountain home.
In the distance, the small reptile is unsuspecting, a beaked mouth pecking at the ground in hopes of finding its own nourishment from the soil. Similarly placed legs suggest it is a far removed cousin species of the dominant beasts of this harsh, mountainous environment. It looks up with weak, underdeveloped eyes a moment too late, and never sees the large beast barreling towards it. The creature catches the lizard in its powerful maw, right between the blunt foreteeth. Attached to a hidden inner jaw, the razor hindteeth move in a circular motion, tearing off bits and pieces of its meal. Without upper throat muscles to swallow, the creature simply tilts its head back and lets the pieces fall down onto a sphincter muscle, which opens at the slightest touch to drop food into its noxious pit of a stomach. There the food is slowly dissolved by symbiotic microbes; ones that feast upon undesirable elements of the meal and allow the separate nutrients that the creature needs to survive seep into its digestive tract.
After making such a bold sprint, covering a good 40 meters in a mere ten to fifteen seconds, the creature must take rest as it eats, the central heart found just below its stomach pumping furiously. It is the beating of its heart that churns and moves the food in its stomach, promoting dissolution and absorption of elements. Thanks to the microbes, not a scrap of the food is wasted; but every few days or so, when enough microbes die off and stick together, the creature must cough up and spit out long, thin strands of this waste. The microbes, being resistant to its harsh, acidic stomach, are indeed indigestible.
Having given itself a good twenty minutes of rest and digestion, the creature is now ready to make its way further along the landscape, towards a series of mesa and plateau where it can see loud roaring noises emanating from the land. It curiously advances to witness a beast not quite so larger than itself, but quite more horrible. It has six legs, covered large spines, with one circular mouth on its stomach and one large ocular nerve on its back. It witnesses the creature lifting large rocks and crushing them in its powerful mouth, seemingly just for fun. The beast we have followed must be cautious and careful, for one single wrong move will attract its attention and bring forth the new monsters fury. Unfortunately, this is a fact that our primitive creature has yet to realize as it steps out closer to get a better look.
The monster crushing rocks turns its back and stares at our friend, the beast. It lets out a horrible shriek before wildly scrambling towards it. The shocked beast is helpless as it backs up against a rock face, the monster reaching out with two arms and effortlessly swinging it hard into another natural structure. In any normal situation, this beast would be dead and become food for the larger monster. However we are witness to no normal situation. We are to witness evolution in progress.
Frantically the beast begins striking at the monsters arms, attempting in vain to get it to release its grip. When this proves to no avail, it reaches for rocks to get a hold on and pull away, only to have two rather jagged ones come loose in its grip. It swings with one final effort, jabbing one sharp rock into the monster’ great eye and allowing the other to slice the arm that holds it. The monster emanates another horrible scream, this one is of pain, and releases the beast, attempting to escape. The beast in blind fury lunges, instinct telling it to strike, still clutching the sharp rocks tight in its hands.
It tears asunder the monsters flesh, breaking bone and sinew until both of them move no more, our beast standing victorious over its attacker and predator. It looks down at the sharp rocks in wonder, how easily it was to use these to save its own life. But no time to think of that now, for there will be plenty of time to think later. Now the beast has worked itself into an almighty hunger, and looks upon its aggressor in triumph. As it chomps its foreteeth into the flesh of its enemy, its mouth curls in what to us would be a smirk, and it takes a little pride in knowing that it is the first of its kind to taste victory over such a powerful creature. Soon it will finish feasting, removing the rows of razor teeth from this horrible monsters mouth, returning to its encampment to share the discovery of weapons with the rest of its people, eager also to impress a female with the large trophy carcass; and just in time, for as the sun sets in the yellow green sky, he knows that mating season will soon be upon him. But that is a tale for another time.
This scene, were it not on a planet in a far galaxy in modern era, could very well be the story of the first caveman right here on earth. This scene isn’t just restricted to one world; there could be thousands of hostile and volatile planets, inhospitable for humanity and earth life that well support native flora and fauna. And maybe, just maybe far in space, that final frontier, the voyages of an earth star ship on a mission of several years will explore strange new worlds and seek out these unusual life forms and their outlandish, yet similar civilizations. Maybe one day, while boldly going where no man has gone before, we will find new life. Until that day, we can only gaze at the stars and skies, in awe of their majesty and wonder.