An Ecological Perspective On Extraterrestrial Lifeby Ed Komarek
Many people have a interest in nature but in really know little about it being brought up in artificial city environments. Quite often city raised environmentalists do more harm that good having good motives, but because they don't understand nature well, their actions are quite destructive toward nature, It is important for the layman as well as the naturalist - ecologist to understand the forest they are walking through is not peaceful but is in fact a raging battle ground of cooperation and competition.
This competitive and cooperative struggle for limited resources is not just going on in the animal kingdom but with all life in all environments. That forest you are walking through is a battle ground between plant species employing both competitive and cooperative strategies for water and sunlight. Long-leaf pine even uses natural and man controlled fire as a means to burn out the competition. It has evolved insulating bark and needles that are very flammable so as to use fire against the oaks and other vegetation that are more vulnerable to fire. The oaks on the other hand employ a strategy of snuffing out the fire by having leaves that do not burn easily and are more adaptive to lowlands where fires do not burn so intensely.
Taking in to account earth, our sample of one, what can be inferred as to life across the universe? We can speculate that life is a natural result of increasing complex chemical reactions in environments favorable to life. Microbial life can exist in very extreme environments and is likely quite common across the universe. More advanced forms of life are not nearly as common because more advanced forms of life need less extreme environments in order to multiply and flourish. Still, because the universe is so big, more advanced forms of life should also be common. Even highly evolved technical civilizations should likewise be common.
We can observe creatures evolving in intelligence on earth in the insect, reptile, mammal, mollusk and other kingdoms. Given more time and the right conditions these creatures can become as intelligent or more so than ourselves. Indeed there is much speculation in scientific circles, that if the asteroid that hit the earth millions of years ago wiping out most of the reptiles had not happened, that earth might well be home to a two legged intelligent reptile that could be now traveling the vast reaches of space as we are now about to do.
What a ecological perspective has to offer is a clearer more objective picture of life in the universe. We can now infer that intelligent life is abundant and is involved in a very complex web of relationships of both competition and cooperation everywhere just as on earth. We should be able to also see by observing ourselves that natural evolution throughout the universe can give rise to species so intelligent that they can interfere with natural evolutionary processes. Both creationists and evolutionists are both partly right and partly wrong because life across the universe has been been influenced heavily by both natural and artificial evolutionarily processes.
While astro-physicists have been around awhile in force I believe that soon the astro-ecologist and the social scientist will soon emerge as forces to be reckoned with in the near future as disclosure accelerates. The nature of extraterrestrial intelligent life across the universe has in my estimation been monopolized and controlled by certain special interests through the security services for far too long, and this is damaging to humanity as a whole. In a universe of predators and prey does it not make sense to cultivate friendly relationships with other potential prey rather than to indiscriminately antagonize those potentially friendly relationships out of ignorance and false perceptions.
Visit Ed's website at exopolitics.blogspot.com/
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