Aliens Poll

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

I am tempted to point out the UB cannot be used a source since it is a religious text and cannot be verified but since I am very interested in Aliens I'll bite. Does your book give any indication as to which planet these non breathing complex creatures live on?

IMHO the UB is, most charitably, an odd king of science fiction, but despite its often oblique style, this question’s easy to answer: “non-breathers” live on airless bodies, such as asteroids and moons.

Source: The Inhabited Worlds; The Urantia Book: Paper 49

Turtle’s got the basic gist of it, I think, except (from the little I read) the UB’s not specific about which airless body. It goes into some detail about number and percentages of such bodies, but using terms I don’t recognize.

[Moontanman]

Haven't we probed Uranus? Was it painful?

[Moontanman]

Seriously why would non breathing imply an airless world? On a planet with a high pressure hydrogen atmosphere with hydrogen metabolizing creatures breathing would seem to be unnecessary since hydrogen is so penetrating any life form should be saturated by hydrogen be default. I think of breathing in this context as actively pulling air in and out of your body. Even large insects have to pull air in and out of their body's, especially the most active insects like wasps.

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

Seriously why would non breathing imply an airless world?

it needn't necessarily make the implication, however allowing for non-breathers allows for the possibility of life on 'airless' planets.

if you want the Urantia's take on it, i recommend you read it. it is, if nothing else, an interesting insight into what people were speculating about in regards to extraterrestrial life in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

[Moontanman]

Where would I find a copy of the book of Urantia?

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

Where would I find a copy of the book of Urantia?

online here: >> The Urantia Book: Online Study Edition with Bible, Topical Index, and Audio Links

[Moontanman]

Thanks Turtle, I think, is it really worth reading all that ?

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

Thanks Turtle, I think, is it really worth reading all that ?

for the purposes of this thread, no it's not worth it or necessary. paper #49 on the inhabited worlds covers most of the material in the book concerning alien races.

as far as i can tell, the whole extra-terrestrial races business got started around 1877 with Schiaparelli's mars maps and the "lines" he saw on mars that he called canali.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal

Originally Posted by wicked pediac

...Some people went so far as to propose the idea that the canals were irrigation canals built by a supposed intelligent civilization on Mars. Percival Lowell was a strong proponent of this view, pushing the idea much further than Giovanni Schiaparelli, who for his part considered much of the detail on Lowell's drawings to be imaginary. ...

from then on, the sky was, and remains, the limit on speculation of the nature & form of extra-terrrestrial intelligent beings.

[Turtle]

carrying this alien history a bit further beyond Lowell, and tying it to the Urantia Book, is the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and specifically his exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. you see, the primary author of the Urantia Book, one Mr. Sadler, lived in Chicago, moved with movers & shakers, and undoubtably visited the Exposition. go figure.

ERBzine 1275: Remarkable Summer of '93 ~ Part I

William S. Sadler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Turtle]

curioser & curioser. i admit to only a casual knowledge of mr. burroughs and his works, however even a smidgeon of association with Urantia puts me on high alert. phi phi pho phum, i smelt blood and tracked down some. seems ol' burroughs was born in chicago only 2 years before sadler. indeed. while he left for a number of years, lo the native son returned.

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Wicked Pediac

Following a period of drifting and ranch work in Idaho, Burroughs found work at his father's firm in 1899. He married Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900. In 1904 he left his job and found less regular work, initially in Idaho but soon back in Chicago.[2]
By 1911, after seven years of low wages, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. By this time Burroughs and Emma had two children, Joan and Hulbert.[3] During this period, he had copious spare time and he began reading many pulp fiction magazines and has since claimed:

"...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."

Aiming his work at these pulp fiction magazines, his first story "Under the Moons of Mars" was serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912[4][5] and earned Burroughs US$400 (roughly the equivalent of US$7600 in 2004). ...

as i say, i'm not very familiar with burrough's fiction, but i think a close inspection of his work and comparison to Sadler's Urantia book is in order, with a particular eye to their descriptions of alien races. if that is not appropriate here for you all, then i'll pick it up in the Who Hoaxed the Urantia Book thread where we last left off with the nazi connection.
mmmmmm...tastes like chicken.