The Temple of Dagon

Before the essay, I would like to ask for discussion on this subject matter after reading, if you are all so inclined. I will wish for intelligent discourse but will not hold my breath...

I went to Walmart at midnight, roughly, and decided to buy War of the Worlds. I had not seen it, the recent one that was in theatres. Life had conspired different reasons, and I literally had forgotten about the film, while looking for season 4 of Millenium instead. Millenium was out of stock, so I looked around and saw WOTW, and decided to grab it for shits n giggles.

I just completed my viewing of it, and it made me start thinking about a lot of things. Most profound of all, it made me feel very, very tiny and insignificant to the bigger picture that is the universe.

I am an old-world book nerd, and collect books from all era's that I can get my hands on. War of the Worlds is one of my favorite novels, and, after seeing this movie, in modern day America, with all the hollywood bells and whistles, I have, for the first time in a long while, been stood on my hands a moment...

My main driving point in all that is, take away the sci-fi alien crap, remove the invasion story, and just look at the biology side. Morgan Freeman narrates at the beginning and again at the end of the film (for those who have not seen it), and he is using quotations directly from the book itself:

No-one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, *they* observed and studied, the way a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiple in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our planet with envious eyes and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.

And, at the end of the film:

From the moment the invaders arrived, breathed our air, ate, and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all of man's weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in his wisdom put upon this earth. By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet's infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

The underlined portion of that quotation is my main interest for my purposes here.

We pride ourselves on being the dominant lifeform on this planet. We have our interweb, out Ipod, our prosthetic limbs, our Space Program(s). We have medicines and architecture and the innate need to dream bigger than we have yet grasped. And yet, all it takes is a little, unseeable little virus, and it all goes away.

Think about that, in all seriousness. I am being as pragmatic as I can be, realistic in the truest sense of the term. What the fuck are we?

A virus, for an example, let's say Polio (not extinct by a long shot btw - they keep it in a lab in Wisconsin for some retarded reason), is a lifeform that can sit, in a state of dormancy, for upwards of a thousand years of more, just sitting there, waiting for the perfect conditions to become active. Any virus of course, exists for one purpose, to make copies of itself. It is not mired by banal concepts of ego, personal property, fear, hunger, thirst, sexual procreation. It exists on it's own level of being, to simply "exist". And will hide in the most insidious vector to maintain its existence. But what happens when it enters a host and begins the copy process? It kills the host in some cases, or plagues it until the last breath of that organism, but to what end? Annihilation of self. But it lives on. It keeps resurging. It spreads and will never fully go into the quiet dark of extinction.

Dinosaurs, birds, some plants, us. We are so keen on our ability to endure, to survive, that we are blind to the reality that, when all is said and done, we really are...at the very least...conduits for things beyond us. It has been argued that, perhaps on some scientific level humans cannot comprehend, viral organisms and their ilk have some form of hive mind, rudimentary intelligence, and they maintain themselves.

One of the biggest reasons I am saying all of this after that movie is, well, not one single disease that mankind has ever classified (that being ailments brought on an organism by a virus or bacterium), has EVER, not ONCE, been extinguished from our world. Not one. Oh we suppress AIDS now, with medicine. We try to raise awareness about sanitation and living quality to lessen the CONDITIONS that are ripe for Typhoid, Typhus, etc.

We innoculate against polio and smallpox, but they are out there, doing what a virus does: changing. They are evolving. They remain, ever-present, waiting for the time to be right for their resurgence. This is known reality. This is not some morbid fascination I have with the plot points of this movie, or it's inspiration, a novel which seems to me more about facing the world as a whole, rather than hard science fiction and perhaps horror.

We really are very small things....

Thoughts?

The fact is we're not that great, a single strain of an unknown virus could wipe out humanity in the course of a week with current traveling trends. The most relevant example is the Avian Flu. Experts at the CDC say that, essentially, if it continues to transmit the way it currently does, we're fine; yet, if it becomes airborne humanity is facing another Black Death, maybe worse. Then of course there's SARS, Ebola and Small Pox. All are still present on earth and doing quite a bit of damage in Asia and Africa. Can you imagine what would happen if Ebola became a pandemic? What if a new strain of Small Pox erupted out of Asia? Humanity would be devastated.

Then of course our egos are fed by our other accomplishments such as technology, weaponry (as if splitting an atomic bombs weren’t enough we decided to go ahead and make hydrogen - otherwise known as thermonuclear -, neutron bombs, a very real concept of the cobalt bomb, and not to mention the U.S.A.F. is currently doing research on antimatter weapons), and our space programs. All of our developments have lulled us into a false sense of security about our own superior nature over those organisms around us. As a whole, we think humanity is some sort of superman: fast, strong, and always correct.

We're not always right, we can't be. Alright, physics might be as they are on Earth and in the space we've observed, but they can't be that way everywhere in the universe(s); and sure, life on earth may be carbon based, but that doesn't mean has to be carbon based everywhere in the universe(s). Yet we have the strange notion that what goes on earth goes everywhere. We have our heads so far up our asses that we can't see that earth is just one of "the creatures that swarm and multiple in a drop of water," our galaxy being the drop of water.

We're tiny, egotistical and impudent creatures.

The only thing that keeps me from despairing over my own inferior intellect is that humanities intellect is not that far above my own, which is molecular in comparison to the intellects of beings in the vast reaches of space.

you've taken the scenic route to say what hpl said about his stories: 'common human interests and laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos at large.'

wells starts out 'war of the worlds' with much the same tone, but in the end he falls into the old security blanket of 'god's wisdom.' think about it: a super-advanced alien civilization goes around conquering worlds, having no concept of communicable disease? pretty flimsy if you ask me

More scenic, yes, but based more on real facts than on the fancy of imagination.

fair enough, i'm just sayin

First off, while it makes me very sad, there is no fourth season of Millennium

You ask what we are - just living beings.

For a species to become 'intelligent', it first requires the individual to become self-aware, and have ideas.

After that comes the understanding of the collective group. By this I mean that we have a general understanding of how our species thinks. We know that others share thoughts and emotions, and eventually realize that most people are not that different, and many of them share the same feelings, goals, worries, etc..

The introduction of spoken and written language acts to greatly increase this, as much more could be conveyed between groups of individuals.

As thoughts are shared, invention and new ideas become commonplace, we of course will consider ourselves to be the most intelligent species on Earth.

But there is of course much more than Earth. Hundreds of billions of stars in each of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe. That alone is hard for most people even today to grasp, and it is much easier for them to believe that we are the most intelligent beings anywhere.

Perhaps it is because the Earth is filled with such a huge number of other species which all appear to be less intelligent than ourselves, that we are quick to assume we are at the top everywhere. Would we feel the same way if we were the only animal on the planet (If that were even physically possible)? Or would we be more humble?

The more we discover and theorize, the more we want to be able to answer all of the unknowns, which there are still quite a lot of.

Most humans refuse to believe that there is nothing more to it. There are many reasons for this of course (religion, being afraid of the unknown, etc..) but they all involve the same thing. Wanting to believe that there is a plan behind everything.

Well, there may be reasons behind everything, most of which involve science that we are not even close to fully realizing.

It comes down to this though - there does not _have_ to be a reason for it all. It could in fact just be how things happened, and could be happening all over the universe.

Our existence validates even the most remote odds for intelligent life to exist. If it did not happen, we would not be around to think about it.

One thing that sort of puzzles me regarding viruses, bacteria, and such, is that there are so many of them that destroy or weaken their host species. It seems that if a virus was to be most successful in reproducing itself, it would actually _strengthen_ its host species. By increasing the viability of its host, it would be increasing its own viability. By destroying its host, it decreases its viability.

There are actually some bacteria that makes its host more able to survive. For instance, there is the bacteria that lives in the human gut that allows us to digest dairy products. If someone destroys their gut bacteria, they become lactose intolerant.

Someday, its possible that humanity may be transformed in some great way by the evolution of a new type of virus that makes us better in some way. Unfortunately, it seems that the destructive viruses are more common.

My wife, who is big into biology as she is studying to become a forensic pathologist, often reminds me that an 'efficient' virus/bacteria/etc.. is not one that kills quickly, simply because the quicker the infected host dies, the less time it will have had to infect others.

Indeed a good thread has birthed. I am listening.

Enkil wrote: We're tiny, egotistical and impudent creatures.

You mean, YOU GUYS are Tiny, Egotistical and impudent Creatures, Im the one whos gonna be sitting at the left hand of the Father Dagon when Cthulhu rises.

Yog-Sothoth wrote:

Enkil wrote: We're tiny, egotistical and impudent creatures.

You mean, YOU GUYS are Tiny, Egotistical and impudent Creatures, Im the one whos gonna be sitting at the left hand of the Father Dagon when Cthulhu rises.

Shining his toes.

Yog-Sothoth wrote:

Enkil wrote: We're tiny, egotistical and impudent creatures.

You mean, YOU GUYS are Tiny, Egotistical and impudent Creatures, Im the one whos gonna be sitting at the left hand of the Father Dagon when Cthulhu rises.

And where do I get to set??

I guess at the right hand...

for religious folks, there are no viruses or bacteria.. just demons and angry spirits

odin2 wrote:

Yog-Sothoth wrote:

Enkil wrote: We're tiny, egotistical and impudent creatures.

You mean, YOU GUYS are Tiny, Egotistical and impudent Creatures, Im the one whos gonna be sitting at the left hand of the Father Dagon when Cthulhu rises.

And where do I get to set??

I guess at the right hand...

No, your sitting on the right of Mother Hydra.

Oh, okay Thats good to...