in the very first substack i wrote i promised to share my most āunacceptableā ideas. ok hereās a good one š
letās start with a theory that at the center of earth is a BLACK HOLE. black holes spew matter and magnetic fields, and at their edge is an impossible dilation of spacetime which stretches duration to ridiculous extents. which could result in a lifeworld for us in which we experience time and duration as we live on the edge.. literally. iām not a physicist, just a concerned parent, so take this with a grain of salt šāāļø
letās think also about how GRAVITY, which i believe is an emergent effect of the displacement of spacetime by massive objects, would be more effective, in every sense of the word, nearer to the center of earth.
ok letās leave that idea for a second and discuss human evolution. in my lifetime, science has changed its view on the age of āmodern humansā several times. it was said that we were approximately 24k years old when i was younger, but this has continually been revised backwards. today, modern humans have been proven to have existed over 300k years ago.
the bering strait land bridge, which currently is the best guess about how the human population spread to the western hemisphere, was breached 16k years ago. this means: for sixteen thousand years, two populations of humans lived and developed separately. they lost the memory or maybe never even had the understanding that it happened, this separation. the rejoining of eurasia and africa with what we call the americas was the reunion of two isolated lineages of homo sapiens, however bloody and fraught with ignorance and brutality. the two lineages though had only separately evolved for 16 thousand years, so the differences were minor; cultural, phenotypical, i.e. superficial. the most recent reunion of two separate lineages of established human populations is still happening in the amazon rainforest, with the well-known āuncontacted tribeā.
this human group had no knowledge of the rest of the human world, supposedly. when they learned of the outside world, after millennia, apparently, they must have been surprised to learn about the amazing technological developments their siblings had made: iphones and spaceflight amongst others. they would find a science fiction futureworld made by ppl just like them, in another context and another culture, with unknown materials unavailable to them, and incredible technologies that had been enabled by these materials and sciences.
the reunion of the eastern and western hemispheres happened 500 years ago, a tiny blip of time. the amazonian tribe was ādiscoveredā in the 80s. it was hard to find them, because the amazon rainforest is sooooooo huge right? hold that thought.
the amazon basin is approx 7Mkm square. huuuuuuge. a whole civilization could get lost in there.
the surface of the OCEANS OF EARTH is approx 361Mkm square. this is 51X the surface area of the amazon. but the amazon.. is just a surface; the oceans go many kilometers deep in places. so the living world of the oceans is 51X bigger than the amazon, plus depth. huuuuuugely more vast than the amazon. you could fit the amazon in the ocean thousands of times at least. hold that thought.
approx 540M years ago, we believe currently, we had a common ancestor with an aquatic animal. we donāt really know the whole story, our understanding is evolving also
regardless, some animals which live in the ocean literally came from the same animal as we did, evolving separately, with different cultures and phenotypes, but waaaay more different than the eurasian/african humans and the western hemisphere humans; these were still both homo sapiens. but think, this evolution of our separated lines has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, and our closest relatives may be surprised, just as the amazonians were, to learn about iphones and spaceflight. just as we, the non-amazonians, were surprised to see that there was a civilization living in a completely different mode than ours, with no phones, no rockets, isolated.
given the vastness and unexplored regions of the ocean, how are we so sure that there is not some sort of technologically advanced civilization in the ocean?
think of this: a human-like species which evolved at the bottom of the ocean, or in its depths, would have its own exploration issues. its own āspace programā would be about developing a craft that could support the organismās life at the oceansā surface, an inhospitably low pressure environment with an oxygen atmosphere created at the edge of the water by the sun, gravity, and the earthās magnetic field. just as we pressurize our airplane cabins and our spaceflight crafts, a sophisticated organism evolved in the depths of the ocean would need a craft which could pressurize its cabin to the level of the oceanās depths. it would also need to be propelled in both a high pressure environment and also the extremely low pressure atmosphere of earth. the low pressure atmosphere of earth may seem to this hypothetical species as the moon does to us, an easy environment to move in, where itās easy to jump high in the air, and weightlessness makes movement relatively effortless.
an aquatic species may power such a craft with bioluminescent electricity. this is totally possible, fyi.
if the uapās contain our lost relatives it will disturb some of humanityās most cherished beliefs. if there are already people who know this is true, they may have understandable motivation to keep it a secret, for various reasons both good and bad that we can surely imagine. but it wouldnāt be that weird really to think that while we, a tiny species occupying a tiny amount of surface land on earth made iphones and rocketships, perhaps an even tinier (in numbers), but still large species in the ocean has created powered craft to explore earthās surface. we would appear to them as the uncontacted tribe in the amazon does to us, possibly. and they may appear to us as the europeans did to the native americans, strange and different, using tools and materials that we didnāt want or need.
look at a globe and ponder the size of the land versus the size of the ocean. look at the amazon basin and see how many times it fits in the waters. humans went up before we went down, exploring the skies and atmosphere, even the moon. for an aquatic relative there would only be one choice, and it would probably take 500M years of thinking to get there, just like it did for us.
https://www.livescience.com/ancient-fishlike-weirdo-tetropod-ancestor
https://youtu.be/jeRgFqbBM5E