In response to my previous post, some noted that if another planet of humans had terraformed our own Earth for their future use, millions of years ago, they made a big mistake because Earth got populated by people who evolved here before they could use it.

To that I say once again you make the mistake of assuming Earth is special. If we had the technology to terraform planets, and the predicted need, we wouldn't take a chance on just one other planet. We'd spray a thousand probes into space all searching for their own planets to seed. Then when the time came, millions of years later, we'd colonize whichever one came out best, pushing aside any prehuman species that got in the way.

Therefore, if Earth was seeded for life by earlier humans, there is actually a very small chance they would choose Earth as one of the new planets they colonized. And that might be especially true if we evolved and populated the planet with humans before they had need for this planet.

Someday, when almost everyone is connected to almost everyone else via the Internet, I would argue that humans will have evolved into a single collective organism for all practical purposes. It would be much like the way individual cells of your body are united as one human.

Sure, humans aren't physically connected to each other, but neither are the atoms in your body if you shrink down to their level and take a look. You'd see more empty space in your body than matter. So proximity doesn't seem to be relevant to the definition of a living entity. It has more to do with how the parts communicate and act in a generally shared purpose for survival. Thus, when humans are linked via a central nervous system called the Internet, we can call humanity a newly evolved creature.

Humanity will eventually develop the scientific wherewithal to create new worlds, create new life, and manipulate existing life. And humanity will be immortal for all practical purposes, as long as it diversifies its parts across multiple planets, which seems likely.

If science progresses at a normal pace, it seems inevitable that we would someday terraform a planet and seed it with life designed to evolve. Prepping new planets for our eventual colonization might be part of our long term plan for survival. We'll always need more real estate if we keep reproducing. And it is the only way this new entity called humanity can reproduce.

Once we future humans get rolling with all the terraforming and seeding planets with life, we'll probably repeat the process thousands of times over millions of years. And that brings us to the interesting part. Logically, it is far more likely we are the product of previous human tinkering than it is likely we are the original humans who start it all. There can be only one first planet of humans, but there will be (or has been) thousands of subsequent versions that are essentially man-made.

So even if you assume a traditional God exists, it is far more likely that your more proximate creator is people. And even if you believe in evolution, it is far more likely we are a human designed version than the very first version.

And the odds that somewhere there is at least one planet inhabited with some version of advanced humans is very high indeed, for there is no rational reason to believe we are the first of what will be thousands to come. It's more likely we are somewhere in the middle of the process.

[Note: Yes, I know all of the individual ideas in this post are borrowed from places such as the old TV show Firefly, Boltzmann's Brains, my own book God's Debris, and more. But you probably haven't seen them all together. I hope.]

Talk about your favorable media coverage, check out this photo of Obama standing in front of, I assume, the Presidential Seal. It looks like he is glowing.

http://news.aol.com/?feature=329973

Have you noticed that people with impressive voices tend to become leaders? I first noticed this during my corporate years. Every male executive seemed to have a voice that resonated on more than one level, as if two or three people were talking simultaneously when they opened their mouths. I know that's a poor explanation so I just went to Youtube and searched for a CEO speech. The second one I viewed had the distinctive "leader voice."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUjoQPUsr4Q

Sometimes you hear a guy with a leader voice in a non-leader job and it immediately seems out of place. I wonder if the voice quality makes leadership more feasible or if the body chemistry that promotes leadership (say testosterone levels for the sake of argument) create an excellent voice as a side benefit.

There are plenty of leaders with sketchy voices, of course. Bill Gates comes to mind, as does the first President Bush. Obviously there's more than one way to get to the top. But I wonder if we will ever see a medical procedure to turn normal voices into leadership voices for the purpose of furthering a career.

My guess is yes.

A reader caught me using the same joke twice. See today's Dilbert:  http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-02-04

Then check out the comic I drew way back on 3/13/95.

I never repeat intentionally, but I often get a nagging feeling that something looks vaguely familiar. That's probably because the human mind is tuned to recognize patterns, and almost everything you see reminds you of something you already saw.

I suppose I'm most prone to repeating a line spoken by Dogbert because his voice is the one that plays in my mind all day. He says the things I am thinking but could never say in polite company. When someone tells me they got a "new position" at work, what I say aloud is "Congratulations!" But what I think in the deepest Dogbert part of my brain is "Grabbing your ankles?"

Okay, that's three times I've used that same joke. Ithink it's out of my system now.

Last week my cable box stopped responding to the remote. I went through the obvious checklist of changing batteries, checking the remote's settings, rebooting the cable box, making sure the remote still controlled the TV volume and power functions okay, and making sure the cable box could be controlled manually by the buttons on the front. Then I called Comcast's tech support.

They put me through the same steps I already tried then added reversing the polarity of the batteries in the remote to essentially reboot it. That didn't work. So the tech support person sent me to the nearest Comcast store to get a new remote control. The new one didn't work either. But of course the tech support person on my next call (an American woman in case you wonder) made me repeat all the steps that didn't make a difference last time just to be sure. At the end of the call the tech support person concluded, and I am not making this up, "The remote probably just needs to loosen up."

Pause while you digest that.

I had already requested a repair visit before this latest call to tech support, so I gave up and waited. When the repair guy came I described my problem and informed him in the best straight face I could muster that his company thinks maybe the remote control just needs to "loosen up."

The repair guy asked, "Did they really say that?" I confirmed that they did. I could see the last bit of hope drain out of his eyes as he just looked to the floor, slumped his shoulders, and shook his head in disbelief. He seemed a broken man. But he replaced the cable box and everything was fine. Later that night I doubt he bought anything to stimulate the economy, unless it was beer.

Okay, now changing topics, I got this story by e-mail:

"The door on the mini-refrigerator at work wouldn't close because the freezer compartment was iced over.  Two employees, a man and a woman, decided to thaw it out. They carried it down from the second floor to the warm outside so it could thaw without making a mess in the office.

When their boss heard what they did, he screamed at them for doing it without the assistance of the unionized maintenance group. So even though by now the freezer was completely thawed out, fully cleaned, and sitting outside the building, the boss contacted the maintenance people to schedule a day and time for them to bring it back in.

The day before the maintenance people were scheduled to bring it back inside the office, the boss saw that the refrigerator was missing from outside the building. He stormed up to the female employee's desk and screamed at her, ‘I told you not to ever move that refrigerator again!' She burst into tears and said, ‘I didn't touch it . . . I didn't touch it! I don't know what you're talking about.' Apparently someone thought the refrigerator was being discarded and took it home."

That night the two employees who cleaned the refrigerator did not buy anything to stimulate the economy. They cried themselves to sleep. At least that's my guess.

Recently I joined an indoor soccer league. We play on artificial turf inside a big warehouse. You might wonder why Californians need to play sports inside. Answer: Sometimes it is too sunny.

Actually, indoor soccer is about twice as fun as outdoor soccer owing to the fact you can play the ball off the walls, giving the game a new dimension. It's ridiculously fun.

I joined the over-30 coed league. I figured that guaranteed I wouldn't be the worst player on the field at any given time. What I didn't count on is that due to a schedule misfire, my team got lumped with the over-18 league and there was no practical way to fix it because the over-30 league was filled. We knew the younger league would be stiffer competition, but our players are reasonably fit for our ages, so how bad could it be? Plus our women are exceptionally good, and that's generally the key to winning in a coed league.

On Friday we played a team named Arsenal. The team name was our first clue we were in trouble. Let me tell you how that went.

Before the match I was doing some stretching and trying to scope out the players for Arsenal as they gathered. It was embarrassing having them near our team because it looked like some sort of educational film where we represented the "after" to their "before exposure to toxic chemicals." They were clearly elite athletes, possibly the products of genetic engineering. While I grunted and strained to keep one leg straight while touching my shin, an opposing player was scratching an itch on his back with his toes. While I was doing a little running in place, knees high, an opposing player was hovering six inches above the ground in a lotus position. He seemed to be glowing.

At first glance I noticed that their women were petite and unimposing. I breathed a sigh of relief until one of them stretched, and her long soccer shorts hiked up a bit. Oh God. Her thighs looked like The Incredible Hulk posing in front of a mirror. I doubt she even owns an automobile. I assume she leaps from one town to the next.

Her ball skills were awesome. During the game I made a lucky guess on which way she planned to maneuver and won the ball against all odds. This miracle lasted about one second until she body-checked me so hard I left a Shroud of Turin-like impression in the wall, except mine was screaming.

The game became the soccer equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters versus seven clumps of moss. Arsenal scored at will, often with trick shots. We ran, they glided. I literally counted the players on the field to convince myself they weren't playing with too many. I think some of them were holograms but I can't prove it. It was a massacre.

Before long the score was 12-0, still with plenty of time on the clock. I overheard one of the Arsenal players tell his team "Just header goals from now on." I guess that was intended to keep us from feeling bad about the score. It didn't work.

I wasn't clear if some sort of league "mercy rule" went into effect or the score keeper just got a bad case of carpal tunnel from pressing the button so often, but the score board stayed at 12 while our 60-year old keeper replayed the final scene from Bonnie and Clyde, except with soccer balls. I think we held them under triple digits.

In the end we only suffered three injuries, so most of us will be back again this Friday. We're hoping to do better, and by that I mean only two injuries.

Just when you thought we didn't have enough problems, a type of immortal jellyfish is making a move for world domination. Apparently they become younger after they procreate.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4357829/Immortal-jellyfish-swarming-across-the-world.html

I welcome our jellyfish overlords. We humans like to think we're the pinnacle of evolution but the evidence doesn't support that theory. Let's see how we compare to jellyfish.

Starting with the obvious, when we humans become old we pay big money to inject rat poison in our foreheads so we won't look like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sushisharpei.jpg

When Jellyfish get old they just hump their way back to childhood and start over. Seriously, who has the better system?

When humans want to find a mate they use online dating services and interview many strangers, at least half of whom have club feet and criminal records.

Jellyfish have the advantage of looking exactly alike. That means every jellyfish is aroused by every other jellyfish. When they want to mate they just grab the nearest jellyfish that isn't their own reflection and start going to town. Advantage: jellyfish.

Last night I watched the Jacksonville auditions for American Idol for the second time in two nights because the kids hadn't seen it the first time. Jellyfish spent last night making love and getting younger. Advantage: Jellyfish.

Okay, now it's your turn. Tell me what you have been doing recently and compare that to what jellyfish were doing at the same time. See who wins.