☕ been reading more about viruses this morning. This chapter is hard to get through... I get nauseous from seeing blood, and reading about viruses is like double that effect. So it's been three days on one chapter... That rate ain't gonna cut it.

This makes me think about aliens. Lots of things make me think about aliens. I'm always trying to think of some explanation for those insane lights and the maneuvers they pulled, which I saw in 2001. 

So the thought is this : aliens are interested in us and our planet because its a living laboratory for infectious diseases. Imagine you somehow figure out how to cross the ludicrous distances between stars, and you find a living planet... What then? Then probably you die. A living planet has diseases, most of which probably is completely unrecognizable to your own immune system's defenses. Most probably won't infect you, because your biology is new and unrecognizable to the diseases, but there are an absurdly enormous number of different diseases and chances for something to figure out how to infect you. Something will cross over eventually. Every breath of air, every surface touched, is a roll of the dice. 

Some numbers, according to Mr. Nice AI : there are over 30 nonillion individual viruses on earth, with over 6000 species known. 30 nonillion is a number so large, if you lined up all of them, the line would stretch 100 million light years. For context, our galaxy is 70,000 light years across. All of that packed into one planet... Not even the whole planet - just the one mile-ish thickness of the biosphere. Earth is a disease soup. 

If you assume that all living planets are similar, and there are probably millions of living planets just in this galaxy, then... Well, then there's a really big problem.

So what do you do? You quarantine every living planet you find. The distances are so vast, that its unlikely you find any, even if you're expanding into space in every direction for thousands of years, but suppose you do find one... You have to quarantine it. You have to maintain enough presence to shoot down any of your own species' craft that try landing - there's all the crashed UFOs ; and if there's any organized sentient native life, you send them the clear message of "peace is only possible if you stay on your planet" - and that might explain all the probes that we've inexplicably lost contact with, especially with regards to Mars and Venus. Its been a lot. Idk how many, but a lot. Maybe too many. 

This might explain the abduction reports, too. Apparently, most abductees think they were a patient of some alien doctors. It could also explain the bio-robot-like nature of the greys - they're disposable, and not meant to return from whatever mission they have on earth. Returning might (IMO probably) be catastrophic for whoever sends them. It might explain the reports from astronauts that they were being watched from the ridgeline/rim of a crater on the moon - if its contamination that the aliens are worried about, I can imagine a crew coming onto the site following our exploration and using high heat and radiation to sterilize every surface. Considering how big of a problem diseases must be, I'd bet they sent that crew in to sterilize the place a dozen times and then still never go near it.

This might even explain some religious stuff. I'm not talking about seeing lights and making assumptions - everyone thinks of that. I mean, the archons of gnostic cosmology, which we usually interpret as psychological forces, but could actually have been real rulers who seemed hostile or indifferent to humanity. Ancient gods who rarely interacted with people, but when they did, it was thunder and lightning and explosions - all of that could just be sterilizing some contamination. The "Fall" in Christian theology might have been a literal fall into the earth, where they (possibly us) were damned to death on this world of death, because once you breathe the air of this world, ain't no way anyone up there is letting you back off this rock. Maybe. Just possibilities. It might be the simplest explanation. 

Anyways, I've concluded that learning biology is the best way to find answers - at a minimum, answers relating to mundane life, but possibly these bigger questions. I don't think rocketry is the big problem preventing us from space colonization. I think that's relatively simple and mostly already solved. And its actually exciting for its own reasons - I can see a clear path to literally programming matter via enzymes, which change their geometry based on pH. That's like... Suddenly seeing how that could work was one of those moments... It was one of those moments where everything shifted in my mind.

Well anyways. My coffee is cold.