Most people in Canada are really nice! Like everywhere, however, there's assholes and I've run into a lot of horrible and intolerant people who I really hope don't represent what Canada's turning into. >_>; the internet's ruined a lot of things. But overall, I love it here and consider myself super fortunate I live here! I wouldn't trade it for the world. I really like the US, but I'm so glad I don't live there.. between the insanity that is health insurance, your incomprehensible political system that thrives off of bipartisan showboating, and a lot more extremist groups, it's definitely somewhere I know I'd feel very vulnerable living in.
I guess interdimentional beings would be akin to a god, for all intents and purposes. There's no way to say one way or another if parallel universes exist, although I am a fan of multiverse theory. I'm always up for being surprised or discovering something new, so if we start to see proof of this, it wouldn't take much to get me on board. There's biological reasons why humans are as intelligent and inventive as we are, and it's part of the reason that compared to other species we're smaller, have worse senses, are weaker and more frail, and aren't as fast, and our children take three years before they start really forming all their bones, their skulls fusing together, and so on. We have huge brains for our size, and we kind of put all of our chips on that table, speaking through evolution. It's the reason we're the only kind of human that exists; we outsmarted and destroyed all the others. I think as humans we're naturally curious and inventive, so for something like fire, all it would take is someone to see fire in nature to know it exists, and to put the ingredients together (you see that trees burn, especially when it's been dry, so you gather bark and twigs and shit. You know that rubbing your hands together keeps them warm through friction, so maybe it's friction that starts fires, and so on). Every single thing you see in our society and for us as a species was at one point just some idea somebody had, and they brought it to life. That to me is the coolest thing ever. I guess for me a big thing is I fully believe in the power of the human spirit, and our potential. Attributing our greatest characteristics and ideas to a higher power just leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It's like when someone wins a major sporting event and they thank God for their success, and to me that's completely undermining their own contributions, all the pain, dedication, and skill they put into their craft to have won. It's also why I hate the idea of fate and karma and shit, it implies that everything's predetermined and meaningless. We're so much more than somebody's plaything, and we got here where we are because we didn't look at the world and accept it as it is, we looked at it and saw what it could be.
Nope! First I heard of it, but it's certainly possible it's a holdover from millions of years ago. o.o Hell, alligators and sharks have remained virtually unchanged since the Cretaceous period, and things like trilobites are among the earliest complex organisms in Earth's history and they're still around today! It would make sense that some plants reached an evolutionary apex and didn't need to adapt any further.
As for domestication, animals need to have certain traits they need to be domesticated. They need to have a quick birthing rate, they need to be largely docile, they need to require few resources, you need to be able to contain them, and so on. It's why in all of human history we've only found a few species that can be domesticated. You can tame a lot of other ones, but that's an individual more so than a species in general. Chickens are pretty easy to round up and contain, they can't jump or fly that high or far, so I imagine it was simply a matter of chasing them into an enclosure, and then feeding them, killing troublesome individuals while giving docile and high egg producing individuals more reproductive chances. Do that long enough and you're left with a pretty tame population that does exactly what you want. You promote the genes you want, and extinguish the ones you don't.
It's like how we turned wolves into dogs, we fed wolves scraps, they began to associate us with a source of easy food and it was more beneficial to let the humans feed you than to attack them, and if you protect them, they give you more food. We encourage behaviour in dogs the same way; do what we want, we give you a treat. Before long, the wolves are having cubs who grow up around humans as companions, and humans keep the wolves that are friendliest and have features they prefer around while driving away the bad ones, and fast forward tens of thousands of years and you have fucking pugs.
And of course! I think everyone and their dog knows what megalodon was! That was a big ass shark, I still find it kind of funny how some people think it's still out there. Granted, the ocean is an impossible huge and mysterious place we know little about, but when your main source of food is whales and there's no signs of whale populations being preyed upon by enormous sharks, I think it's safe to say it was too big for this world. Something that big requires a lot of food to keep going, and evolution crashed from making everything super huge to favouring smaller animals that needed less resources to survive when mammals started coming into play (fun fact; early mammals lived on the Earth alongside the dinosaurs!). Personally, I like the megathereum, a gigantic 12 foot tall ground sloth that was known to fight off sabertooth tigers and steal there food. I wish those things were still around lol.
And yup! I basically live in a provincial bonfire waiting to happen. :D It's a place where you really hope it rains once in a while because you know a fire's going to happen otherwise. We get like 5 months of snow, a month or two of fall, like 3 months of summer, and another couple months of spring.
Honestly, I was entertaining the idea of getting another cactus... >_> I like things that require zero upkeep.
