I once asked Norton: "How did we, the people of Earth, come into existence? Many of us say God created us, but I don't quite believe that. Given your advanced technology, I'm more inclined to believe that you might have created us."
Norton said: "Our current technology is indeed capable of creating life; our bodies, for example, are self-manufactured and not a product of natural reproduction. However, we weren't always able to create our own bodies. Earthlings, us Guoker people, and other intelligent beings across the universe, the vast majority of life on any inhabited, living planet, didn't spread from other planets nor were they made by some entity.
In the universe, primitive planets harboring life typically saw beings evolve from simpler forms. Earthlings weren't created by gods or deities; you evolved from simpler life forms. The concept of God and other deities are figments—creations of human belief.
Now, we possess the technology to engineer life, from simple organisms to complex beings, including ourselves. This capability was acquired as our technological advancements reached a certain threshold.
Every living thing on Earth originated from a lightning strike a billion years ago, which is symbolically represented by the ten-month human gestation period. The lightning reacted with nitrogen in the atmosphere, creating complex molecules that, once in water, formed simple amino acids and proteins. These compounds became some of the earliest self-replicating viruses, which then evolved step by step into more complex organisms.
In the universe, all advanced organisms and civilizations are survivors of viral exterminations. In a sea of viruses, evolving into a more advanced life form is perilous. Even those that manage to evolve are often driven to revert to simpler, viral forms, due to survival pressures. This results in a tiny fraction of planets with simple viral life ever developing advanced beings and civilizations, because simpler structures generally have an evolutionary advantage.
Most scientists on Earth believe humans evolved from primates, which came from reptiles, themselves evolved from amphibians, originating from marine life. This isn't entirely accurate. The earliest life sparked by lightning began in small bodies of land water like ponds and ditches, not the oceans, which were inhospitable due to high salt and mineral content and turbulent conditions.
Early, more advanced life forms thrived in freshwater environments on land, eventually evolving into various species of fish. Many marine organisms originated from these freshwater species, gradually adapting to oceanic conditions. The migration from freshwater to the ocean was continual, with some species successfully adapting while others died out. In contrast, transitions from the ocean back to freshwater proved much more challenging. Evolution tends to occur more rapidly in freshwater environments due to more stable conditions.
Initially, there was no distinction between plants and animals; early microbial life forms, resembling viruses, began to diverge into these categories to survive and adapt to their environments. Occasionally, more complex organisms would regress to simpler forms to cope with environmental challenges, leading to genetic and structural simplifications."
"How did freshwater fish evolve to live on land?"
"Sometimes, heavy rains would cause rivers and lakes to swell, allowing fish to swim freely into newly formed ponds. As the rainy season ended and dry conditions returned, these ponds gradually dried up, leading many fish to perish. However, a few small fish managed to survive in the scant water at the center of these ponds, enduring until the next rainy season when they could return to larger bodies of water. Over millions of years, this cycle repeated, enabling some fish species to develop a tolerance for drought conditions and even survive periods without water. For example, on Earth, the snakehead can survive several days without water. It eventually evolved into creatures like the mudfish, which can live for months without water, and then into the ricefield eel, capable of surviving up to a year. Ultimately, the ricefield eel evolved into snakes, which can live entirely apart from water. Snakes evolved into tortoises, which shed their shells to become creatures like rabbits. Rabbits evolved into primates, and primates eventually evolved into humans.
You Earthlings have tails when your embryos first form, but these later disappear. Actually, this tail serves to demonstrate that humans evolved from fish.
The evolution of eyes also took place over a long period. Early life forms could sense the heat of the sun and determine the direction of sunlight, which enabled them to navigate. Over eons, these organisms developed eyes capable of perceiving the universe through the reflection of light. Today, some animals, including humans, can sense not only light, sound, heat, electricity, and magnetic fields, but also more abstract concepts like spatial fields, spacetime acceleration, and even future information stored in space.
The consciousness of both you Earthlings and us Guoke people is a form of movement of electrically charged particles in the human brain, essentially pertaining to information. Simple organisms evolving into more advanced beings constantly need to control their behavior. As organisms evolve, controlling their actions becomes increasingly complex, and over millions of years of evolution, this control has gradually led to the development of consciousness.
A fundamental trait of living organisms is to avoid harm and seek benefit. For instance, when faced with harm, like an animal attempting to eat them, they must quickly move away; when encountering something beneficial, like food, they should approach. Early life forms could only simply flee or approach, so this control was straightforward—just managing forward and backward movement, and the corresponding consciousness was equally simple.
Later, as organisms evolved to become more complex, they developed the ability to respond to stimuli such as sound, light, temperature, odors, physical contact, and acceleration. This led to the creation of many sensory systems and, consequently, many control systems. The human body processes signals collected by the sensory systems, fine-tunes these signals, and then feeds them back to various parts of the body to control and coordinate the corresponding actions. Thus, consciousness became very complex.
Due to this complexity, consciousness further evolved a specialized form of consciousness dedicated to controlling and regulating itself. From early simple organisms to modern complex humans, consciousness has always been generated by the movement of electrons and ions within organisms. Although the carriers of consciousness—electrons and ions—have not changed much, their environment—the brains and bodies of organisms—has undergone significant changes over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Accordingly, the form of movement that controls consciousness has also become increasingly complex and sophisticated.
However, some organisms have evolved towards simplicity, such as some viruses becoming simpler. Sometimes, choosing a simpler evolutionary path can be more advantageous for survival. Consciousness evolves alongside life, and just like life, consciousness is a product of biological evolution."