The Five Elements

It occurred to me, as I wikipedia stumbled across a debate between medieval muslim theologians and philosophers on the qur'anic verse that says the moon split, as predicted in advance by the prophet, that in a very real way, the so called five elements (*singsong* love, or really, life, being the fifth) really do describe the five things necessary to colonize another planet.

According to wikipedia, "splitting of the moon," philosophers argued that the verse could not refer to a literal splitting of the moon because, unlike the earth, the moon was not made up of all of the elements.  Now, this is not what that random ass old muslim scholar was talking about, but I got to thinking, that the reason the theory that a meteor impact had in some way made the moon look split open was not viable is because, although the moon is made up of earth, it has no fire, no molten core.  The fact that the moon also has no air or (much) water is not relevant to the splitting of the moon thing, but is absolutely true, that is what makes the moon uninhabitable, it is a rocky body, but without atmosphere, mass enough to have tectonic shifts, or liquid water.

I truly believe there is something to the idea of ancient aliens, but I do not believe in convenient space travel, so the idea of things like "the four/five elements" being an axiomatic list of the things necessary to support life on a distant planet is one of the sorts of things I credit oral traditions with being capable of preserving.

Imagine, if you will, some roughly human life somewhere in the solar system.  It is made up of DNA because DNA is such a fundamental molecule that it develops independently into the same thing instead of being built differently on every planet where life begins.  It progresses to the point where it is capable of sending small colony ships out on generations-long journeys between the stars.  When the colonists leave their own solar system they are completely on their own, without even effective means of communication, and although they propagate life in barren systems, or put humanoid colonies in "wild" systems, they inevitably would lose a lot of the social knowledge the original astronauts who lifted off from the home world would have had, especially because they would have had to devote their lives to figuring out the particularities of survival in the new world.

I don't know.  That's just my brand of crazy coming out.