Are spiders an alien life form?

Question

I read an interview with Stephen King, (in the excellent SFX magazine), where he said he'd heard a theory that spiders are an alien form of life that crashlanded on Earth (On a meteor,maybe), and the reason so many people are scared of them,is that some primal area of the brain recognizes them as Creatures from Out There. I frickin' hate the things, so it sounds plausible to me...

Answer 1

Dont be silly. Spider are one of the oldest animals on earth.
Before apes existed there were spiders.
For them We are the alliens.
Spiders are predatory invertebrate animals that produce silk, and have two tagma, eight legs, no chewing mouth parts and no wings. Spiders are classified in the order Araneae, one of several orders within the larger class of arachnids, a group which also contains scorpions, whip scorpions, mites, ticks, and Opiliones (harvestmen). The study of spiders is known as arachnology, and those who study spiders are arachnologists.

Evolution
Trigonotarbids, spider-like arachnids, were among the oldest known land arthropods. Like spiders, they were terrestrial, respired through book lungs, and walked on eight legs with two additional legs adapted to use around their mouth. However, they were not true spiders, not even ancestral to them, but represented independent offshoots of the Arachnida.

True spiders (thin-waisted arachnids) evolved about 400 million years ago, and were among the first species to live on land. They are distinguished by abdominal segmentation and silk producing spinnerets. The first known fossil spider, Attercopus fimbriungus, lived 380 million years ago during the Devonian. Attercopus is placed as sister-taxon to all living spiders, on the basis of characters of the spinneret and the arrangement of the patella­tibia joint of the walking legs.

Most of the early segmented fossil spiders belonged to the Mesothelae, a group of primitive spiders with the spinnerets placed underneath the middle of the abdomen, rather than at the end as in modern spiders. They were probably ground dwelling predators, living in the giant clubmoss and fern forests of the mid-late Palaeozoic, where they were presumably predators of other primitive arthropods.

Answer 2

Spiders are spiders. Stephen King makes his business, bread and butter feeding from ppl fears! many are afraid of spiders - count me in! just little creatures feeding on mosquitoes and that one can crush with a rolled newspaper!

Thanks goodness I don't live where they are HUGE!!!! yuck.

When a meteor gets in the athmosphere, it gets so hot that there is no way a life form could arrive hitch-hiking on that.

Answer 3

Fear of Snakes, Spiders Rooted in Evolution, Study Finds



"Aaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!" The mere sight of a snake or spider strikes terror in the hearts of millions of people.


A new study suggests that such fear has been shaped by evolution, stretching back to a time when early mammals had to survive and breed in an environment dominated by reptiles, some of which were deadly.

"Their brains certainly had to be effective in identifying reptiles in the world around them," said Arne Öhman, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute and Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.

Öhman, who was afraid of snakes and spiders as a child, is co-author of a study on how the human fear of snakes and spiders evolved. A report on the research appears in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

The research shows that mammals developed the perceptive ability to focus on things seen as threatening, such as snakes and spiders, and to respond emotionally with a feeling of fear.

To reach their conclusions, Öhman and his colleagues conducted experiments in which their subjects were asked to identify pictures depicting sources of fear (snakes and spiders) from among an array of images that did not induce feelings of fear (mushrooms and flowers), and vice versa.

A statistically significant number of the subjects found the pictures of the snakes and spiders more quickly than they did those of mushrooms or flowers.

Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neural science and psychology at New York University in New York City, said the results of the research by Öhman and his colleagues were generally accepted within the scientific community. "Certainly there are certain stimuli that are pre-wired in the brain because they have been perennially dangerous to our ancestors," he said.

Answer 4

No, he is talking bollocks. He is a horror/science fiction author not a Zoologist like me. Their genes are pretty similar to those of other arthropods including insects and crustaceans. It is just a reaction to them having too many legs that scares people - and this applies to lots of other invertebrates too but you don't see them as often as spiders.

Answer 5

I don't know...I think politicians are an alien life form, though. Stephen King is an awesome writer. :)

Answer 6

No. But Stephen King is.

Answer 7

That's an interesting theory just like the story about Gilgamesh and the flood. But like everything else, the truth is found in the Bible.

Genesis 1:29 And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.

Notice that when God first created life and there was no sin in this world that animals only ate plants. But then...

Genesis 3:17 And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

...sin came into the world and the creation has been warped by that curse, until....

Romans 8:19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

...when finally...

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." Revelation 21:1-4

And animals like spiders will...

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah 11:6-9

Answer 8

I f'in hate spiders too. I dont know what it is....they just really creap me out. Maybe it is because they are from another planet. We should help them find a way home.

Answer 9

Sounds like Scienciology or whatever that new religion is. All based on creative imaginations.

Answer 10

I asked this question yesterday about daddy long-legs. Maybe spiders AND daddy long-legs are alien to this planet. Maybe every lifeform is alien to this planet ! ! !