So long, and thanks for all the sausages.
Interesting read from Nature, written by Jeff Crook. “Adam” ponders about the existence of life in other planets, interplanetary travel, and their effect on religion in his conversation with a “Nordic man.”
Consider this monologue from Adam:
“So, as I was saying, Revelations and all the other Armageddon philosophies,” Adam continued. “I mean, if there are other worlds out there where a man… being… whatever… can be born, live and die without ever setting foot on Earth, that kind of pulls the end-timers’ teeth, doesn’t it? Without an end-times in which sinners are judged and the righteous rewarded, Western religion becomes rather pointless. God destroys the world — big deal. Sure, a few billion people die, but in the big picture, it’s a minor occurrence. Planets explode every day, am I right? Whole star systems go nova, trillions of intelligent life forms wiped out in the twinkling of an eye, no matter how moral or immoral they are or were. It’s physics, and a lack of sufficiently advanced technology to detect the impending Armageddon and/or to escape it by fleeing their doomed planet.”
Sounds like the story of the planet Krypton, doesn’t it? If only all survivors would turn out to be Supermen, haha.
Just some food for thought for you guys to start the week. Want a beer or something? 🙂 Read the full text here.
Excellent food for thought indeed.
Scientists theorize that it would take billions of years for life forms to develop on a planet, largely dependent on the atmospheric condition and permutation of chemical elements that would exist in such planet. It is also inevitable that stars eventually explode and extinguish its energy that supports its adjoining planetary systems. Such is the puzzle of life. Suffice to say that our understanding of the creator is quite limited, and our experience is bounded by time and space in such a minuscule speck of the universe called Earth 🙂
i was just having this conversation with my amiga about travelling. there are so many places to visit on earth! so many things to do! and so we often wonder why people are so interested in outer space when there’s so much explore on earth alone… hmmm…:)
How very true. We are only beginning to understand the mechanisms that run this universe, no matter how limited our knowledge may be.
As Carl Sagan had so eloquently written in “Cosmos”:
“World and stars, like people, are born, live, and die. The lifetime of a human being is measured in decades; the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotic remote sphere of silicate and iron.”
Thanks for dropping by, bw, and for sharing your thoughts. 🙂
hi herb, hisashiburi ne.
well, people are interested in learning about the universe for a myriad of reasons; just think of the implications on politics, science, and religion if ever SETI efforts reveals that “we are not alone.” it would be devastating.
I watched an episode of Sagan’s COSMOS on TV and it was amazing. I hope I could purchase the entire volume. It would be an awesome collection. I have Sagan’s book BILLIONS and BILLIONS
( believe this was his last book) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
( collaborated with another author). Like you, I dig Sagan too 🙂
Why care about outer space? In my opinion, the more we know the universe, the more we understand the reasons why we are here 🙂
The devastation would actually rise to heights at times if man cannot reconcile such scientific facts with religion and his accepted social norms.
Wow, a fellow Sagan admirer! 🙂 I’ve never watched any COSMOS episode, although I did read the book(obviously)…Broca’s Brain is just as engrossing. But now that you mentioned it, I wonder if the video’s available on Amazon? Hmm.
If there really is intelligent life out there, I believe that we would have to fundamentally change everything that we have accepted as norms. Remember the social and scientific upheavals that transpired during the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric paradigm. I imagine that those will not even measure up to what will happen if we discover that we are not alone in the universe. Just my two cents. 🙂
While everything cannot exist by itself without acquiring the breathe of life from the supreme source, and this supreme source is the life of all the things we see and cannot see and comprehend, and while human mind and comprehension are limited, i think everything out there is intelligent 🙂 if not, for example, the planetary systems would have been in total chaos upon swaying from the designated path of rotation.
Whew, this is really digging me down 😛
An alternative thinking would be to say that the universe always existed and had no beginning and will exist forever. This theory stemmed from our misunderstanding of nothingness which we readily refer to as void, or space or absence of visible object when in fact nothingness means absolute non-existence. The paradox is non-existence and reality are contradictions. Non-existence cannot be reality. How then can the universe evolve from absolute nothingness or non-existence?
The notion of a timeless universe is truly an enigma because it clashes with our inability to comprehend infinity and eternity 🙂