Posted on 06/19/2019 9:08:03 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Gotta quickly share my Art Bell story. Art Bell may very have been a deep-state CIA employee planting fake UFO stories to cover for other nefarious government ops, but he was dam good at it. One early Saturday morning I had to go in to work and happened upon his show on an AM station on my car radio. He was interviewing a guy who was reporting on aliens making contact somewhere in the Pacific northwest. it sounded so incredibly real and authentic. I totally believed the aliens had landed as the report went on for 10-12 minutes. Then, the station cut to air some commercials. I tried other stations and all was as normal. Once at work my colleagues told me about Art Bell and his show. But there for a few minutes, I was hooked!
I thought they were already flying around in our skies
Art paid me a visit one day. He was protected by an Egyptian amulet. Lol.
No such thing as aliens. They make for nice stories and all, but they don’t exist.
My guess is capitalism won in this galaxy. Tyrants can make short term gains, but they tend to lose support in the long run.
The answer is in the Fine Structure Constant.
You cannot hide from them. It is their galaxy. And it is not called the Milky Way. Lol.
Democrats: There are no signs of aliens on the U.S.-Mexican border.
Long complex story. We do not know enough to even make a good guess.
Angels, demons, ethereal dragons, ah the list goes on. It’s a really big universe.
The famous one about the pilot flying into area 51. And then his radio went dead. Lol. Clear message from the CIA there. Lol.
“Closest” is a relative term.
Highly unlikely due to the age of the universe. Now you could say space travel and communication across a galaxy is so difficult that no one has got there yet. And maybe no one can get there. Definitely a possibilty.
Somebody has to be first.
“Everything is rare, but even this is..”
“Wait, everything is rare?”
“Yes, Rodney, everything in the universe is rare.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, let’s start with life. You agree that life is pretty rare in the universe, right?”
“Of course. Life exists on only in a tiny subset of planets. The probability is modeled by the Drake Equation: the rate of star formation, the fraction of those stars with planets, the average number of planets that can potentially support life, and the fraction that actually develop intelligent life. We know it’s really tiny, but not zero. Until the Stargate Program the only example was Earth itself.”
“Correct. Now, is life rare on Earth, as a fraction of the planet I mean?”
“Well, yeah, I suppose so. You can calculate the amount of biomass versus the mass of the entire planet, which yeah, is a pretty tiny fraction of it I bet.”
“Again correct. I worked it out. Rodney, the planet Earth, with its huge biomass of life, including all underground and undersea life, is roughly a trillion metric tons, with the vast majority being single-cell microbes and plants. In contrast, the mass of the Earth is six billion times that.”
“Pretty tiny fraction.”
“Emphatically. Only 0.000000016 percent of your planet is actually alive. And humans are a less than microscopic fraction of even that. Compared to your planet as a whole, even mold and mildew is incredibly special and rare. Everything that is alive will live for only the tiniest fraction of Earth’s history until it dies and gets covered by other life until it forms topsoil, then it sinks over millennia into the Earth and decomposes back to basic carbon and other elements, with some forming oil and coal but with the vast majority of it sinking slowly back into the unquenchable fires of the Earth’s mantle, never to be seen again until the universe dies. Don’t you see? Any given bit of living matter on Earth, even the most insignificant spot of slime, is rarer than winning a thousand lotteries, and it lives for only the most fleeting of moments before it dies and sinks back to into the Earth, never to be seen again.”
McKay raised a hand. “Okay, Kit, you made your point..”
“I’m not done. You, Rodney, are the product of conception where a half billion sperm cells fought to fertilize only one egg. Only one sperm succeeded. Now, doesn’t that sound like a waste?”
McKay wasn’t sure where she was going with her argument now. “Uh..”
“And the hierarchy of all wildlife can be stacked like a pyramid, with microbes and plants and the bottom, then insects, then arthropods and fish, birds and herbivores, leaving a tiny fraction as carnivores, and then just the tiniest number of them as apex predators: wolves, sharks, eagles, lions. Guess which of those categories is the most celebrated? The most talked about? The ones that appear in almost all your wildlife film documentaries? The rarest.”
“Well, yeah, lions and stuff are the most interesting. Who wants to watch a documentary about slimes or mold?”
“Exactly! Rarity is interesting. Remember that.”
“Fine, fine, I get it, all life is rare. And interesting life is rarer still. But you said *everything* is rare. What about that 99.9999.. blah blah percent of the Earth that is dead? How can that be rare?”
“Rodney, planets are rare. You know how big space really is.”
“Yeah, I do. And yes, it is really incredible just how big the Solar System really is compared to the itty bitty planets in it, and few people realize it. There’s an Internet video at a URL that I forget*** that really nailed it for laypeople. Earth was a marble, Jupiter was a soccer ball, the Sun was a about 5 feet across, and they laid all all the other planets like that in the middle of the desert. The video is amazing to watch. They built the whole Solar System going out to Neptune and the whole thing was bigger than San Fransisco.”
“And that is downright crowded compared to interstellar space.”
McKay chuckled, “Oh yeah. Interstellar distances are insane. The nearest star to Earth’s system is Alpha Centauri, about 4.2 light years away. If you shrank the Sun down to the size of a period on a printed page, Alpha Centauri would be another pencil-point about 14 kilometers away. If Earth’s Sun was scaled to a 1 foot radius and put in London, Alpha Centauri would be another ball 10,000 miles away in the southernmost tip of South Africa.”
“Yes, and interstellar space is crowded compared to intergalactic space.”
He stopped her. “I can take it from here. Yeah, intergalactic space is appallingly empty. Well over 99% of the observable universe is intergalactic space with nothing in it, and between the galactic clusters and superclusters themselves are monsterous voids that are even bigger.”
“Correct. The physical structure of the universe is actually very frothy, sort of like soapy suds when you take a bath. The galactic superclusters are all clumped along very thin strips and point junctions that interconnect the frothy soap bubbles. The rest of it, all that empty space inside those soap bubbles, goes for billions of light years in any direction.”
“I know that. So what’s your point here?”
She ignored him. “Rodney, let me ask you now, given how space is so appallingly empty, would you consider a random meteor, a lump of rock, in the great scheme of things, to be something rather special?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Rare?”
“Of course.”
“Perhaps even precious?”
“I get it. Anything at all would be pretty special given the complete emptiness surrounding us.”
“Good, now do you understand? When I say ‘everything is rare’ I mean it literally. Everything in the universe is fantastically rare, on every scale.”
“So is there a point to all this?”
“Yes, I think so. By learning about the properties of the observable universe on all of it’s scales we can learn about its Creator.”
“Oh not this again. Dang it, Kit..”
“Hear me out. I’m almost done. What I am trying to say is that the nature of Creation, how it is structured, how it works, helps us to understand something important about the One who created it.”
“Which is?”
“He seems to like rarity.”
“Huh?”
“I admit that I can’t prove it. But it seems to me that if everything is rare, then He must like that.”
“So Earth being the only planet with intelligent life is not completely out of the question then?”
“No, it isn’t.”
We are so limited. We live in time, and cannot understand fully a God who does not, and is not constrained by it - He created it.
He is outside of it, and sees the beginning from the end.
There will come a “time” when “time” no longer exists for us, I believe. Eternity is not unlimited time, it is not made of time - it just IS.
Not us by a long shot. We seem to be going backwards now anyway. Lol.
That right there is pure ego, not rarity. Most of the mass is not observable. We do not yet understand the universe.
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