Posted on 03/24/2002 5:07:44 AM PST by 2Trievers
THE DEPARTMENT of Transportation deals with the movement of things, which is important. The Department of Agriculture deals with food, which is vital. However, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration deals with the origin, nature and meaning, if any, of the universe. Attention should be paid.
Space lost its hold on America's imagination after the last lunar expedition in 1972. But the really exciting research had just begun, with the 1965 discovery that the universe is permeated with background radiation which confirmed that a Big Bang had indeed set what are now distant galaxies flying apart.
A famous aphorism holds that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. It is remarkably so because of advances in particle physics and mathematics. And because of magnificent telescopes, like the Hubble, which is now 11 years old and due to cease functioning in 2010. Operating above the filter of Earth's atmosphere, it "sees" the past by capturing for analysis light emitted from events perhaps — we cannot be sure how fast the universe is expanding — 12 billion years ago.
Astronomy is history, and NASA's Next Generation Space Telescope, coming late in this decade, will see even nearer the Big Bang of 13 billion to 15 billion years ago. That was when, in a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the Big Bang inflated from a microscopic speck to all that now can be seen by NASA's wondrous instruments.
Mankind is being put in its place, but where is that? Mankind felt demoted by Copernicus' news that this cooled cinder, Earth, is not the center of the universe. Now Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, in his new book "Our Cosmic Habitat," adds insult to injury: "particle chauvinism" must go. All the atoms that make us are, it is truly said, stardust. But Rees puts it more prosaically: they are nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine.
So, is life a cosmic fluke or a cosmic imperative? Because everything is a reverberation from the Big Bang, what is the difference between fluke and imperative?
Rees says our universe is "biophilic"— friendly to life — in that molecules of water and atoms of carbon, which are necessary for life, would not have resulted from a Big Bang with even a slightly different recipe. That recipe was cooked in the universe's first one-hundredth of a second, when its temperature was a hundred thousand million degrees centigrade. A biophilic universe is like Goldilocks' porridge, not too hot and not too cold — just right.
Here cosmology is pressed into the service of natural theology, which rests on probability — actually, on the stupendous improbability of the emergence from chaos of complexity and then consciousness. Natural theology says: A watch implies a watchmaker, and what has happened in the universe — the distillation of the post-Big Bang cosmic soup into particles, then atoms, then, about a billion years ago, the first multicellular organisms that led, on Earth, to an oxygen-rich atmosphere and eventually to us — implies a Creator with a design so precise.
Perhaps. But not necessarily, unless you stipulate that no consequential accident is an accident. "Biological evolution," says Rees, "is sensitive to accidents — climatic changes, asteroid impacts, epidemics and so forth — so that, if Earth's history were to be rerun, its biosphere would end up quite different." There is a lot of stuff in the universe — the estimated number of stars is 10 followed by 22 zeros. But as to whether there are other planets with life like Earth's, Rees says the chance of two similar ecologies is less than the chance of two randomly typing monkeys producing the same Shakespearean play.
"Eternity," says Woody Allen, "is very long, especially toward the end." The end of our universe — long after our sun has died, 5 billion years from now — is certain to be disagreeable.
In his book on the universe's infancy ("The First Three Minutes"), Steven Weinberg concludes that "there is not much of comfort" in cosmology. It indicates that Earth, "a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe," is headed for "extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat," either an unending expansion or a fiery collapse backward — a Big Crunch.
Yet research like NASA's is its own consolation. "The effort to understand the universe is," says Weinberg, "one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Not a negligible mission for NASA.
George Will is an ABC commentator and a columnist with Newsweek in Washington, D.C.
It's healthy to be reminded, from time to time, of this vast creature called the universe, on which we small humans have hitched a ride in the back seat. Mysteries and miracles are as important to human life as politics and plumbing.
Congressman Billybob
From the words of Peter in 2 Peter 3:5 "For this they are willingly ignorant of, that by the word of God, the heavens were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that was then being overflowed with water perished: But the heavens and the earth which are now by the same word, is reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungoldy men.", we know and are told that a big change has happened in the past and to expect some big changes in the future. We are told what those changes will entail.
Isa 24:19 "The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly: The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage."
Joel 2:10 "The earth shall quake before them, the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark and the stars shall withdraw their shining.
Jesus says himself in Matthew 24:29 "Immediately after the tribulation of those days, shall the sun be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken."
2 Peter 3:10 "But the day of the Lord shall come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat, the earth also and the works therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of person ought you to be in all holy conversation and godliness? Looking for and hasting unto the coming day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements melt with a fervent heat?
These verses are just a few of the many verses that plainly say all of this will be changed without killing us off somehow. I really fail to understand man's lack of understanding of his future when it is written in simple black and white. How ever these changes take place, it is by no means the end of us, "to mankind there shall be no end", "behold, I make all things new" (not all new things), and finally
Revelation 21:23 "And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: For the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it, and the Kings of the earth do bring their glory and honor into it."
The future of man seems pretty secure in my estimation.
Ever hear of eddy currents? Very common in nature.
I like this theory better: 'Brane-Storm' Challenges Part of Big Bang Theory' , but my mind remains open.
At this point, I had hoped he would launch into a discussion of how the Constitution does not authorize the feds to spend our money to ponder the meaning of the universe.
That is a false statement in every respect.
That's news to me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.