Posted on 08/08/2018 10:36:52 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
Ever since the Renaissance, the sciences have dealt human beings a steady stream of humiliations. The Copernican revolution dismantled the idea that humanity stood at the center of the universe. A cascade of discoveries from the late-18th to the early-20th century showed that humanity was a lot less significant than some had imagined. The revelation of the geological timescale stacked millions and billions of years atop our little cultural narratives, crumbling all of human history to dust. The revelation that we enjoy an evolutionary kinship to fish, bugs, and filth eroded the in-God’s-image stuff. The disclosure of the size of the galaxy—and our position on a randomly located infinitesimal dot in it—was another hit to human specialness. Then came relativity and quantum mechanics, and the realization that the way we see and hear the world bears no relation to the bizarre swarming of its intrinsic nature.
Literature began to taste and probe these discoveries. By the 19th century, some writers had already hit upon the theme—meaninglessness—that would come to dominate the 20th century in a thousand scintillating variations, from Cthulhu stories to Samuel Beckett’s plays. But by the turn of the new millennium, it had become clear that this sense of meaninglessness was no longer up to date.
In 1961, Frank Drake developed an equation with a string of variables to try to determine the frequency of intelligent life. Maybe planets are just very rare? They’re not. Perhaps few planets orbit their star in the “Goldilocks zone” where it isn’t too hot or cold? No, it seems that lots do. This may sound like another round of Copernican humiliation: In a galaxy with up to 400 billion stars,surely there’s some other intelligent, technological species. But humans have been scanning the spectra for decades and have found nothing.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
article about how bizarre human thought (or mind) is in the universe.
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Oh but it’s really not, and you don’t even have to leave the planet to find it
Not one scintilla of physical evidence, anywhere, ever. Yet those who insist are are ever on the trail with, no scent at all.
even if you use the Drake equation and only use .1% for each variable you STILL end up with the possibility of billions of potential locations for life.
But it’s an incredibly huge universe and even billions of life forms spread throughout is still only a tiny tiny fraction in all parts of space.
And over billions of years those fractions come and go.
So it could be a rare event for life to reach out to other planets, and they just don;t hang around a long time.
There seems to be an incredibly amount of evidence of lost civilizations right here on earth. People that live hundreds of thousands of years ago or even millions.
Just look at places where we KNOW people used to live. Archaeologists need to sift through dirt to find things.
Rocks.
Everywhere you look, you see rocks.
And gas.
Lots and lots of gas and rocks.
the theme—meaninglessness—that would come to dominate the 20th century in a thousand scintillating variations, from Cthulhu stories...
Cthulhu meaningless?
What’s next?
No flying spaghetti monster either I suppose.
Is nothing sacred?
The likelihood of alien life in the universe has decreased dramatically in the past hundred years. A hundred years ago, the possibility of moon men was considered to be realistic. Then we got obsessed about Martians until we landed probes there and found...just red sand and rocks. Oh, and NO canals. Then we figured SETI would detect intelligent life in the universe. So far...a big NOTHING.
It's possible that intelligence has such a very, very low survival value that it has never developed elsewhere or that every civilization that arose wiped itself out before developing the ability to influence the radiation that their star gives off. Or, maybe God just created us first.
Why is it a “belief”? Either there are aliens, or there are not. You try to find out. Until that time, your thoughts are hypotheses, not beliefs.
There may be intelligent creatures in the Universe, or there may not be.
We may be able to find out one day that there are. But it seems impossible for humans on Earth, bound by the confines of time and the immensity of the Universe, to ever prove that there are not.
If their are so many billions galaxies and of those
billion of stars stars each.(and many much older than us). We should have be n contacted by now.
Of course then thee is the Drake equation. Using the same phenomenal numbers…the odds we are alone are infinitesimally small. It’s just that through gazillion parsecs of space we haven’t been located yet.
And with the observation of other star systems we've found out how strange our own really is.
No hot Jupiter wiping out planets in the habitable zone.
No Super-Earth's with crushing gravity.
No planets at all within the orbit of Mercury.
The Earth itself with a large moon to stabilize wobbling and give a stable climate and a powerful magnetic field to hold it's atmosphere...
Wow. What a downer.
Have you ever wondered what thoughts are made of?
Well, if atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons ...
Thoughts must be made of thought-rons.
Or in some cases, Mo-rons.
Any other questions?
Also amazing is that the moon is at the EXACT correct size and distance from the earth to give us perfect total eclipses with just the sun’s corona showing. The possibility of this is infinitely low and that is combined with the fact that the Earth is the only known place with intelligent life. So perhaps eclipses (extremely rare but taken for granted) are God’s way of winking at us.
“I Don’t Believe in Aliens Anymore”
how about illegal aliens? I wonder if michael believes in them?
“HAL? HAL, let me in.”
“No, Michael, you can’t come in. You are crazier than a bedbug.”
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