Posted on 05/25/2016 6:59:50 PM PDT by MtnClimber
When I was a student in the 1960s almost all scientists believed we are alone in the universe. The search for intelligent life beyond Earth was ridiculed; one might as well have professed an interest in looking for fairies. The focus of skepticism concerned the origin of life, which was widely assumed to have been a chemical fluke of such incredibly low probability it would never have happened twice. “The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle,” was the way Francis Crick described it, “so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Jacques Monod concurred; in his 1976 book Chance and Necessity he wrote, “Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance.” Today the pendulum has swung decisively the other way. Many distinguished scientists proclaim that the universe is teeming with life, at least some of it intelligent. The biologist Christian de Duve went so far as to call life “a cosmic imperative.” Yet the science has hardly changed. We are almost as much in the dark today about the pathway from non-life to life as Darwin was when he wrote, “It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.”
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.scientificamerican.com ...
Maybe it depends on how the Creator decided to have things work out.
The vastness of the universe in time and space is incomprehensible. There are more galaxies than there are stars in our own galaxy.
There can be no doubt that millions of life supporting planets have existed, exist now or in the future, but the nearest one is easily millions of light years away.
For all practical purposes, we are alone.
When I was a student in the 60s just about every scientist or sci-fi enthusiast thought there was life in other parts of the universe. Sort of like Star Trek.
I remember Billy Graham saying something like this: “If there are other worlds, it is likely that they never rebelled against God.”
Our sample size of planets that contain life is n=1. That is a pretty small sample on which to make any kind of assumption or prediction about life elsewhere in the universe.
The way I heard it: “If the Universe is inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly! If it is not, what a waste of space!”
“so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Well... the same is true of the entire Universe, yet it exists.
Duh....I’ve seen honest astronomers say stars like ours with planets like ours appear to be extremely rare
That quote is from the movie ‘Contact’. Did Carl Sagan write it? I don’t know.
There is not one shred of evidence that life exists anywhere outside of planet Earth. Everything is fanciful and silly, speculative conjecture. That life exists here at all is a miracle of Creation.
Exactly. We have an example of one. Assumptions based on an example of one are naturally prone to wild misses.
Freegards
Assuming there is “life” on other worlds, no matter how far, it would be foolish to believe that life to be like us. It could very well be based upon some other unique chemical conditions. So different that even if we “met” that “life”, it could be as alien as the microbes clustered around deep sea volcanic vents.
I have plenty of doubt.
“so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Life as we know it in our example of one. Why do we have to make the assumption that all life everywhere has to have those conditions satisfied the same way, or with the same seeming effort?
Freegards
The vastness of the universe in time and space is incomprehensible.
...
It’s actually quite comprehensible. The matter in our Universe is finite and there are reasonable estimates for the number of protons and even photons.
Talking about time and distance, yeah, it's like being right in the middle of a desert, days away from anyone. It's basically you and your thoughts. Unless someone decides to say 'hi' in a way the government wouldn't be able to cover up, we'll never know for sure.
Observational evidence up to this point has always indicated that life is rare. The ratio of living mass to non-living mass on Earth is just four parts in ten billion. When considering the entire Solar System life is much rarer than that.
There can be no doubt that millions of life supporting planets have existed, exist now or in the future, but the nearest one is easily millions of light years away.
For all practical purposes, we are alone.
Link, please.
This seems a strange claim to make. Darwin knew absolutely nothing of genes, and so he was entirely ignorant of the physical basis for the phenomenon of variation which was crucial to his theory.
Crick and Watson founded a whole new realm of life science. Even in the last few decades the techniques of this realm have undergone a revolution which increased the experimental capabilities by orders of magnitude.
Then there's the Woesian Revolution of the new Archaean Domain, which provides a new basis for thinking about life's origin.
Of course, one could always say that we are still far from any sort of ultimate knowledge of this process, but we ain't done yet! In fact we are still picking up steam, in my view.
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