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 ...
I’ve always said this.
If light speed really is a limiting factor and no warp crap, then a you need a very powerful long-lived society working very long term. You turn things like pulsars or gamma ray bursts into beacons and wait for someone else like you to answer in the same way. But this assumes the thing out there that keeps eating your physical probes doesn’t come in when it notices you.
Freegards
Stephen J. Gould, at the end of his life, proclaimed the virtual uniqueness of human intelligence, arguing, e.g. , that the Dinosaurs dominated the earth for hundreds of millions of years without any prospect of producing a species with intelligence such as humans possess.
“What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?”
Totally. We imagine a 'beginning' and 'end', that we know it's size and weight. Yet, the farther we look, the more appears. If our scientific theories are correct (speed of light/etc) then theoretically we could never see the outer 'edge' of the expansion, even if it existed.
There are more galaxies than there are stars in our own galaxy.
Another thing about the Universe that seems almost incomprehensible.
For all practical purposes, we are alone.
We may be. Or... life on another planet may not take such a physical form. There may be intelligent life that consists of only neutrinos. Who knows ?
For a time I worked at the worlds largest IR/optical telescopes and had many hours of working with the world’s most renown observers while installing new instruments. Most don’t admit to believing in a “creator”. But they get really quiet when you ask how so much mass and energy could come from a single point as our observable evidence indicates. Common response is, I didn’t make the place I just observe it.
It would be arrogant to think that God made only us in his image( how ever many millions of years or “days” that took), but God certainly made sure that even if we found another life, it would be nearly impossible to interact with it given our Physics and physical universe constraints.
The most important thing we must learn is that that we are ignorant of what we don’t know.
Same astronomers who used to say that stars with planets were very rare, or that used to say that our galaxy WAS the universe ?
Aren't we pretty early into the 'earthlike detecting phase' of our technical abilities ?
Even where we do detect 'something' (and think it's a planet), we are basing that on what was there millions or billions of years ago.
That’s why I’ve always struggled with people who believe in aliens. They can never explain space travel of millions of years.
Go out on a clear night and look up. Every point of light you see is LIFE.
During the day, look up and the big bright light you see is LIFE.
Proof: Take it away, no LIFE exists.
It is the Sun, the Stars that are LIFE and LIFE GIVING. I suspect life forms are abundant, but it's 'form' all depends on the 'conditions' on each planet. We may not even be able to recognize some of the 'life' on other planets, even if we walked right over it. There may my places that the life forms are so large we mistake them for mountains, or so small that we wouldn't notice them. They may not even be 'flesh' based.
Well... we have only one 'experience' to base our speculation on.
There are many documentaries you can watch. Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate SG-1, Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet etc. All show life on other planets....
But if we can imagine other instances of life in the first place, why can’t the imagining of other ways it happened and what it needs to survive be just as valid?
Freegards
The blueprint for life is built into the mathematics of the tiniest subatomic particle.
That didn’t happen by accident.
I’m an “Alien Atheist”.
Why should they have to? The Theory of Relativity is only 111 year old. Don't you think, in even another measly 111 years, in 2127, we might have surpassed it in our understanding? How about in a thousand years?
It's not technology that will create FTL travel - it's the longevity of technological civilization. If we can just keep from wiping ourselves out long enough, we'll find the way. So the idea that someone else beat us to it isn't so far fetched, when you consider the vastness of the night sky.
There is a difference between evolution and the origin of life.
Darwin acknowledged that explicitly in the title The Origin of Species.
How did the first living organism arise?
That’s the real question to ask “evolutionists” who think they know everything.
Atomism is over 2000 years old, and still stands.
Even with that being so, it is only 2/3 of the whole. Without our moon there would be no life on earth. It takes the sun, the earth and the moon!
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