Posted on 12/28/2022 11:14:08 AM PST by Red Badger
I think any habitable planet would be so far out there that Earthlings could never get there. They’d have to build a network of space stations, and by the ttme they reached the planet, some of the space stations would have failed, so they’d have to start all over.
The stars out there are so far away and many of them cannot be used for navigation. So why would God create them?
Good post.
I’ve always thought the “others” were those in the angelic realm.
“He makes his angels winds,
His ministers of flame of fire”
CS Lewis said somewhere, “Possible worlds” are worlds God could have made, but didnt’
Unless and until we either find life somewhere else or figure out how to make a living organism from scratch in a laboratory we have no idea how common or rare life may be in the rest of the universe.
Making complex organic molecules is easy. Just take hydrogen, carbon dioxide and a few other elements, put them under pressure with a heat source, and mix them around for a few million years. The atmospheres of most gas giants do nicely. How to make the jump from the most complex organinic molecules to the simplest living organism is the big unknown.
It is quite possible that the evolution of life took such a complex number of coincidental conditions that Earth is the only place it has ever happened, like the old saying that if you have an infinite number of monkeys banging on typewriters eventually one of them will reproduce all of the works of Shakespeare.
What are they?
IMHO, atheists must find advanced life outside of Earth to prove that a series of freak accidents could have resulted in our existence. The more we look and look and look without finding advanced life in space, the more it sees we were specially created by a Creator.
But Christians don't have that restriction. Whether or not advanced life exists elsewhere doesn't negate our belief that God created us. God could have created other advanced organisms elsewhere. And it's possible He didn't.
“Doesn’t “The Heavens and the Earth”, imply with ‘Heavens’ that it is the entire Universe?”
“Heavens” is plural.
Good post but conclusion is wrong. "Life" exists elsewhere than Earth. The sole question is did their sentiency last long enough to get off the planet.
Earth is 4.5B; Big U is 13B; M-class stars with suitable planetary systems would have started forming 5-6B later.
That gives a 3B head start to other ur-Earths, which is enough time, enough chances, for a carbon-based, water-dependant humanoidish society to either get off their planet and get going, OR singularize with silicon-based forms and get off their planet and get going.
Then the question is, how many, where did each start from, and did any acheive interstellar flight.
3B is a looong time. YUGE. You could have hundreds of thousands of cycles where sentient carbon-based forms arose and failed to acheive interstellar flight. We may very well do the same thing.
“If there were ‘others’ out there, wouldn’t we see some sort of evidence, direct or indirect, of their existence by now?................”
We don’t see what exists now. We see what existed eons ago.
Our transmissions have only reached a very few stars to this point.
We can certainly speculate about it. God does nothing in vain so they have a purpose. But that purpose may have nothing at all to do with our current physical reality. I'm a firm believer that the existence of the physical universe is a shadow of the real reality which exists in a realm that we can only describe as "spirit". Perhaps there is something going on in the spiritual realm that does or will involve these. But for now God created life here and his purpose is to bring many sons and daughters to glory.
Maybe God learned from his mistakes and created better lives elsewhere?
God doesn't make mistakes. Only we do. God created us with free will. Unfortunately most have turned away from him. That is a mistake. But he took all of that into account.
Not really. We’re in a pretty inconvenient spot in the galaxy. And we’ve only had a rather small window that we’d even be able to detect others. Basically since radio was invented. IF said others used the same frequencies we use, which is actually a very small part of the spectrum. As for what we watch telescopically remember those images travel slow, and we’re really understanding more than we’re seeing. Like the article said we aren’t actually seeing most of these planets, we’re seeing the light of their stars fluctuating in a way that indicates planets. Even when we can see the actual planet we’re not looking at the planet now, we’re looking at the planet hundreds of years ago. Imagine somebody 400 light years away “looking” at Earth. They’d be “seeing” 1622, Jamestown Massacre, Huguenot Rebellion, 30 Years War. Not a lot of really visible stuff, heck they might not even manage to see evidence of humans.
Space is big. Our knowledge of it is small. Our footprint in it is small.
Yes, our solar system was created by God specifically to be hospitable to life, and since He only created life here in this solar system, and made it basically physically impossible for us to escape the solar system, I doubt God tailored many other solar systems to the same parameters.
“God created us with free will.”
Apparently that was his mistake.
He did warn us about the Brain Police.
What the article misses, and so do 99% of people is they ignore how vast the universe is.
To reach the NEAREST Star from earth at supersonic speeds would require a hundred generations of humans breeding inside the space capsule. That is THE nearest star in Milky way galaxy.
So this article is extrapolating our limited ability to see much more beyond than the current science is capable of. It is like extrapolating the beach sand on Australian coast by an a sand fly from beach in Florida.
It’s a great big universe
And we’re all really puny
We’re just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney
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