Are you an a-xenist?

by AuldSoul 72 Replies latest jw friends

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  eclipse

  I think that is a really good point, Para.

  As an weak atheist, (open-minded to the possibilty of god),

  it goes against my logic to staunchly believe that life/sentient life on other worlds is not probable.

  If I were to believe that life exists ONLY on earth, then that makes earth special, what made earth so special?

  Well, the majority of people who believe that earth is special are people that believe in god.

  And if god does not exist, it makes sense to at least keep the option open that life/sentient life exists on other planets in other systems.
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  Paralipomenon

  To put it into a visual perspective. You are away from the city and you look up into the sky.

  It is a clear night and the sky is full of stars like this:

  

  Amazing and beautiful. The sky is covered, you can hardly put your finger to the sky without it blocking the view of at least a dozen stars. But what about the blackness in between? What if you could focus a powerful telescope and magnify the darkness, what would you see?

  It just so happens that the Hubble telescope performed just such an action trying to illuminate a quintuple quasar. I was more blown away by what was around it than the item itself.

  

  Those are not stars, they are galaxies and it makes you wonder about what's in the black spots in this picture.

  Based on what we can see, scientists estimate that there are 10 to the power of 21 stars in our universe. That is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.

  That figure is based on calculations of visible stellar bodies. We don't know what lies outside of our view. Now that is only 3 dimensional math, factor in the 4D math and the number grows.

  Estimates peg our universe at 12-14 billion years old (12,000,000,000 - 14,000,000,000).

  So Terry's argument is that in 12-14 billion years, in 10 to the 21st power number of stars, we here on earth were the only life to form.

  Based on what? Math? Odds? Facts?

  Nope, just a hunch. Haven't seen any aliens recently so they can't exist.

  Think of this argument the next time a theist argues that there must be a God because evolution is so unlikely. You believe the exact same thing as them, you have just replaced God with Earth.
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  Abaddon

  Beautifully put point Paralipomenon.

  Obviously Terry is perfectly entitled to an opinion. I can't help but think 'can't happen' is less supportable than 'might happen' and just re-stating an argument and taking no real effort to address the faults in that argument is not going to change that.

  Terry, you seem to miss that a sentient observer capable of asking such a question might arise on other planets, and say exactly the same things. Might. To say it can't requires bigger leaps of faith than to say it might.

  There probably will be solar systems with planets that can support forms of life that could achieve sentience and develop technology. Such planets are below the limits of observability in other solar systems at this time; we can only 'see' super gas giants today, and I am for the sack of argument excluding any possibility of gas giants developing life with intelligent technology-using societies. Soon we could well prove this point.

  Humans exist is just because that's how things turned out. The dominant sentient species with a technological society could have been descendant of marmosets or sea otters, for example. The factors which lead to the development of human sentience could have happened in other species, as they are more to do with sexual selection than survival to be able to breed; it wasn't our environment or specific (as in no others possibly could) ancestery that made us smart, it was what the females found attractive that made us smart. That was just happen-chance; females liking big colourful tails is nothing to do (directly) with fitness to survive - it's a bloody liability - it didn't really help Peacocks become more intelligent. What females pre-humans liked, selected in a mate, made humans become intelligent.

  So just as there could be a planet with a guy called Terry ("Slayer of Empires" in T'chakian) with hydrogen peroxide mixed with the water in his body and 7 tentacles saying there isn't any where else life could evolve, a 6' tall marmoset called Terry ("Gatherer of nuts" in Chk!-Chk!--Ch~~~llk!) could be telling his kid that whilst showing them the giant chimps (Pan Terrestalis, one of three species in the Genus Pongo, see P. paniscus and P.troglodytes) at the Zoo.