Posted on 06/10/2005 8:04:42 PM PDT by CHARLITE
I've never heard that viewpoint expressed. If anything, the fact that life has occurred on earth indicates that it's quite possible to have occurred elsewhere.
The idea that countless lifetimes of light years of travel away exists a separate body of life adds exponentially to the odds against evolution.
Why? This doesn't follow at all.
You might want to read the story about the ocean explorations of the Chinese under the third and fourth Ming emperors. China only had to walk through an open door and they'd have dominated the world for the next five centuries, and they walked away from it. We're facing a similar door.
What's the scale on that picture you claim is a village?
Good metaphor. The door is always open, just knock. Why would one knock on an open door?
Here is where they move definitively from posing a legitimate argument into special pleading, if not out-and-out moonbattery in the first degree.
First of all, an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere (which is dictated by basic chemistry and element abundance on a planet with life as we know it) is going to be generally clear.
Second, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that having a moon the same size as the sun in the sky is in any way essential, even if one accepts the notion that a large moon provides necessary axial stabilization. (I'm not convinced that life wouldn't adapt just fine to axial instability -- it adapts to some pretty extreme climates on Earth, after all.)
Third, the statement that a solar eclipse is needed to study the spectrum of sunlight is just plain nonsensical. I've seen plenty of rainbows, both natural and artificial, with nary an eclipse in sight.
Obviously, water ice is less dense than liquid water on any planet (unless the local pressure level is so high that water solidifies into a denser allotrope, which isn't the case in any environment where life as we know it is to be expected anyway). Thus, the argument is completely irrelevant to "privileged planet" twaddle.
The moon is just rocks, which I find non-interesting. Mars may be the original home of the human race, and I definitely want the US to be the first to get inside those pyramids and read whatever sort of literature one might find there.
If nothing else, whoever built those things had bulldozer technology which was better than ours. The first nation to get there will probably dominate the bulldozer market for the next 1000 years.
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