A Recent Article Ponders the Rarity of Earth And How Astronomical Are the Odds Against Complex Life in the Universe!
Monsignor Pope Ping!
The big problem is this... If life is common when circumstances are right, then complex life systems should already exist, some being millions of years old. Imagine homo sapiens one million years from now... At the very least we would have invested in beacons transmitted intelligent signals to star systems with the potential for life... Where are the signals?
Amazing! Some scientists don’t like hearing that, and so they have invented ridiculous things like “the multiverse” or a “fifth dimension.”
Science is a tool for testing the validity of theories. But there is a tendency for some to misuse it and make ridiculous comparisons in order to “disprove” the existence of God. They’ll treat religion as some kind of disease to be cured, as if science is somehow a suitable replacement. Wasn’t Nazi Germany the most scientifically enlightened society of its day? That certainly turned out well.
It’s pretty hard to speculate when you are working off of an example of one. For instance:
“It is in a “habitable zone” in the galaxy. Radiation and the presence of wandering planetoids make life closer to the center of galaxies unlikely.”
That is only true if life is similar to us. So far we only have one example of life, us. It’s fine to suppose that all life would be vulnerable to high intensity cosmic radiation, as we are. But it’s still a supposition based on an example of exactly one.
Freegards
The argument that life is rare cuts both ways:
(1) to the believer, it affirms that life is a miracle; that God loves us and must surely have providentially designed the universe for our benefit.
(2) to the non-believer, it affirms that life is an accident, and the continuation of life tenuous.
Hence, the post-Christian world dwells on man-made climate change or rather a series of catastrophe stories whereby life “as we know it” comes to an end. Pope Francis, in throwing his lot in with the progressive socialists on matters of economics and science, shows that he doesn’t really believe in God.
Praise God, the King of universe, who has preserved us alive and sustained us, who not only revealed himself to us in the Law, but provided for us a Redeemer!
I think that science and religion seek to answer fundamentally different questions, and that to use arguments from the one to address issues in the other is a badly misguided exercise.
Some of the criteria you propose are not essential for life. For example, Seasons and tides are not essential - bacteria live miles underground.
A while back, I read “The Life of Super-Earths” by Dimitar Sasselov (2012), an astrophysicist involved in the study of exo-planets, associated with the study of potential alien life. He reports that with the Kepler space telescope and a few other modern instruments, they are now able to observe planets transiting in front of their stars. The results of their sampling indicate that about half of stars have planets in the ballpark for potentially supporting life (one half to ten times the size of Earth, in the habitable zone around their star where temperatures could allow for liquid water).
They can’t tell which planets would be good habitats for us, but other life forms can live where we could not, like the bacteria D. Radiodurans, which can clog the drains of nuclear reactors. In many places where we could not live unsupported, like Antarctica or our moon, we can survive inside shelters with supporting equipment. One of the results of the study of life, is that once it has developed, it can be quite difficult to completely erradicate, just as life on Earth survived huge asteroid impacts and climactic changes.
The bottom line is that the estimate of one out of a thousand stars supporting life remains supportable as a conservative estimate.
There is no reason to believe that the Scriptures were ever intended—by either their human authors or the Holy Spirit—to teach scientific facts. It is unreasonable to believe that the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the earth came into existence in a six-day period. There is ample evidence that it did not happen in that way.
What revelation does tell us is that the universe was created so that human nature could be created, so that God could become man.
Surprisingly (and pleasantly) enough the opening page of a neuroscience college text also explained how fine-tuned our planet is for our existence. It concluded the discussion with the fact that the discussion was outside the scope of empirical science.
Love this stuff.
All intelligent biological life forms build intelligent machines that then extinguish the biological creators.
There are a couple of problems in logical analysis that need to be addressed here. First, one logical fallacy is called “god in the gaps” which basically says, if no one knows the causes behind or is unable to explain an observation, this lack of knowledge is taken as proof of a supernatural being having created it. A second related logical fallacy is found in conformational bias. This is just the tendency to only see evidence that you want to see and blocking out or explaining away any evidence against you predetermined conclusion. Then, of course there are straw men (misstating your opponents position in terms favorable to your argument).
Being a fan of gravitational and orbital computer simulations, this one thing is an extremely difficult thing to achieve.
“As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even WE shouldn’t be here.” - article, MP
There were many steps skipped to get to here. What are the 200 factors? are they all really requirements? What is the probability of each? Are these factors paired or related?
This is far from a well-documented rebuttal to Sagan or anyone. Further, mixing in irreducible complexity, which is a fairly strong argument on its own, makes no sense here. life supporting planet probability/frequency is a totally unrelated line of thought from irreducible complexity.
I think the author should spend more time thinking and researching, and less time writing. IMO, this is half baked.