... earthlings are the most intelligent creatures in the entire universe?
Posted on 07/13/2018 9:42:03 AM PDT by Salvation
Truth Passes Through Three Stages: First, It Is Ridiculed. Second, It Is Violently Opposed. Third, It Is Accepted As Self-Evident. — Schopenhauer
We’re somewhere between two and three among the intelligentsia.
The only scripture I can recall is when Jesus states that. “I have sheep that are not of this fold.”
In my mind, without the benefit of having delved deeply into the original text, that could mean human believers that are not of the country or locale. It could mean heavenly beings like angels. It could even mean beings not from the Earth. Bottom line is, I readily admit that I do not know.
“As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”
- Freeman Dyson
Yet we will continue to be inundated constantly, even here on FreeRepublic, with new “science” reports claiming to have discovered another “earth-like” planet somewhere in the universe.
But almost always those reports contain findings of planets - light years away and observable only with far distant reading astronomical instruments - that the “scientists” and their reporters refer to as “earth-like” merely with barely one or two valiables that proximate such measures for earth - such as inhabiting a “habitable” zone of a star and the size of the planet.
But:
1. Orbiting a star with sufficient “metallicity,” necessary for the formation of terrestrial rather than gaseous planets?
2. Orbiting a star that is orbiting a “habitable zone” within a galaxy, and not closer to the center of a galaxy, where radiation and the presence of wandering planetoids make life there unlikely?
3. Orbiting a sun that is in a disk-shaped spiral galaxy rather than in an elliptical (spheroid) galaxy?. Spiral galaxies are thought to be the only type capable of supporting life.
4. Orbiting around a star in an almost perfect circle (like earth days) rather than the more common “eccentric” (elongated) ellipse? Steep elliptical orbits take a planet relatively close to and then relatively far from a sun, with great consequences for warmth and light. Earth’s stable, nearly circular orbit around the sun keeps our distance from it relatively constant, and hence the amount of heat and light does not vary tremendously.
5. Orbiting in a star system with outer massive gas planets (like Jupiter and Saturn) that can attract and catch many wandering asteroids and comets and generally keep them from hitting planets closer to the star (like with Earth)?
6. Orbiting in a solar system with asteroid belts that also keep a lot of destructive flying rock in a stable orbit and away from other planets?
7. A planet with a molten core that creates a magnetic field that holds radiation belts in place; belts that protect the surface of a planet (like Earth) from the most harmful rays of it’s star?
8. A planet with ongoing volcanism that plays a role in generating an atmosphere, and together with seismic and plate tectonic activity is cycling rich minerals widely?
9. Orbiting just the right kind of star, putting out a fairly steady amount of energy? Other types of stars are more variable in their output and this variance can utterly destroy life or cause it to be unsustainable due to the extremes.
10. A planet with a fairly rapid rotation (like erth) that reduces the daily variation in temperature and also makes photosynthesis viable because there is enough sunlight all over the planet?
11. A planet tilted on its just enough relative to its orbital plane to allow seasonal variations that help complex life, but not so tilted as to make those variations too extreme (like earth)?
12. A planet with a moon that causes tides that are just strong enough to permit tidal zones (a great breeding ground for diverse life) but not so severe as to destroy life?
Do these often “we found anothter ‘earth-like planet’ “ reports refer to what all really makes a planet “earth-like”?
No. They are all click bait seeking groupies from which they can tell their advertisers that their ads are worth it.
Libs never get pass the second stage
“And if there’s life on other planets, then I’m sure that he must know. And he’s been there once already, and has died to save their souls.”
- Larry Norman
It would be hard for me to imagine earth being the only planet capable of supporting life.
The way the scientists talk you would think they know the universe from a to z but i believe the truth is that they really know very little.
The Bible tells us that God has no beginning and no end, if we are the only ones who has ever been here then what has God been doing for eternity?
The Bible tells us that God is for the living which tells me that man has been living some where for much longer than what they have been here, they were most likely some where else.
I chuckle every time there is some breathless report that water might be on the Moon - or Mars!
'Cause it's generally believed that: water + "dirt" + solar energy + TIME = life
You'd expect it to look that way to life on that planet. Just as life on a different planet would think theirs was designed for their life. Reverse the cause and effect.
The article has a point about the MANY variables that all came together to allow the miracle of life to be created on Earth.
We truly are a unique.....like billions to one odds.
BUT the universe is frigging HUGE.
Life MUST exist elsewhere, if it happened here it happened there as well.
Intelligent life?
Just looked it up, 8.7 million species of life on Earth with only one being truly sentient.
that drops the odds a bit but again the universe is HUGE.
Do you believe that the universe was created in 6 literal days?
“Life MUST exist elsewhere, if it happened here it happened there as well.”
Must exist, did exist or will exist.
Yes.
If I may try,
The Bibles’ stated purpose of;
The Stars...to give light and
mark the seasons. —Gen.1:14-28.
The Earth...Created to be inhabited Only.
-—Is.45:18.
Other Sheep, but Not biological Entities
Gen.2:1——Luke2,24.
yup, time...how long have we been around, 300,000 years?
A drip in the ocean to how old the universe is and will survive until all the lights go out.
The most obvious definitions differ from each other:
"There was evening and morning" --- which is referenced Biblically after every verse describing Creation --- wouldn't quite work before the sun was created. This raises the question of what "evening and morning" meant with no sun.
"24-hour period" assumes, without warrant, that the earth's rotational period was always what it is now.
"A thousand years are as one day to the Lord, and one day as a thousand years" suggests that these may be very long, possibly indefinitely long, periods.
???
Please explain what this undefined period of time
has to do with the existence of other inhabited planets. I'm still interested.
Earth is uncommon, but it’s essentially impossible to prove that it’s unique in having intelligent life.
Now consider, the human world stands about midway between the infinitesimal and the immense . The size of our planet is near the geometric mean of the size of the known universe and the size of the atom. The mass of a human being is the geometric mean of the mass of the earth and the mass of a proton. A person contains about 1028 atoms, more atoms than there are stars in the universe. In our 150 pounds of protoplasm, in our three pounds of brain, there may be more operational organization than there is in the whole of the Andromeda Galaxy. The number of associations possible among our 10 billion neurons, and hence the number of thoughts humans can think, may exceed the number of atoms in the universe.
The sun orbits the galactic core at the speed of about 220 km/s and takes about 230 million years to make one revolution around the center of the Galaxy. If the Sun was to be scaled down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States. Kilogram for kilogram, the human body generates 8000 times more power than the Sun. You have about 10 trillion cells in your body and the length of one uncoiled strand of human DNA is approximately 2 meters. The moon is only about 400,000 km away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back almost 1500 times (to put that in perspective, all the planets in our Solar System can fit between the Earth and moon). To put in another way, the DNA in all your cells put together would be about twice the diameter of the Solar System.
The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. Nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.
As you might guess, these spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass. The protons and neutrons inside of an atom’s nucleus are each made up of three quarks. The mass of the quarks, which comes from their interaction with the Higgs field, accounts for just a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. Gluons, carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds these quarks together, are completely massless.
If your mass doesn’t come from the masses of these particles, where does it come from? Energy. Scientists believe that almost all of your body’s mass comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the binding energy of the gluons.
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