It Looks Like We're Not Alone

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JanR said:
There are scads and scads of places we don’t know of.
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True. But this far everywhere we look shows how unique our earth is. We never find anything like ours, we always find inhospitable.
JanR said:
There are many millions of suns with their own planets elsewhere in the Milky Way and in other galaxies that we aren’t aware of. Certainly, some of those suns are an appropriate distance away from some of those planets to enable the necessary conditions for life to form.
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But we have no idea what it really takes for life to form. No one has created life from lifeless except God. Until we can achieve that, and I do not believe we can, we have no recipe to look at and therefore cannot actually apply those numbers in any meaningful way.
 
Has anyone read C.S. Lewis’ space Trilogy? (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength)

I think these novels present a very real way, taking the Christian God into account, for beings to exist in other worlds than Planet Earth.

If a great Christian like C.S. Lewis can “believe” enough to theorize the universe in these novels, than a puny mind like mine can kind of believe, too!
 
We barely know anything about some of the worlds in our solar system, and only in the last decade or so have we even been able to reliably detect terrestrial-like bodies in other stellar systems.
 
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Look at what happened when a more superior militarily advanced nation took over this country…(the USA)…the American Indian was decimated…their way of life…their culture…their belief…their land…all of that changed forever by a regime imposing its own laws…belief…culture…etc…(the only good injun is a dead injun)…now you see why some people say that the government is keeping quiet on the existence of UFO’s…or specifically alien beings…what if they were real and were indeed alien in every respect as white men were to the indians and were to impose their alien culture on us…aside from the worldwide panic that would ensue… society as we know it would collapse…but that’s only one “theory”…maybe what people are seeing are demonic apparitions…benevolent beings come to save us from ourselves…Satan is the Prince of Powers of this world devouring all he can…what more sinister way for him to delude people into believing he is our “savior”…personally I don’t have a problem accepting that God has created other beings throughout this and maybe other universes…after all he created us out of his infinite love…why not others…as for Jesus Christ…ALL things were created through him…not only is he the only Son of God…he is also THE one and only Savior…so any being created with a soul would still have to acknowledge that fact…how their salvation works only God knows…but these are just theories and conjecture…interesting subject though.
 
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Peebo said:
Look at what happened when a more superior militarily advanced nation took over this country…(the USA)…the American Indian was decimated…their way of life…their culture…their belief…their land…all of that changed forever by a regime imposing its own laws…belief…culture…etc…(the only good injun is a dead injun)…now you see why some people say that the government is keeping quiet on the existence of UFO’s…or specifically alien beings…what if they were real and were indeed alien in every respect as white men were to the indians and were to impose their alien culture on us…aside from the worldwide panic that would ensue… society as we know it would collapse…but that’s only one “theory”…maybe what people are seeing are demonic apparitions…benevolent beings come to save us from ourselves…Satan is the Prince of Powers of this world devouring all he can…what more sinister way for him to delude people into believing he is our “savior”…personally I don’t have a problem accepting that God has created other beings throughout this and maybe other universes…after all he created us out of his infinite love…why not others…as for Jesus Christ…ALL things were created through him…not only is he the only Son of God…he is also THE one and only Savior…so any being created with a soul would still have to acknowledge that fact…how their salvation works only God knows…but these are just theories and conjecture…interesting subject though.
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Great post. Pretty much my thoughts on this.
 
niceatheist said:
We barely know anything about some of the worlds in our solar system, and only in the last decade or so have we even been able to reliably detect terrestrial-like bodies in other stellar systems.
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As I said, I recommend the book. It’s not some whacky creationist book either.
 
The discovery of such life would cause us to revisit our thinking on these issues.
Fortunately, we have theology that exists to address it.
 
Can you summarize it’s students, because such arguments usually boil down to arguments from incredulity. Even the Drake Equation, which is really about the evolution of intelligent life, not life in general, looks like a woeful misuse of statistics, when at the moment we have only a sample size of precisely 1.
 
I’m curious. What if we encountered an advanced civilization and they thought Christianity was nonsense?
 
I believe they come from the spiritual dimension, if you will. 2 books to read:
See: Dr. Hugh Ross “Lights in the Sky and little Green Men.”
and Fr. Seraphim Rose, “Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future.” The Chapter on UFO’s addresses this.
Now that being said if it is discovered that there is complex or intelligent life elsewhere in the
Universe it would not shake my faith and the Church would have to come to an understanding
of where they fit in the plan of salvation, etc.
I just at this point do not believe that what we are experiencing are nuts and bolts vehicles coming from elsewhere in our Universe. The abduction phenomenon most especially has the smell of sulfur about it. In other words I believe it is demonic.
However, I do try to keep an open mind.
 
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Dr. Hugh Ross “Lights in the Sky and little Green Men.” goes over the same material As Ward and Brownlee’s book. He also goes over the impossibility of faster than light speed travel, etc. As a Star Trek fan it was kind of disappointing.
Dr. Ross is an astronomer/astrophysicist and although an evangelical Christian believes the Earth and our Universe is about as old as scientists say it is. (4.5 Billion years, 13 billion years.)
 
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Can we at least all agree that the term Xenobiology is awesome? It’s like a xenomorph from the Alien series.
 
It’s not an uncommon assertion, but it’s one with a paucity of evidence. We still have large gaps in our knowledge about how life began on Earth, and furthermore our definition of life is biased by the only example we have. Usually such arguments boil down to some sort of statistical analysis, but without knowing more fully the stages between inanimate organic compounds and the earliest replicators, it’s literally an assertion without justification.

In the next few decades we’ll be sending probes to moons like Europa, with vast oceans, lots of energy (the tidal forces Jupiter exerts on its moons is huge and is why Europa maintains a subsurface ocean and why Io is the most geologically active body in the solar system). With the liquid water, likely presence of complex organic chemistry, Europa is a good place to look. The trick will be identifying life that may have very different biochemistry from ours. Further, probably towards the latter half of this century we’ll have telescopes capable of imaging the surfaces of exoplanets, and we may be able to capture strong evidence of active biospheres on other planets.
 
I agree faster than light travel is probably in the realms of fantasy. But that just means talking to an alien species, even if we discover one, could be very long winded. But that’s not an argument against intelligent life in the Universe, it’s an argument against them ever showing up on our doorstep.
 
niceatheist said:
But that’s not an argument against intelligent life in the Universe, it’s an argument against them ever showing up on our doorstep.
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That’s something the wikipedia summary touches on as well. As a Catholic I believe God can do anything of course. I just don’t find it very likely beyond simple bacterial life forms.
 
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