huckelberry wrote:Dr W. I can remember as a youngster I enjoyed reading the Martian Chronicles. I could hope to float down a canal on mars and eat a martian fish. I was fascinated by the hope. It was a real emotional blow to learn in the subsequent years as details become clear that our sister planets are very uninviting places to live.
I think your comment about how we can best see our situation is right on target.
Well if Dr. W is right and we are the only one in our galaxy, and assuming even a 1% chance that at least a single inhabited world exists in each of the rest of the galaxies, then that would make us one out of another billion inhabited worlds in the universe.
Nearest neighbor galaxy that's of any appreciable size is Andromeda at a distance of about 2.5 million light years.
These kinds of distances make any type of two way communication impossible, even if one is prepared to go for many multi-generational time frames. Bottom line: if they are out there in the universe outside the Milky Way, it can make no practical difference to us.
Here in the home galaxy, a round trip out to our nearest extrasolar neighbor Proxima Centauri, its Goldilocks planet and back, would take more than 8 years at the speed of light.
At the fastest speed we humans have achieved with deep space vehicles the round trip would take roughly 7,400 years. All of recorded history for humankind is generally agreed to span a mere 5,000 years or so.
Last edited by Guest on Fri Jun 22, 2018 10:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."
DrW: "Mistakes in science are learning opportunities and are eventually corrected."
I have the question but I have to die to get the answer.
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2 different threads same day 2 hours apart Yohoo Bat 12/1/2015
Fence Sitter wrote:Well if Dr. W is right and we are the only one in our galaxy, and assuming even a 1% chance that at least a single inhabited world exists in each of the rest of the galaxies, then that would make us one out of another billion inhabited worlds in the universe.
Nearest neighbor galaxy that's of any appreciable size is Andromeda at a distance of about 2.5 million light years.
These kinds of distances make any type of two way communication impossible, even if one is prepared to go for many multi-generational time frames. Bottom line: if they are out there in the universe outside the Milky Way, it can make no practical difference to us.
Here in the home galaxy, a round trip out to our nearest extrasolar neighbor Proxima Centauri, its Goldilocks planet and back, would take more than 8 years at the speed of light.
At the fastest speed we humans have achieved with deep space vehicles the round trip would take roughly 7,400 years. All of recorded history for humankind is generally agreed to span a mere 5,000 years or so.
The massive distances between possibly inhabited planets, and thus the time (measured in hundreds of lifetimes) it would take to travel from one to another, is the reason I rule out as essentially impossible the notion of alien beings ever visiting earth. Or vice versa.
Of course that doesn’t mean there can’t be a buttload of planets with intelligent life somewhere in the universe. Just that earthlings will never really be able to verify it.
"The DNA of fictional populations appears to be the most susceptible to extinction." - Simon Southerton
huckelberry wrote:Dr W. I can remember as a youngster I enjoyed reading the Martian Chronicles. I could hope to float down a canal on mars and eat a martian fish. I was fascinated by the hope. It was a real emotional blow to learn in the subsequent years as details become clear that our sister planets are very uninviting places to live. .
I still enjoy the fantasy of immortality, of exploring space, the past and the future. I'm not as interested in divine justice as I used to be, though.
krose wrote:The massive distances between possibly inhabited planets, and thus the time (measured in hundreds of lifetimes) it would take to travel from one to another, is the reason I rule out as essentially impossible the notion of alien beings ever visiting earth. Or vice versa.
Of course that doesn’t mean there can’t be a buttload of planets with intelligent life somewhere in the universe. Just that earthlings will never really be able to verify it.
Question for anyone who knows: Biologically, how inevitable is the timeline from emergent life to human life? I wonder how variable it might be, what the minimum time would look like under optimal natural conditions?
I don't ask the question as much as I used to. That is the beauty of leaving Mormonism and religion in general. One doesn't have to obsess over these questions as much and therefore one can concentrate more on actual life in the present. Religion needs to feed into the human race's lack of a clear answer to why we are here or where we are going in order to justify its existence. It preys on fear of the unknown and extracts time and money from fearful humans as a result. I'm glad I don't have to deal with this as much. Nevertheless, I still frequent these sites and make comments. Perhaps the next stage is to leave this entirely. If only my family would somehow see the benefits of freedom from religion can offer. These religionists are simply magicians or overly confident or perhaps delusional - maybe a combination. In any event, they don't know any more than the rest of us about why we are here or where we are going. As Tator said, we have to die to find out the answers and that will happen soon enough, so why stress?
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen
Exiled wrote:I don't ask the question as much as I used to. That is the beauty of leaving Mormonism and religion in general. One doesn't have to obsess over these questions as much and therefore one can concentrate more on actual life in the present. Religion needs to feed into the human race's lack of a clear answer to why we are here or where we are going in order to justify its existence. It preys on fear of the unknown and extracts time and money from fearful humans as a result. I'm glad I don't have to deal with this as much. Nevertheless, I still frequent these sites and make comments. Perhaps the next stage is to leave this entirely. If only my family would somehow see the benefits of freedom from religion can offer. These religionists are simply magicians or overly confident or perhaps delusional - maybe a combination. In any event, they don't know any more than the rest of us about why we are here or where we are going. As Tator said, we have to die to find out the answers and that will happen soon enough, so why stress?
I really like your take on this. The one dumb thing I keep of Mormonism...is the worry..what if..why and what are the answers..thank you!
