Choose life
John H Wednesday 25th April, AD 2007
Let’s just pause a moment and consider how astonishing it is that 229 extrasolar planets are currently known, all of them discovered since 1992. Our six-year old is (like I was at that age) fascinated by astronomy, and this has to be one of the most striking changes in astronomical knowledge compared with when I was his age. One of the great scientific revolutions of the past quarter-century.
And now we have news of a “Goldilocks” planet – one whose distance from its star makes it neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right for liquid water to be found on its surface. How long, I find myself wondering, before the Big One: the first detection of free oxygen – a strong indicator of life – in an exoplanet’s atmosphere?
I wonder how ready Christians are, intellectually and emotionally, for the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Because we can be sure that the likes of Richard Dawkins are ready for it, and in particular to claim it as Christianity’s death-knell. It would be nothing of the sort, of course, but this claim would be aggressively made and in many quarters would rapidly become an unquestioned, self-evident truth.
If and when this happens (and personally I think we are talking when, and we’re talking sooner rather than later), we need to be ready to respond, not defensively, but singing:
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
- bearing in mind that, in biblical terms, “the earth” can refer to the whole visible realm “under heaven”.
- Tags: Astronomy, Life
- Categories: Apologetics , Psalms
- Comments(9)
Unless they turn out to be Daleks, in which case perhaps we should best be singing:
O my God, make them like whirling dust,
like chaff before the wind.
As fire consumes the forest,
as the flame sets the mountains ablaze,
or something like that.
Well, as long as it involves Anglican chant somewhere along the line, I’m cool.
Something I’ve wondered about for a while is if we’ll get to explore the rest of creation sometime after the current age.
It’s pure fanciful imagination, but a nice one at that.
One of the reasons I’ve always liked “The Lord is King! lift up your voice” is because I so want it to be the case that “from world to world the joy shall ring: the Lord Omnipotent is King!” ‘Course, that’ll probably mean putting humans on the Moon, or at a pinch, Mars, rather than Gliese 581 C (which really needs a rebranding exercise, pronto).
Incidentally, while I’m very keen on the idea of finding alien plant and animal life, I’m not sure I’d be prepared for the discovery of intelligent, self-aware life. That’d throw up all sorts of horrendous questions about the Incarnation and the atonement.
Lemme tell you, It wouldn’t shake my faith in our God, but I am not looking forward to learning about an alien planet with intelligent life.
Though I do know that as soon as we are able to fly ourselves out there, we will be doing so. And I doubt we’d be coming in peace. We’ll probably be abducting and probing them, just like we fear they’d do to us.
[...] April 25th, 2007     Well, I’m about the gazillionth blogger to note that we’ve stumbled upon a delightful garden world that our intrepid scientists have dubbed Gliese 581 C after its most famous of stars, Gliese 581. This planet is at the ‘Goldilocks distance’ from its own sun. That is, it’s neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right – water won’t freeze all over its surface at all times, nor will it vaporize off its entire surface at all times. Of course, the thing is fifty percent bigger than earth and apparently much denser than our humble abode to boot, so who knows what kind of life if any such a rock might foster. After all, density has an effect on the force of gravity at the surface of a planet, and that force of gravity in turn affects the likelihood of life larger than a bacterium or a self-flagellating paramecium.     In any case, this is being heralded as an astonishing discovery, but for the wrong reasons. I mean, there is as yet no evidence of anything we might call ‘life’, as though we could be certain just what constitutes ‘life’ at a far corner of some far-flung arm of a spiral galaxy. No, it’s just cool to find all these planets – as John H notes, we have come across 229 new extrasolar planets in about fifteen years. That’s just good fun.     Still, we seem obsessed with life ‘out there’, and I agree with John H that we Christians might want to give some thought to this poser, because Dawkins and his gang sure as hell have.      So let’s give it some thought.     I can’t say that it bothers me overmuch. As I said already, there seems no reason to get hot and excited over the possibility of ‘life’ out there since we have yet to find definitive evidence despite all our searching and all the hype over each supposedly apocalyptic discovery.  [As an aside - just what we hope to find is, to me at least, as telling as the hope itself.]  Anyway, if there is something alive out there, then, hey, the Father created it through the Son in the Holy Spirit, and that’s that. If, mirabile dictu, it happens to be ‘intelligent’ – like a dolphin, perhaps, or a precocious MBA student with extraterrestrial Blue-Tooth – then, hey, same deal.     What we mustn’t do is head down the path of ‘multiple incarnations’ of the Second Person, or Cosmic Christ, or whatever. Jesus is and will always be a man, and a Jewish man at that. IF there are weird and wily civilizations out there, then he died to save ‘em, just like us. As for the scandal that gives, too bad. It only increases in scope; it doesn’t change in kind. After all, most folks despise a savior born into a tribal people suppressed in an imperial backwater at a most unglamorous time in history. That he came to get himself killed as a criminal of no account outside the gates of the City Supposedly At The Center Of The Earth only makes it more unbearably offensive.     So, our claim that Jesus is the ‘image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation’; that he is the one ‘in whom and for whom and through whom all things were made’; that in him ‘all things hold together’; and that by his stripes we, and all creation, are healed – as Gregory of Nazianzus said, one drop of blood heals the whole cosmos; well, those will just have to stay. The fact that this all means that we puny humans, with our susceptibility to viruses the size of a few microns and our penchant for self-destruction, are somehow the main event inasmuch as we are patterned after Jesus, well, that’s fine by me. Now, if folks out there are, you know, humanoid, then, well, that’s a neat kettle of sawdust…    Posted by Thomas Filed in Uncategorized [...]
I am curious how anyone is able to say that water and oxygen on a planet can be a “strong indicator of life.” We have exactly one data point to make that claim. One. One data point is absolutely insufficient to draw a conclusion.
As far as we know, water and oxygen are necessary conditions for life. That does not mean they are sufficient conditions, nor does it mean they establish the probability of life.
I’m not saying there can’t be life there. I’m just saying people should stop embedding such crappy mathematics in their probabilistic language.
Josh: water certainly isn’t an indicator of life in itself, though it certainly indicates a good place to start looking for life.
Oxygen is a different matter, because free oxygen can’t survive long in an atmosphere unless it is being regenerated by some means. And while some other means could (I gather) do this, such as release of the gas from subterranean rocks, or interactions in the upper atmosphere to create ozone, the consensus seems to be that earthlike levels of oxygen could not be sustained without life.
To put it another way, we have lots of data points to make that claim, as we know of a number of planetary atmospheres, but the only one which contains significant quantities of free oxygen is the one that contains life. And no alternative models have been proposed, other than life, that could produce earthlike levels of oxygen for sustained periods.
OTOH my understanding is that the detection of oxygen would not be regarded as an absolute sign of life in the absence of other indicators. But the discovery of high levels of oxygen in a planetary atmosphere would still be enormously significant.
[...] As I wrote on my blog earlier this year (after the first “Goldilocks” planet was detected): I wonder how ready Christians are, intellectually and emotionally, for the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Because we can be sure that the likes of Richard Dawkins are ready for it, and in particular to claim it as Christianity’s death-knell. It would be nothing of the sort, of course, but this claim would be aggressively made and in many quarters would rapidly become an unquestioned, self-evident truth. [...]