Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
Billions of earth-like planets. Makes you want to live forever to get to explore all that stuff, doesn't it?
We could probably do something, but it would require a lot of hacking, and wouldn't necessarily be worth it. Perhaps it's currently good enough.
The article title is not inaccurate.
So, the article itself says:
There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, ...
The title says:
Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'
In the title we don't have any of the words "could", "might", "may", "possibly", or any other words indicating the uncertainty. To me, that means the title is inaccurate.
Proof is here: http://images.google.com/images?q=bible
Science is somewhere else: http://www.google.com/search?q=science+proof
ID -- the belief that our perceptions can either be of completely natural artifacts or artifacts created as a result of an external intelligent agent -- also not implicated. Interestingly enough, there may be a counter-movement here: if intelligent life were discovered, arguments could then begin to be made that some sort of intelligent agent had some play in our cultural/geological history. That would be new.
This religion-vs-alien life question has been going around since the 1950s, at least. What a lot of people forget is that most major organized religions have been adapting to situations like this since their beginnings. Christianity, for instance, thought of the "world" as basically Eurasia for hundreds of years. People in Africa and the Americas were not considered fully "human" until fairly recently. That meant, for all intents and purposes, that places like the New World were 1) far away and almost impossible to reach, and 2) not part of the normal world, and 3) inhabited by creatures that were somewhat intelligent but not completely human.
Religions, especially successful ones, adapt. I would be extremely surprised to see any impact at all. The more you study it, the more of a non-issue it is.
As you said, religion would have to adapt, but that is an impact. I'm more curious what path they would take. As you said, they could deny them full privileges of being sentient...that is they are less than human. Or they could accept them as being on the same level, but that would require a small alteration to their beliefs.
Seems to me that Judaism is a major world religion that applies for Jewish people, although there are many kinds of people in the world.
Christianity is a religion of mankind, hence the need to dehumanize native peoples. The logical progression would be that Christianity would simply follow the lead of Judaism, i.e., Christianity is just for men.
Of course, that's a big-picture, long-range guess. One of the reasons Christianity is so resilient is that there are so many versions. What would happen would be a thousand different possible ways forward. Most wouldn't last 200 years. A few would succeed.
The "man is special" disgust with coming from monkeys thing is just a limited reaction to Darwinism. It's already dying off. Within another 300-500 years it'll be completely gone. There were similar reactions against Copernicus.
http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-exist....
Apologies for Richard Kulisz's more asinine qualities, but I've never seen a convincing refutation of the argument he presents there.
He also says that it's not in an alien's interest to leave one planet (Earth) just in case we develop - but he doesn't consider that they might have colonized the galaxy but left Earth precisely because they did find life on it. Even the slightly unimaginative at times Star Trek had the idea of humans only colonizing 'empty' areas and leaving anything with existing life on it alone.
Also, he states that colonizing the galaxy takes ~110,000 years because humans took 10,000 years to evolve + 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. He completely ignores that humans actually took many tens of millions of years to evolve from scratch not from existing life forms.
Also, he assumes zero chance of catastrophic accident leading to exctinction as an explanation for why aliens might not exist. Maybe they did exist but wiped themselves out.
Also, he assumes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, but that means traveling pretty much at the speed of light, which is currently not possible/forseeably practical. Yet he doesn't consider how aliens would stay as a coherent civilization when a light speed ping response starts taking years, let alone tens of thousands of years.
Also, he doesn't consider any kinds of future technology, IT, AI, singularity or similar. Maybe any culture which gets a thousand years past where we are now does not become a galactic conquerer, but a Matrix-style virtual reality.
Lastly, what if aliens decided the best way to colonize the galaxy was to spray terraforming machines and life seeds, and we are the 'alien' intelligence colonies? Who says alien ideas of 'colonize' have to be like human Earth colonies of the last thousand years?
He completely ignores that humans actually took many tens of millions of years to evolve from scratch not from existing life forms.
Kulisz responded:
The point is that it didn't have to. Nothing in the universe prevented a technological civilization from arising 8 billion years ago. And certainly not 65 million years ago back when the dinosaurs ruled.
He seems to simply be restating a typical resolution of the Fermi paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Explaining_the_pa...
It is unlikely, that our Galaxy will contain too many systems created by two objects with comparable mass, because such systems are unstable. We can calculate this number by comparing number of star systems with two comparable stars in the system to number of regular stars.