Stewart on the Founders’ Cosmic Beliefs
A few days after I wrote my piece on cosmic religions, I see Matthew Stewart had a similar piece on the matter. I didn’t read Stewart’s book. His article could have been based on the research found there. A taste:
If these peace-loving aliens were a threat to anything, it was to theology. John Adams put his finger on the problem as a young man in a diary entry from 1756. Given the near-certainty of alien life, he reasoned, Evangelical Christians must either condemn our extraterrestrial brothers to everlasting perdition or suppose that Jesus shows up on an endless number of planets in ever-changing alien incarnations. Thomas Paine later made the same point in print, rather more caustically: “The person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.”
There are a lot of sightings of strange objects in the sky. I often wonder if not only have we been visited by them, but if we are their projects. If they do exist and are visiting, it needs explaining why they aren’t sharing their technology like zero point energy and cures for diseases like cancer. One reason is it would be too “disruptive.” Likewise if they are that much more advanced then they have presumably knowledge of the origins of reality. That would disrupt or perhaps clarify “religion.”
Perhaps the recorded miracles of old were simply uses of advanced alien technology. From Thor:
Erik Selvig: I’m talking about science, not magic.
Jane Foster: Well, “magic’s just science we don’t understand yet.” Arthur C. Clarke.
….
Thor: Your ancestors called it magic…
[Thor skims through a book on Norse mythology]
Thor: …but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same.
Assuming aliens exist and have visited our planet, there are other reasons why they might have chosen not to share their technology.
1) we’re potential rivals if we had better technology.
2) we’re not considered “intelligent” but just stupid animals and they don’t acknowledge our sentience.
3) we’re a planned food crop.
4) they don’t give a damn about us. Maybe they are more interested in our water, the whales, the giant squid, or some other animal/plantReport
Or perhaps mining resources in the solar system.Report
If the aliens don’t care they are almost like the “deistic” cold watchmaker. There is “evidence” (what passes for evidence in the community of those who believe in aliens) that they cared enough to shut down nukes to avoid World War III.Report
Or we’re a national park or a reservation or somewhere in between.Report
When I first read this, I read “Mathew Stuart” as “Martha Stewart,” and really thought we’d had an alien invasion. Whoa.
I suspect life springs from chemical reaction where conditions meet this certain set of criteria which we might only guess at since it’s spring and reworked so much in its wake here on Earth. I doubt, however, that it’s up to traversing the vastness of space, at least not without a ship large enough to bring along a substantial chunk of the flora and fauna that make life, and I’d expect it to rapidly vary from the life left behind in ways that might be quite nasty were the two biospheres to re-encounter one another. So despite my many, many years of consuming space operas and post-apocalyptic sci-fi, it’s only a dream of the frontier beyond our grasping. I do realize that it’s possible that the limits I see are the limits of what we know now, and we might know more some time in the future. But we still don’t seem to get that we live in a biosphere, and none of us are really individuals, we’re all colonies.
As to cosmology of other biospheres? I would presume sentience a prerequisite. But then I wonder of the gods of the great ape, the sperm whale, or elephant. Perhaps the noise pollution we pour into the oceans are whale’s fall from the garden?
I like the notion of the perpetual life/death cycle of Jesus as refutation of the one Christian God. But I grow completely disgusted with the never ending assertions of Christ as the truth, too; truth beyond questioning is very convenient. Particularly if you’re not a whale or ape or elephant, facing armageddon of your species.Report
See, now, my favorite from the MCU is this
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I tend to believe the following regarding extraterrestrial life:
1. Life is common throughout the universe. Copernican principle.
2. Assuming the history of life on earth is reasonably typical, most extraterrestrial life will be pretty boring, unicellular stuff. That’s what life looked like here for the first 3 billion years or so.
3. While complex, multicellular life, much less intelligent lifeforms like us, may be uncommon, even rare, there’s a lot of planets out there. Potential for life, just in our own galaxy likely number in the billions. Even one-in-a-million odds gives you potentially thousands of neighbors.
4. Even so, the galaxy is an awfully big place. Our nearest neighbors could easily be hundreds or thousands of light-years distant.
5. Interstellar travel is possible. It’s also really hard and it takes a long time.
6. Given #5 the economics of interstellar commerce or resource exploitation are impossible.
7. The politics are almost as bad. Assuming ET’s have lifespans even roughly comparable to our own, funding an incredibly difficult, risky, and expensive expedition the outcome of which won’t be known for many generations hence is a hell of a political proposition.
8. Of course, as @zic points out above, all this is based on very limited information as well as a lot of assumptions that may or may not prove to be valid. But as much as I would like to believe otherwise, there’s no evidence or logic pointing to a Star Trek future as a reasonable possibility.
9. On the other hand, in true Rumsfeldian fashion, we have to admit to the existence of “known unknowns.” The twin pillars of modern physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, while being fantastically fruitful and well-verified, are also fundamentally at odds with one another. It should be noted as well that we don’t even know what 96% of the universe is made of, beyond attaching the labels Dark Energy and Dark Matter to it, which really means “I dunno.” Bottom line is that our understanding of physics is incomplete, and the gaps, being centered around really fundamental stuff like space, time, energy, and matter, is precisely where technologies like faster than light travel would exist if the universe allows it.Report