Over the course of the last thirty years more and more exoplanets have been \u201cdiscovered.\u201d\u00a0 In most cases the astronomers use changes in stellar light output measured by their instruments to infer the diameter of a planet transiting in front of its star.\u00a0 And what they\u2019ve discovered is there are thousands of these planets.\u00a0 In fact, they seem ubiquitous.\u00a0 Everywhere we look we find them.<\/p>\n
And this has convinced an awful lot of people that life must be ubiquitous in the universe too.\u00a0 And that intelligent life must be common too.\u00a0 This would go a long way to encouraging the crowd who believe that human beings are nothing special and any belief in the divine origin of the human race is completely unfounded.\u00a0 The story goes we\u2019re just some monkeys that got a little smarter than the other monkeys and have become a blight on the face of \u201cGaia.\u201d<\/p>\n
I have to say, I completely disagree.\u00a0 I look at the Earth and compare it to the other planets in our solar system and I\u2019m struck by how many factors conspire to make Earth a paradise while leaving all of the other planets different flavors of hell.\u00a0 Everything from the effect of our large satellite, to the strength of the magnetic field to the balance between elements and compounds that make up the oceans and atmosphere, to the exact orbit of Earth around the Sun.\u00a0 And that\u2019s not to mention the remarkable way terrestrial life has shaped the environment in remarkable ways.\u00a0 Plant life has increased the oxygen content of the atmosphere and life has changed the environment in innumerable ways.<\/p>\n
And then we have the fossil record demonstrating the prodigious changes that have gone on for billions of years to produce the current flora and fauna of this remarkable world.\u00a0 From the one-celled origins of life to the present-day complexity of creatures as varied as hummingbirds and blue whales; birds of paradise and Siberian tigers; dragonflies and giant pandas.\u00a0 And us.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sorry, I cannot believe that all this is just the random result of fermions and bosons rattling around the aftermath of the \u201cbig bang.\u201d\u00a0 To quote the immortal words of Vizzini, \u201cInconceivable.\u201d\u00a0 And I know he was dead wrong every time he said it but that is my rock bottom intuition.\u00a0 All of this is purposeful.\u00a0 All of this was directed.\u00a0 We are here because life has meaning and human life is the soul behind the giant mechanism.\u00a0 We are the witness and the object for which the whole dizzying array was created.<\/p>\n
We are the guests of honor in a parade that stretches out to the detectable limits of the universe and back and forth in time from, \u201cLet there be light\u201d to the end of \u201cRevelations.\u201d\u00a0 We\u2019re here to make sense out of the wonders of creation and to use them to figure out the full potentialities of the human mind and soul.<\/p>\n
And I don\u2019t believe for a minute that we\u2019ll destroy ourselves utterly.\u00a0 History has shown just how stupid and cruel we can be.\u00a0 Humans can be more vicious than any predator.\u00a0 There are no depths we can\u2019t sink to.\u00a0 But that is lowest part of our nature.\u00a0 We have not yet begun to figure ourselves out.\u00a0 We\u2019re still ignorant children.\u00a0 But we will grow up and we will grow out of our ignorance.\u00a0 And then we will become what we are supposed to be.\u00a0 God\u2019s children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the course of the last thirty years more and more exoplanets have been \u201cdiscovered.\u201d\u00a0 In most cases the astronomers use changes in stellar light<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1263,2852],"tags":[1267,86],"class_list":["post-33575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-religion","tag-photogs-corner","tag-religion"],"yoast_head":"\n