Not necessarily an indication that there’s no God, but it’s powerful evidence that life arises spontaneously, without divine intervention. We’re used to being isolated on our little rock, secure in the belief that Man is nature’s greatest achievement. If life exists elsewhere, it’d show that we’re just an accident of physics, something that could have happened anywhere.
Let’s use Christianity as an example. If we’re to believe Genesis, man was created in God’s image; we’re his special children. Why, then, would God bother to make another planet full of Wookies (or whatever)? Or are they just more animals over which to exercise our God-given dominion?
In addition, Christian doctrine states that God gave to the world his only begotten son for the redemption of us higher mammals. If God was really all that crazy about us, why would he create life elsewhere? Did he give up on us somewhere along the line and decide to start over? Or, were the stories all crap to begin with?
Or, do you plan to be a missionary to the noble Vulcan (or whatever) savages and tell them that God let his son die on our planet for their benefit? Good luck with that.
Shortly after the discovery of the first planet in another star system (51 Pegasi b, unofficially dubbed “Bellerophon” by Geoffrey Marcy), some Catholic bishop or cardinal announced that, if there was life on this planet, their souls would need saving.
The Church quickly recanted his position, though, saying that their souls wouldn’t need saving if Original Sin had not happened on their planet.
(Incidentally, they were getting their panties in a bunch for nothing. 51 Pegasi b is about the size of Saturn, and is closer to its host star than Mercury is to our sun. If there is life on/in 51 Pegasi b, it won’t be life as we know it today.)
Well there is a line in the bible that states that “we were created in the image if god” so god looks like us. If humanity were to get a superiority complex it would be disasterous to both of our cultures.As for single celled life I can imagine a lot of religions would try to use it as proof of their beliefs.
As a believing Catholic I would like to state the following.
The universe is a big place, and it would be pretty damned arrogant of us humans to believe that this is the only planet that God put intelligent life on. If proof positive is offered that there are intelligent beings on other planets, and that some of them stopped by and helped put up a few building (the Pyramids), it wouldn’t rock my little world.
Society is a lot stronger (and more apathetic) than public perception seems to think it is. Remember the worries about millenium cults and rioting in the streets around 2000? NOTHING happened. The parties were a little bit bigger, and that’s it.
When scientists announced that they had found life on Mars (the first reports from the popular media didn’t say maybe, they said “MARTIAN LIFE FOUND”). It barely made the front page of the paper, and was treated with a yawn in a few days.
When the cold war ended, people in North America hardly noticed. Pundits were predicting dancing in the streets.
Last year a new article reported that an biosphere-destroying asteriod might be on a collision course with Earth. The news barely made the papers.
Based on all this, I think the following would happen if we discovered a signal from another civilization: The techno-philes would go ‘Cool!’. The government would allocate a few more bucks to SETI projects and astronomy in general. There would be a big boom in amateur radio astronomy. And that’s about it. I imagine Jerry Falwell and his ilk might come up with some new sermons. End of story. If we didn’t receive cool instructions for building a giant spaceship or other fantastic technology, the public would forget about it in about a week, and within a few months it would be completely off the radar screen except for the occasional news story when some significant chunk of new data is received.
I’ll bet we couldn’t even work up funding for a manned Jupiter mission if an unmanned lander radioed back photos of Europian wombats.
I think the most obvious answer is being completely overlooked…
If life were discovered on a different planet/moon/asteroid/interstellar gas station/Bob Dole/whatever, it’d mean that there’s a likelihood that PEOPLE can go there and survive for a relatively long period of time. Complete terraformation would require a long time and plenty of genetic engineering of the native bacteria (to get them to produce oxygen and such), but the first spot discovered to have life on it will be targeted as El Primero Numero Uno Colonization Spot a century or two down the road.
Religiously… well, it’d simply be explained this way… (I’m not religious by the way, so this is partially farcical)… “God wanted people to only be concerned with what goes on down here on Earth. Traveling to other planets is blasphemy, heresy, and all astronauts and NASA employees should be burned at the stake immediately. And as soon as we do that, we can go get Quake 3 off the market, too!”
Okay, so I’m being facetious, but I hope my exaggeration drills my point home. Here’s hopin’ for a Martian Colony within the next few years or so! (I wanna go there and take advantage of the lower gravity… then I won’t have to diet anymore!)
Only a complete fool would state that there is no life save ours in the universe. In fact, the universe may well be teeming with life, and I, for one, would not be surprised if that was indeed the case.
Some of us, however, have a problem with a bunch of Captain Kirks gallavanting around the galaxy and making weird designs on our wheat fields.
I object! Jim Kirk never made a design in a wheat field in his life! The idea! He’s a STARSHIP CAPTAIN, he has more important things to do than titillate ignorant rustics…
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
If microscopic life were found somewhere else, I suspect most people would react the same way they do whenever they hear that the rain forests are filled with kazillions of undiscovered varieties of plants and animals.
That is to say, they’d go, “So?”
If intelligent life were found, why, I think the first reaction would be fear.
Do it represent a threat?
But I suspect that any intelligent life we find on another planet or whatever might possess a consciousness so alien to us that we’d just kind of ignore/exploit it.
Dolphins, it’s been said, are REAL smart, and possess some sort of intelligence that we can’t/don’t/won’t comprehend.
And here they are on our planet. And they end up in cans of tuna fish.
SPOOFE: Your arguments don’t make sense. There’s no reason that a habitat for life, intelligent or otherwise, has to be good for humans. We may well find complex life in the Europan ocean, but humans are not likely to want to live in a pitch-back ocean under 60 miles of ice. On earth, a different form of life lives in 200 degree water near deep-ocean thermal vents. I doubt humans would want to live there.
As for Terraforming - the LAST place you’re going to terraform is one that already has indigenous life. Anyway, a planet’s suitability for Terraforming has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there is life already there. It has more to do with the abundance of the compounds necessary to create a breathable atmosphere, its location to the sun, etc. It doesn’t matter if the planet is currently 200 below or 200 above zero. What matters is how easy it would be to change its nature.
In fact, Star Fleet protocol says that Federation ships should remain hidden and not distrub the locals unless the locals at least have warp drive. So as not to send lowly beings into a panic.
Max, why could Jesus have not died on multiple planets?
My point is, I do not know about life on other planets, nor do I know what God did for the other planets. I do believe that there is life on other planets, probably even intelligent life. Life that God created in the same image as we are. I do also believe however, that we will never see these other people. Due to distance and technological limitations (i.e. laws of physics)
Maybe God created the laws of physics and the fact that we cannot exceed the speed of light and then placed the other life on distant planets so that we would never see each other, at least not until heaven.
If you’re interested in life out there you should read the book “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe” . Perhaps it’s time we concentrated on loving our neighbor more and quit worrying if there’s life out there.
I think it could cause a problem to Christianity if whatever we found were to be far more advanced than we are. If it were obviously superior…people might have to rethink us being God’s “chosen creatures,” his “crowning achievement.”
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing and mean your mother.
