Discussion»Questions»Science and Technology» Why is NASA spending billions of tax payer funds to find extraterrestrial life if not to dispute divine origin and with them NOT
I thought NASA was barely an agency anymore. That's why billionaire Rocket Barons (Bezos/Musk) have taken over.
Why can't God create aliens? Maybe they have their own alien Bible. Maybe it is the EXACT same Bible. Maybe it would end up verifying the existence of God. If two distinct life forms believed in the same thing, that would be good evidence that something is going on. Maybe the aliens are angels like in Battlestar Galactica. Of course they were Space Mormons, so I'm not sure about it.
The existence of extraterrestrial life won't disprove the existence of a God, not at all.
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at July 17, 2017 10:58 PM MDT
Sorry, but you seems to have veered of into conspiracy theory land. Do you really think that your little corner of Christianity (I assume you call it that) is so significant that anyone would spend that much money just to eradicate it. It will snuff itself out in a few generations in any case. just look around you, how many teenagers come to hear the sermons in the church you attend?
This post was edited by JakobA the unAmerican. at July 17, 2017 11:24 PM MDT
I have read the Bible all the way from "In the beginning ..." to "Amen", several times including the OT in Hebrew and the NT in Greek. Nowhere does it state whether God did or did not create life in the Heavens as well as on Earth, so the disvovery of ET life (or proof of the Fermi paradox) neither proves nor disproves the existence of the Judaeo-Christian God - it does make a mess of bits of the Qur'an, however.
What is NASA's own explanation of the programme? To me, it cheapens astronomical research, while pandering to human curiosity and a yearning to believe either that we are or we are not, on the only life-holding planet within our own Galaxy, let alone the Universe.
Even if any such life could be found, and it could be found only within our region of the Milky Way Galaxy, that would neither prove nor disprove what cannot be proven or disproved anyway - the existence of any god building and driving it all.
The serious science is looking for planets that might have surface conditions potentially amenable to some form of Life. Not to find that Life: it is too far away to detect let alone analyse.
The notion that somehow we can send some distant being meaningful radio signals, or eavesdrop on any radio traffic it may be transmitting, is fanciful to say the least. It falls at the first hurdles: the statistical probability of firstly any such life existing fairly nearby in cosmic terms; and secondly on basic physics, either side being able to transmit coherent radio signals with sufficient power to reach the other in a coherent, detectable state. Then what? It would be a remarkably stilted conversation given that the nearest potential planets are all light-years away!
That's even before the possibility of such life being suitable similar to our own (poor dears!) with both the same urge to try to see what's "out there" among the stars; and the technical means to investigate it.
There is a space probe (Voyager 1?) that has been sent on its merry way beyond the Solar System having completed its work "here", and it bears an assortment of signs and symbols that mean things to we humans on this planet; but would prove to anyone else far away and in the distant future only that someone somewhere sent out some sort of space-craft with magic symbols on it. They would not be able to tell us they've found it and would we like it back or at least please desist from chucking our scrap space vehicles over their own solar-system wall.
Allegedly, if any such finders are at least approximately hominid, they might wonder how we procreate. I recall reading somewhere - and it may be apocryphal - that the nude man in the drawing on the space-probe's hull has the right attributes but the NASA artist was too prissy to draw a short vertical line in the appropriate place on his mate!
