Is there life out there?

NASA’s Kepler Mission has detected a near-earth rocky planet in a solar system that is quite proportional to our earth-sun relationship and similar to our home planet, except that it is orbiting its sun in 8.5 hours - so is hardly viable for life.

What do we make of that? Well, I guess it means that exoplanets in the expanse of space are possible. Potentially the bible confirms it is so as it points to a new heaven and a new earth, and we know that Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us – these things can take time – millennia in fact.

Well, so what, the world is adamant there must be life out there somewhere. Too arrogant they say to assume we are it and that this universe exists solely for us. I accept. It probably is a fair point.

However, if there is another world out there, that would really set the cat among the pigeons, especially if it is habitable or, worse yet, inhabited.

Then again, maybe not so, for after all there was a time when the world was adamant about a geocentric universe and we survived the realization that our calculations were a bit off.

There was also a time when we believe that our references to the starry skies were all absolute, until Einstein proved otherwise – that it is all relative. I think we got through that okay.

Hey, Darwin also upset the apple cart, but what evolved, excuse the pun, was a lot of desperate science aimed at disproving creation that ended up driving creationists to up the ante and provide better proofs and evidence than ever existed before. The arguments for creation have just got harder to disprove and every wave of dispute makes the argument more compelling.

Hence, it might not matter if we do find other life elsewhere, but I must ask, why the big deal about finding such life at all? We really do have bigger fish to fry in solving our own problems, not to go looking for more.

I have absolutely no problem getting through life on the assumption that what we have is all there is. It doesn’t inhibit my breathing, my daily living, my ability to love and learn. It is just not an issue and I doubt if it will ever be issue enough to devote billions of Dollars of public and private funding to, especially if that (a) yields nothing or (b) opens a Pandora’s box we might wish we hadn’t opened.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net