Maybe humans (and Earth itself) isn't so special after all...
Wed, 2009-02-25 13:57
#1
Sven
Maybe humans (and Earth itself) isn't so special after all...
Wed, 2009-02-25 13:58
#2
Sven
NASA researchers indicate that there may be 100 billion (!!!) earth-like planets in just our galaxy (and there are billions of other galaxies).
Read about it here.
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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]
Wed, 2009-02-25 14:03
#3
Ah, but you're special Sven. 
Wed, 2009-02-25 16:04
#4
Sven
Ah, but you're special Sven.
Awwww...thanks, God! I always knew you and Jebuz were my buds!!!! 
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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]
Thu, 2009-02-26 15:08
#5
[url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090223.wmacgregor23... defence minister says UFO proof 'irrefutable'[/b][/color][/url]
As far as I'm concerned, it's irrefutable."Paul Hellyer is in his downtown Toronto office on a Saturday morning, just as he is the first five mornings of every week, still driven at 85 years of age.
He has been finishing up a book, his 13th, that is part memoir, and so he has been looking back on a remarkable career that once made him Canada's youngest member of Parliament, that took him to key cabinet posts in the governments of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and that had him run for the leadership of the two main national parties and even form his own political party.
Lately he has not been looking backward - but into the future.
A future in which humans will have to accept they are far from alone in this universe.
Hellyer's "irrefutable" evidence received a bit of pumping this past week. A Winnipeg group that tracks UFO sightings across Canada says 2008 produced a record number of sightings - 1,004 - a 25 per cent increase from the year before. Ontario and British Columbia were the hot spots, reporting 334 and 272, respectively, while Prince Edward Island had only two mysterious objects flying about, Nunavut one and Northwest Territories none. . .
"I think there is a spiritual longing out there," he says. "People are so distressed at the present time by all that is going on in the world. The banking system has fallen apart. People worry there's a possibility of war between the Christian world and the Muslim world. We want something better."
Thu, 2009-02-26 15:42
#6
Frustrated Mess
Yes, we want something better ... so long as it comes in the form of a pill, a techno-fix, the great spaghetti monster in the sky, or a spaceman in a white space suit and riding a silver rocket ... just don't ask us to actually change anything.
Thu, 2009-02-26 20:21
#7
Sven
I don't doubt that there is other life in the universe. In fact, I think it is almost a certainty that there is (and probably countless trillions of examples of it).
But, I'm really skeptical (to say the least) of UFOs (at least in the sense of UFOs containing alien beings from other worlds). The technology that would be required for other beings to travel interstellar space at the necessary speeds is probably beyond what humans are even capable of imagining (just to communicate, let alone travel, across those vast distances would require inconceivably complex technology). The crude looking depictions (flying saucers, etc.) of popular myth don't seem like the likely tools of transportation that someone would need to travel the universe.
But, if there are 100 billion "Earths" in our galaxy (which is only one of billions of galaxies), then that would mean that the universe is teeming with life (and that our Earth is infinitesimally insignificant).
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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]
Thu, 2009-02-26 20:27
#8
M. Spector
Do we really need [url=http://rabble.ca/babble/humanities-science/space-whats-out-there][color=... threads on the same topic[/u][/color][/url]?
(...especially considering that this is [b]old news[/b])
Thu, 2009-02-26 20:44
#9
Sven
Do we really need [url=http://rabble.ca/babble/humanities-science/space-whats-out-there][color=... threads on the same topic[/u][/color][/url]?
Ah, I missed that other thread.
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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]
Thu, 2009-02-26 21:15
#10
Hey, FM, don't dis the Spaghetti Monster. 
Thu, 2009-02-26 22:09
#11
Sven
Hey, FM, don't dis the Spaghetti Monster.
I think the proper term is the Flying Spaghetti Monster!!
(wouldn't want to confuse the FSM with the lesser being known as the Strolling Spaghetti Monster)
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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]
Thu, 2009-02-26 22:18
#12
Is Earth set to go silent in the next hundred years?
Martin Rees said:
Astronomers can set our home planet in a vast cosmic context: a backdrop of millions of galaxies, each containing billions of planets.
And we know that every atom in our body was forged in an ancient star somewhere in the Milky way. We are literally the ashes of long-dead stars - the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine. To understand ourselves, we must understand the atoms we're made of - but we must also understand the stars that made those atoms.
But there's something else that astronomers can offer: an awareness of an immense future. The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. We're the outcome of more than four billion years of evolution. But most people still perceive humans as the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That hardly seems credible to me as an astronomer.Our Sun's less than half way through its life. Darwinian evolution surely hasn't run its course. Any creatures witnessing the Sun's demise 6 billion years hence won't be human - they'll be as different from us as we are from a bug. Posthuman evolution - here on Earth and far beyond, organic or silicon-based - could be as prolonged as the Darwinian evolution that's led to us - and even more wonderful.
Sat, 2010-09-11 21:11
#13
[url=http://news.exopoliticsinstitute.org/index.php/archives/412]Famed researcher of human extraterrestrial contact passes away[/url] Wendell C. Stevens 1923-2010
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BuJKrXHY8&feature=player_embedded#!]Wen... C. Stevens retired U.S.Air Force pilot on UFOs[/url] (YouTube) Wendell's stories are stranger than science fiction