| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Pro-Humanist FREELOVER" |
| Date: |
15 Jan 2005 01:26:36 PM |
| Object: |
Your Identity/Life -- How, Why -- Answers on Titan? |
The assignment of personal pronouns, like "I",
"you", "we", "them", and "us", was a consequence
of an evolved being possessing the sound utter-
ance capability by which those expressions, in
innumerable languages, were developed.
The matter which eventually became the being
that you are, that is best understood as a natural-
istic series of events in an all-but infinite if not infi-
nite expanse of time and space.
The way in which you function is naturalistically
understandable up to a point, with some mysteries
remaining.
The inability of any of us to explain all that is, all
that ever was, and all that ever will be, not surpris-
ing what with the way we arrived here, genetically-
inclined to be what we are, the only knowledge
present being whatever our genes possess, and
whatever was learned prior to our arrival + whatever
we've learned since each of us has arrived.
Of course, much of that knowledge has been lost,
in the last few thousand years, due to deterioration
both natural and imparted by humans who sought
to destroy rather than preserve.
Thanks to extinctions, mass extinctions, much of
the genetic record is forever lost. So much is lost,
that it's difficult to figure out how the spark of life
got started in the first place, as earth was a far dif-
ferent environment when the replication modality
was initiated. Here's a perspective on that from a
recently televised broadcast of "Discoveries This
Week" ...
---
The Beginning of Life?
Excerpt:
Narrator: Welcome to the University of Arizona,
where desert gardens blossom with life, and
scientists grapple with a thorny question. How
did this planet, which began as a sterile lifeless
rock, become the home to every living thing we
know of in the universe?
Dr. Jonathan Lunine (planetary scientist, University
of Arizona): We would like to understand how life
began, so one would expect that looking at the
earth, the earth being the only place we know of
as having life, would be the perfect way to do it.
It's actually the worst way to do it.
Narrator: According to Jonathan Lunine, earth is the
worst place to learn how life began because here
on earth, all the organic molecules available have
already been processed and re-processed by
living things, leaving no trace of what came before.
Dr. Jonathan Lunine: Very much like the perfect crime
in which all of the evidence of a crime has been
erased, life has erased the signatures of its origin
on the earth. So if we want to understand the origin
of life in a natural environment, we need to go some-
where else in the solar system where organic mole-
cules and organic chemistry is going on, but life is
not present.
Narrator: For Lunine, that somewhere else could be
Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. Lunine is an inter-
disciplinary scientist with NASA's Cassini mission
and the European-built Huygen's probe, which to-
gether are exploring Titan up close for the first time.
His goal is to discover whether there's anything on
Titan that could reveal how life began on earth, and
his search begins with Titan's atmosphere.
Dr. Jonathan Lunine: Titan's atmosphere is both very
dense and also very extended. Now the primary
gas in the atmosphere is nitrogen, as in the case
of the earth, but because the conditions are so
cold ... there's no water vapor in Titan's atmosphere.
Instead, there is methane vapor, and methane is
the simplest organic molecule. It is the starting
point for any kind of chemistry leading toward life.
Narrator: The presence of methane gas in Titan's at-
mosphere makes possible the same chemical reac-
tions that are the basis for life on earth. Like the bot-
tom rung in a ladder, it's the first step toward a whole
series of more complicated molecules collectively
known as hydrocarbons.
... What scientists are hoping to see on Titan is a
preserved version of the scaffolding of life, the same
scaffolding that allowed living forms to spring up on
earth. That means sampling Titan's atmosphere dir-
ectly, to see what molecules are present there, and
landing on the surface to see where that material
ends up. ...
... It seems strange to search for a basic truth so
far from home. But on the hidden surface of Titan,
we may yet learn how life came to be. Life that on
earth eventually reached the level of a technological
civilization, and produced people like Jonathan Lu-
nine who want nothing more than to know what life
in the universe is all about.
---
- - -
As for what resides outside our particular space-time
continuum, only theoretically explorable, thus far.
As for what resides apart from earth, significant prog-
ress has been made in studying our Moon, and Mars
(and recently, a moon of Saturn, Titan), and some
asteroids and comets, but much more exploration
remains. As for the other planets and moons in our
solar system, a modest amount of progress has
been made, and a very large amount of exploration
remains.
As for nearby solar systems, advances in confirming
large planets has been made, but further exploration
via space telescopes currently planned will, perhaps
in the next 10 years, allow us to confirm whether or
not earthlike planets exist and if any of them have
signs of life as discernable via their chemical signa-
ture. Said exploration is currently planned for solar
systems within 100 light years of earth:
---
They May Know We're Here
http://fire.prohosting.com/prohuman/2002/02/19_to_24.htm
Complete article describing the way in which advanced
civilizations can detect life on distant planets, a method
which humans will begin to use to search for life up to
100 light years away, over ten years from now (now be-
ing 2002, when the article was written).
---
- - -
¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤ - ¤
~~~
Pro-Humanist FREELOVER
http://fire.prohosting.com/prohuman
(Freethinking Realist Exploring
Expressive Liberty, Openness,
Verity, Enlightenment, & Rationality)
~~~
.
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| User: "Jim07D5" |
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| Title: Re: Your Identity/Life -- How, Why -- Answers on Titan? |
15 Jan 2005 02:18:02 PM |
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"Pro-Humanist FREELOVER" <prohumanist@gr8mail.com> said:
...Said exploration is currently planned for solar
systems within 100 light years of earth:
---
They May Know We're Here
http://fire.prohosting.com/prohuman/2002/02/19_to_24.htm
Complete article describing the way in which advanced
civilizations can detect life on distant planets, a method
which humans will begin to use to search for life up to
100 light years away, over ten years from now (now be-
ing 2002, when the article was written).
If there is a way to detect whether there is life on a planet within,
say, 100 light years of us, and if there are a number of such planets,
then it is plausible that at least one of then is sufficiently
advanced beyond us to have detected that there is life on our planet.
However, it is possible that civilizations, before they develop and
use such capability and act on it to make contact, advance
technologically to the point where they wreak such destruction on
themselves, that they set themselves back to an earlier point where
they can't mount the effort to detect life on other planets or do
anything about it if they do detect it. Or, a natural disaster might
be statistically likely over such time spans as are needed to advance
to a stage where they can detect life and do anything about it.
Earth's natural and human history suggests that such setbacks can
occur.
Humanists -- gotta love 'em even if their science classes were
minimal: Except for the glaring mistake of saying that green plants
reflect red light, when they obviously reflect *green* light, making
the overall color not the predicted purple, but more toward the
yellow, it's a pretty good article. But also it depends on the
relative intensity of the colors of reflected light leaving the
planet.
See question 15 at:
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/chemphys/reviews/u5review/u5ans2.html
Jim07D5
.
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| User: "Eric Gill" |
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| Title: Re: Your Identity/Life -- How, Why -- Answers on Titan? |
15 Jan 2005 02:49:45 PM |
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"Pro-Humanist FREELOVER" <prohumanist@gr8mail.com> wrote in
news:34t933F4feo6nU1@individual.net:
The assignment of personal pronouns,
Dan - get a new hobby, hey? There's a lot more to do in Houston than
compose manifestos!
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