abstract engineer blogspot

  • Subscribe to our RSS feed.
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • Digg

Wednesday, 4 August 2010

Weekly Devotional

Posted on 14:01 by hony
Once again, I write the weekly devotional for my church:
I was talking to my friend Matt last week when he dropped a bomb on me: he had started considering the Almighty "plausible." This was news; Matt was a physicist and during college he'd taken pride in his atheism. I asked him what was up.

"Well, you just can't ignore the absurdity of it all," he said. He went on to describe his newfound lack-of-lack-of-belief: apparently he had read that astronomers have recently updated the estimate of the number of stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way) to around 400 billion. That got him thinking about the total number of stars in the known Universe. He told me that current estimates are that there are around 70 sextillion stars in the Universe (a 7 with 22 zeroes after it).

He then went on to tell me about the "Drake Equation," a formula that takes probabilities of planets being habitable, number of stars in the Galaxy, and so forth, and estimates that in the Milky Way there are maybe 2-12 alien civilizations at any given moment. "The Drake Equation isn't hard math, though," he told me. "None of the variables can be nailed down to an exact number, so you get wildly different estimates of the number of alien races out there depending on the interpretation."

Then Matt went on to describe a concept called "The Fermi Paradox," which basically states that even if intelligent life is extremely rare, and statistically unlikely, given the sheer number of stars in the Universe, there must be tons of alien civilizations. The paradox is that there should be all these aliens all over the place, and yet astronomers can find none of them.
He then said to me "So which is it? Are we in a Universe teeming with intelligent species, on hundreds of thousands of star systems? Is 'intelligence' something that naturally evolves and the Universe has filled itself with beings that can zip around in spacecraft and interact with one another? Or, are humans alone? Are we some sort of improbable oddity of science that, despite 70 sextillion other stars, we and we alone are the only species in the entire Universe that can build telescopes and stare into the deep Heavens searching?"

I told him I did not know.

He smiled then, and said that was why he had started to doubt his atheism. "Either scenario," he said, "leads me to believe that this isn't all random. In the first case, you have a Universe filled with amazing, varied species that all have somehow evolved to the common point where they can speculate, wonder, and create. That is really a pretty decent argument for God. But in the second case, you have an even stronger case for God: if we are alone in the Universe, if humans really are the only intelligent life amongst a nearly infinite number of stars, then our solitude has so overwhelmingly defied statistics that you almost have to believe something supernatural has occurred to bring our very existence about."

What a wondrous thing, I mused, is this world we live in.

_

Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to Facebook
Posted in | No comments
Newer Post Older Post Home

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Popular Posts

  • 5 Years
    Five years ago tomorrow I started this blog. I was working at a job I didn't particularly like nor found mentally fulfilling, and the bl...
  • This Tesla Love-Fest Has Got To End
    Over at The Oatmeal, a popular online comic, there's a sprawling, gushing graphic about Nikola Tesla. Inside it, Edison is referred to ...
  • I promise to stop writing about STEM soon. Just not yet.
    Imagine you are a tech company that makes widgets. You've gotten a factory in China to make the parts for the widgets for a tiny amount....
  • Evolutionary Politics
    If President Obama is reelected I see a clear example of specialization-elimination in effect here. Let's say each of the GOP primary ca...
  • In which I criticize the antiquated feelings of Ye Olde Mechanikal Engineer
    In a Lawrence Journal World blog, Dave Klamet writes about changing trends in education, especially the increasing competitiveness of non-A...
  • The Worst Science Idea of 2010 - Genspace Now Open For Disaster
    Here's the idea : Let's build a lab where anyone, literally anyone, can come and tinker with microorganisms. Better yet, let's m...
  • A Better Way To Cut College Costs
    End University athletics. _
  • Driverless Cars, Ctd
    The Atlantic pays Alexis Madrigal a lot of money to basically outline what I outlined for free TWO YEARS ago. This isn't a knock on Ma...
  • Links
    I've been terribly swamped with work the last week, and when I wasn't working, I was loudly defending gun rights. Subsequently, the ...
  • Staying abreast of technology
    TAE thinks that it is a good idea to embrace every new technology that emerges, be it Twitter, Facebook, mp3s, tablet PCs, and now the new M...

Blog Archive

  • ►  2013 (41)
    • ►  July (4)
    • ►  June (7)
    • ►  May (4)
    • ►  April (6)
    • ►  March (8)
    • ►  February (8)
    • ►  January (4)
  • ►  2012 (91)
    • ►  December (8)
    • ►  November (5)
    • ►  October (11)
    • ►  September (8)
    • ►  August (8)
    • ►  July (3)
    • ►  June (10)
    • ►  May (12)
    • ►  April (3)
    • ►  March (9)
    • ►  February (10)
    • ►  January (4)
  • ►  2011 (205)
    • ►  December (11)
    • ►  November (14)
    • ►  October (10)
    • ►  September (18)
    • ►  August (18)
    • ►  July (10)
    • ►  June (15)
    • ►  May (11)
    • ►  April (32)
    • ►  March (24)
    • ►  February (16)
    • ►  January (26)
  • ▼  2010 (163)
    • ►  December (20)
    • ►  November (20)
    • ►  October (23)
    • ►  September (28)
    • ▼  August (28)
      • Quote of the Day
      • Help a Bradley Out
      • flash on the Droid
      • Geneva Drive
      • Unbiased survey questions...or the lack of them
      • Dreams of Superconductivity
      • The Abstracted Bucket List
      • Facebook Places
      • Ross Vs. Gay Marriage
      • Boston, Ctd
      • If only it weren't Boston...
      • Astronaut Muscle Deterioration
      • NASA Contracting Shennanigans
      • METI
      • Proof of Aliens in 25 Years?
      • Only in America..
      • Friendship
      • Friday Poetry Burst
      • Voting For Obama
      • TAE Approves of this Post
      • Hilarious Wordage in Wikipedia
      • The Moon is a Soggy Cheeseball, Ctd
      • Delusional Dieting
      • Weekly Devotional, Ctd
      • Weekly Devotional
      • Cognitive Surplus
      • Wikipedia Article of the Day
      • Soaking in your own bathwater
    • ►  July (29)
    • ►  June (15)
Powered by Blogger.

About Me

hony
View my complete profile