Yes, that is what SETI is …
You misunderstand me. I didn't mean *I* don't think it's important or interesting. What I meant was - we tend to attach a lot of importance to the fact that we have consciousness - but what if it is of no consequence, just a blip in time that means nothing other a mutation occurred and here we are. What if the answer to "why are we conscious" is simply - because evolution happened, and just as we have four limbs and five fingers, we have consciousness. That it has no relevance to our place in the cosmos.
I learned that fallacy as using a false dilemma which excludes a third available choice, or the Middle, as being either totally irrelevant, or else non existent. In short, it is a misrepresentation of a situation which attempts to make it appear as if only two choices are available. when in fact, a third one is present.
I'm with you on dogs.
We're certainly special on this planet. And talking of blind faith, I have blind faith that life exists on other planets. It just seems, mathematically, to be incomprehensible that a process of mutation/evolution hasn't occurred elsewhere. We lack any evidence this is the case though, at least to the level that one could categorically claim life is out there. But that takes nothing away from amazing humans are, albeit we too often squander life's opportunity.
Just what are we doing here, spinning on a tilted planet swinging round a star? … Where do we stand, with our few pounds of flesh and bones and our fleeting lives?… Only a short while ago we were all God’s children, holding most of His attention, and the world was exclusively ours for better or for worse. The sun shone to give us warmth and light, the moon to bewitch us, the stars were there to be born under, and the volcanic depths to serve as hell. Now paradise is lost and we find ourselves in limbo, inhabiting one of the minor planets of a middle-class star drifting in the outer arm of a spiral galaxy no different from a hundred million more that are visible through our telescopes. Space and time and stellar systems are overwhelming and to face the twinkling sky of night with any sense of what you see requires either courage or a great amount of faith. Stars are no longer baleful or beneficial, an have no concern with us, but they leave a lonely terror striking at the heart. So here we stand, looking wistfully into the void and nostalgically back into time, for knowledge has put us outside our house.
Such a profound mystery. Keeps me busy all day.With you on all points. I wonder if you or anyone here ever takes a peek at Maria Popova’s The Marginalian. I get a weekly summary on Sundays. I think today’s update fits here nicely.
You and the Universe: N.J. Berrill’s Poetic 1958 Masterpiece of Cosmic Perspective
In her stunning space-bound ode to the human conditioninspired by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome creatures “traveling through casual space past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns” — and yet these selfsame stars made us; out all this indifference arose all our capacity for feeling, our poems and our postulates. That every single atom in your body, if tagged and traced back in time, would lead to the core of a particular star in the early universe is a truth pulsating with transcendence, a truth Nick Cave channels beautifully in one of my favorite songs, singing of the stars as “bright, triumphant metaphors of love.”
An epoch ago, before we set foot on the Moon and sent rovers to Mars, before we built supercolliders to search for the “God particle” and heard the sound of spacetime in a gravitational wave, the cosmically curious English marine biologist N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) took up the eternal question of how to harmonize our cosmic smallness with the immensity of our creaturely experience in his slender, splendid 1958 book You and the Universe (public library).
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Berrill — a writer partway between Rachel Carson and Carl Sagan in both subject and poetic sensibility — begins with the basic question of being alive:
My favorite part is enclosed in another quote at the of this. It begins “what are we doing here ..”.
Introducing more words doesn't clear anything but confuses more. Saying "we don't understand" is easier (but almost impossible for the mind to admit).
Stardust gazing at stardust.With you on all points. I wonder if you or anyone here ever takes a peek at Maria Popova’s The Marginalian. I get a weekly summary on Sundays. I think today’s update fits here nicely.
You and the Universe: N.J. Berrill’s Poetic 1958 Masterpiece of Cosmic Perspective
In her stunning space-bound ode to the human conditioninspired by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome creatures “traveling through casual space past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns” — and yet these selfsame stars made us; out all this indifference arose all our capacity for feeling, our poems and our postulates. That every single atom in your body, if tagged and traced back in time, would lead to the core of a particular star in the early universe is a truth pulsating with transcendence, a truth Nick Cave channels beautifully in one of my favorite songs, singing of the stars as “bright, triumphant metaphors of love.”
An epoch ago, before we set foot on the Moon and sent rovers to Mars, before we built supercolliders to search for the “God particle” and heard the sound of spacetime in a gravitational wave, the cosmically curious English marine biologist N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) took up the eternal question of how to harmonize our cosmic smallness with the immensity of our creaturely experience in his slender, splendid 1958 book You and the Universe (public library).
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Berrill — a writer partway between Rachel Carson and Carl Sagan in both subject and poetic sensibility — begins with the basic question of being alive:
My favorite part is enclosed in another quote at the of this. It begins “Just what are we doing here ..”.
Desperate? Oh, FFS! Are believers desperate not to offend you? HaHa.
. Really, Vaughan, pull yourself together!
He did expose himself to you. You didn't hear him or listen. It wasn't important at the time.
Definitely a first world problem.
