Carl Sagan, the most widely publicized SETI-promoter of recent times, was once absorbed by flying-saucer reports. He joined the astronomy department at Cornell, chaired respectable conferences, and appeared on the Johnny Carson Show forty times. His biographer said that he believed in superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful as to resemble gods. At the first international SETI conference, in 1971, Sagan declared that a new civilization is formed in the Milky Way every ten years: There are a million technical civilizations in the Galaxy, he said. His biographer said that Sagan believed in superior civilizations because he believed in Progress. We are reminded that at the end of The Origin of Species, Darwin foresaw a future in which all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection. Built into this is the assumption that self-replicating life can easily get started on its own. No divine intervention is allowed, of course. That has been the underlying assumption since Darwins day. If so, life must have arisen by accident. Then it keeps climbing onward and upward, through random variation and natural selection. In 1950, at Los Alamos, the nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and others were discussing the latest ideas about the universe. It was much larger and older than once thought; billions of stars evolving over billions of years, surely accompanied by more planets than stars. At that point the difficulty of life starting up on its own was considered to be exaggerated. If conditions are suitable and given enough time, life and evolution will happen. See more at: evolutionnews.org/2013/10/the_anxious_sea077601.html#sthash.9Ii2qLmt.dpuf
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 22:13:03 +0000
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