Life on other planets?

[Bernard Gui]

While reading an article in the Washington Post about the scientific search for extraterrestrial life, I noted this comment by one of the scientists working on that project at JPL in Pasadena. When asked about the spiritual implications were life on another planet to be discovered, she responded, 

Quote

Yeah, it’s funny, I mean, on a day-to-day basis, I think our work is so in the fine details and not in the big picture that we don’t usually ask ourselves this. But personally, I would find that incredibly inspiring, finding life on another planet. I like feeling small. I like going into Yosemite with the mountains and feeling part of an inconsequential piece, but part of this bigger whole. So, to me, I think finding life elsewhere would only expand that sense, but in a very positive and I think a hopeful way. It also lessens the pressure on you to get everything right because you’re not so special.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/dave-eggers-jet-propulsion-laboratory-nasa-who-is-government/?itid=hp_opinions_p001_f013&fbclid=IwY2xjawFg18FleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHZ2OD_pOqL71NnEjjKYctr2wRp-OVu2-Khyp1PQn-5qD4xpr81Ld7nDjrw_aem_OqqVjxGuSUko9cbQSrg9nw

Her answer is a tad underwhelming, so considering our rather unique beliefs found in the Pearl of Great Price, I would like to pose the question here.

[Dario_M]

I believe in Aliens. 👽

[CV75]

34 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

While reading an article in the Washington Post about the scientific search for extraterrestrial life, I noted this comment by one of the scientists working on that project at JPL in Pasadena. When asked about the spiritual implications were life on another planet to be discovered, she responded, 

Her answer is a tad underwhelming, so considering our rather unique beliefs found in the Pearl of Great Price, I would like to pose the question here.

Her answer reminded me of Moses' response to being shown our world in Moses 1: 8 - 10 (that man is nothing). I see this as an initial spiritual awakening in a positive and hopeful way, which depends on the individual, but for me counts as a spiritual response nonetheless. I think she is describing a very fundamental spiritual sensation that could lead to more. 

I am also reminded of Alma 30: 44, "all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator."

For me, the spiritual implications are that they offer another witness of Moses' subsequent observations (Moses 1: 27 - 29) and the Lord's explanation of it all. Enoch and Abraham had similar experiences and explanations. This would be so regardless of how the inhabitants of these worlds might appear or be imagined to appear to us now, or how we might classify them. Seeing them, however they looked (for they did not describe them), built up these prophets' testimonies. That might be more a function of the spiritual impact than the visual.

[Stargazer]

43 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

While reading an article in the Washington Post about the scientific search for extraterrestrial life, I noted this comment by one of the scientists working on that project at JPL in Pasadena. When asked about the spiritual implications were life on another planet to be discovered, she responded, 

Her answer is a tad underwhelming, so considering our rather unique beliefs found in the Pearl of Great Price, I would like to pose the question here.

There should be no question about not only life, but intelligent life on other planets, even from a completely atheist point of view. The universe we can see if so vast that it is impossible to consider that in all its vastness we are the only ones. Both the atheist and the theist must look at it all and ponder.

Do we know how utterly huge the universe is?  I took the screen name of Stargazer because I am interested in astronomy.  And what I have discovered is that humans have discovered that the universe is so vast that we cannot even begin to comprehend the teensiest part of it, and there are parts of it that we cannot even see because it's too far away.  You see the sun shining bright, and it's pretty big you think, but how big is it?  You cannot comprehend how big it is, but just try for a moment to imagine it.  It's voluminous enough that 1.3 million earths could fit inside it. After this, there are plenty of other suns out there, glowing brightly. And at night you can see a few thousand of them. But there are patches of luminosity out there which are actually clusters of hundreds and thousands of stars like the sun, some with planets like the earth circling them. And there are other patches you can barely discern, like the Andromeda Galaxy, which is similar to the one we occupy and misidentify as the Milky Way, and in the Andromeda galaxy (M31) we can see that it has billions of stars circling around a central bulge of stars.  Thast galaxy is so far away that it takes light 2 million years to cross the gap.  Looking further outward, we see clusters of galaxies, hundreds of millions of light-years across, containing hundreds and even thousands of galaxies similar to ours. Going further we see that there are super-clusters of galaxies containing millions of galaxies containing billions of stars each. And yet further still we see enormous clusters of super-clusters of galaxies, super-clusters of super-clusters of galaxies, and long filaments of chains of super-clusters of super-clusters of galaxies. And all of this expands continuously and evolves. And as it all evolves, gas condenses into new stars, swirling into new planets.

Other intelligent life is out there. We just don't know where, and communicating with it is a virtual impossibility. But it's there. It has to be, even from an atheistic viewpoint. And for latter-day revealed religion, those unknown and innumerable planets out there represent new homes and testing grounds for more and more of Father's children.

We like to quote Moses 1:39 when talking about the purpose of God, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. But we almost always forget to read the preceding verses, where Moses asks about the Father's worlds and works, and he is told:

33 And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.
34 And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many.
35 But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.
36 And it came to pass that Moses spake unto the Lord, saying: Be merciful unto thy servant, O God, and tell me concerning this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, and also the heavens, and then thy servant will be content.
37 And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying: The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.
38 And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.
39 For behold, this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

We are 13.5 billion years into the life of this Universe, and there have been billions of stars that have entered the Main Sequence and left it again, who might have had habitable planets that God put other of his children on, and their cycles of life and dispensations are complete.

In a sense, interestingly, Moses 1:33-39 may actually represent a kind of proof-text for evolution. This is because it tells us that the Universe itself, along with its suns and planets, is evolving, which is what astronomy and physics tell us.

 

 

[CV75]

1 hour ago, Dario_M said:

I believe in Aliens. 👽

Take me to your leader...

[Dario_M]

Thank you for your upvote @rodheadlee and @Bernard Gui that doesn't happen aften that someone upvotes my post so thank you. 

Edited September 25, 2024 by Dario_M

[Dario_M]

1 minute ago, CV75 said:

Take me to your leader...

I am the leader. 

[The Nehor]

The likelihood of life existing on other worlds is something we just don’t have enough data to predict. We have a good grasp of only the planets in our own system and only a vague understanding of the planets in a few nearby systems. It is very hard to tell whether our system and a planet capable of sustaining life is a rare anomaly or relatively common. We need a lot more data.

Also a lot of exoplanet announcements make life sound super likely when life would have a hard time.

There are a lot of specific things that make the Earth exceptional and possibly very rare. The stabilizing effect of the moon, the radioactive elements that formed the planet that keep the core going giving it its magnetic field, the isolation of where our solar system is and the isolation our planet has from the gravitational effects of other objects in the system made it so life could form with much less risk of a major catastrophe, and the position of Jupiter functions almost as a shield preventing a lot of potential ‘hits’ on the Earth from large objects. Getting hit by a lot of stuff would mitigate the chance of more complex lifeforms surviving. The rare hit that we believe took out a lot of the dinosaurs happening regularly would probably prevented humanity’s ancestors from surviving long enough to grow more complex. That is a short and very incomplete list of what we suspect was needed to create life.

We also have no idea if life exists elsewhere that something similar to our form of life is the most common.

Lots of questions. I don’t buy the idea that life must be common because the galaxy (and Universe) are vast. Until we have a probability model of the odds of life developing we are just guessing the odds and extrapolating from there. That might be fun but it doesn’t make the results likely to be accurate.

[LoudmouthMormon]

31 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

There are a lot of specific things that make the Earth exceptional and possibly very rare.

Yep.  And with somewhere between several hundred billion and two trillion galaxies in the universe, each galaxy with like 100 billion stars, that "very rare" status means it's pretty statistically impossible that there is only one.  More like a couple hundred thousand or a few million Earth-type situations out there.  

But yeah, agreed, even though we know more every year, we still don't know enough to make any sort of relevant prediction about such things.

[Bernard Gui]

3 hours ago, Dario_M said:

I believe in Aliens. 👽

I'm on the fence with that one, but I strongly believe there is life on other planets. We used to have Artesians in Washington. Some people claim to have seen them (old Olympia beer commercials). Hope this works. 😁

 

Edited September 25, 2024 by Bernard Gui

[Dario_M]

3 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

We used to have Artesians in Washington.

 

That's funny. 🤣

[Bernard Gui]

3 hours ago, CV75 said:

Her answer reminded me of Moses' response to being shown our world in Moses 1: 8 - 10 (that man is nothing). I see this as an initial spiritual awakening in a positive and hopeful way, which depends on the individual, but for me counts as a spiritual response nonetheless. I think she is describing a very fundamental spiritual sensation that could lead to more. 

I am also reminded of Alma 30: 44, "all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator."

For me, the spiritual implications are that they offer another witness of Moses' subsequent observations (Moses 1: 27 - 29) and the Lord's explanation of it all. Enoch and Abraham had similar experiences and explanations. This would be so regardless of how the inhabitants of these worlds might appear or be imagined to appear to us now, or how we might classify them. Seeing them, however they looked (for they did not describe them), built up these prophets' testimonies. That might be more a function of the spiritual impact than the visual.

Yes, we have the "what I have been doing in other worlds" and "If you could hie to Kolob In the twinkling of an eye, And then continue onward With that same speed to fly, Do you think that you could ever, Through all eternity,
Find out the generation Where Gods began to be?" in our lexicon. I understand her reaction and Moses' feelings of smallness on seeing all of God's creation. On the other hand, I'm overwhelmed that in all of this immensity God knows and cares for me personally and by name. We have a hymn on that subject.

That is truly mind-blowing and what I meant by feeling underwhelmed by her comment on such a profound question. 

Edited September 25, 2024 by Bernard Gui

[Bernard Gui]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

The likelihood of life existing on other worlds is something we just don’t have enough data to predict. We have a good grasp of only the planets in our own system and only a vague understanding of the planets in a few nearby systems. It is very hard to tell whether our system and a planet capable of sustaining life is a rare anomaly or relatively common. We need a lot more data.

Also a lot of exoplanet announcements make life sound super likely when life would have a hard time.

There are a lot of specific things that make the Earth exceptional and possibly very rare. The stabilizing effect of the moon, the radioactive elements that formed the planet that keep the core going giving it its magnetic field, the isolation of where our solar system is and the isolation our planet has from the gravitational effects of other objects in the system made it so life could form with much less risk of a major catastrophe, and the position of Jupiter functions almost as a shield preventing a lot of potential ‘hits’ on the Earth from large objects. Getting hit by a lot of stuff would mitigate the chance of more complex lifeforms surviving. The rare hit that we believe took out a lot of the dinosaurs happening regularly would probably prevented humanity’s ancestors from surviving long enough to grow more complex. That is a short and very incomplete list of what we suspect was needed to create life.

We also have no idea if life exists elsewhere that something similar to our form of life is the most common.

Lots of questions. I don’t buy the idea that life must be common because the galaxy (and Universe) are vast. Until we have a probability model of the odds of life developing we are just guessing the odds and extrapolating from there. That might be fun but it doesn’t make the results likely to be accurate.

Might I suggest reading the article that I included? Lots and lots of money and effort are being invested to get answers to those questions.

Edited September 25, 2024 by Bernard Gui

[Bernard Gui]

4 hours ago, Stargazer said:

There should be no question about not only life, but intelligent life on other planets, even from a completely atheist point of view. The universe we can see if so vast that it is impossible to consider that in all its vastness we are the only ones. Both the atheist and the theist must look at it all and ponder.

Do we know how utterly huge the universe is?  I took the screen name of Stargazer because I am interested in astronomy.  And what I have discovered is that humans have discovered that the universe is so vast that we cannot even begin to comprehend the teensiest part of it, and there are parts of it that we cannot even see because it's too far away.  You see the sun shining bright, and it's pretty big you think, but how big is it?  You cannot comprehend how big it is, but just try for a moment to imagine it.  It's voluminous enough that 1.3 million earths could fit inside it. After this, there are plenty of other suns out there, glowing brightly. And at night you can see a few thousand of them. But there are patches of luminosity out there which are actually clusters of hundreds and thousands of stars like the sun, some with planets like the earth circling them. And there are other patches you can barely discern, like the Andromeda Galaxy, which is similar to the one we occupy and misidentify as the Milky Way, and in the Andromeda galaxy (M31) we can see that it has billions of stars circling around a central bulge of stars.  Thast galaxy is so far away that it takes light 2 million years to cross the gap.  Looking further outward, we see clusters of galaxies, hundreds of millions of light-years across, containing hundreds and even thousands of galaxies similar to ours. Going further we see that there are super-clusters of galaxies containing millions of galaxies containing billions of stars each. And yet further still we see enormous clusters of super-clusters of galaxies, super-clusters of super-clusters of galaxies, and long filaments of chains of super-clusters of super-clusters of galaxies. And all of this expands continuously and evolves. And as it all evolves, gas condenses into new stars, swirling into new planets.

Other intelligent life is out there. We just don't know where, and communicating with it is a virtual impossibility. But it's there. It has to be, even from an atheistic viewpoint. And for latter-day revealed religion, those unknown and innumerable planets out there represent new homes and testing grounds for more and more of Father's children.

We like to quote Moses 1:39 when talking about the purpose of God, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. But we almost always forget to read the preceding verses, where Moses asks about the Father's worlds and works, and he is told:

33 And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.
34 And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many.
35 But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.
36 And it came to pass that Moses spake unto the Lord, saying: Be merciful unto thy servant, O God, and tell me concerning this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, and also the heavens, and then thy servant will be content.
37 And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying: The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.
38 And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.
39 For behold, this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

We are 13.5 billion years into the life of this Universe, and there have been billions of stars that have entered the Main Sequence and left it again, who might have had habitable planets that God put other of his children on, and their cycles of life and dispensations are complete.

In a sense, interestingly, Moses 1:33-39 may actually represent a kind of proof-text for evolution. This is because it tells us that the Universe itself, along with its suns and planets, is evolving, which is what astronomy and physics tell us.

Thank you for the comments. I knew it would attract your attention! It's amazing to see Abraham, Moses, Enoch, and Joseph Smith being vindicated by modern science, at least in this matter. (Pun intended). Except in the "spiritual" impact I referenced in the OP.

I'm a bit of a dabbler. I suscribe to the daily NASA space photos, use a couple of apps and several really nice amateur guide books, keeping a diary of objects I have found with my big Celestron binocs and a modest reflecting telescope. I had hoped the skies of Kentucky would be darker, but we are too close to Lexington - darker than our area of Washington, at least. Growing up in the mountains of northern New Mexico was a star watcher's dream. That's where I got the bug.

This chart, or one like it, in one of my books put things into perspective for me.

https://www.namahariplaasmark.com/2021/12/the-universe-in-perspective.html

 

Edited September 25, 2024 by Bernard Gui

[CV75]

23 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

Might I suggest reading the article that I included? Lots and lots of money and effort are being invested to get answers to those questions.

These efforts and questions seem to focus on the realm of secular / scientific reasoning (is there or isn't there life on other worlds -- what are the measurements and facts?) rather than, "What are the spiritual implications of life, regardless of quantity (none or some) or quality (long or short; integrated with or independent of a larger life system, etc.), on other worlds?"

[Bernard Gui]

3 minutes ago, CV75 said:

These efforts and questions seem to focus on the realm of secular / scientific reasoning (is there or isn't there life on other worlds -- what are the measurements and facts?) rather than, "What are the spiritual implications of life, regardless of quantity (none or some) or quality (long or short; integrated with or independent of a larger life system, etc.), on other worlds?"

Indeed. If the reporting is accurate, the folks at JPL and elsewhere seem to be gaining confidence that they will be able to answer the secular questions fairly soon. I quoted one of the scientist's response to the spiritual ramifications question. Maybe we are talking past each other?

[CV75]

15 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

Indeed. If the reporting is accurate, the folks at JPL and elsewhere seem to be gaining confidence that they will be able to answer the secular questions fairly soon. I quoted one of the scientist's response to the spiritual ramifications question. Maybe we are talking past each other?

I'm agreeing with you all the way, except perhaps in our evaluation of the scientist's answer -- I see her as acknowledging spirituality and describing a rudimentary spiritual response to scientific observations. Similarly, we hear of how astronauts and others feel seeing the Earth from high orbit.

[Calm]

4 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

Her answer is a tad underwhelming

It referenced Yosemite and that makes it perfect.  

[Bernard Gui]

22 minutes ago, CV75 said:

I'm agreeing with you all the way, except perhaps in our evaluation of the scientist's answer -- I see her as acknowledging spirituality and describing a rudimentary spiritual response to scientific observations. Similarly, we hear of how astronauts and others feel seeing the Earth from high orbit.

I understand your point.  But…..feeling small in the immensity of space is not necessarily a spiritual feeling limited to science, if it is an actual spiritual feeling. 

I was interested in the writer’s description of the JPL scientists’ humility. That is something I observed growing up in Los Alamos NM and knowing some pretty smart folks. 

[Bernard Gui]

Just now, Calm said:

It referenced Yosemite and that makes it perfect.  

Yeah, if you can get past the traffic jams. 😁

[Stargazer]

1 hour ago, Bernard Gui said:

I'm on the fence with that one, but I strongly believe there is life on other planets. We used to have Artesians in Washington. Some people claim to have seen them (old Olympia beer commercials). Hope this works. 😁

 

The Olympia Brewing Company is long gone, alas. I used to drive by the brewery in Tumwater every weekday on the way to work. The brewery buildings are still there, but after a series of buyers, the final owner, Pabst, closed the brewery down in 2003. The brewery whistle still sounds at 5 pm every day, however. It's heard all over the Olympia area. I can't hear from where I am now, however.

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

Might I suggest reading the article that I included? Lots and lots of money and effort are being invested to get answers to those questions.

I know. I don’t think we know enough yet to be able to come up with probabilities. I hope we will soon.

[CV75]

1 hour ago, Bernard Gui said:

I understand your point.  But…..feeling small in the immensity of space is not necessarily a spiritual feeling limited to science, if it is an actual spiritual feeling. 

I was interested in the writer’s description of the JPL scientists’ humility. That is something I observed growing up in Los Alamos NM and knowing some pretty smart folks. 

If I feel small in the immensity of space, this mental state produces a spiritual feeling based on intersecting physical phenomena (my brain, the cosmos). Others may not identify it as a spiritual feeling, but I know better  ! I choose to act on this feeling by striving to be more in tune with God. So for me, humility is emotional and spiritual. Some respond to feelings of smallness with fight/flight instead of how God intended. I can't read the article because I won't pay for it, so I'm probably missing a more specific point you are trying to make re: our rather unique beliefs found in the Pearl of Great Price and the spiritual implications were life on another planet to be discovered (as well as theorized and believed in scientific circles).

We as a faith community believe in life on other worlds (Pearl of Great Price), so if such life were discovered scientifically, the spiritual implication would be, for me, that He honors our agency to to obtain knowledge of other worlds and their inhabitants even though He typically chooses not to offer it (e.g., Moses 1:35). He honors our agency in doing what we will with that knowledge. I see the same principle at play in our scientific endeavors to build and regulate the building blocks of life to create living organisms or intelligence (however "life" might be defined -- the Lord makes it easy by using the term, "inhabitants" instead of say, "inanimatoid"  ).

 

[blackstrap]

I have no problem with Aliens visiting Earth. It is obvious , however , that they need better pilots because they are always crashing. ☺️

[Stargazer]

5 hours ago, The Nehor said:

The likelihood of life existing on other worlds is something we just don’t have enough data to predict.

I wouldn't be so certain of all that, if I were you.

5 hours ago, The Nehor said:

We have a good grasp of only the planets in our own system and only a vague understanding of the planets in a few nearby systems. It is very hard to tell whether our system and a planet capable of sustaining life is a rare anomaly or relatively common. We need a lot more data.

We always need more data. That doesn't mean we don't have enough data to sustain a valid opinion.

5 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Also a lot of exoplanet announcements make life sound super likely when life would have a hard time.

Lots of clickbait. Science writers have to make a living, too. As of 24 July 2024, a total of 5,759 confirmed exoplanets are listed in the NASA Exoplanet Archive. How many exoplanet announcements have you heard that sound like life would have a hard time? We say "confirmed exoplanets" but it is believed that every star has at least one planet. Finding planets is hard anyway, and our methods of finding them can't find them all. There are something like 60,000 stars visible with a telescope within 100 light-years of our solar system. At least 512 of these are G-type yellow dwarfs (sunlike stars). I haven't been able to find how many of these are believed to harbor habitable rocky planets. 

5 hours ago, The Nehor said:

There are a lot of specific things that make the Earth exceptional and possibly very rare. The stabilizing effect of the moon, the radioactive elements that formed the planet that keep the core going giving it its magnetic field, the isolation of where our solar system is and the isolation our planet has from the gravitational effects of other objects in the system made it so life could form with much less risk of a major catastrophe, and the position of Jupiter functions almost as a shield preventing a lot of potential ‘hits’ on the Earth from large objects. Getting hit by a lot of stuff would mitigate the chance of more complex lifeforms surviving. The rare hit that we believe took out a lot of the dinosaurs happening regularly would probably prevented humanity’s ancestors from surviving long enough to grow more complex. That is a short and very incomplete list of what we suspect was needed to create life.

Oh, yes, there are a lot of factors. There are others besides the ones you list, but that's a good summary. From a purely secular point of view it might seem that the chances are low, but if God is the maker of worlds, then He knows perfectly well how to engineer as many habitable worlds as He likes.

One thing to consider is that most star systems with exoplanets seem to have Jupiter-sized and larger gas giants. So at least that factor is likely to exist for every system with habitable rocky planets in their habitability zone.

5 hours ago, The Nehor said:

We also have no idea if life exists elsewhere that something similar to our form of life is the most common.

Lots of questions. I don’t buy the idea that life must be common because the galaxy (and Universe) are vast. Until we have a probability model of the odds of life developing we are just guessing the odds and extrapolating from there. That might be fun but it doesn’t make the results likely to be accurate.

You seem to be a "glass is half-empty" kind of guy. At least in this respect.

Do we understand biogenesis? No. And from a strictly secular point of view it doesn't seem that we're going to figure it out anytime soon. But again from a secular point of view, it has happened at least once. That means it can happen again. It would seem to me, at least, that if conditions on an exoplanet were the same as on earth, the likelihood of biogenesis is high. And how many exoplanets are there expected to be in a galaxy the size and type of ours? NASA says that there are 100 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and that there are at least the same number of planets.

An article on NASA's website, entitled "About Half of Sun-Like Stars Could Host Rocky, Potentially Habitable Planets," [HERE] has this to say:

"According to new research using data from NASA’s retired planet-hunting mission, the Kepler space telescope, about half the stars similar in temperature to our Sun could have a rocky planet capable of supporting liquid water on its surface. Our galaxy holds at least an estimated 300 million of these potentially habitable worlds, based on even the most conservative interpretation of the results in a study released today and to be published in The Astronomical Journal."

Let's assume the conservative figure of 300 million habitable rocky planets in our galaxy (there are other estimates going as high as a billion). How much would you like to bet that there isn't at least one other world like ours, with life? I'd say it is certain that there is no chance we're the only one. And if life could develop on this one, it must have developed at least one other time -- and probably hundreds of times in the past and hundreds of time more in the future in our galaxy alone. This because there are stars not yet born that will eventually host the conditions necessary for life to spring up. This is just our galaxy. 

David Kornreich, an assistant professor at Ithaca College in New York State, estimated that in the observable universe there are at least 1 septillion stars. [HERE] That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. It is believed that every star has at least one planet, with most having many. Applying the same ratio of total stars to stars with habitable planets in our galaxy to all these others, this yields at least 1 quintillion habitable rocky planets in the observable universe. Even if an actually habitable planet is as rare as you seem to think, that still yields an astonishingly large number of potentially inhabited worlds.

That's the purely secular science on it. When it comes to theological science, biogenesis is not a matter of random chance, as it might be in the secular science. If God creates a world for habitation, He makes it habitable and then he generates the biome. No need to hope for a chance things will come together.

As you may have read in my earlier post, the theological science says that God is busy engineering habitable planets in numbers innumerable to man, and then placing man on them. We read in Moses 1:34 "And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many." Many Adams and many Eves. You may not have read the verses I referred to. I am afraid I am extremely wordy, and constantly risk my words suffering from the TL;DR effect. So, if you didn't already, have a look at Moses 1:33-39. 

It doesn't necessarily stop there. In verse 37 God tells Moses "The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine." The heavens are many? What does He mean by heavens? Does he perhaps mean universes? If so, it means that our Father Elohim has many more universes than the one we now inhabit. A lot more. And if so, He is making many men and women in his image in all of them.

Don't allow yourself to limit God to this tired old planet alone. He's a very busy God and has works and wonders going on everywhere, and everywhen.

Edited September 25, 2024 by Stargazer