Years and years ago I was intrigued by Carl Sagan's Cosmos series and with the possible number of inhabited planets. Now with a better idea of how many planets can be around a star a better postulate of how many inhabited planets there might be has been formed.
BBC
Number of alien worlds quantified
Intelligent civilisations are out there and there could be thousands of them, according to an Edinburgh scientist.
The discovery of more than 330 planets outside our solar system in recent years has helped refine the number of life forms that are likely to exist.
The current research estimates that there are at least 361 intelligent civilisations in our Galaxy and possibly as many as 38,000.
The work is reported in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
Read about it at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7870562.stm
Elsewhere on the web I keep having conversations about whether or not the historical Jesus is the only way to "Salvation". Throughout Earth's history every-time a new portion of the globe was discovered the pro-Jesus groups sent missionaries to win the native populations there-in to Jesus and to the religion they had founded on his teachings and their Faith in his Godhood. Now I'm asking shall we send missionaries to these planets in the same way? Is there a religious imperative to press forward to find them and find ways to get to them? Or, do we think that each planet would have it own Jesus? So maybe there should be a religious imperative not to go there and intervene in God's ordained events in their history.
Is Jesus by any other name on any other planet in any other time, still Jesus?
A silly question? Maybe not. Still, what do you think?
9 comments:
I think at least "361" is precise to the point of arrogance. Without knowing even the approximate odds of intelligence - and the Earth survived a lot longer without self-conscious brains than it's likely to with - I call phooey.
And i don't know nothing bout no jesus.
Actually the initial base result was 360.61275 and was just rounded up for simplicity's sake.
The Christian church can't even deal with homosexuality. Those with the desire to convert could not realistically handle the reality of alien sentient life. Their theology would spend too long a time in recovery.
Which is oddly, apparently, the same kind of psychological situation Mr. Stockmann would be in upon "discovery."
Sort of gives a different slant to
"space mission". The thought of christianising the few billion light-years sent me to Google, where there are 2,510,000 entries for 'Christian Martyr'. ..and that is on just one obscure planet!
One twist to this concept would be to ask, what if they came here and prosilitize our population to their version of religious truth?
My feeling is that these hypothetical aliens would just quarantine us until our fervor breaks.
giggle
Fervor, people who pun should be drawn and quoted.
Have you seen the Alec Balwin add for hulu?
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1874549_1874552_1876259,00.html
So i am sorry to be late in this conversation.
First, I've got to admit this is a hard question to answer.
I'd hope Jesus would go to those other planets and incarnate himself and become what to us would be "alien." Better yet, I hope other forms of life would not need their butts bailed out because they were stupid like we are.
But if missionaries were needed, maybe they could be aliens going about the galaxy. They could even come here if they wanted and if God let them. See, that's the thing, unless God let's us travel though time and space better than we're doing now, we can't get to the "lost" aliens. Hopefully, God's got something in mind for them.
I think I am up for Jesus being in a different understanding. What though i can't comment on.
When our European explorers went out, they took missionaries with them. I wonder if extre-terrestials will have there missionaries on board when they show up?
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