The Mars Rover And The Dinosaurs
The reason for this latest multibillion-dollar excursion, as indeed the expressed reason on the TV specials for all the previous ones, is to find evidence of life on Mars. And this has been a national effort not too far in scope from the Manhattan Project. Somehow our way of life, or democracy, or civilization or something, hangs in the balance. Wha? To me, as I would guess to vast numbers of other people, whether the rover landed on Mars was about as critical as whether Tom Brady won the Super Bowl.
So I thought back to the TV special I saw last weekend about the mission. I won't cite which one, I think they were all scripted by the Bilderbergs and said the same things. Mars once had water. Then the water went away after a billlion years. But a billion years is long nough for microbes and such to evolve. After all, what you need for life is water and other stuff. Leave water around long enough and let lightning and volcanes stir things up, and voila, microbes.
So the Perseverance rover is gonna use its little shovel and stuff and dig up the microbes, or at least the microbe fossils, and basically prove the above standard wisdom.
But this actually illustrates the problem of the dinosaurs. In the mid 19th century, as dinosaur and other fossils were discovered, this posed questions about the age of the Earth. If dinosaurs existed a gazillion years ago, this meant that conjectures, ostensibly based on scripture, that the Earth was created 6000 years ago were incorrect, although scripture itself mentions no such number and has nothing specific to say on the subject. This was a problem largely for Evangelicals at the time, but mainstream Christianity has never been much disturbed by it.
But the dinosaurs over time became a much bigger problem for Darwinians. Fossil evidence cuts both ways. If life evolved via a process of random natural selection that started with simmering primordial soup, with speciation a very gradual process where rats turned seamlessly into guinea pigs and so forth, why do we have sudden cancellations of whole biological orders? If things got warmer or cooler, why didn't we just get fat dinosaurs with fuzzy scales or something? Instead, the whole idea just suddenly didn't work any longer, and although there are still cockroaches, there aren't any dinosaurs at all.
This is the origin of the big asteroid theory of Earth's history. At some point, an asteroid left a crater that created Yucatan, and that explains why the dinosaurs didn't just evolve their way along. (Wha?) In other words, the dinosaurs have actually been a bigger problem for the secularist theory of life than they were for certain schools of Evangelical thought. They're what might be called a metaproblem.
Mars represents a similar metaproblem for secularism. The first Mars probes that sent back photos were the start for this branch of the problem. It could be theorized that life might have evolved separately on Mars even given the climatic conditions we surmised were present on the planet -- after all, microbes thrive on Earth in extreme cold at low oxygen levels. But the first Mars photos showed there was no persuasive evidence that any such thing had ever taken place there.
Nor has any subsequent probe or rover proven anything else. This is probably the inspiration for the name Perseverance. They're gonna persevere at this search, presumably until they can find the evidence they want. If this one, or the next one, or the ome afer that, finds even a fossil bacterium, wham, that'll prove it. Life is not unique. Humans are not unique. The whole theistic scriptural project has been a huge evolutionary dead end.
Well, good luck. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the nature and objective of this incrediblly huge boondoggle.
