Take Us To Your Leader

Via the UK Daily Mail, I learn of another round in the debate about space aliens:

A group of astronomers are pushing back on humanity's preoccupation with communicating with aliens beyond our galaxy, warning that alien contact could result in 'the end of all life on earth,' physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

I think the last time I brought up space aliens here, it was to cite Fr Sam, the smartest man I've ever met, who spoke in a homily about a question he raised in a session with seminarians: if we encounter space aliens, should we offer them baptism?

This is all a reminder to me that there's no real science or philosophy in the current talk about life on other planets. Fr Sam has this right. Nobody else does.

I was watching a TV show about the European Space Agency's Mars rover mission, which made the point that the agency is spending a billion euros to send a new-model rover to Mars for the specific goal of finding life there. This in fact has been a major purpose, if not the driving one, behind all Mars missions, and the most recent was named Perseverance, which can only be an indication of how frustrated the space elites have been at finding nothing of interest there to date.

An Italian scientist explained in the show I was watching that the problem has been that solar radiation has "sterilized" the top meter and a half of the Martian surface. However, the ESA rover will be equipped to drill a full two meters into the surface, which will be beyond the sterilized layer, and this will most certainly either bring up live microbes or fossils of old ones.

The narrator indicated this would be a major, major discovery. Except, first, it hasn't happend yet. Second, so what? On Earth, we keep finding microbes that live in boiling water or under Antarctic ice. The space elites have already told us this should make life possible in oceans under nitrogen ice on the moons of Uranus. Why should we even need to go looking for it? But if we don't find microbes two meters down on Mars, we can still have missions to the moons of Uranus anyhow. Nice work if you can get it.

The reason the space elites keep wanting to find microbes on Mars is that they think this will finally scorch away the unscientific, terracentric, homocentric Biblical world view once and for all. But there's a problem with their basic assumption. Let's go ahead and grant that the 83rd mission to the moons of Uranus drills through the nitrogen ice to find microbes in the ocean there. The technology in 2096 lets us not only find them, but bring them back.

Except there's a lab leak. Even by 2096, they haven't cured the problem of screwups. The Uranus moon microbes break out of the lab, but the life form is so different from ours that we haven't got the first clue on how to make a vaccine, and within two weeks, the Uranus moon virus wipes out all life on Earth.

Naturally, the space elites haven't figured this one out even now, which is why the scientists are writing worried op-eds. But the elites are acting under the unconscious assumption that the universe is benevolent -- as Bp Barron puts it, the universe acts in a way that can be understood, which is an argument for the existence of God. But this is also behind the science fiction fantasy that if there are space aliens, they'll also form intergalactic federations and either play the usual Earthbound political games or fight the usual Earthbound wars. Nobody's seriously thinking they're just gonna harvest the planet, eat everything, and move on.

The science fiction writers basically feed the thinking of the science elites; there's an assumption in particular that if a species is advanced enough to understand and manipulate the matter in the universe, light or dark, it's working under conditions in a consistent universe created by God, that this will be done by intelligent beings capable of reason, created in God's image. Otherwise, eveything is absurd. Among the absurdity is that the grants and tenured professorships and perks that go to the space elites are completely random, and any efforts they put forth to get or retain them are meaningless.

No matter how I circle around this, I can't escape from the conclusion that Fr Sam has this right -- if we run into space aliens, it's our duty to offer them baptism.