Tag Archives: Th1sWasATriumph

News, Reason, Religion, Science

Andrew Parker Lost The Game (And The Metro, Happily, Did Not)

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The last few hours have been full of nonsense.

Initially, a brief article in the London Lite detailing how a medium has told Jade Goody’s mother how Jade still loves Jack Tweed – the violent, sociopathic ass that he is – but doesn’t like him sleeping with other women.

That must have been the easiest work the medium ever did. “You’re the mother of a famous recently dead quasi-celebrity stupid racist bint . . . who could we possibly be here to talk about?”

There is no afterlife and anyone who says they can talk to the dead is either deluded or knowingly deceitful. And anyone who says they can talk to the dead and pretends to do so for bereaved relatives is just . . . reprehensible.

And this morning I found an article in the Metro, an interview with one Andrew Parker – an Oxford Uni biologist – who claims that God is behind the big bang, and has written a book (The Genesis Enigma – Why The Bible Is Scientifically Accurate). I was expecting to read the interview and find it full of mealy-mouthed delicacy and tolerance, but it seems the interviewer, Graeme Green, certainly isn’t taking Parker’s claims at face value. In fact, within the constraints of civility, Parker leaves with his ass in a sling. Instead of respecting Parker’s beliefs, something which happens with depressing regularity these days, Green submits him to fairly rigorous criticism – even levelling accusations of quote mining, a foul deed that all too many fundamentalists remain unchallenged on. In fact, I need to isolate that segment as you can practically hear Dr. Parker stumble:

“You say the second ‘Let there be light’¦’ refers to the evolution of the eye but you edited out the rest of the line, which clearly refers to the Sun, Moon and stars. There’s no mention in Genesis of the evolution of the eye.
Um, OK. I’ll probably have a look at this in more detail again. The first page of the Bible doesn’t spell out the eye but it doesn’t spell out any of the science in detail.”

“I’ll probably have a look at this in more detail again”? He’s already written the book, how come it’s only now that he’s deciding to reassess his source material thanks to a well-aimed question during a short interview? And he thinks creationism is unfounded and dangerous despite apparently subscribing to just that belief by thinking Genesis is completely true.

Full interview here.

And, of course, Parker would seem to be one of those people who doesn’t get how the eye could have evolved. For a recent diatribe on creationist tactics regarding ocular evolution CLICK THIS THING

Philosophy, Reason, Religion, Science

If Antony Flew Believes In God, Isn’t That Good Enough?

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Congratulations to our two promo winners!

 

Now, this is a recurring trend in fundamentalist debate (and there are so many recurring trends . . . just so many, and it hurts a little). It’s a variation on the “Einstein believed in God, and he’s the father of science, so just . . . shut up, ok? Shut up and take it” argument.

The difference is that most of the notable figures who fundies claim to have believed in God didn’t, of course. Einstein didn’t, Darwin didn’t – claims to the contrary are supported by careful quote mining. But Antony Flew is a goldmine for the right kind of fundamentalist mindset – a notable atheist who decided he believed in a higher power after all. This, despite the possibility of his advancing years causing mental decline, is sadly – or happily, depending on your outlook – incontrovertible.

The thinking is always that, if someone like Flew can renounce atheism, surely that’s good enough for you? There are a few other names of deconvertees that occasionally arise at this point in the debate (generally, it’s around this time that fundies will start to link you to Hovind videos as well) but I can’t recall them. There aren’t very many, though. Fred Hoyle is sometimes used, as his perception of the fine-tuning of physical laws led him to theistic views.

How to defeat this argument? Simple. As with most of the logicfails committed by our opponents, the best way to rebuke is to turn it back. So if a famous atheist deconverting is proof for God . . . surely a famous theist deconverting is proof for God not existing? Douglas Adams, say. He’s famous. He used to believe the whole thing, until he stopped and listened to a street preacher and decided it was nonsense. Is that proof of God being nonexistent? No, of course it isn’t! Neither argument is worth anything; the thing is to get fundamentalists to realise that if our version is meaningless, so is theirs.

Philosophy, Random, Reason

The Illusion Of Choice, Or Maybe It’s Not An Illusion, Who Knows

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Ever made a decision?

Of course you have! You chose to visit the League today. And for this, I salute you. Except that, by visiting the League today . . . maybe you’ve killed us all. You bastard.

When you actually think about the choices, decisions and actions you’ve taken that led to your current life, many of them will probably seem unbelievably haphazard. I got to know one of my closest friends because, on my first evening at uni, I happened to go to the student bar and hang around. Crippling isolation compelled me to strike up hesitant conversation with a couple of people. I nearly didn’t go to the bar and there were dozens of other people I might have talked to instead. The last 5 or so years of my life could have been entirely different if I’d taken a second more or less to think about what I was going to do that evening.

Likewise, I got to know my other closest friend through a series of more or less random happenstances, but again things would have been very different had I not been looking to stay around for another year and he hadn’t been looking for a housemate (and I hadn’t happened to see his advert for a vacant room.) For a start, I very likely wouldn’t be here writing this.

The relationships you hold with your closest friends and loved ones are probably all based on tenuous interconnecting circumstance. Go out, or stay in? Go here or there? And maybe you meet someone pretty randomly and it becomes something special. But all the events, the choices that led to you being where you are at that moment discovering that you both love Bon Jovi, become so fractured and multiplying as you go back in time . . . it’s odd to think about.

Another example. I’ve been with my girlfriend for about a year. We met because I went into a salon where she worked. I courted her, won her and then BROKE DOWN HER FAITH. If another salon had been cheaper, I’d have gone there. Would I have met someone else? If I hadn’t been fired from my previous job, I’d never have met my girlfriend at all. And me even being in London in the first place directly results from a decision\action I took some years ago (I won’t give details) that, had I taken it 30 seconds later, would have affected nothing. I’d have never known, of course. I might still have come here, but it would have been very different.

The thing that gets me is that, if you can so easily form a complex and meaningful relationship with someone through a chance meeting informed by countless decisions (by both parties involved, who have in themselves been affected by countless decisions of countless other people) then how many relationships are we missing? If I decided to strike up more conversations with a customer, who would they turn out to be? Is that girl there, the one who sort of smiled at me as I got off the tube, is she the One? Is she another One? How many people are there walking around that have the potential to deeply change my life that I never met thanks to some tiny choice that I probably wasn’t consciously aware of?

It’s enough to drive a man insane. Maybe my decision to write this blog will cause something to happen. Maybe Patrick Stewart will read it, be impressed, and adopt me as his son and protege.

Anyone who’s seen “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” will know that it’s not a great film – but it’s one of the only films I’ve seen that actually spends time trying to grapple with the headwrenching concept of cause and effect. A lengthy sequence details all the countless tiny interconnected things that, had just one been different, would have resulted in a character not getting hit by a car. When your future can be decided by something a complete stranger does or doesn’t do, on a whim in the space of a second, that can affect many other people and events sequentially and exponentially, doesn’t life seem a bit shaky?

Since we have the glory of retrospect, it’s tempting to look at the consequences of all the things we do and think how easily different everything could have been – and to extrapolate from that all the potential pathways we can lead ourselves down. Such thinking can drive you mad, of course, because while we may have the power to make our own choices it is ONLY in retrospect that we can see the full effect of them. I could engage every one of my customers in detailed conversation today, but it was a more or less desultory comment to a customer recently that revealed him as a fairly successful award-winning musician. Do we really have any choice if we only know what we did after the event? Sure, I could do a great many things today, and all of them are possible – but it only becomes real when I DO them. All the previous branching chances collapse as soon as you do anything at all.

And it’s thinking like this that tends to lead to speculations on parallel universes, where everything gets played out, that every choice or non-choice sends the universe spinning down some different route. I personally reject such thinking, unsupported as it is by anything other than wishful thinking. My adopted philosopy is Didactylos’ “Things just happen. What the hell.” I recommend this stance to everyone.

Philosophy, Random, Reason, Science, YouTube

The Moon

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Look at this video I just dids LOOK AT IT

The glories of space.

You’ll presumably forgive my idealistic ramblings, but the moon was out when I was walking to work this morning and something occurred to me that hadn’t before. As I’ve said in a previous blog, we don’t really look at the moon and sun as anything other than constants in the sky, purely because they’re as ubiquitous as the oceans or the clouds. If we want to look at the wonders of space, we’re trained into thinking that we must seek out photos and videos  – that this is the only way we can see into the universe.

There’s something utterly haunting about a moon in orbit round a distant planet. I did my best to collect the finest space photography I could find in the video, but of course we don’t need to go anywhere near that far.

The half-shadowed moon, in the early morning light in a pale blue sky, looked every bit as beautiful and tantalising as Titan behind Saturn’s rings, or Io transiting Jupiter. It’s up there now. A whole world. Get you outside.

Philosophy, Reason, Religion

The Failbox Of Moral Absolutism

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My inspiration for this particular blog is gleaned, unhappily, from a NephilimFree video. For those languishing in sweet ignorance, NephilimFree is a Youtube creationist who closely resembles something you might find hunkered under a stone. And for those about to accuse me of cheap adhom, don’t worry – the man would be as stupid and worrying if he looked like Brad Pitt and AronRa strapped together. It’s just so . . . so classic that he looks like everyone’s stereotypical image of the pale, overweight religious fundamentalist.

He made a brief allusion to moral absolutism whilst en route to some cataclysmically balls conclusion about evolution, offering it as a brief proof of God. His argument, and indeed the arguments of all moral absolutists are similar, went like this:

“We know it is evil to rape a baby. But how do we know? This inherent evilness must come from somewhere, it has to have been provided ERGO GOD DID IT HE BLOODY DID THA KNOWS”

Now, I may often make babyrape jokes, so I just want to assure you that I wasn’t making that example for lulz – his words, not mine.

The basic tenet of moral absolutism, (or moral objectivism\objectivity) henceforth referred to as MA to save me a great deal of tedium, is that certain things are universally known to be good or bad. To everyone. Popular examples are rape and murder. We all KNOW it’s wrong. William Lane Craig, that spectacularly fatuous but annoyingly eloquent apologist, made a similar argument when debating with the then atheist Anthony Flew.

This argument is, I need scarcely point out, the supremest ass.

For a start, NephilimFree fails to take into account that, whilst the majority of people would certainly regard the rape of a baby as morally repugnant, some people would not. Namely the people who go around raping babies in the first place. And this is completely ignoring hypothetical situations where the rape of a baby would save a great many people (I freely confess being unable to think of many such situations, but say you have a man who takes 20 people hostage and demands a baby to rape in exchange for the safe release of his hostages . . . is babyrape then still immutably wrong? How many people would have to die before the rape of one baby is outweighed by multiple murders? And so on.)

The world is not as starkly black and white as MA-ists would have us believe. There are clear trends that show what actions are, by and large, considered to be good or bad by humanity in general – but there is no standard, no consensus, no one list of good and bad that every single person could agree on. The shades of grey number into the practically infinite. The trouble is that MA-ists tend to – in fact, are quite naturally compelled to – see the moral compass from atop their own cultural magnet. Nephilim and WLC, to take my two examples, are both American Christians living in the hallowed grounds of the Western civilised world. I’m sure they would recoil in horror if lectured about the scarification rites of various tribal cultures and groups, which are by my standards barbaric. I’m sure they would be repelled, as I am, by the ritual cutting of Muslim children’s heads during Ashura. I would take such acts to be considered immoral more or less across the board, outside  the cultures that practice them – but there is no absolutism here. The people that perform such ritual incisement and scarification are not isolated sociopaths, they are merely operating from a different perspective that they consider to be entirely justified. Note that I’m not condoning such things in the slightest, just demonstrating that what we may call barbaric child abuse is a way of life to a large number of people.

Of course, I have to wonder how Nephilim and WLC regard circumcision. Personally, I find it abhorrent – the mutilation of a child’s genitals, against their will, in the name of some unprovable deity. I often wonder how the nation (whichever nation, mine is the UK) would react if news surfaced of some religious cult who, inspired by their scriptures, ritualistically cut off the left earlobe of all newborn boys. I imagine there would be outrage. However, circumcision is carried out en masse, every day, every minute – the forced removal of part of someone’s body. The only authority it has is antiquity, and of course that argument would lead us back to treating women like possessions (unless you’re in a religion where you already DO treat them like possessions, which saves time) and enslaving people who have a different skin pigmentation. Authority is no kind of argument, and it seems the only defence circumcision has – claims that it significantly improves health are bogus. The decision should lie with the individual, unforced by external pressure.

If two of the largest religions in the world practice genital mutilation, how can there be moral absolutism?

There can only be moral absolutism in small groups – probably the only way you could get a handful of people who would take identical stances on every single moral issue you could raise. Of course, I’m not talking only about things like rape, murder and mutilation. I’m talking about the little things, decisions on whether or not to lie\go home early from work\not do something you were told to do, and so on. I’m sure Neph would say that only the big issues matter, but if you’re talking about MA then you can’t have it just for the major issues. It’s not as if these absolute morals break down once you get into pettier concerns of lying and cheating. If one thing is absolutely right or wrong, everything has to be. So out of 100 people, 100 might agree that babyrape is wrong – but 26 might think it’s ok to steal to provide money for medicine (and 4 of them think it’s ok to steal just to provide money for themselves). 14 might think it’s ok to cheat on their partner. A further 7 might think homosexuals are sinful. 32 might have no problem with circumcision. And for every person who is ok with such a stance, you might have people who take the opposing view whilst doing something themselves that others consider to be immoral. And so on, and on, and on. The Pope, ensconced within his fortress of deceit, thinks that homosexuality is objectively wrong – and this man is the head of the Catholic church. Nice going, guys.

At best, there are trends. Some of the trends are stronger and more widespread, but none are immutable. I cannot think of a single thing that everyone would agree on as being completely and universally bad, something from which moral absolutism could be derived. I put this question to my girlfriend, and she suggested “Destroying the world?” Sadly I can imagine that you’d easily find someone to do it, if they had the chance.

Censorship, Reason, Science

Conspiracy Theories and Me

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The League of Reason has exposed me to quite a few conspiracy theories – some of which I’d heard of (Chemtrails and OMFG THE MAN KNOCKED DOWN THE TOWAZ) and some which I had hitherto been blissfully ignorant of (the infamous “Fluoride in drinking water’ nonsense.)

I don’t believe a word of it, of course. The claims of conspiracy theorists are all too often similar to the claims of the faithful – a distinct lack of evidence, a pre-existing bias, an unwillingness to consider other explanations or refutations. However, as far as some of the biggest theories go – the moon landing, government-captured aliens and 9\11 – I would not be surprised in the least if irrefutable evidence suddenly arose that proved foul play.

I may not believe the theories, you see, but I fully believe that people – mainly in government, in America, the place where so many of these theories either originated or are linked to – are capable of such duplicity for various reasons.

Let’s take Roswell, Area 51 and all that kind of thing. What if the American government really had isolated and confirmed alien life? What would be the options? Either make it public, or hide it.

Can you begin to imagine the uproar if it was announced that aliens walk among us? It would be indescribable. And the public response would probably be unanimous – more money to space exploration and related technologies. Let’s get out there. People would suddenly be more interested in space than petty squabblings over oil and territory. Where would this extra money be diverted from? Probably the military. And an America without a military is not a happy America, at least as far as the government is concerned. So, what to do? You bury the evidence and keep the army that’s made your nation mighty.

Of course, I don’t think that this has happened. But I can’t help but think it’s at the very least possible, should aliens ever be discovered. I’d like to think that such a thing would be shouted to the highest mountains, but a cynical part of me suggests that folk would like to keep their guns.

The moon landing is infamous for claims of fakery, claims which I sadly used to indulge myself in, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was announced that the whole thing really was a big pile of ass. The motivation for such deception is clear; the drive to put a man on the moon was less driven by scientific endeavour and more by the threat of Russian space presence. It was a matter of national pride and security. I can imagine a government faking the moon landing for much smaller reasons – though I don’t believe it WAS fake. I can simply recognise why it would have been faked, if it had been, which it wasn’t. If you follow me.

And, of course, there’s all sorts of reasons put forward to suggest why the WTC might have been planed by their own country.

I guess that if I believed in any conspiracy theory, it’s the one claiming that people really can be as bad as you fear. And that’s not even really a conspiracy theory at all, is it?

Note to all glorious american patriots: I DON’T CARE

Philosophy, Reason, Religion, Science

A Debate With A Vague God Enthusiast

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Haven’t blogged for a bit, so I’m storming back with a long one. In addition to that, I have a larger than average blog post for your delectation.

My girlfriend and her friend ended up talking about God, and my name got mentioned – presumably because I’m just that awesome. My GF, as someone who’s pretty much had her faiths eroded by my niggling arguments (“Shall we get some wine? Also, why would an all-powerful God allow evil to occur?”) wanted her friend to talk to me on the subject. She prepared a short argument and I emailed her my response.

Something I wasn’t aware of until after I’d emailed her was that she is, apparently, very stubborn and will never let go of her beliefs. Which renders debate more or less meaningless, but hey – who knows?

 

“What is sense? Why can’t open minded thoughts help you accept a possibility of a greater power/energy source named as god?”

I think my GF gave you the wrong impression of my perspective on this issue. I accept the POSSIBILITY of God, or a higher power, simply because it would be scientifically hypocritical to state with certainty that it could NOT exist. Until every iota of the universe has been catalogued, which is almost certainly something we will never do, we cannot posture with certainty on such matters. To state something CANNOT exist is a faith-based position, albeit anthetical to faith IN a God, and as such is a position not often adopted by intellectuals.

So, I can accept the possibility. But with a complete lack of any positive proof, there is no point considering it further. An inability to disprove something is not adequate proof FOR it, otherwise you would have to give equal credence to absolutely every unfalsifiable hypothesis anyone ever makes. Along with your concept of God, you’d have to grant the equal chance of everyone else’s concept of God, along with all supernatural claims. This is without even going into the logical paradoxii that arguments for God tend to invoke, which I’ll go into a bit later..

“Why can’t there be a god?”

I’d need to know more detail about your concept of God to answer this. However, in general, God creates more questions than it answers. Simply using God as a catch-all answer to the mysteries of the universe is unrealistic, because you then have to explain God. You end up with paradoxii of omnipotence, problems of free will, problems of omnicognisance. So tell me more about your perception of God – is it conscious? Insensate? Does it have a specific purpose? What powers does it possess? Is it immortal/eternal/invincible? Is it limited in any sense?

Until I have more detail, though, the simple answer is there COULD be a God – but it’s so vastly unlikely, so internally inconsistent and contradictory by most human accounts, that there’s no point in pursuing it. As we on the internet say, pictures or it didn’t happen. The onus of proof is ALWAYS on the other side to substantiate God – NOT on me to disprove.

“By opening your mind and thoughts you accept possibilities, by accepting possibilities you become more knowledgeable, and by being more knowledgeable you are naturally more intelligent.”

Accepting possibilities is fine. It’s what drives scientific endeavour and progress. But you don’t actually become more knowledgeable until you have proved these possibilities as something workable. There’s some famous quote, I think from Richard Dawkins, which is more or less “Be open-minded, but not so open that your brain falls out.” Wondering how things work and having a spirit of enquiry keeps discovery constant; however, that is no reason to hang on to the impossible or the unworkable. The historical precedent is that poorly understood natural phenomena attributed to the supernatural (for example, the various cultural pantheons to whom natural forces and processes were attributed via individual deities, as opposed to monotheism where a single entity controls everything – this seems to be what you’re postulating) eventually become explained by scientific means. The age of simply hypothesising something which sounds about right is long gone. The age of empiricism demands proof, repeatable observation, before a possibility becomes workable. Otherwise the whole thing simply collapses in disarray under the weight of countless “possibilities” which can only be accepted because they cannot be completely disproved.

That is the nature of science, of course. It operates on inductive reasoning, on extending an assumption from a necessarily limited sample group. However, deductive reasoning – which begins from an axiomatic statement and is thus considered to be more reliable than inductive logic – is never grounded in the real world. Only logical and mathematical constructs can be axiomatic. A famous deduction is “All are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.” However, this deduction relies on inductive empiricism for its axiom. The only way of looking at the world and the universe is by the scientific method; only abstracts, like logic and maths (human constructions) produce axiomatically true results – and these results are definitionally divorced from the real world.

“Where did the first energy source come from?”

We’re working on it 🙂

We don’t know. The origins of the universe are pretty trippy to consider. However, given the aforementioned historical precedent of supernatural explanations being superceded, it’s reasonable to assume that we will eventually know – and not knowing NOW doesn’t mean we will NEVER know. Also, not knowing the origins of the universe is comparatively simple when compared to using God as an explanation and then trying to work out how God created itself, or all the other attendant problems with using God to explain anything.

“Do humans have any energy source beyond physics? Why? Why not?”

If human beings have an energy source beyond physics it’s pointless to even speculate as it necessarily wouldn’t be something we could even detect. If we could detect it, it would be an aspect of known physical laws and not metaphysical or supernatural in nature. So, no, humans do not have an energy source beyond physics because the question doesn’t have any actual meaning – you’re asking to verify something which definitionally, as soon as it is verified, STOPS being beyond physics.

“Bear in mind that without self-evidence there is none. With no evidence, you rely on belief. Therefore proof is belief. If belief is your source of proof why can’t you believe in god and use belief as proof.” (I nearly pooped myself when I read that argument.)

That’s a little too much of a logical leap though. Proof is NOT belief. Proof is proof. Belief implies some kind of dependence on the believer for continuation, and gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it or not. Scientists don’t rely on belief or faith, and neither do the things the scientific method discovers.
Your argument dictates that, if belief is a proof, EVERYTHING is real and possible. Jeremy, the unicorn inside Jupiter who controls gravity (but only in this solar system) is real because I have belief in him – and thus proof. And, of course, the concept of God that I believe in that forces all possible Gods to NOT exist (including yours) must be real, because I have belief.

Belief is not the source of proof for scientists, or for me. Repeatable, observable testing and evidence is proof. Proof that is consistent with all previously gathered research. Using belief as proof not only invites a great deal of confusion, it’s demonstrably untrue, and it indicates a lack of any REAL proof for claims. If your proof is belief, you are admitting that you have no concrete evidence on which to go on.

 

So now, we wait . . .

Reason, Science

The Argument From Design Is Pretty Bad

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You’ve probably come across this one a lot. Variations on the theme of “Everything is really super complex\the universe is obviously custom made for our please\life is designed, it couldn’t have happened by chance ERGO GOD” crop up all the time.

When you think about it, it’s pretty disgusting. It reveals a shallowness of intellect and reasoning that’s staggering.

The evolution of the eye is the most oft-quoted piece of “evidence” for intelligent design. “Look at this thing,” they’ll bluster, spit rolling down their chins. “Look at it! It’s really super complex! How could it possible have happened by chance? It’s perfect! Can you lend me a nickel?”

Ignoring the fact that the eye’s evolution has been pretty well covered by a number of people, the eye is NOT perfect. Not by any means. It is our most important sensory apparatus, far more so than hearing or smell, and yet this apparently God-patented design can be rendered inoperative by simply poking at it a bit too hard.

The eye manages to be one of the most important and most fragile parts of our body at the same time. Get a piece of grit in it and you’ve pretty much lost the rest of your day. Expose it to minimal pressure and it’s gone. A lot of people don’t even have eyes that work properly in the first place; I wear contacts to correct the flaw that God must have deliberately inflicted on me.

How could anyone look at the eye and think it could be designed? How hard would it have been for God to cover it in a thick protective layer instead of leaving it moist and vulnerable to the world? If people are going to appropriate natural evolution as proof for intelligent design, they MUST take into account all the flaws and room for improvement. Except they don’t, of course. The standard response is something like “Everything was perfect until SIN (even though God knew it was going to happen and could have stopped it and therefore we should be absolved of all responsibility but shut up SHUT UP don’t tell anyone) and then everything started to degrade.”

It’s pretty bad.

Worse still are the tactics used to support this “evidence”. Probably the most famous quote mine of all is the one that seems to have Darwin saying “I freely admit that the eye happening by itself seems impossible” (to paraphrase.) This quote is launched by IDists the world over. However, the full quote doesn’t end there; Darwin goes on to say “oh wait, I was trolling. It’s entirely possible in small steps. See how I talk in detail for a few pages.”

To quote mine in this way, the miner MUST have read it in context and then decided which bit best supported his cause. This tactic goes beyond cunning, sly and underhand – it enters the realm of reprehensible duplicity. It’s really not cricket. And yet this tactic attends creationist arguments constantly; misquotes from Einstein, Hawking and even Dawkins pepper the creationist world.

Sensible people can see this as simply more proof for the shaky foundations of intelligent design, but it’s still pretty annoying.

Science

Why Europa Is Awesome

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Here’s why, although most of you probably already knew.

It’s something that excited me ever since I first found out about it and began revolving it through my brains. Despite chances rising for life on Mars, Europa remains a more mysterious and potentially fruitful location. An icy Jovian moon, Europa is believed to possess a sub-surface ocean beneath a crust of ice, kept warm and fluid by tidal heat.

So . . . complete darkness, high pressure, possibly considerable heat, potential toxicity. It doesn’t sound altogether promising.

Except life fluorishes on Earth in environments at least as harsh and alien as those existing in the chilly reaches of space. Where? Oh god, where? Are we safe? Where do these barren tracts lie?

Mainly, in the sea. The deepest part of our ocean is nearly 11,000 metres, and life exists at the bottom of it. Life exists around deep sea vents, in extremes of pressure, heat and toxicity that would do credit to the kind of planet hitherto only seen in 70s adventure shows. This life has no need of light, favours heat and pressure with a jaunty smirk, and eats chemicals. In short, it’s just . . . different.

Why is this significant? Well, we no longer have to find soft, human-friendly worlds in order to hunt for extraterrestial life. If life can exist under nearly 7 miles of water, or not only survive but thrive on hot, chemical-rich environments, the vista of possibility is far wider. All we need is a place with chemicals and water and heat that’s had some time to stew, and even in our own solar system there’s more than a few possibilities: Mars, Europa, Titan, Enceladus, even Ceres.

Unless something unexpected happens, probes will reach Europa within my lifetime; although actually getting under the surface will be a bit tricksy.

NOTE: None of this is new information and I’m not trying to sound smart by going on about it.

News, Reason, Science

Life Could Easily Have Survived Meteor Bombardment 3.9 Billion Years Ago

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One of the more annoying battle cries of creationists, or indeed anyone who seeks to disprove the workability of the abiogenesis model, is “But 3.9 billion years ago all life would have been wiped out by an epic meteor bombardment NOT LEAVING ENOUGH TIME FOR US TO EVOLVE TO THE STATE WE ARE NOW THEREFORE GOD DID IT.”

Now, from my perspective a meteor bombardment would have had to be sustained and concentrated enough to vaporise the seas and turn the entire surface of the earth to molten slag before you could make an assertion like “All life would have died.” We’re not even talking life as we know it, just single or maybe multi-celled organisms – organisms which are numerous, resiliant and extremely quick to reproduce. If only one was left alive, life would have continued.

So it’s nice to see my untutored assumptions backed up by science. A study from the University of Colorado shows that life could easily have survived the bombardment, thus potentially increasing the age of life on earth by several hundreds of millions of years.

And if life can survive a meteor strike of such intensity, it could have survived it on other planets as well. I’m waiting with impatience for news of Mars.