For quite some time now, I’ve been wavering on my religious stance.
It just doesn’t make sense. Everything is too perfect to just be happenstance. Everything just works out. We can explain everything in our daily lives by science, but can we really explain how we got here? Just far enough away from the sun to receive the benefits of its heat and light, not too close to burn up, not too far to freeze? How did the Earth get thrown from the solar nebula and rest in an orbit that was just right for human life?
Why is it that the sun and moon appear to have the same size as seen from Earth so as to allow total eclipses to be possible? This really has no effect on life as far as I can tell, but it’s just something that seems too peculiar to be by accident. This will eventually cease, however. The moon is moving closer to the earth so eventually full eclipses won’t be possible. But when we look at how humanity has only been on Earth for a very short time, and will probably only be here for a short time longer, it was us, humans, who witnessed this phenomenon. During our time.
And it just seems suspicious to me that our galaxy is located in such a small group. The Local Group has about 40 galaxies while most have between 50 and 1000.
And honestly, this always blew my mind, the fact that 1 astronomical unit is exactly the distance between the Earth and the sun?
Okay, okay, just kidding about the last one. But seriously, astronomy class has been making me think.
And while Yahoo Answers tells me that life arose because Earth had such conditions, and if these conditions didn’t exist, life wouldn’t exist, and it doesn’t matter, yada yada. I know that. I know that if Earth then life, not if life then Earth. This is obvious.
What I’m saying is what are the chances? What are the chances that conditions would be perfect?
And then of course, with the universe so big as it is, what are the chances that conditions would never be perfect?
I certainly can’t answer either of those questions, because it would probably involve some sort of wacky calculations like the Drake equation, and I certainly haven’t the time to figure out that.
I started to search for some more coincidences — in the worst possible place, of course. I’ve been sucked into the black hole that is Wikipedia for the rest of the night. A lot of things about space and the universe make me happy: the Arecibo message, Deep Impact, the fact that we know all kinds of stuff that will happen in the 11th millennium and beyond, the Long Now Foundation writing 2009 as 02009, this picture of stratocumulus clouds, Titius–Bode law, Voyager Golden Record, using the Sahara as a blackboard for ET communication, and OTHER universes.
The other day I went and randomly spasmed, just because I didn’t like the thought that I was living the exact same life as this one on another universe.