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Extraterrestrial Life
North Miami Beach, FL April 28, 2002
A.H. Schectman
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on Issues, Ideas and Reflections on the Times. Published now and
then. Opinions pro or con are welcome.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE
We haven't even agreed if there is another world up there in what
we call the heavens - the one inhabited by angels and a supreme being who
created all that we know. We vaguely trust that when we die we will have an
afterlife - an oxymoron, but one subscribed to by all the major religions.
Some believe this more strongly than others but who are we to question
matters of faith?
We are still discovering the wondrous results of the act of
"creation" or the one we scientific types call, "evolution". New forms of
life are found that were hidden before we humans scraped off the surface of
"Earth" to find gold and silver as well as other minerals we call jewels.
Now we are emptying out the wells of oil and searching the seas for rare
metals and even predict mining the asteroids for dwindling substances here
below the heavens.
We postulate life on the "outer" planets. It is reasonable to
assume if there is life here on "Earth" then life may well exist elsewhere
throughout the universe. These must be celestial bodies that have water and
an atmosphere to support life like ours. We may well be the only life forms
just like us. In our singularity we may fit our own specifications for
being the product of a God who worked for a specified unit of time and then
had to rest. The rest, so it is said, is history. We have brought to the
world the idea of a week of work and a day of rest and the celebration of a
Sabbath. We haven't found a single extraterrestrial form of life even though
we can send robotic ships to Mars and moons of Jupiter to scratch around to
look for evidence.
We, the humans here on earth, are all we have yet been able to
find with our telescopes and probes. But, what will happen to all our
preconceptions and beliefs if we discover life somewhat like ours on, say
"Farblunjett" found in the "rim worlds" at the edge of the Milky Way? We
will probably be interested for a week or two and then go about working six
days and resting on the seventh. Carol's Evaluation: 10 out of 10.
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