Welcome to the Mos Eisley Cantina
Written May 14th, 2008 by Josh Rives | Email This
So the Vatican’s chief astronomer recently said that belief in aliens does not contradict faith in God. This is a hilarious discussion. One time Mindy and I got into a big argument because she wouldn’t admit that it is more likely than not that there are aliens. Yes, we actually had this discussion. I think that logically with the size of the universe and the huge number of other planets, you have to say that there is a greater probability that there is life elsewhere than not. I am not saying that there are in fact aliens, but just that the probability of there being other life is greater than the probability of no other life.
I think this is an obvious statement, but we can look at the math. Our star, affectionately known as the Sun, has eight planets orbiting it (RIP Pluto). Only one of these eight planets has life. According to Wikipedia, our star is one of 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. Since not all stars will have planets, we’ll play it safe and estimate each star has only one planet orbiting it. Many stars have no planets orbiting them, such as our neighbor Proxima Centauri. However there are at least 270 planets outside of our solar systems that we know of, so surely some stars have multiple planets like ours. So with our safe estimate of one planet per star, that means there would be 300 billion planets in the Milky Way alone. In the observable universe there are over 100 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. The current estimate for the number of stars in the galaxy is 70 sextillion or 7 followed by 22 zeros. So assuming there is only one planet per star, that means 70 sextillion planets. What are the odds that only one of 70 sextillion planets contains life?
If there were life on another planet, how is their approach to God different? Does Christ’s death cover their sins as well? Were they even subjected to the Fall or did they get it right the first time? Does the Bible apply to them or has God revealed different things to them? Perhaps Christ died for their sins on their planet long before (or after) He did here?
Of course this conversation can in the end come to no conclusion. You will notice I didn’t quote any verses and my stats came from Wikipedia. Many people will (probably wisely) just ignore this discussion all together for these reasons and the most surprising thing they learned was that the Vatican has a chief astronomer.
So purely from a science perspective I think the problem is that life doesn’t just require a rock to live on. It also requires (at least in the only experience we know of) carbon, water, etc. The Drake equation tries to get at the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication would be possible. I think he came up with about 5,000 but the Scientific America estimate is currently 2.31. The other problem is why we don’t see evidence of other civilizations such as radio signals/artifacts. Check out Wikipedia for the Fermi paradox for more info on that part.
New question: What percentage of our atheists would think again if we found a planet with the same religious beliefs as ours? How faith-affirming that would be!