“It’s impossible for [this] to be the only world…There are other intelligent entities out there, probably since life is so ardent…[do] you think that’s [life] only on this little rocky planet?” – William Shatner
The legendary Captain Kirk said these words after his flight on the Blue Origin NS-18 spaceflight. Is he right? Are the many people who have looked at the heavens and concluded, “There must be more life out there,” correct?
Probably not. What Shatner and others are saying is not a scientific argument. It is barely a viable statistical one. What we may think is true, or wish to be, must always give way to physics.
Life is very complex and requires very specific conditions, controlled tightly by very narrow constraints. We aren’t just talking about the obvious like temperature or air composition. There are a vast number of interconnected systems, large and small, terrestrial and cosmic, that allow us to be here at this time, in this place, on Earth.
For decades, astronomer Hugh Ross has been documenting the constraints that must be met, and cannot change, for life to exist. This is true of primitive life, to say nothing of complex life such as animals or humans. Among the hundreds of parameters he has identified from scientific studies:
- A planet’s distance from a star, cannot be too far or too close (temperature and gravity).
- A star’s size, age, luminosity, and type, among other things, must be in the right range for life to exist.
- Tectonic activity (earthquakes) must not be too great (destructive), or too little (they recycle soil nutrient runoff from rivers).
- Speed of a planet’s rotation (too fast creates hurricane speed winds, or too slow makes it too hot), its size (too much, or too little gravity), and a precise amount of oxygen (too much causes uncontrollable fires, too little, and large life can’t live), and even the size and distance of any satellites (like the Moon, which affects Earth’s rotation) impact the existence of life.
There are hundreds of such constraints, from the quantum level to the galactic. Even the Big Bang at the origin of time and space, had to be so fine-tuned for Earth to exist here and now as it does. Mathematically, there is zero chance of this occurring on its own from random processes. What does this mean? Two things: One, these constraints eliminate millions and billions of star systems from contention of harboring life. Two, only design can explain what science has discovered.
Naturalists don’t like the implication of design behind the universe’s origin, and call these constraints anthropic coincidences, even though chance cannot explain what we observe. Nonetheless, opponents to design try to sweep this all away with one or another version of the anthropic principle. The popular “weak” version states, “We ought not to be surprised at the order and fine-tuning we see in the universe around us, since if it did not exist…we would not be here to observe the fine-tuning.” This was from Oxford mathematician, John C. Lennox, who further explains why this doesn’t work:
All the anthropic principle says is that for life to exist, certain necessary conditions must be fulfilled. But what it does not tell us is why those necessary conditions are fulfilled, nor how, granted they are fulfilled, life arose.
Evangelists of chance-based, naturalistic explanations like Carl Sagan struggled with this. He marveled at the complexity and beauty of the universe, yet claimed Earth was just a “pale blue dot” and our place among the stars was “demoted” due to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. It didn’t dawn on Sagan and his successors that scientists like Copernicus and Galileo studied the heavens to learn more about Creation and its Creator. Never did they think they were demoting humanity. As astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez has documented, not only have we not been demoted, the evidence points to Earth as being a “privileged planet” that could not be the result of chance, but was created in such a way to make the fine-tuning of the universe evident.
So while we cannot eliminate completely the possibility of life elsewhere among the stars, the physics of the universe guarantees it is exceptionally rare, at the very least. Should we feel despondent and depressed that we could, in fact, be on our own? Not at all. If, as the evidence points, everything from the moment of the Big Bang onward, conspired to allow Earth exist here and now, with its humans, we should feel quite special.
We aren’t a pale blue dot, but rather, we are a bright blue star in the cosmos. Rare and special, with design and purpose.
What does this mean for the current, how should I say, obsession, with UFOs/UAPs? I’ll be returning to this subject in part 2 as we explore what is going on in our skies.
Until then, ponder on what it means for little Earth, perhaps not at the center of the universe, but nonetheless being its central purpose.
Darrick Dean 