is why I say:
" A lot of these types..."
or
"Most of these types..."
Cause I know that people like him do exist in this field.
It's just that...unfortunately, like a lot of other human endeavors, the loud vocal minority gets most of the attention they so obviously crave (as to crowd out other voices.)
Marcelo Gleiser thinks we have the story of the universe all wrong. And that it’s time to restore Earth and humanity to the center of the cosmos.
(Dont laugh...
"The observable Universe might be 46 billion light years in all directions from our point of view, but there’s certainly more, unobservable Universe just like ours beyond that. It’s unfair to associate any particular point with the center, as what we perceive is determined by the amount of time that’s passed since the light observed today was emitted, rather than the geometry of the Universe."
So you cant really rule the earth out...)
"The Brazilian physicist, astronomer, and winner of the 2019 Templeton Prize thinks modern science has fallen prey to an increasingly bleak perspective—a view of Earth as an insignificant speck alone in a cold, dark universe."
(Agreed, and modern man has went right along with modern science.)
Gleiser, a noted theoretical physicist who teaches at Dartmouth College, has published a string of books on high energy physics, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. In his latest, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future, he writes that ever since Copernicus, “the more we learn about the universe, the smaller and less important planet Earth seems.” It’s a toxic narrative, he thinks, that set the stage for reckless use and abuse of the planet’s resources. There aren’t that many writers who could make the story of the Big Bang, expansion of the universe, and galaxy formation relevant to fossil fuel consumption and the climate crisis. In Gleiser’s hands, the story of the universe becomes a call to action."
"I wrote a book called The Island of Knowledge a few years ago, where I said that the island of knowledge is surrounded by the ocean of the unknown. And as the island grows, so does its periphery, which is the boundary between the known and the unknown. So the paradox of knowledge is that the more you learn, the more you discover that you don’t know."
(Almost like an entity wanted it to be that way.)
Interviewer: That sounds like a profoundly depressing realization for a scientist.
"If you’re a card-carrying “reason will solve everything and science is truth,” person, then maybe.
(Where did the ability to reason come from? Becomes my question for the “reason will solve everything and science is truth,” person.)
"But in my case, I think it’s inspiring because it means there is no end to the quest; we humans will always have a limited grasp of what reality is. And what could be more fascinating than being surrounded by mystery?"
"...we have this saying—“you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” I think that applies here too—you have to be comfortable with the fact that we will never know everything, that there are questions that have no answers, and that’s not a bad thing."
(Ecc 3:11
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time:
also he hath set the world in their heart,
so that no man can find out the work that God maketh
from the beginning to the end.)
Interviewer: "Did you have any kind of faith tradition to help explain it?
My family is Jewish—and I had a pretty traditional Jewish education—with traditions, but not so much belief in all of the details of the Old Testament. But there’s an element of the supernatural in all the big monotheistic religions, and I tried to connect with that."
"I chose to work on the nature of space and time and the Big Bang and the origin of life. These are really boundary questions between scientific and philosophical or religious thinking. So I think I found a way to be what you could possibly call a rational mystic."
(:-).
"Interviewer: Did that ever create problems for you in the scientific community, among other scientists?
No, simply because I never told them. Like—and I’m not comparing myself to Einstein—but I’m sure that Einstein also didn’t talk about his Spinoza notion that God is everywhere.
That’s what he thought?
He had a very wonderful—and I would say mystical—way of relating to this intelligence that he found embedded in nature, which was some sort of divine presence. "
(How you can not perceive it is beyond me.)
"He didn’t associate it with a Jewish God or anything like that, but there was something and he thought that science was a portal to connecting with this kind of intelligence."
(It's what most of these guys are just not understanding today.
Science isn't the end all be all,
it's a means to an end, not the end, in and of itself.)
"That’s way more mystical than I thought Einstein was. I mean, there’s his famous remark, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
Yeah, but that was a joke. He had a much deeper connection, what I would call truly a mystic connection to the natural world, and to this kind of hidden intelligence in the depths of nature that we can never quite understand, but which is there. He has this famous quote that I love, which is: “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” I mean, who would write that? Krishnamurti, yes—but that was Einstein!"
"I’m saying we have to rethink the story of who we are and how we relate to the planet. A little bit of deep time history here: Homo sapiens have been here on this planet 300,000 years, more or less. Of that time, about 95 percent, almost all of it, we were hunter gatherers moving about the planet. And we had a completely different relationship to the world than the agrarian civilizations did. For the hunter gatherers, the world was sacred. They understood that there were powers in nature that were beyond themselves, that they were not above nature."
"And then when Copernicus says, “Look, the Earth is not even the center of everything, the sun is,” then the Earth became not the center of creation, but just another world. Which further disrupted the vertical hierarchy of us here on Earth and the gods up in the skies. Now that Earth is revolving around the sun, it becomes less important. And we become less important too, because immediately after Copernicus, people started to speculate: “Wait a second. If there are other worlds, why should life only be here?”
"The observable Universe might be 46 billion light years in all directions from our point of view, but there’s certainly more, unobservable Universe just like ours beyond that. It’s unfair to associate any particular point with the center, as what we perceive is determined by the amount of time that’s passed since the light observed today was emitted, rather than the geometry of the Universe."
So you cant really rule the earth out either...)
"But within the framework of the Copernican narrative, the more we learned about the universe, the less important we and this planet became.
Interviewer: And today we talk about multiverses.
"Yeah, that’s the final insult, right? “Hey, there’s not just our universe, there are countless universes! Ours is just one.”
(Yes, yes it is, that and synthetic brains..., tells you whats up in the world RN.
Never forget:
Chuck Missler
“Another reason that an understanding of Genesis 6 is so essential is that it also is a prerequisite to understanding (and anticipating) Satan's devices and, in particular, the specific delusions to come upon the whole earth as a major feature of end-time prophecy.”)
"There’s this thing people talk about in astronomy, the principle of mediocrity—meaning we are not important at all. I think this is just completely wrong. Because there is a fundamental element missing in this whole story: We have no clue what life is or how it emerged on this planet."
(Where did the information in the DNA come from?)
"I mean, we don’t even know how to define life very well. We have an operational definition: a biochemical network system that is capable of metabolism and of Darwinian evolution. But that’s what life does—it doesn’t tell me anything about what life is."
"In the meantime, there’s a lot of money going into looking for exoplanets that might support life. Elon Musk thinks we can terraform Mars. There’s the whole narrative of “when we’ve wrecked this planet, we’ll head to another.” You’re pushing back on all that?
Okay, let’s qualify. Searching for other planets, and in particular searching for biosignatures, meaning the signs of life, is essential research right now. I work on this. But Elon Musk and terraforming Mars? That’s just silly stuff. Our problem right now is the next few decades on this planet—not if, in 500 years, we’re going to have a colony on Mars. I mean, that’s useless."
(Agreed)
"Interviewer: Then why even bother looking for exoplanets? Why not focus our attention on this one?
Because that’s how we advance knowledge, by asking profound questions about the universe and matter. Looking for life on other planets is essential because for now, as far as we know, Earth is the only planet that has life. The post-Copernican narrative decreased the value of our world, and we constructed a whole civilization based on the idea that we can use and abuse it. We built giant cities and industries by essentially consuming the entrails of our planet. Oil, gas, and coal—the insides of the planet—fed our technologies, and it all worked until it didn’t."
"Interviewer: At this point, it almost seems like the problems are too big to do anything about."
(The confluence of calamities is here...yup... truth.)
"First of all, when you look at the evolution of life, you realize that it’s completely dependent on the history of the planet. If you change or tweak something that happened here on our planet a long time ago, life would be different, which means we wouldn’t be here.
The most famous example is 66 million years ago, the big asteroid hits the Yucatan Peninsula. It wipes out the dinosaurs and a bunch of other creatures, with the exception, maybe, of the birds and some little mammals. It completely changed the evolution of life on the planet. And it was a cosmic accident."
(Or not :-).
Interviewer: So your point is, it’s not about counting up the number of planets that could possibly support life because they’ve got the right chemistry and the right mass. It’s that there were so many little contingencies without which you could never get this form of life again. Although, you might get a better one."
What I’m trying to say is that instead of thinking of the Earth as just another planet and life as ubiquitous in the universe, the truth is that Earth is not just another planet. The Earth is a very rare oasis that has supported life for at least three and a half billion years, which allowed for life to change and adapt to different environments that coincidentally and completely randomly evolved to generate a species that is able to reconstruct this entire story and to tell it. And without our voice, the universe itself would have no story, would have no memory. It would be a dead universe. So it’s not just that we are we are stardust, as Carl Sagan used to say—we are how the universe is telling its own story."
"I think this is only possible because of this incredibly spectacular and rare planet that we live on. Look at Mars, a horrible frozen desert. Look at Venus, a boiling soup of sulfuric acid. Other planets, you can’t even stand on them because they’re gas giants. So this is not just another world; it’s a rare gem in the universe.
(Complete accident I'm sure :-).
And yes, there could be other planets with life on them, maybe. But probably very simple life—single celled organisms. Never or very rarely complex organisms."
(From somebody who reads a lot of articles like this? It was just refreshing to hear an inconvenient voice as it were.)
"Interviewer: The other thing I was thinking about is James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory and the suggestion that at some point the universe would develop consciousness. It sounds like you’re saying it already has—in the form of humans.
That’s the beauty of this whole story. We carry the whole history of the universe in ourselves. The atoms in your body—the iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones—came from stars that exploded 5 billion years ago.
They traveled gazillions of light-years to fall four and a half billion years ago into this nebula that was collapsing to become the sun and the planets.
And then in one of these planets, which happens to have water and carbon and magnesium and phosphorus, molecules organized themselves and became alive—
(Where did the information in the DNA molecule come from?)
and then began to evolve, three and a half billion years ago, into a species that is telling this story.
That is not something that is going to be happening all over the universe!"
(Exactly.
So much for:
Neil Degrasse Tyson's argument:
"This is in response to the people out there who say
"The earth is just perfect for life
Oh what a haven in all the universe just right...
"It's not just right
every opportunity it gets
it tries to kill us.
The tsunamis
the hurricanes
the tornados
the asteroids.
On 3/4 of the earth
if I drop you buck naked?
You are dead 10 minutes later.
Cause something eats you.
Okay?
The earth is bad for life.
Okay?
The proof is in the fossil record,
99% of all species who ever lived
are now extinct.
That is not the signature of a planet that is in love with life."
If you knew just how slim the odds were
that the universe could have come into existence?
Let alone
there be
sentient,
cognizant
rational beings
in it?
You'd see it for what it is.
Nothing short of a miracle.
The odds are really
that slim.)
"The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has a beautiful concept called “interbeing,” which he described this way. He said: Let’s say you’re reading a poem, and the poem is printed on a sheet of paper. Well, that paper came from a tree. The tree only grew because there is water and there is sunlight. But the sun is a star, and the star is shining because there is a universe that developed stars. So every time you look at a piece of paper, you are connected to the rest of the universe."
"And that’s what I’m talking about: the re-sacralization of the planet.
Interviewer: Do you think doing science can be sacred?
"Absolutely.
(Agreed)
Not everybody will agree with me, but that’s how I wake up every day—to go do my calculations and write my papers and try to figure out if there is life on another planet. To me, that’s a sacred engagement with the universe. And I know I’m in very good company saying that, because Einstein used to say the same thing."
"He (Einstein) had a very wonderful—and I would say mystical—way of relating to this intelligence that he found embedded in nature, which was some sort of divine presence. "
He didn’t associate it with a Jewish God or anything like that, but there was something and he thought that science was a portal to connecting with this kind of intelligence."
(It's just right in my wheelhouse.
I Couldn't agree any more.)
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