To me that is an
absolutely inane comment to make. I think a few of you actually know me and have
met me and you know that I am easy going, but I do have an issue when people
try to lord over some sort of perceived intellectual advantage as i interpreted
this to be
.
So I asked the individual why they believe there is no life
in the universe, bear in mind he didn't say galaxy he said universe, and the
universe is about 300 times bigger than our galaxy. His argument was that we
haven't found life out in the galaxy/universe therefore life cannot possibly
exist out there. I was flabbergasted at this statement.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
is an important scientific tenet, but it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and
I understand this. And I explained it to them that just because we have not
found evidence of life does not mean that life is not out there. We suspected
that planets existed in the galaxy but we had no way of actually seeing them
until we develop better telescopes that could detect the wobble and the transit
of planets in front of their stars.
I thought it a good argument on my part; however, it appears
all I did was infuriate the other person. So he came at me with the supposition
that if there were intelligent life out there they surely would come here to
make themselves known to us. I've already posted previously my thoughts on why
aliens probably would not come here, and why they certainly wouldn't come here
for slaves or for our materials or our resources. And I thought I laid out the
argument pretty well that the cost of traveling to Earth over such interstellar
distance would not make sense to him.
Now at this point I'm not sure if he's playing devil’s
advocate or he actually believes that aliens would come to our planet to steal
our resources. So I laid out a pretty compelling scientifically based argument
that life may exist in the universe because quite frankly there's so many stars
and we are finding so many exo-planets that that hover between the habitability
zone and the frost line of solar systems. That's when I got the shock; now bear
in mind this is a science fiction forum for science fiction writers to throw out
ideas and to get feedback. The individual stated that God only made life here.
What do you say at this point?
While I have the utmost respect for people who have a higher
faith it's hard for me to logically think that as big as the universe is as a
whole, that life is so unique that it only happened on a small rocky planet on
the outer rim of the small modest galaxy. And then it struck me that this
person is on a science fiction writing forum, and they don't believe there is
life in the universe, what an odd juxtaposition to have about the genre they
are writing in. So I asked how he reconciles his beliefs with his writing of
alien races, distant worlds, etc. He simply said he just writes fantasy in
space.
It was quite an eventful discussion, and to be honest I was
absolutely struck by his convictions that life only exists on this planet and
how it is so diametrically opposed to my own belief that there is life in the
universe besides us. I guess the moral of this is that we all write differently
based on our beliefs and that is what makes it such an interesting life.
