Privileged Planet: another summary of evidence (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 22, 2018, 19:29 (1949 days ago) @ David Turell

A good summary of reasons to consider Earth this way:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/apollo-8-astronauts-christmas-eve-message-book-o...

"Astronomers now know that Earth is a rare, life-friendly “oasis in the big vastness of space,” as Borman later reflected. In the past few decades they have discovered that life on our planet depends on many improbable “rare-earth” factors. Earth must orbit the sun at just the right distance, with just the right axial tilt, and with just the right-shaped orbit and right planetary neighbors. Life depends on Earth having a moon of the right size at the right distance. The solar system as a whole must also reside in a narrow life-friendly band of space within our galaxy, the “galactic habitable zone.”

"We’ve also come to appreciate that we inhabit a privileged platform for scientific discovery. Earth’s crust is endowed with the abundant mineral and energy resources required for advanced technology, including that necessary for sending astronauts to the moon. Our clear atmosphere and location far from the center of a large galaxy allow us to learn about the universe near and far.

"At a deeper level, physicists now know that the universe itself exhibits extreme fine-tuning. Even slight changes to the relative masses of fundamental particles or to the strengths of fundamental forces, or to the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe or to its initial arrangement of mass and energy, would have rendered the universe incapable of sustaining life. In the 1960s, physicists had just begun to discover examples of such fine-tuning. Now they know of many more. This suggests “the common sense interpretation,” as Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, “that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.

"Parallel developments in biology have reinforced this perspective. In the 1950s, Watson and Crick discovered that DNA contains digital information, which many biologists and computer scientists have likened to software code. Molecular biologists have since elucidated a complex information-processing system serviced by equally complex nano-machinery in even “simple” one-celled organisms. These discoveries have thwarted attempts to explain the origin of life by undirected processes. By 1980, Francis Crick would acknowledge that the origin of life appears “to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

" In 1968, physicists had only just discovered in the mysterious “cosmic background radiation” the echo of the Big Bang. Though that evidence strongly implied that the universe had a beginning, other cosmological models remained viable. By 1992, more-detailed images of the radiation collected by a sophisticated satellite established the Big Bang beyond reasonable doubt, confirming the words read from space: “In the beginning . . .'”

Comment: It should be noted Fred Hoyle was an atheist most of his life. A 'super intellect' must exist.