Tue 22 Jul 2008
There are several things that science current sees as a “best guess” that don’t make much sense to me, from a cause & effect standpoint..
The Inflationary Period. Shortly after the big bang, the universe expanded rapidly and then, for no apparent reason that anyone has given me, stopped expanding so rapidly. Why did this occur? Well, that’s the wrong question. The right question is, “What magical event do we need to have to make the big bang numbers work out?” They don’t work without this inflationary period.
The Cambrian explosion. About 500 million years ago, for no apparently reason, life apparently greatly expanded from single celled organisms to all of the current chains of life that we see today (not saying that it went from single celled to humans, but we basically went from single celled things to having the tree of life that we have right now. This all occurred in 20 million years or so. The universe is currently thought to be 13.74 billion years old. They say that life has been around for 4 billion years or so, and for an unknown reason, about 500 million years ago, all of the basics of life just happened all of the sudden (ok.. 20 million years isn’t “all of the sudden”, but when you think about life being around for 3.5 billions years.. you gotta wonder Why?.) They don’t have a clue. Lots of conjectures, though. So… Why did this happen that way?
Speaking of rapid explosions.. Here’s another one, and the actual reason that I decided to write this blog entry.. I was reading today about colonizing the upper atmosphere of Venus, and one guy had an interesting quote in the comments:
Think of how much we’ve done in just the past couple thousand years! We’ve gone from caves to space stations.
Yes.. think about that, indeed! In just a few thousand years we’ve gone from supposedly being stupid humanoids to what we are today. I’m not saying we are smart yet, or anything.. but I think, by any metric, we are far more knowledgeable and capable of impacting the earth (and our universe to a much lesser degree) in very tangible and lasting ways. So, we have a Universe that is 13.74 billion years old. 500 million years ago, we had all of the basics of life form.. I’d assume that evolution tells us that humanoids very close to us have been around for a few million years at least………….. and yet nothing much happened until just the past few thousand years. Why?
Now.. I’m not particularly arguing for religion in this post. I might do that in other posts, but in this post I’m just pointing out a few things that I find intriguing. I haven’t done the wikipedia searches on all of these topics.. I’m sure that if any Richard-Dawkins types out there read this that they’ll be happy to provide various web links that might shed some more light on a few of these points..
But, I’d be curious to know what other events we have in science have been invented to make the numbers work, but really are not the most likely scenario. Some would say that religion has invented concepts, but hey.. those same people would consider religion philosophical.. so it can do whatever it wants. We’re talking science here. Science can’t get away with just inventing situations to make the numbers work. I sat in a study of Science and God this summer where a book’s author was roasted at the stake for inventing numbers that made his hypotheses sound correct.
I’ll get into the multiverse in another blog post at some point in the future.
OK. So I decided to look up a couple of links on my own:
