Colonization Of The Stars And Contact With Aliens: The Last False Hope Of The Secularists

http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/i...2&art_id=31576


We're Hardly Alone in the Universe


7/5/2006


by Mark P. Shea

Bible Study and Truth Tracts Author





One thing I have discovered (to my surprise) is how shocked some folks
get when I express my opinion that we humans are never getting off the
earth in any serious way.


We're Staying Right Here on Earth

Oh sure, we might get a couple of people to Mars to walk around. Maybe
a long-term space station with more than a handful of astronauts in
near-Earth orbit. Maaaaaaaybe a moon station. But we're never, I think,
going to colonize the planets. And we're most emphatically never going
to go to another star. This earth is pretty much it. We must learn to
face the fact that the frontier period is past and we ain't going
anywhere.

These are not, by the way, religious opinions. They are opinions based,
not on my theological views, but on cold, practical considerations
about things like "what it takes to get there." I'll be willing to
change my opinion when we establish a thriving metropolis in
Antarctica, which is infinitely easier than establishing a serious,
self-supporting colony on Mars or the Moon.

Rare Earth

Similarly, to devotees of SETI and the quest for extraterrestrial life,
I say my mind is strongly persuaded by a book called Rare Earth that
the assumption of a densely populated cosmos is all wet and that
intelligent (or even multicellular) life is a lot rarer than you'd
think from watching Star Trek. In short, I think that we are, for all
practical purposes, all alone. If there's somebody out there, we'll
never know it, because the odds are that intelligent physical life is
so remote from us - if it exists at all - that we can't hear it if
it is broadcasting electromagnetic signals.

Again, I say this not due to my theological views, but because the
science is on my side. As Rare Earth demonstrates, over 20 factors all
have to line up just so in order to even have a shot at intelligent
life arising on a planet. The odds against all those factors working
out with such fine tuning are extremely slight. So the odds of life
existing in most of our galaxy are likewise extremely slight. Indeed,
the vast majority of stars in the Milky Way cannot have inhabitable
planets, since they are concentrated in the center, where stellar
radiation makes the chemical conditions of life impossible.

Secular Eschatology

Why this digression on science? Because while my views are not
theological, what I discover is that the faith in ET and our eventual
trek to the stars is deeply theological with many people. Very typical
of what I mean is the remark made to me by a friend a few years ago:
"As thought experiments go, speculation about extraterrestrials have
been (for me, anyway) a devotional exercise." And not just for him.
Note this weirdly eucharistic anecdote about science fiction writer Kim
Stanley Robinson from the Chicago Tribune:

In the middle of writing Blue Mars, [Robinson] recalled, he took a
small Martian meteorite he had purchased from a dealer and climbed to
the roof of his home. At sunset, he popped the tiny stone into his
mouth and swallowed it, hoping that having a piece of Mars inside him
would enhance his creative process.

Communing with the Real Presence of our Great God and Savior, Mars
Ares. Nope. Nothing religious going on here.

This is why the longer I live, the more persuaded I become that aliens
fill, in a secular age, the imaginative and emotional niche that was
once occupied by angels and demons just as Our Destiny in Space fills
what used to be the Christian hope of our Destiny in Heaven. It is, I
think, a profound illustration of the fact that our hearts are
God-shaped vacuums, sucking in whatever comes to hand in the search for
God or His nearest approximation.

Hope or Despair?

Some will argue that Christians "fear" the notion of contact with ET
because it will definitively remove us from our "privileged" position
as children of God and show that we are but one of many intelligent
species throughout the cosmos. But this simply goes to prove my point
about the way in which angels and demons have receded from popular
imagination and left a void. For the trouble with this criticism is
that the Christian revelation already tells us there are myriad
intelligent beings throughout Creation. That is, after all, what angels
and demons are. So I see no reason that finding ET should trouble us as
Christians. I merely think that there is plenty of scientific - not
theological - reason to think that such biological creatures will
never be found.

Colonization of the stars and contact with ET (sort of) fills the void
left by modernity's abandonment of the true eschatological hope of the
return of Christ. Sooner or later, it will become evident to
secularists that this hope is as chimerical as the Marxist hope of the
Withering Away of the State. I wonder whether that will prompt a return
to Christian hope or simply lead to final despair?





Mark Shea is Senior Content Editor for Catholic Exchange and a weekly
columnist for the National Catholic Register. You may visit his website
at www.mark-shea.com check out his blog, Catholic and Enjoying It!, or
purchase his books and tapes here.