Saturday, November 22, 2014

It's A Large World After All

So in class we were talking about how small we seem to be in this world. I brought up a Buzzfeed article that really put that into perspective. Obviously we live on earth but there are some things that we forget to think about. Take a look at this article. After reading it I felt kind of insignificant in the scheme of things, but it is amazing to truly realize how much is really out there. This place may not be as large as we believe it to be.
 http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/the-universe-is-scaryThis is the Earth! This is where you live.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The question "are we alone in this universe" has continuously puzzled scientists. Being scientists, they have always searched for a quantity to describe our odds of finding aliens. In 1961, Dr. Frank Drake developed the Drake equation to provide an estimate for the number of inhabited exoplanets extant in our universe. Recently, Dr. Sara Seager from MIT has refined the Drake equation. Using ranges of values, they have estimated the number of possible exoplanets with life on them to be between 2 and 280,000,000.
Quite the range, but notice that 1 is not the lower bound. Scientifically and statistically, we are most likely not the only ones in the universe. If we do discover life, though, it would be light years away, and it would take years to even communicate basic messages; however, it would be interesting to see how the Church handles it.
Iris, could you tell us more about your discussion with the Episcopal priest about baptizing aliens? Thanks.

Unknown said...

This buzz feed is interesting and it just reminds me a lot of how in the Elizabethan era they connected what went on in the heaves directly to what when on on earth. It's strange to think how people during the Elizabethan era thought that things that went on in a vast universe corresponded to occurrences on earth, which constitutes such a small part of the universe. I think that Elizabethans maybe recognized and thought how since the rest of the universe is so vast that it overpowered and dominated the world that we live in; therefore, everything in this world is determined by the reset of the universe.