Atheist Meditations

My one beer a day program totally sucks! I think I may have made a foolish decision there; the first beer merely cleanses the palate for the next one. I'll never again split a variety pack with a buddy and debate the various styles of ale, lagers, pilsners, and stouts. One beer a day makes it difficult to compare and contrast.

I've decided that drinking wine in excess just ain't for me. I used to love to drink a bottle of Australian Shiraz, smoke a thin cigar and write. Guess I'm not into stained teeth anymore. I'll drink a glass with Cin over a good meal, but excess be denied me. I dug all my old cocktail apparatuses out of storage, and attempted to achieve the perfection of a Stolichnaya Straight Up Extra Dry One Olive Martini. I feel pretty good writing with one of those in front of me, yet by the Wolf's Hour when I'm in need of number three, I usually just go to bed. My ancestry is Irish, not Russian.

Whiskey goes down just as fast and smooth as beer - even faster and smoother in fact - so that beverage was returned to the list of 'inappropriate for regular consumption.' Trust me, nobody wants to be around Aurelius when he's 'Whiskey Friskey.'

RANDOM THOUGHTS

• I can't believe when Petraeus and Crocker testified before Congress they did not have to do so under oath. What a crock .
• The latest issue of Skeptic magazine has a fascinating article on the end of science. Really he's talking about the end of technology, i.e. that most of the major breakthroughs have already happened. A Bee-Girl from the thirties might be impressed with your iphone, but between the telegraph and radar she ain't seeing much science that's new to her.
  

Here's how Mordechai Ben-Ari extrapolates this line of thinking to grapple with ET (I think it's fascinating.)

We have every reason to believe that the laws of physical science are universal, so that even if there is a much older intelligent ET life, it will have the same physics and chemistry as we do. Any scientific revolutions that they underwent are ones that we might potentially undergo, so if that prospect is doubtful here, it is doubtful there too. Discussions of ET life must be careful not to commit the non sequitur of deducing the existence of radically new science and technology from the existence of intelligent life. (Skeptic Vol 13, Num 2 2007, p 26)

I love this line of thinking and Cindy and I debate it frequently. She believes that life is astronomically rare, I favor the notion that life (at least simple life) is fairly commonplace. Within my lifetime we should have definitive knowledge regarding Mars and microbial life.

This debate at astrobiology.com lends my views some support.

Imagine an immense universe filled with countless planets and moons that harbored complex life, many of them even able to evolve a sentient species before an asteroid/solar fluctuation/volcanism/pandemic/war wiped the slate clean. All of them contemplating existence, and none of them ever going to discover a technology that would allow them to escape their host star's gravity.

I think that's beautiful

Labels: Astrobiology, personal