September 29, 2010

Take Me To Your Head Of The Office For Outer Space Affairs

Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, is head of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs. According to published reports, Ms. Othman is going to be responsible for co-ordinating mankind's response when extraterrestrials land.

Now, if you ask me, when the little green men come calling, they're going to talk to whomever the hell they want.

While the naive plans of the bureaucrats at the U.N. are beyond silly, they do raise a serious question.

One thing we know for sure about the universe -- it ain't nothing like what we thought it was just a few decades ago.

The universe is enormous beyond any human ability to comprehend. To say that our little planet is a speck of dust is to exaggerate its size a billion fold.

By the time the next decade is over, I believe science will have found reasonable evidence for life elsewhere in the universe. It may just be a bacteria-like organism on a meteorite, or remnants of a virus-like form somewhere else. Or something else we have no clue about.

Regardless of how simple or tiny it is, it will create a crisis for theologians.

How will this fit into contemporary theology? How will the world's religions interpret and explain finding life elsewhere?

It's going to be interesting.

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