Extraterrestrial Life…or not

In the old days, the Church torched philosophers who dared to suggest that there was life elsewhere in the universe.  Things changed in the 18th century during the Enlightenment when it seems there was actually a greater belief in life on other planets by scientists than there is now. Today, mainstream scientists gang up on scientists who find micro-biotic life in meteorites.

But I’m getting ahead of myself….

I was reading an article on-line from the Washington Post that cast doubts on the existence of extraterrestrial life anywhere in the universe to say nothing of UFOs and aliens here on Earth. While reading,  Trish arrived home with a copy of the June/July issue of Open Minds Magazine. She laid it on the kitchen table open to an article headlined: “Will Mainstream Science Ever Accept Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life?”

So that was a synchro for me – two ET articles coming together at about the same time, both dealing with the same question from opposite perspectives.

The Post article, entitled “The Fear that Drives our Alien Belief,” asks us: “What is it about UFOs that drive so many people to believe they exist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?”

According to a 2012 National Geographic poll, 36 percent of Americans believe aliens have visited earth. Yet, as one scientist wrote in a letter to the late UFO researcher and Harvard prof John Mack, such visitations “contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on which modern science depends.”

Meanwhile, the Open Minds article starts off in the opposite mode, “Reputable scientists have conducted multiple studies that suggest the existence of extraterrestrial life, but the mainstream scientific community refused to accept those claims….One wonders what it will take for the mainstream scientific community to accept evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

The Post tells us that “a belief in extraterrestrial life answers many of the same questions as a belief in God.” The alternative is a “vast, dark emptiness of the unfeeling universe.”

Psychologist Stephen Diamond is quoted as saying without these UFO stories, “we have to accept the fact that some things mean nothing, and others are totally beyond us—a strange, frightening and ultimately deflating thought.” (I would guess that my ET synchro above would be one of those things that mean nothing in Diamond’s eyes.)

The Post article leads readers to the conclusion that belief in extraterrestrial life of any kind is a simply psychological crutch, something to give us hope. Meanwhile, though, it darkly suggests there isn’t any proof and any rational reason to believe.

The Open Minds article begins with a historical perspective. At least believers today are tolerated, probably because there are so many. But in the 16th century that wasn’t the case. Giordano Filippo Bruno, who has been described as an early spokesman for exo-biology – a branch of the science that deals with the search for ET life – was not treated kindly by the powers-that-be. Bruno boldly said that he believed that life, including intelligent beings, exist on numerous other worlds. As a result of that stance, Bruno was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church. Ouch!

By the time of the Enlightenment, the concept of a plurality of worlds existing with intelligent life was actually becoming accepted. Benjamin Franklin believed the universe is “filled with suns like ours, each with a chorus of worlds.”

But jump to the present and we find a dichotomy – a minority of scientists pointing to evidence of extraterrestrial life and a mainstream that says the verdict is still unknown. Scientists who find evidence of extraterrestrial life – even in the form of fossilized bacteria  in meteorites – are routinely dismissed by other scientists who say that the meteorites have been contaminated or even that they aren’t meteorites.

A paper published in January of this year found ET life in the form of  fossilized algae in a meteorite found in Sri Lanka. The paper was met with harsh criticism from the scientific community. In response, the researchers sent fragments to CardiffUniversity in Wales for further testing.

As explained on www.extremetech.com, “The researchers at Cardiff are now reporting that they’re sure that these fragments come from an extraterrestrial meteorite – and that there is definitely ‘fossilized biological structures.” These new findings were published in the March issue of The Journal of Cosmology. It’s not surprising that the new paper is being criticized just as harshly as the first one, and the publication is being dismissed as a low-grade scientific journal.

And so it goes. I wonder what the aliens think.