I just want to point out something that we need to put on the table as a hurdle in our progress and by hurdle I mean a doozie. It is where we fit in the cosmos and the hurdles we must overcome for our species survival in my opinion.
Just to show where we fit in the universe. We can start with our earth. It is approximately 8 thousand miles in diameter. To put this in perspective we can look at this article where the earth is represented by a peppercorn. Read here. (It will open in a popup which you can close to return here)
I won’t copy it but you must read the article in full to get an idea of the scale of the solar system and the issues we have. The rest of the this article refers to data from that article.
Now we have done that at the scale we are working on for the Earth at a peppercorn the nearest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 such light-years and would be 4000 miles away at that scale. Our nearest star. 4000 real miles at that scale. Unbelievable distances. This is just our local part of our own galaxy, our back garden so to speak. Then we have our street, the Orion Arm (5000 light years and contains 600 million stars) followed by our town, The Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way itself is 50 thousand light years across and contains 200 billion stars. It is just one galaxy of so many we can’t count them.
In our *cough* local group, within approx 5 million light years we have two additional galaxies, Andromeda and Triangulum. And as we move out this expands until we see that the visible universe is 14 billion light years across. It contains 350 billion large galaxies, 7 trillion dwarf galaxies and those have 30 billion trillion (3×10²²) stars. Read more here if you are interested. The size of the whole universe is estimated at 93 billion light years across and is growing all the time. It too is evolving, changing as new galaxies are created and old ones destroyed, stars created long before our sun have died and collapsed and black holes are swallowing up anything they touch. It’s all happening so slow and so far away that to us looking out nothing is happening.
The sheer size of the place and where we fit in makes you wonder about what is out there that our puny minds can’t even imagine.
Not sure exactly where this part fits in with a deity. Maybe the cosmos is just decoration on the wall where the deity keeps its Petri dish and it’s just an illusion or it could very well be that the deity is just so busy with more interesting species. 93 billion light years is a bit of a trek.
So here we are. Pure mathematics says that we are not alone in the universe. It is unlikely in the extreme that we are unique and thus we are insignificant, our petty squabbles, even if we were to destroy ourselves and this world it means nothing to the cosmos. If life evolved here in a trillion to one chance then life can evolve somewhere else where there is 30 billion such chances in the visible universe alone. Whether we would ever meet anyone is an entirely different thing. We don’t seem to be on a local bus route but we may be within reach of some redneck backwater if all the UFO spotters are right.
Currently we are stuck on this planet. Everything needs room to grow and the earth cannot contain our biological need to grow and live. We need to find a way to do that. Sci-Fi points us to several options that science has identified but so far we have made no move along that path since the US travelled to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s although there is talk about sending someone to Mars. It’s still a small step as we can see from above in our scale model it’s 2.4 inches from the earth to the moon, and 14 yards from the earth to Mars while it is 4000 miles to the nearest star. However, although it is a small step it is a significant one. Every journey starts with a single step. We need more steps and more people working on making those steps longer and with less time between them.
In my opinion this is the single most important long term project that we have as a species and yet we are doing virtually nothing in this field. Everything is handled short term and thus we don’t really look at going into space beyond our solar system while we know for certain that one planet exists there that supports life and we are already on it.