Quote:
Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn
Re Nature
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That's an extremely ethnocentric view. Other celestial bodies are incredibly hostile, not just to humans, but all life.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimmiej
A purpose suggests design. There is no purpose if this is all just some “cosmic accident”.
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What you call a "cosmic accident" is just the Laws of Physics.
Your whole existence is just a series of accidents, some more important or having major consequences and some trivially minor.
The first major accident that impacts you directly is Earth's collision with a large celestial body.
When our Solar System first formed, it looked, in accordance with the Laws of Physics, exactly like this:
Mercury
Venus
Mars
Earth
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Mercury is located 36,250,000 miles from the Sun. Doubling that distance we get 72,500,000 miles and we find Venus at 67,200,000 miles from the Sun.
That's an error margin of 7.31%
Doubling the distance of Venus to get 134,400,000 miles, and Lo and behold! We find Mars orbiting at 141,700,000 miles from the Sun.
That's an error margin of 5.15%
Doubling Mars' distance to get 283,400,000 miles we find the Earth/Asteroid Belt at 260,400,000 miles.
An error margin of 8.8%
Let's double the distance of the Earth/Asteroid Belt to get 520,800,000 miles and we find Jupiter located at 484,000,000 miles.
An error margin of 7.06%
If we double Jupiter's distance to 968,000,000 then we find Saturn at 887,100,000 miles.
The error margin is 8.35%
If we double Saturn's distance to 1,774,200 miles, then we find Uranus at 1,783,900 miles for an error margin of only 0.54%
We can also examine the ratios of the planets' distances:
Venus 1.85
Mars 2.10
Earth/Asteroid Belt 1.84
Jupiter 1.86
Saturn 1.83
Uranus 2.01
That collision knocked Earth out of its orbit and into its present orbit, left you with a 10" wobble that causes the Precession of the Equinoxes, an axial tilt that is responsible for the Four Seasons and a huge scar we call the Pacific Ocean Basin. Through the process of plate tectonics, that battle scar will be filled in and sea levels will rise, and I don't mean 3 meters to 14 meters, I mean like 300 meters to 1,400 meters or more. You won't see any continents, just island, some island chains and a couple of two or three large island the size of Australian or Greenland.
Your next accident is the asteroid/comet that brought life to Earth.
Then that one anaerobic bacteria that mutated to tolerate Oxygen. Oxygen is a poison to anaerobic bacteria. Who knows how many hundreds of species of anaerobic bacteria went extinct as Oxygen leached out of the ocean into the atmosphere.
Later, a descendant of that one bacteria mutated to not just tolerate Oxygen, but actually use it.
Then the Chixulub Event. That's why we're here. If it wasn't for that, none of would be here.
Timing is everything. If that asteroid lands a few seconds early, it's in the Pacific Ocean and doesn't do much damage. A few seconds later and it lands in the Atlantic. It does some damage, but not to the extent it did.
If that asteroid doesn't hit, dinosaurs rule for another 46 Million years at least. Mammals never have a chance to proliferate, because they're dinosaur snacks.
You have to get rid of the dinosaurs so that mammals can proliferate.
Note that none of that has anything to do with a god-thing.
It's all random chance governed by the Laws of Physics.
So, if you think you're special, you're not. You're only special relative to other life forms on Earth and that's only because Evolution gave you a better brain.
Relative to other life forms in the Universe, you might actually be at the bottom of the food chain.
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