This is a terrific journey. You get to travel from the Earth to the edge of the known universe and back, all in six minutes. It's a beautiful collection of graphics, along with a space-appropriate sound track. Bravo to the American Museum of Natural History.
Scientists now have evidence of about 400 planets outside of the solar system, including 32 new ones:
European astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop. Scientists using the European Southern Observatory telescope didn't find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual.And this is the tip of the iceberg. Though not yet established, any reasonable extrapolation would suggest that there are many billions of other planets out there, and that at least some of them would be hospitable to life. Which makes it all the more amazing that out of all of those available planets God chose to send his "only begotten Son" toour planet: Earth. Or is that the point that Carl Sagan was opposing in this video?
We human beings are the most important aspect of the entire universe. Or at least some people say. They say that a Supreme Being created the entire disposable universe to serve us, and that HE visited us here on earth, the moral and spiritual center of the entire universe. Others would differ. Unbelievable as it might seem to many Believers, perhaps we are big fish in a very very small pond. Listen to the words of Carl Sagan, as he discusses our "pale blue dot":
In this TED video, astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. Smoot presents his lecture with the help of dramatic images created through the crunching of massive amounts of real-life data. The bottom line is that…
I have personally heard this claim from several Christian Fundamentalists. It usually doesn't survive examination. They were raised to the church, had a normal adolescent rebellion and denied everything to do with the authority structure they knew. Then as they matured they experienced the guided hallucination (revelation, dream, epiphany, psychotic…