Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for January 27, 2012

Whoa….how did the hookah smoking caterpillars get here? No more doubles of Nyquil before surfing comics.

Or are the planets in some huge shoe?….Always happens to me at the beach…

Varnes — guess you’d better be more careful when you empty them.

Might be mini-mes or mini-yous in there.

Coool!

and maybe some of those aliens will tip us off on where the heads of Elvis and Michael Jackson converse, in their respective life support bubble tubes

Channelling the spirit of Carl Sagan: I told you so!

There is the possibility of up to 11 different dimensions existing, each one possibly slighty different from our own. Who knows what life forms exist in those.

The mathematician Frederick Hoyle once said that the odds of a tornado whipping through a junkyard and assembling a fully functional 747, greater by far than the probability of that a primary building block of life, such as a hemoglobin molecule, could form randomly on it’s own. All the planetary condition could be perfect, proper distance from the sun, proper angle, proper atmosphere, proper chemical make up… still the odds of life self-generating from non-life are astronomical (pun intended) The more intriguing thought from my point of view is … what if among the billions and billions of stars with planets, still we are alone in all the universe. Unique among all the cosmos.

it must be nice to be so sure…..

The odds of life being out there are good, the odds of life similar to life on earth less so, the odds of intelligent life being out there smaller still, the odds of ever discovering life elsewhere are so-so, the odds of ever making contact with intelligent life out there (either our going to them or them coming to us) are vanishingly small.

Still, if you take a metaphysical approach to the creation of life rather than a natural-phenomena approach, the question remains: If it happened here, why not elsewhere?

Agree 100% with fritzoid.

They are getting closer.

The universe is too vast for us to be the only life out there. They have found the building blocks of life on our planet in asteroids and on other planets in our own solar system. I think it is arrogant to believe we are the only life out there. If the conditions were right for life here, why not elsewhere in a universe with billions of other galaxies.

Arlo, you are pulling my wurble…

1000 years ago, we knew that the earth was flat. 500 years ago, we knew that the sun and other heavenly bodies (except for Janis snerk) revolved around the earth. Today we know that there are — how many did AshburnStadium say? 300 sextillion? — stars out there, oh and if you move electrons around really fast in a certain way, you can read comics online.I wonder what we’ll know 500 years from now?

thank you Mr. Johnson.

Seeing as I have very little faith in anything, including the anal probe crowd, I respectfully disagree. It seems more like common sense than faith to me. Until a few years ago, we didn’t even know there were other galaxies, much less how many other galaxies. You are correct that there is no evidence of other life in the universe. We have no way of getting that evidence in our life time. I just don’t believe that in a space as big as the universe is, that we could be the only life. That seems to be a more faith based belief in my opinion.

Gee, that poor unfortunate extraterrestrial life, struggling along without the “protective stewardship” of Man. The dumb beasts are SO dumb they probably aren’t even aware that Man has dominion over them. And since there would have been no extraterrestrial Adam and Eve, death has never entered their worlds, and the Brontolions of Mars lie down with the Lamboids of Venus, never knowing that they should be eating them instead.

On the other hand, since God had Noah build an ark instead of a spaceship, perhaps all the extraterrestrial lifeforms were destroyed in the Universal Flood. That could explain why there’s water on Mars, but no flora or fauna.

Strange thing is that, although exoticdoc2 would have us believe that the theory of evolution is on such shaky grounds, over 99% of scientists accept it on its evidence. I can understand if someone who does not have much of scientific background could find evolution to be far fetched, but believing that nearly all of the independent scientific community is involved in a vast conspiracy (including astronomers collaborating to “distract us” as ColoradoRon stated)? And for no discernible reason? Now THAT is far fetched beyond measure!

Also, the claim that the evidence is stacking up against evolution and that evolution will be overturned “any day now” has been made since Darwin published his book. Yet more and more evidence piles on – in support of evolution, and still the same old tired arguments against it are recycled.

In one of the older 9 Chickeweed lane strips Juliette and her husband are playing ping pong when Thorax grabs the ball and says "OH here is Gnastok 7, I lost it You expect me to believe that’s an inhabited planet? Thorax, “Not any Longer.”

I’m sorry, does anyone have an English translation of exotidoc2’s post?

I haven’t spoken of evidence, I’ve spoken of probabilities. But you dismiss arguments of probability out of hand, based on your preconceived notions of “impossibilities” taken from a written text of unknown authorship from an era when we knew basically nothing.

The evidence that evolution has occurred on this planet, that species (inclluding homo sapiens) have “changed over time” is overwhelming, and each new discovery strengthens the case rather than weakens it; on the small scale, it has been observed directly, in the exceedingly short period of time during which we’ve both known what to look for and had the technology (genetic analysis) to do so. On this point, it has always struck me as intellectual dishonesty that “Intelligent Deseign” proponents don’t make common cause with the Darwinian evolutionists against the Young Earth Creationists who maintain that the planet is just over 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth alongside human beings. Funny, though. If that sort of argument ever occurs, I’ve never heard of it.

That “natural selection” as Darwin formulated it is the primary/sole force driving these changes is not proven (it’s a “theory” in the COMMON usage of the word, rather than the SCIENTIFIC sense as in “Evolutionary Theory”), but it’s self-evident enough – “It is known that species change/have changed/will likely continue to change over time; some changes are helpful, some are harmful, some are inconsequential, but that can only be determined in retrospect; those individuals carrying helpful changes will survive to pass them along through the generations (and more quickly than those which are inconsequential); while those carrying harmful changes will die out” – that it would take Divine Intervention for natural selection NOT to be operant at some level. It’s also the ONLY explanation put forth for evolution (which, as I’ve stated, HAS OCCURRED) for which there is ANY direct evidence AT ALL; we’ve seen it in occur in microorganisms in very short periods of time.

To discount probability out-of-hand is ridiculous. We are talking about processes that occurred over BILLIONS of years, in an experimental laboratory the size of a planet. When we take the purely natural phenomena that we HAVE observed in the relative blink of an eye, in tiny little laboratories, and extrapolate those results to a PLANET that has been around for BILLIONS of years, and what once would have been though “impossible” becomes, if perhaps not inevitable, at least “very likely.”

By the same token, the more planets we know of, the more likely we’ll find some (perhaps thousands or millions) with similar conditions to those on earth. If there are similar planets, it’s entirely possible (although not inevitable) that they have similar biological histories (or “have had”; one possibility to keep in mind that there have been intelligent life forms who once lived but have since died out).

But if it’s evidence you demand, can you tell me what evidence YOU have that God (or “a god” or “the gods”; I’m not picky) created life? By what mechanism does God (etc.) influence the change of species over time? Mind you, pointing out gaps in a competing argument is not direct evidence in itself; it’s simply rebuttal.

“[Y]ou begin to see why God is the Necessary Being. The Christian worldview can provide for each and every one of these things, atheism not a single one.”

The Christian worldview has, as I said, one glaring lack: There is not a single shred of positive evidence that has ever been produced to support it.

Nowhere above have I denied the existence of God (or a god, or gods, take your pick), but nowhere have I presupposed it. Your preferred book tells one story, but there are other stories extant. If I grant, for the sake of argument, that the change of species over billions of years has been “guided” rather than the result of natural forces, what is there to preclude God (or a god…) from doing the same elsewhere? Heck, why not “ancient atronauts”?

I still take issue with your grasp of probability. “Anything with a “probability” greater than 10 to the power of 50 is considered impossible.” Considered by whom? If finite probability of an event can be calculated, however large, then by definition it is NOT “impossible”. If the odds against someting are 10 to the 50th power against, and you conduct 10 to the 50th trials, the odds of it occurring are 1:1. And of course, it MIGHT happen on the very first trial. I’ll take your word on the 10 to the 80th power atoms in the universe, but how many possible interactions can a much smaller number of atoms (say 6.7 × 10 to the 27th, the approximate number of atoms in a human body) effect over the course of a billion years? And of course, the “lucky event” need only occur ONCE, and then you’re off to the races.

“It was calculated that the odds of the horse coming about through natural processes was greater than 10 to the 1000.” Calculated by whom? Were they presuming that a horse would be the end point? Natural selection has no “goal”; horses are simply the current stage on one divergent path from vertebrates to mammals to ungulates to equidae, as turtles and humans and elk and zebras are the current representatives of other paths.

As far as the development of the eye goes, yes, that famously troubled Darwin as well. It is less troubling now than it was 150 years ago, though. Ask me about them again in another 150 years. But if it necessarily evolved multiple times (for the sake of argument), what of it? An eye is a useful thing to have, and once you’ve got rudimentary photosensitive receptor cells, further refinements would provide great advantages in competition against those who don’t have them.

Chimpanzees are more similar to humans that they are to wolves. Wolves are more similar to humans than they are to turtles. Turtles are more similar to humans than they are to bumblebees. What sort of arrogance is it that we presume that the difference between humans and chimpanzees is the one of paramount importance?

(Apart from the fact that, y’know, we’re US. Giraffes might reasonably assume that neck-length is what counts most with the Great Giraffe Gods.)