Amici,
Great news from NASA today about the Mars Perseverance Rover landed successfully on Mars. Of course, note the photo showing the Mission Control celebrators are
all Whites (and maybe some Asians) clearly demonstrates NASA is a racist
organization. (Yes, yes, /sarc)
But before our new rulers and woke superiors drill down on that aspect of this, everyone of good will (any of those folks left?) can ourselves celebrate this great achievement.
Perseverance and its helicopter, named Ingenuity,
are great achievements, and we can only hope that Ingenuity flies as
well as they hope it will. Their task is mainly to look for life.
Somehow the astrophysicists, brilliant as they are, never took either
much biology (why would they?) or certainly not metaphysics. I never
cease to be amazed at how they seem to think life just pops up where
certain environmental conditions are met, so news reports and interviews
and "scientific" essays are just full of talk about "the building
blocks of life" and so on, as though living matter was nothing but
complicated chemicals and acids, with a little electrical charge thrown
in.
On
Earth, we know life exists pretty much everywhere on (and in) the
planet, from psychrophiles deep in massive sheets of ice to thermophiles
deep in the Earth's crust, and various others, incredible life that can
manage high pressure or high salt or whatever: mostly microorganisms
that are called "Extremophiles" – the highly diversified
organisms that basically could be said to make the planet itself alive.
But what I never see is the obvious conclusion that life on Earth not
only adapts to every condition imaginable, life also adapts Earth for life, "terraforming" the Earth so life can flourish here.
You'll
often see it said that more than 99 percent of all organisms that have
ever lived on Earth are extinct. But look at that from another angle.
How amazing it is that life keeps producing such variety and abundance
that it can afford to let so much of itself "go extinct". Famously,
there have been a number of mass extinctions, such as when a piece of
comet (likely) created the Chicxulub crater and ended the Cretaceous
Period. (Do you realize that we are closer in time to the T-Rex than the
T-Rex was to the Stegosaurus? That's an example of how long Dinos
"ruled the Earth".) But basically, it has been Earth’s carbon cycle –
such as large igneous province eruptions, huge volcanoes flooding vast
stretches of the planet with lave flows (Venus is a perfect storm of
volcanoes and planet-wide lava flows) that was the major driver of mass
extinctions. And yet, regardless of how bad it got for whatever reason,
life flourished. It refused to let go, as it were, and as I say, it
"terraformed" Earth despite every setback, cosmic or home-grown.
Astrophysicists
seem to think, however, that life just "generates" hither and yon
whenever certain basic conditions are met, a lamebrained notion
astrophysicists operate from as they "search" for life on Mars, Venus,
Jupiter's moons, etc. They're apparently utterly clueless that we have
NO clue how life started on Earth, or that life is a different category
of being entirely from the basic chemical and acidic elements that
constitute it on the molecular level. They're clueless that, as old John Lennox says, DNA is a language, the most complicated, longest word
we've ever discovered. ("3.5 billion letters in exactly the right order"; a great discussion
from Prof Lennox.) But from what we see of life on Earth, surely it must
obvious to any thinking individual that had life ever existed on
either Venus or Mars, it would have long ago "terraformed" them as it
has terraformed Earth. Life would have prevented Venus from
super-heating and Mars from super-cooling. Life is transformative, and,
in a real sense, indestructible.
I myself have never read anywhere where any
of these Astrophysics guys made this obvious deduction, reasoning from
the analogy of how life has completely transformed Earth. Pretty
incredible, really. But there it is. Whatever.
So
congratulations to the scientists and engineers at NASA for their
stupendous achievement. It is simply great news, even though they'll
never prove life just sort of self-assembles spontaneously and evolves
the DNA necessary for life's myriad functions.
Alas,
though, I wonder how long before the Chinese Communists infiltrate NASA
as thoroughly as they have Harvard and other of our highest-level
academic institutions. And they "do space" for military reasons, my
friends. They read their Sun Tzu, believe me.
An P
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