In connection with the landing of the Perseverance Rover:
An eight-year-old student named Sai asks if aliens want to contact us. Jacco van Loon, astrophysicist and Director of Keele Observatory steps up to the microphone in the “Curious Kids” service of The Conversation to give the official Darwinian answer. He admits that nobody knows what aliens are thinking, but he never questions the existence of aliens, and why they must be there.
“The question presumes that aliens do exist. And again, because we haven’t found any yet, we don’t know if they do. It is possible they may exist, for one simple reason: we exist. Whatever made the likes of bacteria evolve into complex bodies with intelligent brains on Earth may have also occurred on another planet.” …
“On Earth this transformation seems to have taken place quite suddenly some 700 million years ago. At that time the Earth was already almost 4 billion years old, and had been inhabited by simple lifeforms such as bacteria for much of that time. Why did it not happen sooner? And what made it happen? Until we find the answers to those questions we cannot tell how likely it is that it also occurred elsewhere.”
It is fallacious to build a case on an example of one. van Loon speculates that since humans are curious and want companionship, aliens probably want that, too.
David F. Coppedge, “NASA Indoctrinates Kids to Expect Aliens” at Creation-Evolution Headlines
Aliens are fun but, for all practical purposes, they’re fiction. At Mind Matters News, we do Sci-fi Saturday under an Arts & Culture head. In the real world, we will be lucky to find a fossil bacterium on Mars. It’ll be colossal news and for a while people will forget about the fantasy space aliens.
But in the meantime, if NASA is going to market vast materialist claims for how evolution happens, it’s only fair to ask for equal time for ID.
Here’s the landing: