Mars, Aliens, and SETI

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

I’d love to be talking about unambiguously artificial signals picked up by the Allen Telescope Array, or reports of a ship from beyond the Solar System settling into orbit around our moon.

But that hasn’t happened, and probably won’t. Not in my lifetime.

Instead, I’ll talk about why I don’t “believe in” extraterrestrial life; and do not assume that we are alone in the universe. That puts me in the third of folks who aren’t sure, and I’ll get back to that.

My ‘Friday’ posts are usually about more-or-less-current ‘science news.’ That won’t happen this week. I’ve read a few interesting articles, and will be talking about them — after the Christmas-New Year’s gymkhana is over.

This week I’m using material that didn’t quite fit into an earlier post. I’ll also talk about the Great Moon Hoax, Nicola Tesla and Martians, and what I think about life in the universe.

  1. Science and Silliness in the 19th Century
  2. Lovecraft and “a Placid Island of Ignorance”
  3. Mars: Canals, Pulp Fiction, and Robot Spaceships
  4. Aliens, an Opinion Poll; Serious SETI and CETI

Alone in the Universe: or Not

As of this week, we don’t know whether life exists anywhere other than Earth: apart from what we’ve sent, and the occasional microscopic hitchhiker.

We may learn that life began on many other worlds.

Or we may still be searching for extraterrestrial life when our descendants are discussing the pros and cons of sending probes to other galaxies.

Either way, I think that we’ll learn a great deal about how this universe works — and discover that there is even more left to learn.

1. Science and Silliness in the 19th Century


(From NASA/JPL-Caltech, used w/o permission.)
(M31, the Great Andromeda Galaxy, one of 54 galaxies in the Local Group, photographed in ultraviolet light by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer.)

We’ve been learning a great deal about the universe since Proposition 27/219 of the Condemnation of 1277 reminded academics that God decides what’s real, not Aristotle. (December 2, 2016)

As it turns out, Aristotle was wrong. There are other worlds. Thousands that we’ve found so far in our little corner of the Milky Way Galaxy.

We’ve got pretty good maps of several in the Solar System by now, and I’m getting ahead of myself.

In 1764, Charles Messier put the Andromeda Galaxy in his catalog as a nebula: object M31. By the 19th century, astronomers like William Huggins realized that some light from the Andromeda “nebula” resembled light from stars.

In 1925, Edwin Hubble used observations of Cepheid variable stars to demonstrate that the Andromeda Galaxy was another “island universe:” far outside our Milky Way Galaxy. I’m skipping a lot of folks, like Ernst Öpik.

The point of this trip down memory lane is that we were learning a lot, fast.

Going Ballistic over Darwin

Charles Darwin’s theory wasn’t the first discussion of how life has been changing.

Aelius Galenus was a doctor when Antoninus Pius was Emperor, and died around the time Justin Martialis assassinated Caracalla — there’s a story behind that, by the way.

Anyway, Galenus figured monkeys were like us, since they look a little like us. He was almost right. (July 15, 2016)

Darwin’s theory of natural selection got mixed up in 19th century English politics. (October 28, 2016)

That may help explain why so many folks go ballistic over Darwin, evolution, and science in general. H. P. Lovecraft didn’t help, and I’ll get back to that, too.

The Great Moon Hoax: 1835


(“Nouvelles découvertes dans la Lune….” A lithograph of The Sun’s ersatz “Great Astronomical Discoveries” coverage, translated into French.)

If you believe everything you see in the news, we’ve known that there is extraterrestrial life since 1835:

“GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES LATELY MADE BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c.
At the Cape of Good Hope
[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]”
(Dr. Andrew Grant, The Sun, (August 25, 1835) via Wikipedia)

The smaller picture is a lithograph from The Sun’s six-day coverage of Sir John Herschel’s (alleged) observations.

Dr. Andrew Grant never existed, and we’re still not quite sure who wrote those articles for The Sun. Richard Adams Locke, a writer whose knowledge of history and science made his padded resume seem plausible, is the obvious suspect.

About the “great astronomical discoveries:” Sir John Herschel hadn’t really built a beyond-next-generation telescope at the Cape of Good Hope; and hadn’t seen bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tailless beavers and bat-winged people on the moon.

Eventually somebody checked into the story’s source, learning that the Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publication in 1833: years before Herschel’s alleged discoveries.

The story was still worth reporting, though, and by 1852 was making the rounds in at least some European papers.1

Tesla, Wireless Telegraphy, Martians – – –

Nicola Tesla moved to Colorado Springs on May 17, 1899.

Folks could hear his artificial lightning and thunder 15 miles away. Tesla’s experiments raised sparks on nearby sidewalks, and caused a power outage in August.

He did not, however, use his magnifying transmitter as a reading light. That photo was a double exposure, made by Dickenson V. Alley as a promotional stunt. As Tesla later explained:

“Of course, the discharge was not playing when the experimenter was photographed, as might be imagined!”
(Nicola Tesla, Colorado Springs Notes, via Wikimedia Commons)

When he wasn’t electrifying his neighborhood, Tesla experimented with radio communications: a new field in those days. In December 8, 1899, he sent a letter to reporter Julian Hawthorne, saying that he’d picked up odd signals that could be from another planet.

Pretty soon, news that Tesla was communicating with Martians was spreading through at least the English-speaking world. It made a good story.

I think folks who figure that he’d picked up test transmissions from another human’s wireless experiments are right. Marconi was working on long-range transmitters around that time, and so were quite a few other folks.

Why were so many folks so ready to believe that non-human people lived on Mars, the moon, and elsewhere?

Let’s look at what had been happening in the 19th century.

– – – And the Wonders of Science

Steam locomotives were pulling freight and passengers faster and farther than horses ever could. Also adding phrases like “train wreck” to my native language.

Georg Ohm was bringing the world closer to electric lights, spin dryers and rolling blackouts.

The McCormick Reaper and other newfangled tech was making agriculture more efficient.

“The Contagiousness of puerperal fever,” by Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr., and Ignaz Semmelweis’ observations eventually resulted in doctors killing fewer pregnant women, and I’ve talked about that before. (October 30, 2016)

Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Louis Proust, and John Dalton were laying the groundwork for atomic theory.

Folks who didn’t know much about science or mathematics may have been ready to believe just about anything written about scientists. Don’t laugh: 43 out of 50 folks signed a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide not all that long ago.

Meanwhile, János Bolyai, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, and Bernhard Riemann unleashed non-Euclidean geometry upon an unsuspecting world.

2. Lovecraft and “a Placid Island of Ignorance”

Non-Euclidean geometry apparently gave H. P. Lovecraft fits. Or maybe he figured his readers would think it sounded cool.

Either way, I get the impression that he didn’t like science.

“…The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age….”
(“The Call of Cthulhu,” H. P. Lovecraft (1929); via WikiQuote)

I don’t see knowledge and science that way, but I’m a Catholic who understands our faith.

Some of our Saints, like St. Albertus Magnus and St. Hildegard of Bingen. were scientists back when science was still called natural philosophy. (October 30, 2016; July 29, 2016)

I’ve talked about science, truth, and Pope Leo XIII, before. (July 15, 2016)

Basically, studying natural processes is a good idea. It’s one way we can learn more about God. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 31–35)

We think God is large and in charge, and rational. As St. Iranaeus pointed out, we’re rational and therefore like God; with free will. (Catechism, 268, 2112–2114, 1730, 1934, 1951)

We don’t worship nature — that’d be idolatry — so we can study it without fear of offending ‘the spirits.’ (Catechism, 282–283, 2112–2114)

Greco-Roman culture and beliefs didn’t allow autopsies. That’s why Galenus studied monkeys.

The Church says treating bodies of the dead with respect and charity is important: and that autopsies are okay for legal inquests or scientific research. Organ donation is a good idea, too. (Catechism, 2300–2301)

Today’s medical science and technology arguably exists in large part because Christianity’s attitude toward the study of nature allows autopsies and other scientific research. Where folks accept the Catholic attitude toward using our brains, anyway.

Leaving the Island: and Loving It

It’s been nine decades since Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu.” Some folks still fear leaving our “placid island of ignorance.”

Others are doing what folks have done for at least 1,900,000 years: wondering what’s over the horizon, and finding “wonderful things.” (December 9, 2016)

We’ve found scary things in “deep woods that no axe has ever cut,” as Lovecraft put it in “The Colour Out of Space.”

But we survived, developed better axes, have been learning to be careful with our tools, and that’s another topic. (August 12, 2016)

I don’t agree with Lovecraft’s2 view of reality, as reflected in his Cthulhu stories: but I sympathize with him, a bit.

Living from 1890 to 1937, Lovecraft experienced one of Western civilization’s less tranquil eras: including Modern art, the Titanic’s truncated voyage, and a global war.

Add a string of personal crises, and I can see how he might have imagined that the universe was at best indifferent: if not malevolent.

What we were learning about the scale of the universe probably didn’t help.

That brings me to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892, whose personal life and writing isn’t much like Lovecraft’s at all.

I like some of what he wrote, too. I also think he had a more sensible response to his century’s discoveries.3

“Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face,
“Many a planet by many a sun may roll with a dust of a vanish’d race.

“Raving politics, never at rest—as this poor earth’s pale history runs,—
“What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?…”
(“Vastness,” Tennyson, via Bartleby.com)

If I thought my faith depended on Mesopotamian assumptions being spot-on accurate about how the universe works, I’d be in a pickle. I don’t, so I’m not. (December 2, 2016; August 28, 2016; July 29, 2016)

I think truth is very important, and that God creates everything: the physical realities that science studies, and the spiritual realities that faith pursues. (Catechism, Prologue, 27, 74, 214–217, more under Truth in the Catechism’s index)

Since I think my faith is built on truth, fearing truth would be — illogical. It’s like Pope Leo XIII wrote: “truth cannot contradict truth.” (“Providentissimus Deus,” Pope Leo XIII (November 18, 1893))

I also think insisting that there must — or must not — be other people in this universe is unreasonable. This is God’s creation, so whether or not we have neighbors is up to the Almighty. (July 29, 2016)

3. Mars: Canals, Pulp Fiction, and Robot Spaceships


(From NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS; via Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology; used w/o permission.)

“This view of the downwind face of ‘Namib Dune’ on Mars covers 360 degrees, including a portion of Mount Sharp on the horizon. The site is part of the dark-sand ‘Bagnold Dunes’ field along the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp. Images taken from orbit indicate that dunes in the Bagnold field move as much as about 3 feet (1 meter) per Earth year.

“The component images of this scene were taken on Dec. 18, 2015, by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover during the 1,197th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars….”
(Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology/NASA (January 4, 2016)

Curiosity is the Mars Science Laboratory’s lander, a car-sized robot that’s 1,546 sols/1,588 Earth days into its mission as I’m writing this.

We’ve come a long way since Schiaparelli published his maps.

Paul’s Martians, Secchi’s Canali


(From Giovanni Schiaparelli, via Meyers Konversationslexikon/Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.)
(Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 map of Mars.)

Frank R. Paul’s Martian, from a 1939 science fiction magazine, was arguably more imagination than science.

Mars was looking less and less like Earth.

Astronomers noticed Martian polar ice caps in the 1600s. Giovanni Domenico Cassini’s 1666 observation may have been the first. Other astronomers observed Martian seasonal changes in the 1700s.

Better tech made mapping Mars practical in the 1800s. Fr. Pietro Angelo Secchi, working at the Vatican Observatory, drew some of the first color maps of Mars.

Fr. Secchi described “channels” (canali in Italian) on the Martian surface in 1858. His canali were large features: like “Canale Atlantico,” his name for what we call Syrtis Major Planum.

Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped an extensive canali network 1877. He’d developed an impressively-detailed map by 1886. We still use many of his names for Martian features: like Hellas, Tharsis, and Chryse.

Schiaparelli identified Hellas, one of the Solar System’s largest impact basins, as a small continent or large island. Assuming that bright Martian features were land and dark areas water seemed reasonable at the time.

William Wallace Campbell’s 1894 spectral analysis showed no water in the Martian atmosphere. Folks named Martian feature 991, a crater 125.26 kilometers across, after him. Crater Campbell is centered at latitude -54.25°, longitude 165.58°.4

Crash-Landing on Barsoom


(From Giovanni Schiaparelli, From NASA’s “On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet. 1958-1978, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.)
(Giovanni Schiaparelli’s map of Mars, compiled 1877-1886.)

Percival Lowell was convinced that Schiaparelli’s canali were canals, artificial channels made by an advanced and dying Martian civilization.

Edgar Rice Burroughs published his first Barsoom story in 1912, and Mariner 4 sent back images of Martian craters in 1965.

We’ve been sending robot spaceships to Mars on a fairly regular basis since then.

Some are still in operation, including the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. That mission’s lander, Schiaparelli EDM lander, sent back quite a bit of data before crash-landing on the Meridiani Planum.

The lander probably hit at 300 kph, 186 miles per hour. I don’t think the lander mission was exactly a failure, though. The folks at ESA were testing the landing systems, collected a great deal of data; and that’s yet another topic.5

4. Aliens, an Opinion Poll; Serious SETI and CETI


(From Survata, used w/o permission.)

A Survata poll of Americans, done in 2013 or thereabouts, asked folks for their religious affiliation and then asked “Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life?”6

Roughly a third of American Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists/agnostics weren’t sure about whether we have neighbors.

Interestingly, over half of “other” “believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life.” That may help explain why some American Christians adamantly insist that life mustn’t exist anywhere except Earth.

Me? I’m not sure. We either have neighbors, or we don’t. Right now, we don’t know, and I’m okay with that.

I hope we do have neighbors. For one thing, it would make this universe seem a bit less empty.

For another, comparing notes with folks who aren’t human would be an opportunity to learn how much of ‘human nature’ comes from being critters with free will and bodies; and how much is strictly “human.”

My guess is that we’d learn that a great many of our neighbors are fine folks: but not “human.” At all. Which is why I think nearly every SETI and CETI effort makes unwarranted assumptions.

Herschel’s Solarians, Thousands of Cataloged Exoplanets

Earth’s moon and planets in the Solar system were as unreachable in the 19th century as planets circling other stars are today.

Scientists were learning more about these other worlds, and thought they might be inhabited. It wasn’t a new idea.

William Herschel presented “On the Nature of the Sun and Fixed Stars” to the Royal Society in 1795. He defended his view that our sun is a relatively dark object with a hot, luminous, atmosphere: and said it was probably inhabited, like other planets.7

That wasn’t a crackpot idea at the time.

We didn’t know about nuclear fission or fusion, in the late 18th century; and astrophysics was still learning that Aristotelian assumptions weren’t accurate.

We’ve learned quite a bit since then. William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, showed that our sun would have long since cooled off — if Earth was as old as geologists said and mid-19th-century scientists had uncovered everything there is to know about the universe.

They hadn’t.

Henri Becquerel observed radioactive decay in 1896. Ernest Rutherford, Paul Villard, the Curies, and others, discovered quite a few more radioactive substances. The last I heard, folks were still working the bugs out of practical fusion reactors.

Along the way, we’ve discovered and cataloged more than three thousand planets orbiting other stars: some of which are not all that unlike the one we live on.

We may learn that there’s something very different about the universe beyond our Solar System. But at this point, the question doesn’t seem to be whether there could be extraterrestrial life. It’s why we haven’t seen or heard from extraterrestrial intelligence.8

Assumptions and the Fermi Paradox

The Fermi paradox is the ‘where is everybody’ question. (September 18, 2016)

We’re learning that many of this galaxy’s 100,000,000,000-plus stars have planets somewhat like Earth. We’re finding planets around a remarkable number of them. Some fraction of those planets may support life, which might lead to intelligent life.

Some of those planets are billions of years older than Earth. Folks who are anything like us could have sent interstellar probes here from the other side of the galaxy in about a million years. That’s a very short time, on a cosmic scale.

Maybe the pessimists are right, and we’ll all die horribly right after you read this sentence: just like everybody else has, all over the universe.

I don’t think so, but living with undiagnosed major depression for most of my life has taught me to be dubious about anything that seems like fashionable melancholy or unconsidered pessimism, and that’s yet again another topic. (August 12, 2016)

Maybe Lovecraft was right, and it’s a good thing that we don’t know about Cthulhu. Oddly enough, I think that’s close to one of the more reasonable explanations for why we’re not up to our hips in the Galactic Federation equivalent of empty oil drums.

Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence: the Early Years

Humans are chatty creatures, so we were thinking up ways to communicate with Martians as soon as our technology and economic structures made it practical.

We like acronyms, so these days we call that sort of thing CETI, or communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Carl Friedrich Gauss, or maybe someone else, suggested planting enormous square fields of rye or wheat, outlined in pine forests, forming a giant triangle in Siberia: visual proof that we knew about the Pythagorean theorem.

Joseph Johann von Littrow had pretty much the same idea, except he figured the Sahara would be a better ‘blackboard.’ von Littrow’s proposal was to dig giant trenches, drawing 20-mile-wide shapes.

Filled with water, topped off with kerosene, and ignited, these trenches could send a different signal each night. (Wikipedia)

Bear in mind that radio and environmental impact statements hadn’t been invented yet.

We’ve learned a great deal since the Gauss/von Littrow proposal. Communications satellites routinely route radio messages around the world, and our robot spaceships send reports back by radio.

We’ve learned how to send radio signals to the stars, and have been listening for such signals. Maybe that will be how we make first contact, or maybe not.

Quite a bit of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, assumes that our neighbors, if they exist, use modulated radio signals for long-distance communications. That is an assumption. A big one.

A Million Years isn’t Much


(From Efbrazil, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.)

We’ve learned quite a bit since this was written:

“3 Terrible and awesome are you, stronger than the ancient mountains.”
(Psalms 76:5)

We’ve learned that today’s “ancient mountains” aren’t nearly as old as our planet. But as I keep saying, scientific discoveries are opportunities for admiration of God’s work. (Catechism, 283, 341)

Earth has been around for about 4,540,000,000 years, give or take, and the universe is about three times older. On that scale, a million years isn’t much: 1/13,798th the age of the universe, or 1/4,540th Earth’s age.

I’m in my mid-60s, so 1/4,540th of my life is roughly one and three quarters to five days. Someone who had been born within a week of me would be almost exactly my age.

Let’s compare how many years before today a few key things happened:

On this scale, 154 years is a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ sort of interval.

A million years is a bit longer, bit still only 1/4,540th Earth’s age, and 1/13,798th as long as the universe has been around.

We’ve developed some remarkable tech since Acheulean tools were the latest thing. But I very strongly suspect that talking drums, slit gongs, and the Inmarsat network are not the ultimate communication technologies.

Even if our neighbors are only a million years ‘older’ or ‘younger’ than we are, their cutting-edge tech might be almond-shaped stone hand axes — or whatever we’ll be developing a million years from now.

That’s assuming that they think the same way we do, and are as chatty, and that’s still another topic, for another post.

The quote is from Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” among my favorite poems; and the source for my Google Plus tagline:

“…To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
“Beyond the utmost bound of human thought….”
(“Ulysses,” Tennyson (1833))

Still learning that there’s more to learn:

1 More about the Great Moon Hoax:

2 H. P. Lovecraft and all that:

3 Tennyson’s “Vastness” was originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine, November, 1885 (Vol.LII., pp. 1-4); reprinted in “Demeter, and Other Poems,” 1889. (“The Bibliography of Tennyson,” p. 61; Richard Herne Shepherd; Ardent Media (1896))

4 Mars in retrospect:

5 Mars, imagined; and current exploration:

6 Opinion polls are interesting, and can be useful; but I’m quite sure they measure opinion, not fact:

7 William Herschel and the Solarians is not a rock band:

8 Astrophysics, astrochemistry, and SETI:

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God, Angels, and Belshazzar

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

I don’t know why encounters with angels,1 and God, aren’t all alike.

Sometimes, like Abraham’s meeting with the Almighty and two angels, described in Genesis 18:2, or Habakkuk’s getting airlifted in Daniel 14:33–37, it’s apparently much like meeting another human.

Other times, like Daniel’s interview with Gabriel, it takes days to recover. I suspect that it depends on the personalities involved, and on just how much unshielded power we’re exposed to.

“The writing on the wall” is still an idiom in my language, meaning “the likelihood that something bad will happen.” (TheFreeDictionary by Farlex)

It comes from a reality check Belshazzar experienced.

The chap in the center is Belshazzar, as imagined by Rembrandt. The picture isn’t Babylonian, Neo- or otherwise.

Rembrandt painted it in the 1630s, roughly two millennia after Belshazzar’s time. The ladies seem to dressed along the lines of Henrietta Maria and Susanna Huygens. Folks didn’t always expect strict historical accuracy in paintings, and that’s another topic.2

Belshazzar, after getting at least slightly sloshed, ordered gold and sliver vessels stored with the rest of Nebuchadnezzar II’s loot brought out. (Daniel 5:1–30)

That, I think, wasn’t a big deal. Local and regional leaders had been raiding each other for at least a dozen centuries by then, and this was a big party.

I don’t think alcohol was an issue, either. Being drunk, maybe: indirectly. But let’s get a grip. Our Lord’s first miracle was when Mary told him “they have no wine.” (John 2:3–10)

No, I think the problem was that “they praised their gods of gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone” while drinking from vessels that had been taken from God’s temple in Jerusalem. (Daniel 5:2–6)

That, in 20-20 hindsight, was a very bad idea.

Belshazzar should have known better, as Daniel said in Daniel 5:18–23.

About that, each of us is a rational creature with free will. We can decide what we do or do not do, and are responsible for the consequences of our decisions. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1730–1742)

The Catholic view of responsibility isn’t as stupidly inflexible as it may sound.

If I didn’t know that an action is wrong, like walking off a cliff — I know, unrealistically extreme example, but I’m writing this in a hurry — there would still be consequences: more or less serious, depending on how high the cliff is and what’s at the bottom.

But that daft version of me probably wouldn’t be held accountable by the Almighty. (Catechism, 1735)

If I deliberately maintain ignorance, that’s a problem by itself. (Catechism, 1790–1794)

Lying to God about not knowing any better — would be incredibly stupid, and an exquisitely bad idea. (Catechism, 1859)

George Washington’s Cherry Tree

I think George Washington — bear with me, this makes sense, at least to me — really lived, despite the cherry tree tale.

I’m a trifle less certain about Daniel.

More accurately, I’m not convinced that every anecdote in Daniel is literally true down to the last detail.

I take the book of Daniel quite seriously, along with the rest of the Bible.3 As a Catholic, that’s a requirement. So is “frequent reading of the divine Scriptures.” (Catechism, 101–133)

But I emphatically don’t have to believe that someone with an American viewpoint wrote the Bible.

We don’t know the name of Daniel’s author.

It’s not, strictly speaking, prophetic writing. It’s an early example of “apocalyptic” literature, and that’s another yet another topic.

I do not sift through Daniel, looking for verses that’ll support a nifty new End Times Bible Prophecy. That kind of trouble I don’t need.

“…The moral [of Daniel] is that men of faith can resist temptation and conquer adversity. The characters are not purely legendary but rest on older historical tradition. What is more important than the question of historicity, and closer to the intention of the author, is the fact that a persecuted Jew of the second century B.C. would quickly see the application of these stories to his own plight….”
(Daniel, Introduction, New American Bible)

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Getting a Grip

Daniel and others getting their names changed probably made keeping track of them in Chaldean records harder.

On top of that, Cyrus the Great rolled over that part of the world around 539 BC.

I suspect that cataloging and archiving all Chaldean records wasn’t high on the new regime’s to-do list. I’ve mentioned Cyrus before. (October 2, 2016)

While Chaldeans were still running Babylon, Daniel was among top-drawer young Israelites picked to be in the king’s court.

“2 The chief chamberlain changed their names: Daniel to Belteshazzar, Hananiah to Shadrach, Mishael to Meshach, and Azariah to Abednego.”
(Daniel 1:7)

Like the footnote says, they’re “given Babylonian names as a sign of their adoption by the king.” I suspect the Babylonian names were also easier for the locals to pronounce.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are chiefly famous for not dying when thrown into a furnace. (Daniel 3:13–24)

The lesson here isn’t that worshiping God makes a person fireproof, or that bad things don’t happen to good people.

2 Maccabees 7:1–41 describes eight folks being tortured to death because they wouldn’t “eat pork in violation of God’s law.” Pork isn’t the issue here. It’s keeping God’s law, or not.

I think they made the right choice. Taking the long view isn’t always easy, but I think it makes sense.

“Slay me though he might, I will wait for him; I will defend my conduct before him.
“And this shall be my salvation, that no impious man can come into his presence.”
(Job 13:15–16)

A Temple, Some Lions, and the Living God

That picture is Gustav Doré’s 1866 Bible illustration, “Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts.”

It’s over-the-top imagery appeals to me, and I’ll get back to that.

I like mystery stories, so Daniel 14:1–22 also appeals to me. You know how it goes: Daniel sprinkles ash on the floor in Bel’s temple, and has the door sealed.

Next morning, he and the king examine the seal and take a look around.

“But Daniel laughed and kept the king from entering. ‘Look at the floor,’ he said; ‘whose footprints are these?’
” ‘I see the footprints of men, women, and children!’ said the king.”
(Daniel 14:19–20)

What happens next isn’t so appealing, but I was born in the 20th century and am living in the 21st. We’ve made some headway since Daniel’s time.

By the 46th century, I hope that at least some of what we consider normal legal sanctions will seem unnecessarily harsh. (October 30, 2016; November 21, 2016)

The point of the ‘Bel’s temple’ narrative, and Daniel’s seven days in a lion’s den — that’s in Daniel 14:24–42 — is that God’s God, everything and everyone else isn’t. (Daniel 14:5)

Daniel’s experience with lions reminds me of St. Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio, and that’s yet again another topic.

Gabriel

Daniel’s ‘four kingdoms’ vision, in Daniel 7:1–28, is chock-full of descriptions and discussion of “four immense beasts, each different from the others.” (Daniel 7:3)

I think it’s true, in the sense that we can learn something by reading and studying it.

Some of what’s there is a prediction of what would happen: and has happened, by now. Let’s remember that roughly two dozen centuries have gone by since Daniel’s day.

Some of Daniel’s visions tie in with what’s in Revelation: which is why the lion with eagle’s wings, the bear, the critter with iron teeth, and all the rest, sounded so familiar.

Radio preachers and folks selling the latest thing in End Times Bible Prophecies were full of that stuff in my youth.

They weren’t the first with false alarms and fizzled prophecies, or the last. And that’s still another topic. (December 11, 2016; August 7, 2016 )

Daniel had another vision, couldn’t make head or tail of it, which gets me to Gabriel. I’ll skip over the flying goat, assorted horns, and why I don’t try to second-guess God the Father. I take all that seriously: it’s wannabe prophets that I’m not keen on.

“While I, Daniel, sought the meaning of the vision I had seen, a manlike figure stood before me,
“6 and on the Ulai I heard a human voice that cried out, ‘Gabriel, explain the vision to this man.’
“7 When he came near where I was standing, I fell prostrate in terror. But he said to me, ‘Understand, son of man, that the vision refers to the end time.’ ”
(Daniel 8:15–17)

Daniel was weak and ill for some days after that interview. (Daniel 8:27)

Like I said, I suspect that outcomes of angel-human meetings depend on who meets the angel, who the angel is, and how headquarters defines the mission.

Belshazzar and Ben Franklin

Apparently at least some scholars think Belshazzar really existed, and so did the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean Empire: but that Daniel didn’t.

They’ve got a point, sort of. Daniel lived during the 6th century BC, after 538, more or less.

Someone, obviously not Daniel, wrote the book of Daniel while Antiochus IV Epiphanes was throwing his weight around, in 167 BC. give or take a few years.

Two millennia later, some folks still write stories whose narrators are either long-dead or entirely fictional. Oddly enough, I haven’t heard that Ben Franklin wasn’t real because Robert Lawson wrote “Ben and Me” in the 20th century.4

Nebuchadnezzar couldn’t possibly be Belshazzar’s father. (Daniel 5:2)

As a footnote says, the author may have meant “father” in the sense of “ancestor;” or the author wrote substituted “Nabonidus” with “Nebuchadnezzar.”

When the book of Daniel was written, Nebuchadnezzar II may have had better name-recognition value than Nabonidus.

Nebuchadnezzar II is the Chaldean king who hauled treasure and people from Jerusalem to Babylon. I’ve mentioned him and his urban renewal project before. (October 2, 2016)

My guess is that none of them were Americans, and didn’t have our obsession with “just the facts, ma’am” writing.

More, mostly my take on faith and using my brain:

1 Quick review — Angels are “spiritual, non-corporeal beings” with “intelligence and will,” persons who are as real as we are; but with no bodies. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 328–336)

2 More than you may need or want to know about art and realism:

3 Background:

“…Know what the Bible is – and what it isn’t. The Bible is the story of God’s relationship with the people he has called to himself. It is not intended to be read as history text, a science book, or a political manifesto. In the Bible, God teaches us the truths that we need for the sake of our salvation….”
(“Understanding the Bible,” Mary Elizabeth Sperry, USCCB)

From “10 points for fruitful Scripture reading:”

  1. Bible reading is for Catholics
  2. Prayer is the beginning and the end
  3. Get the whole story!
  4. The Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library
  5. Know what the Bible is – and what it isn’t
  6. The sum is greater than the parts
  7. The Old relates to the New
  8. You do not read alone
  9. What is God saying to me?
  10. Reading isn’t enough
    (From “Understanding the Bible,” Mary Elizabeth Sperry, USCCB)

4 These days, the Walt Disney Productions two-reel “Ben and Me” may be better-known.

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Jesus and Expectations

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

Pip’s Christmas doesn’t have much to do with Christmas, or Advent, but I figured this post should have something that looks ‘seasonal.’

“…Blessed is the One Who Takes No Offense at Me”

We’ll be hearing Matthew 11:2–11 this morning. The readings still aren’t particularly ‘Christmassy.’

“2 When John heard in prison 3 of the works of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to him
“4 with this question, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?’
“Jesus said to them in reply, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see:
“5 the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.
“And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.’ ”
(Matthew 11:4–6)

Our Lord balanced that rebuke with a reminder of the Baptist’s great function in Matthew 11:7–15, and a complaint about folks who wouldn’t listen to John or Jesus.

That’s in Matthew 11:16–19 — and perhaps a reminder that telling the truth can get a mixed response.

Which reminds me: John the Baptist got himself executed for pretty much the same reasons that got Saints Thomas More and John Fisher killed. I’ve talked about Henry VIII, laws, and Chickenman, before. (August 14, 2016)

John’s question makes sense, since he thought our Lord would be imposing fiery judgment. We heard about that last week, in Matthew 3:10–12. My guess is that John was right about an impending fiery judgment, but wrong about its timing.

“the work of each will come to light, for the Day 7 will disclose it. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire (itself) will test the quality of each one’s work.”
(1 Corinthians 3:13)

I think the Final Judgment is ‘imminent’ — from the Almighty’s viewpoint. Like I’ve said, God thinks big.

“4 Indeed, before you the whole universe is as a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.”
(Wisdom 11:22)

“6 7 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.”
(2 Peter 3:8)

I’ll be getting back to that.

Comets, Normans, and Spaceships

Bible-thumping Christians aren’t the only folks who predict apocalyptic events that don’t happen.

Comets were a perennial favorite for doomsayers. Folks seeing something big and new moving across the sky figured it couldn’t possibly be good news.

Unless they were Normans, who saw a harbinger of doom, and maybe figured it was a good time to invade England, since someone’s kingdom would fall, and that’s another topic.

Edmond Halley wasn’t the only one tracking comets after Tycho Brahe demonstrated that they weren’t odd clouds. But he’s the one who noticed that comets observed in 1531, 1607, and 1682, followed pretty much the same track.

He figured it was the same comet, and worked out when it’d show up next. A bunch of other folks fine-tuned his math, and sure enough: Halley’s Comet showed up on December 25, 1758 — not quite when predicted, but close.

The European Space Agency sent a ship to fly by Halley’s Comet, landed another on 67P/C-G, and that’s yet another topic.

Then there was the Great Comet of 1556. Emperor Charles V saw it, said “By this dread sign my fates do summon me,” abdicated, and entered a monastery. Or maybe he quit because of gout.

These days we call the Great Comet of 1556 C/1556 D1. It might be the one seen in 1264, or maybe not. Like I keep saying, there’s lots more to learn.

Fast-forward to 1857. Someone, somewhere, said that the Charles V Comet was coming back: and would destroy Earth on June 13, 1857. That’s what the news said, anyway.

The story probably sold quite a few newspapers, gave at least one cartoonist something to work with, and nearly resulted in a suicide. The comet didn’t show up, we’re still here, journalists still file imaginative reports, and that’s yet again another topic.1

Fast-forward again, to the days of my youth — which I don’t miss. Mass starvation and assorted other catastrophes didn’t happen in the 1970s and ’80s, but the Ehrlichs’ reprise of Malthusian assumptions is still popular in some circles.

A Few Fizzled Judgment Day Predictions

Hippolytus of Rome said the Second Coming would happen in the year 500.

He died a martyr more than two centuries shy of his spurious Parousia. He’s Saint Hippolytus of Rome now. I gather that his feast day is some time in August.

Saints are canonized for their heroic virtue, not for being spot-on accurate. Preferring death to denying our Lord is a short, painful, way to display that virtue. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 828, 2473)

A messy death doesn’t guarantee Sainthood, martyrdom still happens, many Saints died of natural causes, and that’s yet another bunch of topics, for another post or three.

Wikipedia has a (very) partial list of fizzled Judgment Day predictions. There was an impressive cluster around the year 1000: possibly, as Scott Adams suggested, because folks assume that God uses a base 10 counting system, and likes round numbers.

Emanuel Swedenborg was right about what we call the nebular hypothesis. I mentioned that Friday. (December 9, 2016)

Swedenborg also published “The Last Judgment and Babylon Destroyed….” in 1758: announcing that the Last Judgment had happened in 1757 — “in the spiritual world.”

I give him points for originality.

Being Prepared

All that does not, I think, show that Christianity is silly.

It does, I also think, show that humans don’t change much as the millennia roll by. Also that trying to second-guess God the Father is a waste of time, at best.

“21 ‘But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, 22 but the Father alone. …
“… So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”
(Matthew 24:36, 44)

“Therefore, stay awake, 5 for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
(Matthew 25:13)

” ‘But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
“Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.”
(Mark 13:32–33)

“8 ‘Gird your loins and light your lamps …
“… You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.’ ”
(Luke 12:35, 40)

That works for me.

I’ve got my hands full, dealing with my own jobs, and am more than willing to let the top brass handle ‘big picture’ decisions. (November 8, 2016; August 7, 2016)

As far as I’m concerned, our orders haven’t changed, our Lord said that he’d be back, and we’ve still got work to do. If it had been anybody else, we would not still be waiting and working, two millennia later. But Jesus isn’t anybody else. (November 27, 2016)

Where was I? John the Baptist, Jesus, comets, predictions, getting a grip. Right.

I don’t remember what the book was about, or who wrote it, but one chapter included a simple timeline and this question —

‘Before you do something bad, consider this: How long do you plan to be dead?’

I’m pretty sure the author was making the usual carpe diem argument, which makes sense. So does memento mori. (November 11, 2016)

But I took the point differently. Here’s my version of the timeline:

“These Few Years Among the Days of Eternity”

For good or ill, I’ll never die: not permanently. I’ve got another few seconds, years, or decades. Then I’ll experience physical death, which I’m not looking forward to; and a final performance review we call the particular judgment. (Catechism, 1020–1022)

Then I’ll be with our Lord for eternity: or not. (Catechism, 1023–1050)

What happens is up to me: what I do now, and what I decide at my particular judgment.

Nobody’s dragged, kicking and screaming, into Heaven. If I decide that I’d rather not act like a rational creature, I can opt out of Heaven. It’s my decision. It’d be a daft one, but it is possible. (Catechism, 1021–1037)

“The sum of a man’s days is great if it reaches a hundred years:
“Like a drop of sea water, like a grain of sand, so are these few years among the days of eternity.
“That is why the LORD is patient with men and showers upon them his mercy.”
(Sirach 18:7–9)

More, mostly about living like love matters:

1 A Belgian newspaper, Tertio, interviewed Pope Francis recently. He talked about religious fundamentalism, the price of war, the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, and his desire for a synodal Church. He also talked about communications media. What he actually said may not be what you’ll see in the headlines:

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Tides and Our Moon’s Origin

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

Scientists have been wondering how our moon formed, and why its orbit isn’t over Earth’s equator.

It looks like our moon formed after something about the size of Mars hit Earth, roughly 4,500,000,000 years back.

But the giant-impact hypothesis didn’t explain why our moon orbits Earth only five degrees away from Earth’s orbital plane. The math had said that our moon would be orbiting pretty much over Earth’s equator.

  1. When Planets Go Splat!
  2. (Almost) “Tying Up All the Loose Ends”
  3. Looking Beyond Earth’s Moon

God is Large and In Charge

I occasionally wonder if I should keep explaining why reality doesn’t offend me, and why facts don’t threaten my faith.

Then I see something like that billboard. The photo, from a Reddit post, was taken on I-75 in Florida back in 2014.

Someone had pretty much the same display on I-94 near my town earlier this year. That billboard advertised ‘Heaven or Hell’ the last time I drove by, probably for the same group.

I appreciate their concern for the souls of travelers, but not their apparent insistence that salvation depends on rejecting what we’re learning about God’s creation.

I think that God is large and in charge, and creating a universe which follows knowable physical laws. This universe is changing: in a “state of journeying” toward perfection. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 268, 279, 299, 301–308)

I’ve talked about evolution, Ussher, and why I don’t cry out “let the smiting begin” before. (October 28, 2016; October 21, 2016; August 28, 2016; July 31, 2016)

We still don’t fully understand the mechanisms at work in life’s long and complex story. But we’ve known for generations that this world has changed, a lot, since it began.

Asking Questions

Faith and science get along fine, or should.

God gave us brains, pretty good ones. I am quite certain that using them does not offend God. (Catechism, 159)

The Catholic version of faith is a willing and conscious “assent to the whole truth that God has revealed.” (Catechism, 142–150)

That’s pretty much the opposite of rejecting reality. Embracing truth is part of my faith.

A thirst for truth and happiness is written into each of us. Looking for truth and happiness should lead us to God. (Catechism, 27)

We’re created in the image of God, rational creatures whose nature includes curiosity. (Genesis 1:26–27, 2:7; Catechism, 16, 341, 373, 1704, 1730–1731)

Wondering where we came from and where we’re going isn’t idle curiosity. We’re “called to a personal relationship with God,” and can learn something of God by studying God’s creation. (Catechism, 32, 282–289, 299, 301)

This isn’t a new idea:

“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air…. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look; we’re beautiful.’…
“…So in this way they arrived at a knowledge of the god who made things, through the things which he made.”
(Sermon 241, St. Augustine of Hippo (ca. 411) (from www.vatican.va/spirit/documents/spirit_20000721_agostino_en.html (December 6, 2016))

We’ve been finding answers to some questions about this world — uncovering quite a few new questions in the process. I think accepting our increasing knowledge as opportunities for admiration of God’s work makes sense. (Catechism, 283, 341)

I think shouting for joy makes sense, too.

ISS007-E-10807 (21 July 2003) Earth's horizon, over the Pacific Ocean, taken by an Expedition 7 crewmember on the International Space Station.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky proclaims its builder’s craft.
“One day to the next conveys that message; one night to the next imparts that knowledge.”
(Psalms 19:2–3)

“Shout with joy to the LORD, all the earth; break into song; sing praise.”
(Psalms 98:4)

Understanding and Stewardship

From ESA, via NASA, used w/o permission.

We can’t fully understand God.

The Creator is “…incomprehensible, almighty and ineffable … a mystery beyond words.” It’s like St. Augustine of Hippo said:1 “If you understood him, it would not be God.” (Catechism, 202, 230)

This universe may be another matter. Part of our job is taking care of this world. Learning about the universe, and applying that knowledge, is part of our job. (Genesis 1:28; Catechism, 339, 952, 2292–2295, 2402–2405, 2415–2418, 2456)

Our “dominion” isn’t ownership. We’re stewards, responsible for managing God’s world.2 I’ve been over that before. (November 18, 2016; August 5, 2016)

Living With Reality, and Loving It

We’ve known that the universe is big, old, and changeable, for millennia:

“Of old you laid the earth’s foundations; the heavens are the work of your hands.
“They perish, but you remain; they all wear out like a garment; Like clothing you change them and they are changed,
“but you are the same, your years have no end.”
(Psalms 102:26–28)

“4 Indeed, before you the whole universe is as a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.
“But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook the sins of men that they may repent.”
(Wisdom 11:22–23)

We’re learning that it’s really big and old.

Folks like Hildegard of Bingen and Albertus Magnus, both Saints, were changing natural philosophy into science around the time merchants in Lübeck were setting up the Hanseatic League.

A few centuries later, folks like Copernicus and Nicolas Steno added to our knowledge of the universe. “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” got mixed up in post-1517 European politics, and that’s another topic.3

Emanuel Swedenborg outlined a cosmology that included part of what we call the nebular hypothesis in “The Principia.” (1734)

Immanuel Kant published a more detailed speculation in 1755, and so did Pierre-Simon Laplace a few decades later. We don’t know exactly how the process works. But the nebular hypotheses is still the model that fits what we’ve been observing.

We’ve found molecular clouds, protostars, and protoplanetary disks; all of which look and act as predicted by Swedenborg, Kant, and all. Pretty much, anyway. We’ve fine-tuned the math a lot in the last few centuries.

1. When Planets Go Splat!


(From Robin Canup, SwRI; via Astronomy Now, used w/o permission.)
(“The giant-impact theory suggests that the Moon formed out of the debris left over from a collision between Earth and an astronomical body the size of Mars….”
(Astronomy Now))

“Did early Earth spin on its side?”
SETI Institute, Astronomy Now (November 1, 2016)

“New theoretical modelling of the ancient history of the Earth and the Moon suggests that the giant collision that spawned our natural satellite may have left Earth spinning very fast, and with its spin axis highly tilted.

“Computer simulations of what followed the collision, sometimes referred to as the ‘big whack,’ show that following this event, and as the young Moon’s orbit was getting bigger, the Earth lost much of its spin as well gained a nearly upright orientation with respect to the ecliptic. The simulations give new insight into the question of whether planets with big moons are more likely to have moderate climates and life.

” ‘Despite smart people working on this problem for fifty years, we’re still discovering surprisingly basic things about the earliest history of our world,’ says Matija Cuk a scientist at the SETI Institute and lead researcher for the simulations. ‘It’s quite humbling.’…”

We’ve personified the moon as Khonsu, Ay Ata, Phoebe, Chang’e, and that’s yet another topic.

Edmond Halley generally gets credit for drawing attention, in 1695, to a progressive change in predicted lunar eclipses.

Folks like Richard Dunthorne and Jérôme Lalande confirmed that something odd was happening. Laplace added to the mix, so did a bunch of other scientists, and the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment has been giving us more exact data since July 21, 1969.4

Researching this post, I learned that some folks don’t like what’s happening to Earth’s moon. Apparently they say it can’t be doing what it’s doing, because the Bible doesn’t say so. I’m sure they’re sincere. I’m also quite sure that they’re wrong.

Like I keep saying, I’m a Christian and a Catholic. I take the Bible, Sacred Scripture, very seriously. But I don’t assume that the Bible is a science textbook, and I do prefer taking reality ‘as is.’5

Tidal Acceleration and the Leap Second

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that astronomers decided that their observations and math were right.

Earth’s days were getting slightly longer, our moon’s orbit was getting slightly larger, and the process had been going on for a very long time.

Wikipedia has a mercifully-math-free discussion of tidal acceleration.

The gist of it is that Earth’s rotation puts the ocean’s tidal bulge slightly ahead of the Earth-moon line. This transfers angular momentum — pulls on the moon — slowing Earth’s daily spin, and boosting the moon into a higher orbit.

The effects are negligible over a human lifetime, unless you’re one of the folks who maintain the UTC — there’s a story6 behind that acronym — clocks. Earth’s drift away from International Atomic Time is why they added the leap second in 1972.

Earth’s day and our moon’s orbital period would eventually be the same, with one side of Earth always facing the moon. If, that is, our sun wasn’t slowly getting warmer. And that’s yet again another topic.7

2. (Almost) “Tying Up All the Loose Ends”


(From Douglas Hamilton, via ScienceDaily, used w/o permission.)
(“In the ‘giant impact’ model of the moon’s formation, the young moon began its orbit within Earth’s equatorial plane. In the standard variant of this model (top panel), Earth’s tilt began near today’s value of 23.5 degrees. The moon would have moved outward smoothly along a path that slowly changed from the equatorial plane to the ‘ecliptic’ plane, defined by Earth’s orbit around the sun. If, however, Earth had a much larger tilt after the impact (~75 degrees, lower panel) then the transition between the equatorial and ecliptic planes would have been abrupt, resulting in large oscillations about the ecliptic. The second picture is consistent with the moon’s current 5-degree orbital tilt away from the ecliptic.”
(ScienceDaily)

“New model explains the moon’s weird orbit”
University of Maryland, Science Daily (November 1, 2016)

“The moon, Earth’s closest neighbor, is among the strangest planetary bodies in the solar system. Its orbit lies unusually far away from Earth, with a surprisingly large orbital tilt. Planetary scientists have struggled to piece together a scenario that accounts for these and other related characteristics of the Earth-moon system.

“A new research paper, based on numerical models of the moon’s explosive formation and the evolution of the Earth-moon system, comes closer to tying up all the loose ends than any other previous explanation. The work, published in the October 31, 2016 Advance Online edition of the journal Nature, suggests that the impact that formed the moon also caused calamitous changes to Earth’s rotation and the tilt of its spin axis….

The U. of Maryland piece ends with Douglas Hamilton’s sensibly-cautious view of what the team accomplished:

“…’There are many potential paths from the moon’s formation to the Earth-moon system we see today. We’ve identified a few of them, but there are sure to be other possibilities,’ [University of Maryland’s Douglas] Hamilton said. ‘What we have now is a model that is more probable and works more cleanly than previous attempts. We think this is a significant improvement that gets us closer to what actually happened.’ ”
(University of Maryland, Science Daily)

We’ve come a long way since 1898, when George Darwin8 said that Earth and Earth’s moon might have started as a single rapidly-spinning body. Centrifugal force could have caused the Earth/Moon to split.

The idea made sense, and fit what scientists were learning about changes in our moon’s orbit. One of my high school textbooks included the ‘fission’ explanation for the moon’s formation, among others. It said the Pacific Ocean could be a scar left by the event.

George Darwin couldn’t get his math to bring the early moon back to Earth’s surface. But the fission idea, and suggestions that Earth captured the moon, looked better than many others until 1946.

That’s when Harvard’s Reginald Aldworth Daly produced math that said a whacking great impact could have resulted in today’s Earth and moon.

The Plot Thickens

The story gets a bit complicated at that point, partly because scientists have been on a steep learning curve over the last few decades.

Today’s models for planetary formation, based on what we’ve been observing, say that collisions of planet-size bodies were very likely in the early Solar System.9

I don’t know if I like, or dislike, the idea of the early Solar System playing bumper cars with planets. But what I think doesn’t matter.

As I’ve said before, often, my preferences don’t affect reality. Certainly not on that scale. Psalms 115:3 and all that. (November 25, 2016; September 23, 2016; August 28, 2016)

3. Looking Beyond Earth’s Moon


(From NASA, via UC Davis, used w/o permission.)
(“Earth and Moon formed following a massive collision billions of years ago. A new theory answers questions about their composition and the Moon’s orbit.”
(UC Davis))

“New Theory Explains How the Moon Got There”
Andy Fell, News, UC Davis (October 31, 2016)

“Earth’s moon is an unusual object in our solar system, and now there’s a new theory to explain how it got where it is, which puts some twists on the current ‘giant impact’ theory. The work is published Oct. 31 in the journal Nature

“The moon is relatively big compared to the planet it orbits, and it’s made of almost the same stuff, minus some more volatile compounds that evaporated long ago. That makes it distinct from every other major object in the solar system, said Sarah Stewart, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis, and senior author on the paper….”

UC Davis is understandably pleased with Dr. Sarah T. Stewart’s achievement. She’s with their Earth and Planetary Sciences department. Back when I was doing time in academia, it’d have been called the geology department.

Back then, folks who ‘believed in’ flying saucers were making it hard for scientists to discuss what we call exobiology and astrobiology without getting labeled as crackpots.10

That was then, this is now, and the UC Davis piece says that Stewart’s former postdoctoral fellow, Matija Ćuk, is “now a scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.”

About SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I don’t ‘believe in’ extraterrestrial life, or extraterrestrial intelligence. As of this week, I don’t know whether or not we have neighbors. (September 16, 2016)

Many discussions of SETI assume that everybody uses radio for long-distance communication, and is as chatty as we are, and that’s still another topic. (September 18, 2016; September 16, 2016)

Getting back to Earth’s moon and oddness, our own planet is more than a little unusual. Earth is the densest planet in the Solar System, the only one with readily-observable liquid water on the surface, and still the only planet known to support life.11

That could change, though. Kepler-452b isn’t quite ‘Earth 2.0.’ We haven’t found an exact Earth analog yet.

But the NASA Exoplanet Archive’s list of 3,431 planets circling other stars include some intriguing places — like Kepler-62f, Gliese 667 Cc, and Proxima Centauri b. We’ve even found planetary systems that haven’t quite formed yet.

Finding “Wonderful Things”

Some protoplanetary disks, like HL Tauri’s, are close enough for astronomers to observe. HL Tauri’s disk is big, almost three times as large as Neptune’s orbit.

Scientists weren’t expecting to see evidence of planets forming in such a young star’s disk, so there’s more to learn: much more. (“eso1436,” ESO (November 6, 2014))

That’s fine by me. I’d be disappointed if it seemed that we finally had all the answers about this universe.

As it is, I think we’re in the process of learning what some of the questions are. We live in a universe filled with wonders, a cosmic puzzle collection that we’ve barely started solving.

What we learn over the next decade, century, millennium, and beyond, will almost certainly upset some folks. People are like that, but not all people. I’m pretty sure that those of us who want to know what’s over the horizon will keep looking: and finding “wonderful things:”

1That’s not exactly what St. Augustine said, of course. Augustine of Hippo lived about 16 centuries back, long before my language existed. Here’s what he said, in Latin, in ‘sermon 52,’ with what I think is a good-enough translation:

“Quid ergo dicamus, fratres, de Deo? Si enim quod vis dicere, si cepisti, non est Deus:…”

“What shall I say, brothers and sisters, of God? For if that which you want to say, if you understood him, it is not God….”
(St. Augustine of Hippo, via Si comprehendis non est Deus, Wikipedia (Italian))

2 Dominion and stewardship:

3 I’ve talked about scientists, Saints, and getting a grip, before:

4 More about Earth, our moon, and all that:

5 Some of what the Catholic Church says about the Bible (basically, it’s vitally important, that “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”):

  • Catechism of the Catholic Church, 101–133
  • “Dei Verbum”
    Pope Blessed Paul VI (November 18, 1965

Some of my take on the Bible:

6 “UTC” stands for Coordinated Universal Time, temps universel coordonné in French. A person might think that we’d call it CUT, or TUC. But some folks who set it up spoke French, others spoke English, and there’s a history going back at least to the and Norman Conquest, and that’s — another topic.

Anyway, it’s abbreviated as UTC, instead of TUC or CUT, because English speakers originally proposed CUT, while French speakers said it should be TUC. Folks finally settled on UTC, an acronym which would be equally acceptable — or disliked — by both parties.

My opinion is that we should call it “ET,” for Earth Time, but it’s probably too early for that. Besides, quite a few folks probably still remember that movie and there’s that long-running television show.

Astronomers use Terrestrial Time, which I think is a step in the right direction.

UTC is based on International Atomic Time — we call it TAI, of all things — a time standard set by the weighted average of over 400 atomic clocks in more than 50 laboratories at various spots at or near Earth’s surface — coordinated by GPS and two-way satellite time and frequency transfer.

The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency involved with information and communication technologies, recommended today’s UTC setup.

We’re still using leap seconds to keep UT1, the most commonly-used version of UTC, within 0.9 seconds of Solar time at a virtual point on Earth’s surface.

Eventually, Earth Time may be defined as something other than where the sun is, relative to a spot on an island off the European coast — or maybe not. Our current setup puts the International Date Line near the middle of this planet’s largest body of water: which is convenient.

7 If our current educated guesses are spot-on accurate, Earth’s oceans will start evaporating about 1,000,000,000 years from now. By then, we’ll have found out whether WR 104 is aimed at us, and probably will have deflected several ‘extinction event’ asteroids. I suspect there’ll be a lively debate about whether to move Earth, adjust our sun, or evacuate this planet. That’s assuming we’re still interested in such things. A billion years is a long time:

I’ve talked about my reasons for cautious optimism:

8 Charles Darwin might be more — or maybe less — famous, if he wasn’t Charles Darwin’s son:

9 The Solar System’s early years:

10 Life, people, and the universe — sense and occasionally-lethal nonsense:

11 Earth and Earth’s moon:

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Sin, Awareness, Repentance

Posted on December 4, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

Today’s reading from the Gospels, Matthew 3:1–12, doesn’t seem particularly Christmassy. Not in the ‘presents wrapped under the tree’ sense.

“1 2 In those days John the Baptist appeared, preaching in the desert of Judea.
“(and) saying, ‘Repent, 3 for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!’ …

“…When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees 7 coming to his baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?
“Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance…..”
(Matthew 3:1–2, 7–8)

We’ll be getting to the familiar “Christmas story” two weeks from now. That’ll be Matthew 1:18–24, when Joseph learns that he’s involved in a very special mission. About that, apparently Joseph didn’t try to talk his way out of the assignment.

Moses, in the ‘burning bush’ interview, said “but” three times — Exodus 3:11, 13, and 4:1.

He said he wasn’t much of a talker in Exodus 4:10; and asked God to send someone, anyone, else in Exodus 4:13.

He got stuck with the job, anyway.

Isaiah wasn’t exactly thrilled at getting special attention, either. Jeremiah tried to talk his way out of being a prophet, and engaged in a frank discussion or two about his assignment later on; and that’s another topic. (Isaiah 6:5; Jeremiah 1:6; 20:7–18; 15:18)

Salvation and Vipers

John the Baptist is called “the Baptist” partly because he baptized Jesus. (Matthew 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11)

John balked when Jesus wanted to be baptized, and for good reason.

He knew who — and what — our Lord is. The Son of God did not need baptism for himself. Our Lord’s baptism was a gesture “to fulfill all righteousness.” (Matthew 3:13–15; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1224)

“Salvation comes from God alone,” but baptism is important, too. (Catechism, 169, 620, 1213-1274)

So is recognizing that I need to be saved, and that gets me back to St. John the Baptist and vipers. He wasn’t telling the “brood of vipers” to come back with baskets of produce. Folks were being baptized “as they acknowledged their sins.” (Matthew 3:6)

“The Whole Law and the Prophets”

A footnote explains that Pharisees were huge fans of the law. Scribes, experts in the law, were generally Pharisees.

The Sadducees were priestly aristocrats, mostly found in Jerusalem. They were gung ho about the law, too: but only what’s in the Pentateuch. They didn’t like the rest.

No wonder Pharisees and Sadducees freaked when Jesus showed up.

Our Lord boiled “the whole law and the prophets” down to ‘love God and your neighbor.’ We see that in Matthew 22:35–40. Jesus didn’t show them the deference they’d gotten used to, either. (Matthew 16:1–4; Mark 12:17; Mark 12:24)

I’m guessing that not all Pharisees and Sadducees were clueless. Gamaliel showed good sense in Acts 5:38–39, and that’s yet another topic.

Acting Like Truth Matters

Matthew 7 starts with pretty good advice:

“1 2 “Stop judging, that you may not be judged.
“For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”
(Matthew 7:1–2)

Jesus talks about false prophets and fruit in Matthew 7:15–20, winding up in Matthew 7:21–27 by comparing the wisdom of building a house on a rock or on sand. That bit starts with this warning:

” ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, 10 but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
(Matthew 7:21)

That make sense to me. I don’t see the point in believing something is true, unless I act as if it matters. It’s like James1 wrote:

“You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble.
“Do you want proof, you ignoramus, that faith without works is useless?
“Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?
“You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by the works.”
(James 2:19–22)

“Works” is what happens when I love God, and my neighbor, as I should; and see everyone as my neighbor. (Matthew 5:43–44, 22:36–40; Mark 12:28–31; Luke 6:31, 10:25–27, 29–37; Catechism, 2196)

Sin and Holy Willie

When I do or think something in a way that offends reason, truth, and God; or fail to act or think with love; I sin. (Catechism, 1849-1851)

That happens more often than I like.

When it does, I could congratulate myself that I didn’t indulge in the “drinking bouts, orgies, and the like” cited in Galatians 5:21.

Or I could go full Holy Willie, asking God to smite folks I don’t like, while glossing over my own shortcomings. That sort of sanctimonious hypocrisy is a bad idea, and I shouldn’t do it. (Matthew 5:21–22, 23:1–12; Catechism, 2262, 2468)

Instead, I figure acknowledging that I messed up makes sense. Happily, the Church recognizes that we’re all sinners. And, like it says in the Apostles Creed, I believe in the forgiveness of sins. (Catechism; Chapter Three, Article 2, The Credo; 827; 976-983)

Recognizing that I’ve sinned won’t do much good if I stop there.

“After John had been arrested, 8 Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God:

” ‘This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.’ ”
(Mark 1:14–15)

Ongoing Inner Conversion

God is merciful, and expects us to show mercy.

“Like a drop of sea water, like a grain of sand, so are these few years among the days of eternity.
“That is why the LORD is patient with men and showers upon them his mercy.”
(Sirach 18:8–9)

“Hear the word of the LORD, O people of Israel, for the LORD has a grievance against the inhabitants of the land: There is no fidelity, no mercy, no knowledge of God in the land.”
(Hosea 4:1)

“For the judgment is merciless to one who has not shown mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.”
(James 2:13)

I’m not a particularly spectacular sinner. I haven’t robbed a bank, murdered someone, or anything like that. But my low-profile lapses in living as if love matters add up. I recognize my need for mercy.

Getting baptized was an important first step; in my case, done while I was an infant. What I’m doing now is an ongoing inner conversion. It’s not just navel-gazing. I’m expected to live as if my repentance is real. (Catechism, 1422-1470)

And that’s yet again another topic.

More; mostly about love, mercy, and getting ready:

1 This James is likely the one mentioned in Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3. (Introduction, James, New American Bible)

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