contemplation: I believe
the Big Bang: At the first of ELOHIM creating the skies and the land -- and the land was desolation and emptiness; and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of ELOHIM was hovering over the face of the waters--and ELOHIM said, "Let there be light"; and it was light. And ELOHIM saw the light, that it was good; and ELOHIM separated between the light and between the darkness. And ELOHIM called to the light "day," and to the darkness he called "night." And it was evening and it was morning -- day one. (TEV, Genesis 1:1-5)
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Our tribal metaphor by James D Tabor.
Not many will read this, but mox nix mir, it's this morning's rambling lenten contemplation by me for me to me.
The sense of it is that you and I do not see the same or believe the same. What do I believe, what's my religion? It has to do with how Eucharistic Prayer C puts it:
At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home. (By your will they were created and have their being.),
except that the word "command" conveys a sense of the imperative, which is not there, which "yeh-hi" is not, "yeh-hi" is assent with a will that frees the addressed object, Creation, to develop; that looses Nature to evolve from what is to what God hopes may be - - from our perspective, human creatures living in the likeness of God, imaging the Creator as exemplified in Jesus.
Jesus, who came to say Love God Love Neighbor and to reset our realization that our neighbor is not our own tribesmen but every human being on Earth. This is my religion, which ties in with two essays by Avi Loeb that I read this morning in the online magazine "Medium."
"Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024."
One essay is copy and pasted complete below; his opening paragraph of the other essay is copy and pasted below.
For these and other intelligent thoughts as opposed to egocentric human myopia,
RSF&PTL
T90
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Why Do We Exist?
Humans arrived at the cosmic stage relatively late, in the last 0.01 percent of cosmic history. We are not at the center of stage, since we reside on planet Earth which orbits the Sun and the Sun orbits the center of the Milky-Way galaxy, which is one out of a trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. Given that we arrived late and we are not featured centerstage, the cosmic play is not about us. Yet, we can still ask how we got here.
The cosmic play started in the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. We can only trace our roots out to the distance travelled by light since then. This sets the finite size of the cosmic stage which is visible to us, and we do not know what lies beyond its horizon.
On that stage, the initial conditions were remarkably synchronized to a part in 100,000. During the first 50,000 years of cosmic history, the mass budget was dominated by radiation. Subsequently, as the radiation cooled matter dominated, and small inhomogeneities in the matter distribution started growing gravitationally. The cosmic expansion of regions that were slightly denser than average was slowed down by self-gravity, leading ultimately for their turnaround and collapse into bound objects. The Milky-Way galaxy was one of these bound regions.
The first generation of galaxies formed 50 million years after the Big Bang. Inside of them, gas cooled and condensed to make the first stars out of the primordial hydrogen and helium left over from the hot Big Bang. These stars were much more massive than the Sun, as cooling into smaller fragments was inefficient without heavy elements. The first heavy elements were synthesized inside these early fusion reactors. Within a few million years, the first massive stars exploded as supernovae and enriched their surroundings with the elements that enable life-as-we-know-it, such as the oxygen in water molecules or the carbon in organic molecules.
Subsequent generations of stars enriched the interstellar medium further and eventually led to the formation of metal-rich stars like the Sun in the last third of cosmic history.
The Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago. Inside the debris disk that was left from its formation process — dust particles settled to the disk midplane where they coagulated to make bigger and bigger rocks. These so-called planetesimals eventually grew in size to make rocky planets. One of these planets — the Earth — resided in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could flow on its surface owing to atmospheric pressure.
An early collision of Earth with a Mars-sized impactor birthed the Moon which stabilized the spin of Earth. As the Moon receded, its growing orbit reduced Earth’s spin and the duration of a day grew from 4 hours to 24 hours (as reported here).
The soup of chemicals on Earth enabled the emergence of primitive life in the form of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) 4.2 billion years ago. Complex life, in the form of early eukaryotes, appeared on Earth around 2.1 to 2.9 billion years ago (as reported here), during the Earth’s midlife, roughly when Mars lost its atmosphere and surface liquid water to become a desert.
Humans emerged only in the last few million years. This cosmic history should teach us humility. We are minor actors on the cosmic stage and we exist because of everything that preceded us. Terrestrial life is fragile and could disappear once the delicate conditions enabling it will disappear as they did on Mars.
Nobody would mourn the loss of humanity unless we make sure that our descendants travel to the stars where the history books are being written by the most accomplished cosmic survivors.
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The Inevitable Death of the Earth Inside the Sun
In 7.6 billion years the Sun will expand as a red giant star and engulf the Earth. Friction on the solar envelope will drag the Earth inwards towards the core of the Sun where it will evaporate and disperse into hot gas at a temperature of thousands to millions of degrees.
This inevitable future is macabre. All human creations on Earth will be gone, including buildings, statues, books and digital content, as well as mansions, bank accounts and yachts of the most privileged individuals. Our artificial satellites will be lost and the Moon would quickly crash on Earth even before the Earth will disperse. The information that defines our civilization in our computers will disappear in a hot soup of free nuclei and electrons. Extraterrestrials will be unable to recover our culture once the Universe will grow older by 55% of its current age.
Thinking about the inevitable death of Earth should give us a pause. The territories over which people sacrifice their life in Ukraine and the Middle-East today will not exist in the future. Given this gruesome fate, are terrestrial disputes really worth it? Instead of killing each other, the intelligent thing for us to do is to cooperate and use our resources to develop the technologies that would allow us to escape global existential catastrophes. Science is better than politics.