Religion and the Sweet Science

[edgarg]

Hi boxing fans,

We hear many boxers thanking God, but as a fan of a sport which can often be brutal, I wondered what your stance on Religion is? Are you deeply devout? Agnostic? Athiest?

As a huge admirer of Stanley Kubrick, I would like to share his stance with you all and welcome any thoughts, criticisms, agreement:

I'd be very surprised if the universe wasn't full of an intelligence of an order that to us would seem God-like. I find it very exciting to have a semi-logical belief that there's a great deal to the universe we don't understand, and that there is an intelligence of an incredible magnitude outside the Earth. It's something I've become more and more interested in. I find it a very exciting and satisfying hope.

I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe.

Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high.

Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine en******—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

About 50 years ago, before Kubrick, (who may have got the idea from him because Asimov gave advice to Roddenberry re Startrek) Isaac Asimov wrote something similar in a long editorial for a science magazine which I still have somewhere, principally because of that editorial, (the concepts that Kubrick mentions are almost identical to Asimov's). He was discussing the possibility of UFO's which many readers had been writing to him about.

He took a round figure of the present (the 1960s) as being the possible life bearing planets in the universe, and he said that there would be even a far greater number which were as yet undiscovered. He then took this figure which I seem to recall was around 20,000 and estimated that at least 70 would have intelligent life forms which would be far superior to present humankind. He said that they would be so far away that if they spent the time to get here, they would not be wasting it buzzing around a planet like earth with a much lower intelligence than their own, which was only in the Atomic Age. He could not believe that they would be wasting their time appearing to individual farmers on lonely roads at 4 a.m. or any of the others who have sworn that they've seen them-always when there are no other witnesses around.

He could not believe that if they didn't want to be seen, that they would doubtless long since have discovered invisibility.

I believe that he ended it by saying that he'd calculated it mathematically, and didn't think that anyone else had as yet come up with a better.

Asimov was one of the great literary intelligences of our times. I've only roughly repeated his essay, and I could be a little wrong here and there. He must have written several hundreds of books and maybe thousands of short stories, and umpteen other things. I recall that he was reported to have written over 100,000 private letters to readers and others. His entry on the internet would take at least an hour to read, maybe longer to understand.

I believe that -in those bad old days -he was rejected at his first college..........

[lefthook2daliva]

About 50 years ago, before Kubrick, (who may have got the idea from him because Asimov gave advice to Roddenberry re Startrek) Isaac Asimov wrote something similar in a long editorial for a science magazine which I still have somewhere, principally because of that editorial, (the concepts that Kubrick mentions are almost identical to Asimov's). He was discussing the possibility of UFO's which many readers had been writing to him about.

He took a round figure of the present (the 1960s) as being the possible life bearing planets in the universe, and he said that there would be even a far greater number which were as yet undiscovered. He then took this figure which I seem to recall was around 20,000 and estimated that at least 70 would have intelligent life forms which would be far superior to present humankind. He said that they would be so far away that if they spent the time to get here, they would not be wasting it buzzing around a planet like earth with a much lower intelligence than their own, which was only in the Atomic Age. He could not believe that they would be wasting their time appearing to individual farmers on lonely roads at 4 a.m. or any of the others who have sworn that they've seen them-always when there are no other witnesses around.

He could not believe that if they didn't want to be seen, that they would doubtless long since have discovered invisibility.

I believe that he ended it by saying that he'd calculated it mathematically, and didn't think that anyone else had as yet come up with a better.

Asimov was one of the great literary intelligences of our times. I've only roughly repeated his essay, and I could be a little wrong here and there. He must have written several hundreds of books and maybe thousands of short stories, and umpteen other things. I recall that he was reported to have written over 100,000 private letters to readers and others. His entry on the internet would take at least an hour to read, maybe longer to understand.

I believe that -in those bad old days -he was rejected at his first college..........

Hell yeah! Let's make this into a sci-fi thread.

I'm a fan of Asimov's Foundation series. It's been awhile, but I've read em' a couple of times.

What do you think of H. Beam Piper? The Federation books are great and there are a few new authors taking the Space Viking portion in different directions.