Selections from Mormon Scholars Testify

[LA Ute]

I know this thread is going to be wildly popular here.

The first entry:

Charles W. Rogers

He's a professor emeritus of physics (I think) at Southwestern Oklahoma State University.

[CardiacCoug]

He would like that Mormon Transhumanist Association:

Consider the progress humankind has made in the last hundred years. What might we do in a thousand years, or in a hundred thousand years? Will we be able to make ourselves immortal? Quite possibly. If civilization stretches into millennia, will people become more righteous, or will we kill ourselves? In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker shows that world-wide violence as measured by murders per capita has steadily decreased over the millennia and more certainly over the last few centuries. That is hopeful. If we had a million years, could we become god-like? I suggest that the answer is yes, and if it is possible, I suggest that it has already been done, since, as has been said, we are latecomers.

[LA Ute]

This is a very sweet and thoughtful piece by Darin Ragozzine, an astrophysicist with a pretty impressive educational pedigree.

While astronomers identified the terrific scale of the universe over the past century, one of the most interesting current developments is the identification of planets just like Earth around other stars. I am an astronomer who studies planets around other stars (extra-solar planets or exoplanets), and am currently working with the Science Team of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. In a short time from this writing (October 2012), Kepler will undoubtedly announce the discovery of a nearly Earth-sized, potentially habitable planet. In some ways, this will be a completion of the Copernican Revolution, which started the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe or special by suggesting that the planets orbited the Sun instead. After identifying a few examples, it is the main goal of the Kepler Mission to then draw statistical conclusions about the prevalence of such planets in our Galaxy (with preliminary estimates already ranging from millions to billions). While Kepler will identify planets that are at the right distance from their stars to have liquid water, whether or not actual water is present requires a large host of other assumptions about the properties of that planet (primarily, that it has a small and well-behaved atmosphere). Although Kepler will bring us closer than ever to identifying planets just like our own in the universe, it will be ten to forty years until these assumptions can be seriously tested; these will remain only “potentially” habitable worlds for decades to come.

Still, with the imminent discovery of potentially habitable worlds and the decades-long search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) via direct efforts to search for intelligent signals, some groups, religious and secular, are thinking about the strength of the fundamental philosophical shift such discoveries may eventually have. Superficial investigations wonder if religions will crumble under such news, but I think that ignores the complexity of the question. I am saddened to say that there are undoubtedly many religions and individuals who will simply ignore any scientific progress on this problem, refusing to take the time to think about the philosophical and cosmographical implications for them personally. (Indeed, most of us don’t currently appreciate on an everyday basis the unimaginably huge universe and our ridiculously small part of it.)