Day Books: Sunday, 1997-06-08 07:35 EDT - Freeman Lake

When I asked him why he was carrying it, he said, "I know, 'Never trust a programmer with a screwdriver.'" Then he thought for a second and said, "Now does that mean, "Never trust a programmer WITH a screwdriver,' or 'Never trust a programmer ... with a screwdriver'?"

Ahh, the ambiguities of the English Language. How could we ever hope to communicate with EBEs (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities) when we can't even communicate with ourselves?

And as we were laughing at what he'd said, I thought about how many people I knew who could not have understood the different meanings that could be taken from the statement. I hate to have to explain a joke, but it leads to something completely unrelated, so please bear with me a moment. :-)

On the one hand, it's an admonission not to give one's trust to a programmer who is already in possession of a screwdriver. On the other hand, it's an admonission not to allow a programmer to come into possession of a screw driver. The gripping hand is that programmers and screwdrivers are a Bad Combination and should be avoided at all costs; experience has shown that Murphy's Law comes into effect in such situations, resulting in beaucoup Serious Bad Karma.

This anecdote interrupted a conversation we were having about Biblical studies, he having attended a Jesuit school, I being a Sunni Muslim, and both of us having endured Catechism. (That'd be Roman Catholic Sunday school, which is not to be confused with Protestant Sunday school!)

We were discussing the fact that from a literary standpoint, what makes the Qur'an different from the the Torah and the Old and New Testaments is that it is told in the first person and that it is referencial. By this I mean that it is the Word of Allah as spoken by the Angel Gabriel ... and repeated, memorized, and recorded verbatim. Thus we find statements which can be translated into English as, "Remember how our servant so-and-so ...," and then follows a story familiar from the Old Testement or the Torah, such as the story of Lot or the story of Job.

I was bemoaning the fact that many muslims, although they have read the Qur'an many times, do not know the rest of the story as presented in these older Divine Books because they have never read them, and in some misguided cases, believe that to do so would be an act of shirk, or "disbelief", which is a Great Sin. (I call them "misguided" because there are very strong reminders that these books are to be revered, if not studied, as True Books, but when in doubt about "contradictions", then the Qur'an should be the Final Authority since it is the Most Authentic of the Divinely Revealed Books.)

Which brought us back to the ambiguity of "Remember ...", because it could mean, "Don't forget what I am about to tell you," or "Think back to such-and-such event that you already know about." The latter assumes prior knowledge on the part of the reader, and since some of these stories are common between the Qur'an and these older books, they are either (a) not repeated in the same detail, or (b) they have a slightly different spin.

The point is, my first copy of the Qur'an was an English translation with footnotes that contained references to the Old and New Testaments. But for Muslims who have only read copies in the original Arabic, devoid of the references, I began to wonder how much of Allah's Message were they missing?

Brian and I had watched a portion of a movie about the Bible ... the scene about Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah. Anyone who claims to be a "True Believer" has heard this story:

God was angry at the people of these cities because they were doing Wicked Things, so He was going to destroy them. But first He sent a pair of angels to His servant Lot to warn him that the True Believers should flee and not look back. Then Lot tried to bargain with the angels for God to spare the cities if he could find a few Honorable Men among the non-believers, which, of course, he couldn't. So while they were fleeing the city, Lot's wife looked back upon the Wrath of God and was turned into a pillar of salt. 'Nuff said.

I asked Brian my favorite Biblical Trivia question ... "What is gommorahmy?"

Quick as a flash, he comes back with, "It's the Wicked Thing that they were doing in Gommorah."

"Bloody programmer!" I said. "Stop being so literal. What was the nature of this Wicked Thing, and it ain't the same thing they were doing in Sodom!"

"Oh, well, I'm, like, Totally Clueless, man," he replied.

"Gee, you must have been home sick that day. Well, what they wuz doin' in Gommorah was turning away strangers. You know that empty place that they set at a Jewish sadar? Well, that's the exact opposite of what they were doing in Gommorah, and that's why God cursed them."

And that's the part of the story that you won't find in the Qur'an, but if you take the "Remember ..." part by the second meaning, then you can't learn the same things (by contemplating a story you're supposed to have learned elsewere). And that's not a Good Thing, in my humble opinion.

Now any True Believer is by definition a Creationist, but we come in a couple of different flavors; the literalists and the non-literalists. Yer basic literalist sez, "It happened just like in this Holy Book, none of that evil-looshun crap they teach in schools these days." The non-literalist accepts the evidence of the fossil records and the astronomical data, and says, "Don't think of the Seven Days as being twenty four hours like we have today ... they represent geological eras of geometrically shorter duration, and the Big Bang and Evolution are merely the mechanisms by which His Will has become Manifest in this universe, i.e., the Laws of Physics and Genetics."

If you haven't guessed by now, I'm a non-literalist. Which brings us back to the question of communicating with EBEs. :-)

There is nothing in my theology that requires that Life only exists on earth. I mean, who am I to question His Will, but it seems like an awful waste of space. OTOH, I am extremely skeptical that we will ever encounter any of those EBEs. I've recently become convinced of the statistical impossibility of Mankind ever encountering anything capable of communication, or more advanced than a plant.

The best estimates are that the earth was formed about four and a half billion years ago. According to the fossil records, the first single-cell organisms appear about a billion years later. About 600 million years ago, the Paeleozioc Era begins, and we find a flourishing diversity of multi-celled organisms. The diosaurs appear around 225 million years ago, and die out 160 million years later, about 65 million years ago. The closest thing to what you could call a "hominid" (australapithicus bosai) appears about two and a half million years ago.

If you go back to the last Ice Age, about 35 thousand years ago, you find the oldest cave paintings ... this shows that h. sapiens was using fire, had language, and one would not be ashamed to refer to him as a "Child of Adam", or a "product of the Sixth Day". But it is not until about five thousand years ago, with the builders of the Pyramids, that you find something close enough to what we are today that you could take one of their children at birth and raise him in today's society and expect him to develop and function as one of our own, e.g., grow up to be a computer technician or programmer ... with proper pre-natal care, you could probably expect the same of the cave painters, but not a. bosai. ("... and that's why Cro-Magnon Man couldn't rig a sail boat.")

Now, here's the tricky part of the problem ... there has been Life on earth for over three and a half billion years, but for the first three billion years, it was all single-celled organisms! The closest thing we can call "intelligent" Life (like, maybe as smart as a chimpanzee) has only been around for three million years ... one thousandth of the time. That's like one second out of sixteen minutes and forty seconds!

So ... how long will we be around? The dinosaurs were here for 53 seconds compared to our one second ... less than a minute.

But we're not talking about the right thing ... if we use modern h. sap. as the benchmark, we need to expand the scale. Let's say something as smart as those cave men from 35 thousand years ago ... that's one hundred thousandth of the time, so it would be like one second out of 28 hours.

You know, if a creature capable of comprehending God has only been around for the last second of 28 hours that there has been life on this planet, and the dinosaurs evolved and died out in a couple of hours, that says that we're looking at a Very Small window of opportunity for two species at the same level of evolution/technology to even exist at the same time, let alone make contact with each other.

I submit that the earth is not the only planet in the universe where Life does or has existed. I futher submit that life is quite abundent in the universe, but that our own planet reflects the distribution ... 85% of the time, it's nothing more complex than single-celled organisms, and only 0.0001% of the time will it be as "advanced" as we are.

So, there are billions of stars in our galaxy, and billions of galaxies in the universe. Just how big a place is that? Well, a light-year is the distance that a beam of light can travel in a year ... light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so you do the math (60 x 60 x 24 x 365 = number of seconds in a year). The point is that the average galaxy (like our own) is about 100,000 light-years across.

Now let's bring that down to something that you can get your mind around. The earth's orbit is 93 million miles from the sun, so sunlight takes a little over 8 minutes to reach the earth. On Star Trek: Voyager, they're trying to get home from the other side of our galaxy, about 70,000 light-years away. Even though their 25th Century technology allows them to travel at one thousand times the speed of light (that's what Warp 10 is supposed to mean), it will take them seventy years to cover that distance.

And in case you were wondering, it would take fourty times as long, or 2,800 years, to reach our neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy ... you can see it on a clear summer night with your naked eye, but you're seeing light that has been travelling for almost three million years ... since around the time of those early hominids at the beginning of 2001: A Space Oddyssey, the ones who were just figuring out the club.

And that's why I say, as surely as I believe in Judgement Day, that we are not the only Life in the universe, but we are very much alone, and will never "meet" our neighbors ... we'll either find their fossils, or they'll find ours, but that's as close as we're gonna get, because that's the way He set it up in the Beginning.

And I'll go out on a limb here and burst another bubble ... it is the height of human vanity to assume that some extraterrestrial race would want to conquor and exploit our planet. If they have the technology to get here, then they can get whatever they want by way of resources from space ... this is the definition of a "space-faring" species. As for making slaves of us, well, that's what robots are for! Think about it ... they could not have built spacecraft capable of such a voyage without the aid of robots!! Could we have built the space shuttle with slave labor? I don't think so!

I belive that there may be little green men out there, but I don't believe that they've been watching us or that they've even taken notice of us. In several thousand years, something might notice our radio broadcasts, but even if they do, it would be another several thousand years before we'd get any reply. And the chances of physical contact is billions of times smaller than that.

So we fall back to the ambiguity of the question, "Are we alone?" Are we the only Life in the universe smart enough to worship the Creator? No. Are we completely cut off and isolated from His other worshipful servants? Yes.

Does the answer really matter? Maybe. It depends on what you do for a living, and just what your intentions are with regards to that screwdriver.

That is all I have to say. -=DAH=- 1997-06-08