When Billions is Pittance Part II

On the other hand, it is in the actual interest of Darwinists that evidence for habitable planets across the cosmos should continue to mount in an accelerating fashion.  After all, it is logically sound that the greater the sample of potentially desirable planets, the greater the chances that life should have sprung up elsewhere in the universe, perhaps even ubiquitously.   My critique of the Darwinian agenda is not their logic in this particular matter.  It is instead their actual failure, firstly, to demonstrate the evolutionary chemical transition from non-life to life in the first place, and secondly their failure (by an utter lack of a transitional fossil trail, most glaringly illustrated in the “Cambrian Explosion”) to demonstrate the Darwinian program of the amoeba –to-man development of life right here on planet Earth under the most favorable environmental conditions.  Worse still, Darwinists are at an utter loss to account for the very beginning of material existence (space, time, matter, and energy) in the Big Bang, not to mention accounting for the existence of the kind of source that is logically required to bring material existence into being in the first place.  Therefore Darwinists are effectively asking for a free pass when they down-play the challenge of the beginning of existence out of nothing and insist instead on limiting discussion about origins to “the toys already on the floor.”   

Now to the matter of the overlooking of enormously relevant factors:  An article from the NASA website dated July 17, 2013, titled, “In the Zone: How Scientists Search for Habitable Planets,” states that astronomers “search for potentially habitable planets using a handful of criteria (boldface mine). …The hunt is on for planets about the size of Earth that orbit at just the right distance from their star – in a region termed the habitable zone. …NASA’s Kepler mission is helping scientists in the quest to find these worlds.”  (www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/ news/ kepler20130717.hi).

The articles I read declare that recent scientific exploration has uncovered the potential existence of between eight and seventeen billion habitable planets right within our own Milky Way Galaxy.  Under the specific terms that are laid out in the NASA article above I will not argue against the legitimacy of these numbers.  As a non-astronomer I am not in a position to address that challenge.  I will instead challenge the prevailing thesis that builds upon them on other grounds that in fact do place me on equal footing with cosmologists.  I will do so with non-controversial scientific data that is available to all.  Let me just say for now that the word “billions” is a relative term.  Possession of a billion dollars is an impossibly large figure for an average person like me to imagine.    On the other hand, a billion is a tiny number when measured against a number such as “a hundred thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.” The significance of that number with respect to the question of habitable planets will be laid out in the following postings.

To be continued…