By John Traphagan
The look for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) represents probably the most major crossroads at which the assumptions and strategies of medical inquiry come into direct touch with—and in lots of circumstances clash with—those of faith. certainly, on the center of SETI is identical query that motivates many attracted to faith: what's the position of humanity within the universe? either scientists concerned with SETI (and in different components) and people attracted to and devoted to a few non secular traditions are engaged in considering a majority of these questions, whether their respective techniques and solutions vary considerably. This ebook explores this intersection with a spotlight on 3 middle issues: 1) the connection among technology and faith because it is expressed in the framework of SETI study, 2) the underlying assumptions, lots of that are tacitly established upon cultural values universal in American society, that experience formed the ways that SETI researchers have conceptualized the character in their exercise and represented principles concerning the strength effect touch may have on human civilization, and three) what kind of empirical facts we'd manage to entry as a fashion of considering the social effect that touch with alien intelligence may have for humanity, from either non secular and cultural views. The ebook constructed because of a direction the writer teaches on the collage of Texas at Austin: faith, technological know-how, and the hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
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Additional resources for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Imagination: SETI at the Intersection of Science, Religion, and Culture
Example text
What we see in the early part of the twentieth century in the US and Europe, at least, is the manifestation of a new type of imaginary with previously unimaginable repertoires of technologies, images, and narratives that stimulated a way of imagining humanity and its relationship to the cosmos that was only a few hundred years earlier largely unimaginable (Appadurai 1996: 35). In this imaginary, not only are people, with their various values and ideas, moving around the world and coming into contact with each other at an increasingly rapid pace, but the “world” as both a social and geographical construct is no longer limited to our planet.
This book, which is among the most important ever written, not only changed our understanding of the natural world, it also challenged our understanding of ourselves, because Darwin’s process of natural selection effectively eliminates the necessity of a divine creator who has intimate interest in the design and development of life, either human or non-human, and who for some strange reason decides to put it only on Earth. Natural selection responds to the apparent improbability of a world of complexity arising either as a result of chance or some activity of an intelligent designer by recognizing the enormous power of accumulative change over a very long period of time (Dawkins 2006: 147).
Given the incredibly long time that Earth has existed (by human standards), it becomes quite imaginable that the accumulation of minor changes in organisms would lead to complex structures like chimpanzees, dogs, and homo sapiens. Egotistical deities who create humans, and everything else, for their own warped pleasure and desire to be worshiped are no longer necessary in this way of seeing the natural world. This rather brief history of the development of modern physical and biological science brings us to one of the key points of this chapter—that the emergence of modern science changed the capacity of humans to imagine the possibility of life on other worlds.