The Dream of This Place with Us: Science, Religion, and the Environmental Crisis

Abstract

The first color photograph of the whole earth taken by an astronaut aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft in 1969 appeared in posters, popular magazines and films, and a staggering number of advertising campaigns promoting the sale of an enormous variety of consumer goods and services. Like any iconic visual image repeatedly used in a variety of diverse contexts for different purposes, the image of the blue planet shimmering under the flow of its delicate atmosphere against the backdrop of the interstellar dark seemed, over time, to lose much of its original significance and emotive power. But for some of us, myself included, it still serves as sign and symbol of two astonishing facts: life on earth is a self-organizing and self-perpetuating whole that evolved from a single organism to a level of enormous complexity and incredibly beauty; our species emerged from this evolutionary process as fully conscious and self-aware beings in the vast cosmos. Many scientists are convinced that biological life must have arisen on other planets and that the process of evolution on some of them resulted in the emergence of intelligent life-forms and advanced technological civilizations. The most ardent promoters of this idea are physicists and molecular biologists, and public acceptance of their views resulted in the creation of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. The intent of those involved in this project, as many Americans learned for the first time after seeing a movie based on the late Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos , is to intercept intragalactic or intergalactic communications between advanced civilizations on other planets. But what the book and movie failed to mention is that many evolutionary biologists are convinced that the odds that these civilizations exist anywhere else in the vast cosmos are slim to none. The skeptics argue that even if life exists on many other planets, this does not mean that the process of evolution on any of them would result in life-forms that have the capacity to acquire and use a complex symbol system like the human language system.