fractalnavel

it's been quiet out at the vatican lately.  but's not been even two months.  we'll see.

postulate aliens. postulate god.  how does god feel about aliens ?  how do aliens feel about god ?  how do we feel god feels about aliens ?  and so on.  i've never really heard anything about how one of these fantasies thinks about the other, official or otherwise. of the two, at least alien life is theoretically possible.  any reality to god would be subsumed in that by definition.

but i'm more curious as to how the various current religions feel about the possibility of et, and how they would relate to that.  recently read listened to a book called the sparrow, which assumed that jesuits, in any case, would see it as a missionary challenge.  that's a pretty arrogant viewpoint (and, i suspect, inaccurate with resepct to modern jesuits), something-centric, that some other sentient beings would not have experienced some manifestation of god themselves.  in fact, i thought that was pretty much how some religions defined sentience - having received the grace of god.  so the presumption, then, is that a species in need of converting is somehow subsentient - ?  savages ?  so why do we not convert our dogs ?  ok, then it has more to do with self-awareness, then, in which case the sentience and relationship with god is in place, just not, uh, “correct”.  ergo the arrogance.  it could be that the aliens are (more?) correct, and that we should be seeking / welcoming their guidance.  it may be that we are wrong about the “sharing” part, and they might not even let us in on the secret. 

but more likely it'd be the same old crap: we'd see them as inferior, and vice versa.  what is the “image” of god, anyway ?  too many people take that literally and restrictively to mean humans or even singling out particular races, behaviors, cultures, etc.  it's a kind of naive absolutism that sees a multiplicity of expression of truth as “relativism”.

so what of xenotheology ?  so far even the term is apparently rare, existing exclusively in fiction.  but just as it is useful to consider communications in a much more abstract sense, so one should validate their religion in a universal context.  exclusivity betrays falseness.  inclusivity indicates - what ?  allness is nothingness, pretty much.  in this way, one might say that all beingness is an expression of fullness in god, whatever its source or content.  “good” and “evil” are our own very local and idiosyncratic notions; there's your relativity for you.

more ramblings available upon request.  or even just flung out at random ;-)

a recent apod  got me thinking:

apparently the nebula expanded at an average rate of better than 1% of the speed of light.  dang, we only achieve that in particle accelerators.  and large ions.  have we ever tried smashing molecules or other more macroscopic things together at such speeds ?  or would that be pretty much useless, just disintegrating them into already known forms ?  seems to me high kinetic energy chemistry would be an interesting field.  sure, it's being done.  i think you've got various sub-realms of coherency and density to think about.  a high thermal (non-coherent) energy system with high density woulkd pretty much end up as particle soup - a plasma of degenerate ions, etc, molecules would not be viable - or would very transient formations exist ?  then there's the high energy / low density realms, as in the nebular gas cloud that started all this.  that one got me thinking that you could have a complex chemistry and high energy, since the collisions / interactions could be the same frequency as for lower energy / higher density regions.  density-energy is important in fusion research as well, but they're going for high numbers, whereas i'm thinking that something like this, if held constant, could be seen as an indication of a viable life-sustaining environment.  entropy gradients come into play, as do relative time scales.  as a side note, the early universe was high energy-density.  and high coherent energy (as opposed to thermal) systems would be, for example, an interstellar spacecraft, where you could find a frame of refence which minimizes apparent thermal energy.

which in turn got me thinking about the possibilities for “life” under these much broader conditions.  finding something “like us” may be the only practical endeavor in the sense that we would not be likely to recognize or understand anything else.  the other side of this is that we are much more likely to find life in realms not like ours.  so even if difficult to conceive and deal with, there may be a net greater likelihood of success, simply because the subject in the more restrictive case may not even exist, whereas the other ones almost certainly do (but are being missed).

comes down to our definitions of life, really, and to overcome our limitations in vision we have to recognize our illusions and biases.  such as religion.  i was thinking:  how would catholics / muslims / buddhists / etc. deal with a sentient dust cloud ?  an answer would tell us a lot.

but we pretty much already have our answers.  look at how humans - with or without religions - treat our co-habitants already.  dust cloud or dophin, tree or rock, it's all the same.  there are, of course, existential necessities.  it seems the animistic mysticisms of, say, native americans, had a lot going for them in these respects.  but i don't want to fuel the new-age adulations of never-existent noble-savagery etc.