Big Mike: Save Me From Those Who Want To Save Me!

October 22nd, 2009

Lately, I’ve received a few Facebook messages from friends and relatives subtly suggesting I forgo my atheistic ways. As if Facebook isn’t stultifying enough — what with teenagers announcing to the world that they have a taste for ice cream and adults trumpeting that they’re achy from exercise class — now I have to endure Christian claptrap. Jesus!

So now I feel compelled to holler to the world via this blog my firmly held belief that either there is no god or — if there is — man, what an asshole.

One of the hallmarks of religions throughout history has been the idea that we occupy a special place in the Universe. Human beings on Earth, say the priests, the imams and the shamans are unique. We’re the apple of god’s eye, as Mark Twain so aptly put it in “Letters from the Earth.”

In fact, most Holy Men will suggest the raison d’etre of the Universe is to serve as a spacious home for Homo Sapiens. That’s you, me, all our relatives and friends, Benny Jay, Milo, The Loved One, Barack Obama, Meryl Streep, Tony Bennett — everybody! Of course, that also includes Balloon Boy’s parents, Kathy Griffin and Glenn Beck — as if that alone wasn’t proof there is no god.

Anyway, not so fast, Padre. Our pricey big telescopes and darting space probes have shed light on the almost certain notion that life exists elsewhere in this big, old Cosmos. And where there’s life, there must be the potential for intelligence (or, failing that, Glenn Beck.)

Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope announced in 2008 that they’ve detected organic molecules on a huge planet some 63 light-years away. The planet, poetically dubbed HD 189733b, orbits a star in the constellation Vulpecula.

HD 189733b has traces of water and methane — two of the four substances that indicate a planet can support life as we know it. (The other two are carbon dioxide and oxygen.)

Head of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s team responsible for the discovery, Mark Swain (now don’t go confusing him with Mark Twain), called it “a dress rehearsal for future searches for life on more hospitable planets.” HD 189733b is too close to its host star – and therefore too hot – to support life as we know it.

Closer to home, the Cassini spacecraft, which studied Saturn’s neighborhood, “tasted” an organic soup emanating from the gas giant’s moon Enceladus. (By the way, don’t you just love the term “gas giant”? It signifies the massive outer planets of our Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It can also refer to me after I’ve gorged on a frozen Home Run Inn pizza.)

Anyway, Enceladus’s “soup” contains more of the ingredients of life. According to Dennis Matson, Cassini project scientist at the JPL in Pasadena, “Enceladus has got warmth, water, and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life.”

Give us a few more decades and scientists will find living, breathing creatures roaming some distant planet. Just as the spectacular photograph of the earthrise taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts changed the way we view our world (well, some of us,) the realization that beasts and intellectuals may populate other planets ought to put us even more in our places.

Who, then, will be the apple of god’s eye?