What? The bible tells the whole story of why.
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If this man believes that human population and their technlogical achievements have remained at a linear pace since the 'Flood' (based on his other posts)...
I cannot comprehend the black hole that is his brain.
No species can survive by itself. All life on Earth has evolved to coexist in relative harmony. What will happen is they will either starve or evolve into cannibals until they consume all the breathable air on the planet and then asphyxiate to death.
As for your God's infallible plan it basically all fell apart when Adam and Eve at the apple.
I don't understand most of what he is trying to say, but I have to admit, I do agree with his final point. The ultimate goal of humanity should be the stars, and the only way to achieve that is to work together and not let petty, useless things like religion tear us apart.
For some reason tho, I doubt this was what he was going for.
I'm a transhumanist. I think that what defines humanity isn't our limitations but our ability to go beyond them. I think that with the accelerating pace of technology, there's a distinct possibility of us bettering ourselves, eventually spreading ourselves out among our corner of space.
I tend to think of things in terms of their value to humanity. But I don't fool myself into thinking that anthropocentric value is anything but a subjective value we place on things in our own self-interest.
The Universe isn't here "for" us. There's no preordained reason for the vastness of space. It just is.
I think we should expand and make humanity bigger and better -- but there is no destiny for the Universe you're thinking of, outside of what we ourselves make from the situation we're in.
@Michael - and the canopy was destroyed in the Flood, which would have been unnecessary if humans had never sinned, which means each family's space ship would have been destroyed before it got out of the atmosphere.
We are approximately 1700 years behind, thanks to biblical dogma.
The enormous benefits of science and technology were only made possible by people who gave religion the Finger.
Otherwise, we would still be living and dying in squalor and unreasoning fear, ignorant of even Germ Theory.
Ludicrous - you'd die of old age before you could get anywhere near even the closest star to our own, without colossal advances in science and technology. You'd likely have to go even further still to have any hope of finding a star with a suitable planet orbiting it. It was a bloody Herculean effort to get as far as the moon (it went a long way towards bankrupting the entire USSR in the process, and took a huge bite out of US savings too), and even mars is off limits to anything except small, remote control buggies for the foreseeable future.
If your god made the universe for us to colonize, he'd have made it accessible, or at the very least told us how to get space ships up to appreciable fractions of light speed, without annihilating the occupants and using all the fuel on the damn planet in the process.
One, we were meant to DIE, not to live forever(what about animals?, did they sin too?). What the Bible actually says it's that people are the only animals aware of the fact that they're going to die. Second, the universe, as a whole, is unattainable. That some shepperds in the past didn't think so due to their limited resources, is another different point.
Byers REALLY hasn't thought this through. Expansion into stellar space solely due to competition for dwindling resources and population pressure brought on by extreme longetivity really *isn't* a good thing.
Assuming it ever becomes even remotely feasible to send out slow-moving starships to the solar systems around us, they would also become centers of colonization--and systems deep inside the expanding sphere would rapidly find there was no other place they could go that wasn't already settled. Human colonization starts to take on the flavor of a locust plague--or a raging wildfire. Planetary civilizations inside the sphere might start to resemble Easter Island, after the natives finally managed to completely clear-cut their island so they couldn't build boats, and then started slaughtering each other for food.
On the other hand, establishing a permanent, self-sustaining and sustainable human presence on other worlds or in space itself does greatly increase the odds that one branch of humanity or another might survive in the long term.
Also: weren't Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden before they could eat fruit off the Tree of Life? Pretty much puts paid to the idea that God intended men to live forever, doesn't it?
The human race has demonstrated a greater volatility than is preferable, opportunistically spreading beyond its natural niches, kinda like a colony of bacteria in the porcelain throne, spreading to the floor and walls.
We are wayyy behind.
Here's why: from the beginning of the church until the Renaissance, [western] humanity's collective brain was locked down. It took a "critical mass" of people who gave g0d the finger, to start things rolling.
Give g0d the finger = human progress.
kiss g0d's ass = bronze-age slavery.
If you carefully read the Genesis book, you will find no such invitation to explore other planets and space. It seems that like about our origins, the authors were ignorant about the world and of space. It's also obvious that the worldview was a human-centered universe, not even knowing about other continents. It is easy to understand why. Does it mean that we shouldn't explore? Of course not, even if many creationists actually claim that. What was the purpose of the origin myths, the text's emphasis on lineages and natalism? Nationalism and the power justifications of a small elite. Exploitation and war.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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