Catholic Sensibility

The Privileged Planet Gonzalez and Richards' book the Privileged Planet (see their web site: http://www.privilegedplanet.com/) is on my bookshelf this week. I began it last night, and so far, it is a good read, though not the great book I was expecting. The premise is this: over the past ten to twenty years, astronomers have been unearthing substantial evidence that suggests that life-bearing planets like Earth may be exceedingly rare in the cosmos. The old hope that we are not alone might be a false hope. The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and science fiction notwithstanding, every deep space discovery of the past few decades points, in fact, to the good chance that we on Earth are all there is as far as intelligent life is concerned. It was extremely fortunate that a Mars-sized body hit the primordial Earth at an oblique angle 4.5 billion years ago to produce the moon. The Earth was rendered molten, which might have caused the iron to settle to the core, which gives us the strong magnetic field, which protects the planet's surface from solar radiation. The moon also stabilizes earth's axial tilt. Without it, the planet's axis would wobble over a much greater range. It's even thought that the precise axial tilt of 23.5 degrees, plus or minus 1.5 is just about ideal. Any less and ocean and air currents might mix less producing wide bands of desert and wet zones, instead of the temperate four seasons and the tropical two seasons. Any more and most of the planet would freeze dry: bake under a six-month sun, then chill in a night just as long. Without Jupiter in just the right place, we would be at the mercy of a comet much more frequently than every 100 million years or so. If Jupiter were closer, our orbit would be unstable, and if Jupiter were farther away, its comet-gobbling defense would be much reduced (like the goalie who wanders too far from the net). We're finding lots of Jupiter-sized planets very close to their stars, many in very irregular orbits. This would have been bad, as our young Earth would long ago have been plunged into the sun or flung out into the cold interstellar void. Gonzalez take philosophy to task. The Copernican Revolution (which displaced Earth from the Center of the Universe) also brought a philosophical paradigm shift, namely that Earth and humanity aren't so important in the Big View. The authors lose me a bit on this one. Copernicus was earth-shaking to the remnants of the Medieval Era establishment, to be sure. I'm not sure that other philosophers weren't more of a threat, but I leave that for the experts in the audience to comment upon. Is it better for human beings to think of themselves as special, as unique, as central to the universe, as the crowning glory of God's creation? Or are we too full of ourselves, and better off pondering ouselves clinging to the Pale Blue Dot in a remote corner of an unexceptional galaxy at the mercy of a rogue comet or a random gamma ray burst? Life on Earth could be extinguished without even a burp from the vastness of space, without a thought or obituary. Which camp are you in?