Vatican looks to heavens for signs of alien life

[rabs]

Source: AP

By ARIEL DAVID (AP) – 7 hours ago

VATICAN CITY — E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology — the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.

Funes said the possibility of alien life raises "many philosophical and theological implications" but added that the gathering was mainly focused on the scientific perspective and how different disciplines can be used to explore the issue.


Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hf92aHEwYT87J1XPP4JrIusKBT-AD9BSTO1G1

---

Well, well, well.

Never thought I would see something like this from the Vatican. Wonder if the Man upstairs is tipping off His representative on Earth that visitors are coming?

[ProleNoMore]

1. Lots Of Rumors From The Internet Fringe That World Governments Will Disclose Very Soon

Wonder if this a preemptive action on the part of the Vatican?

[lovuian]

23. Yep

this is a SIGN

A sign for going out of business

a quote from Ghost busters

:)

[shanti]

25. links?

i hadn't heard...

[Phoonzang]

30. You'll have to listen to Coast to Coast AM. Hope you can stay up all night... nt

[Dreamer Tatum]

46. Interesting how evidence of the most consequential story in the history of mankind

only comes on AM radio in the middle of the night.

[Jamastiene]

2. I wonder if the aliens know Morse Code.

We should probably warn them. Our probings will be less severe if we ally with them and tip them off to run for their lives.



:hide:

[Ferret Annica]

39. We examine them for signs of intelligent life, and they look for alien life forms

And so goes the disturbing irony inherent to this particular story.

[onehandle]

3. Interestingly, the Catholic Church has great interest in Science. Recognizes evolution.

This doesn't surprise me at all.

[and-justice-for-all]

8. Not the Church as a whole, just the Jesuit priest...

if it was not for them, the CC would not give two shits about Science.

[rabs]

11. Good point you make

Have read that the Jesuits are the most highly educated, progressive and least sheeple-like Order in the mainstream (and to me archaic) CC.

Old Jesuit funny:

Q. When a Jesuit gets bored, what does he do?
A. Earns another Ph.D.

[melm00se]

19. Jesuits take a break

between their education and their actual ordination. The Jesuits want their priests to be "worldly". In my Jesuit High School, our priests were:

Deputy Federal Marshal
Assistant District attorney
Legal Aid lawyer

as well as businessmen who all heard the calling much later in life than your traditional parish priest.

[NYC Liberal]

18. Yep. More than one Jesuit priest at the Catholic school I went to

said that they supported gay marriage and thought women should be allowed to become priests. One of them threw a Bible at the wall because he wanted to show that the physical book itself is not important, but what's inside of it.

Don't tell the Vatican though. ;)

[Retrograde]

26. the nuns in my high school were pretty pro-science

my 9th grade general science teacher in particular was really enthusiastic about continental drift, which was just becoming mainstream at the time.

Overall, the Church has about the same range of ideas about science as any large group. The Jesuits in general have always been keen on knowledge of all sorts, even when it got them in trouble with the Church hierarchy.

[dflprincess]

32. The irony is, when the Jesuits were formed the dedicated themselves to the "service of the Pope"

more often than not, they have been a thorn in his side.

[Ian David]

4. What's the Age of Consent on Alpha Tau Ceti III? n/t

[24601]

7. 350 n/t

[Downwinder]

5. God is an ET.

[jmondine]

6. Dan Brown's next book: The Darth Vader Code

[MisterP]

9. when James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" came out,

turned out the Church had hypotheses on how it would deal with aliens (souls/machines, fallen/prelapsarian)

there's also Mary Doria Russell's somewhat-grim Catholic SF (it's grimmer than Black Robe)

[Fumesucker]

41. Funny, that book was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the headline..

And it's been at least forty years since I read it.

Some books make a real impact..

[eppur_se_muova]

10. That would be such a great headline if only it said "intelligent life". nt

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Beartracks]

14. This thread was doing well, until your unfortunate remark...

... about pedophile-loving assholes.

[Uncle Joe]

21. Well, at least that possibility is mentioned in the column.

"This is not the first time the Vatican has explored the issue of extraterrestrials: In 2005, its observatory brought together top researchers in the field for similar discussions.

In the interview last year, Funes told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God.

"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said in that interview."

[demigoddess]

13. sounded like a merger with Scientology was being considered. Maybe the

catholic church is running out of money and wants to use the same techniques as scientology to raise money??

[tomm2thumbs]

15. shhhh - don't tell anyone but I have one in my basement - he/she eats cardboard & crisco sandwiches

I am keeping Box City in business with my daily trips for grub to feed it.

[defendandprotect]

16. "Create them in OUR image" . . . they've never denied that the Bibble may be about aliens . ..!!

ET's that is . . .

This study may reverse that denial?

[zeemike]

17. But God is an alien...by any definition.

Does not live here...is much more powerful than us...interviens in our lives...and cannot be understood....an alien by any other name.
Can mans ego stand the truth if it means that man is not the center of the universe but just a garden where much superior beings grow their biological crops?

[Delphinus]

24. I like your thinking there, zeemike!

:hi:

[defendandprotect]

27. Well . . . only if you believe in the spaghetti monster in the sky "god" . . .

Others think "god" is in the Venetian Blinds, rugs, walls, whatever -- i.e., everywhere.

More likely, "heaven" was on this planet -- destroyed now by patriarchy and their violence.

Basically, we may be hybrids . . . more than likely.

But, as for an all powerful sky-"god" ... unlikely.

ET's are part of nature as we all are -- though we may not yet understand how.

Any visitors to this planet long ago would have seemed to be "gods" . . . and that is PLURAL.

"Make them in OUR image" is the Bibble quote --

[zeemike]

33. It is only unlikely if you ignore time.

What we have been around 10,000 years according to science that only knows what it knows and that only goes back 5,000 years.....now how old is the universe again...

So it is a lot more likely that there are other civilizations in the universe far older than ours....by perhaps millions of years...
The possibilities may be endless....but haven may well be out there, but you can't get to it from here.

[Zhade]

34. No evidence one exists -- actually, yeah, a lot like extraterrestrials!

NT!

[Kingofalldems]

20. Art Bell has talked about this for years

I think the priest mentioned has been a guest on his show.

[lumberjack_jeff]

22. Of course. Belief is belief.

Belief in aliens? Belief in God? What's the difference?

[defendandprotect]

28. QUOTE: "Belief is the end, not the beginning, of all knowledge --"

Keep an open mind on everything, folks --

[Peace Patriot]

36. Belief is belief? Not really true. You can believe things that are demonstrable,

based on evidence and reason. I "believe" in evolution because the preponderance of the evidence--and certainly scientific consensus--points to the accuracy of the theory. It is based on decades of study of the physical evidence by many scientists. Perhaps "belief" is not exactly the right word. "Tend to believe" or "strongly tend to believe" is better. Science is always challengeable, and invites challenge (or should invite challenge). Something could turn up tomorrow which might overturn the whole theory. For now, that's the best we can do, on the basis of available evidence. If powerful aliens from a much more highly sophisticated civilization "out there" show up tomorrow with convincing proof that they seeded our planet with humans who were genetically close to existing species (in order to make us feel more comfortable here?), we may have to give up our theory of evolution, but we might begin to understand both our feeling of alienation from the natural world and the god concepts that our species has developed. This latter notion is fanciful and also feasible and interesting. But it is not something I "believe." As for belief in God, Thomas Aquinas tried to make a case for God based on reason. His reasoning was that everything has a "cause" (children don't just appear out of nowhere, they are conceived by their parents and are born; a person doesn't just drop dead from a spear wound--a spear wound implies a spear-thrower, even if you can't see the spear-thrower); ergo, there must be a First Cause of everything that is.

It is an interesting line of thought. I've sometimes wondered why the matter in the universe creates order--beautiful spiral galaxies--and life--spiders, wolves, marigolds--and even intricate and seemingly orderly, conscious life. If the Big Bang Theory is correct, why isn't everything just exploding outward with no order at all except blast-order, scattering matter randomly to the further limits of space? The answer to the aggregation of matter seems to be "gravity"--and lately, dark matter--but why would that matter create consciousness (or rather, sentience), or any kind of life? I keep returning to the "Intelligent Design" (do I dare call it a?) theory--which owes its recent Bushwhack, Bible-thumper conception to Thomas Aquinas (a much deeper thinker than any of these stupid anti-educationists and anti-securalists), and wondering...h-m-m...is there something to it? Are consciousness and intelligence somehow wrapped into the universe in some way that we have yet to understand? Belief in God could be an echo in our brains of that unknown phenomenon by which the universe tends to create intelligence--something that may be discovered--investigated, evidence found for it--some day. But until such a discovery--with evidence and repeatable experiment, or whatever new criteria science may one day require--we don't have the slightest clue as to why there is order, beauty and intelligence in the universe. Belief that it is "God" is a good as any other "belief," in this sense of "belief."

"Belief" in aliens, however, can be evidence based. I have long been convinced that life and sentience exist elsewhere on the basis of sheer numbers. There are just so many stars and galaxies--utterly staggering numbers of them--that the odds are overwhelming. Discoveries of the last several decades have reinforced this "belief" --the discovery on earth of exremophiles (life existing here in very extreme conditions, some of it not oxygen-based), and the prevalence of water and various life-creating conditions in our own solar system and everywhere else. The odds have gone from overwhelming to very overwhelming that life may be prevalent in the universe and the development of sentient life and of civilizations is very likely. This is probably what is driving the Vatican to interest itself in the matter. What will it mean to their monolithic, anti-democratic, anti-goddess, woman-despising organization with its false claims of a line of descent back to St. Peter, if sentient life of another kind is discovered at long last? Will they deign to baptize the aliens? Will they ban them from being priests because--as one recent Pope said--they "don't look like Jesus"?

I mean this criticism. I also understand, very deeply, that the Catholic Church has somehow, for all its many faults and crimes, preserved a notion in which I believe: They call it "soul" and have promulgated the reality that every human being has a soul and all souls are equal. I don't call it "soul," when I am being honest with myself. I think it's a quality of the human brain that we almost completely do not understand--something to do with how infants synthesize information to create a unique personality. Every human beings has it. And we are all equal. The Church would say "equal in the eyes of God." I would say equal in the eyes of the higher intelligence that we all potentially possess which understands the uniqueness and compelling importance of each individual human being. Anyway, just wanted to give credit where credit is due--in view of my list of Church sins, above. The Church went through a period in which its theologians argued about whether or not women have souls, but they finally concluded--and certainly their most intelligent and Christ-like theorists always knew--that we do. Will they raise this question about sentient alien life? Can they learn from the mistakes that hubris has led them into?

[lumberjack_jeff]

42. "The universe is so big, if we're alone, it's sure a waste of space"

Is nothing more than the watchmaker analogy redux. It's a teleological argument.

There is lots of evidence for evolution. For God and for ET? Not so much.

[Peace Patriot]

45. No, I don't agree with that. Nor do I "believe in aliens." What I believe--based on both reason and

evidence--is that the odds for other life in the universe--and, indeed, for other life right here in our own solar system--and consequently the odds for other sentient life in this galaxy and other galaxies, keep going up. I think they are pretty overwhelming, at this point. One big key is the prevalence of water in our solar system. Another is the prevalence of planets around other suns. Scientists were skeptical about both--because there wasn't any evidence--for most of the last century. Now there is INCREASING evidence of both. The discovery of extremophiles on earth is another big piece of evidence--greatly increasing the chances of life in conditions that we would have thought impossible, before those discoveries. Life does not have to be photosynthesis-based. And it can exist in truly extreme conditions of heat and cold, and without sunlight.

Anyway, I don't know what to make of the people who claim to have seen "aliens." The lack of physical evidence makes me very skeptical. However, I don't rule out the possibility that intelligent aliens could be communicating telepathically (perhaps with the people they contact not understanding what has been communicated, and projecting their own fears and phobias into it), and/or, have the capability to remove physical evidence if they don't want to be "discovered." Or, the phenomenon could just be pure projection, as Jung thought. In his remarkable book, "Childhood's End," Arthur C. Clarke posited the sf theory that the "Devil" of human imagination in the Middle Ages was an "echo" from the future end of human civilization (and its transformation--or its children's transformation--onto a higher plane of existence), which is overseen by a benevolent sort of dictator who resembles images of Lucifer. The Universe is such a strange place--and seems to be getting exponentially stranger, the more we find out about it, both at the micro- and macrocosmic levels--that we should not rule out "weird" phenomena, reported by humans, just because it's "weird" and because it can't meet the requirements of current science. Have we learned nothing from Galileo, Einstein, Darwin, Pasteur and others, about the truth of things not being evident to whatever science is currently considered acceptable by political and social powers? We need to be skeptical, of course, of "extraordinary claims," but we also need to expand our minds, to dream, to "push the envelope," in order to understand a Universe in which we are the tiniest of ants--so short-lived and generally myopic--crawling around our beautiful little bauble of a planet.

[CanonRay]

29. How do you view the heavens, when you've got your head up your own ass?

[David Zephyr]

43. LOL.

+1

[dickthegrouch]

31. FANTASTIC comment from KCBS anchor on this....

He was wondering if god could send his only son to be sacrificed by more than one civilization and then answered his own question.....




Wait for it :)



















"Only if the other civilization also ate the apple"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I KNEW I liked that anchor!

[Kingofalldems]

35. I wonder if the pope watches UFO Hunters on the History channel

[BadGimp]

37. maybe they can learn more about those little brown ones from Uranus

[havocmom]

38. The church built an observatory on Mt. Graham in Az.

The mountain is sacred to native people in the area, and there were lots of protests about the church's observatory, and others built there. This was back in the early 90s.

Yeah, there's something to watch for, evidently. Vatican probably wants a heads up in case they need to move investments*.



*hm is a serious cynic re church motives.

[defendandprotect]

49. Usually the invading religion builds on top of the old one -- it's ruins and it's traditions!!!

Catholic Church is disgusting -- !!!

[fascisthunter]

40. and as the Pope looks to the Heavens, the Lawd Gord commands

a bird to shit into his eyes.

[defendandprotect]

44. Vatican has tons of "alien" records they were threatening to release a while back . .

PLUS, didn't they -- as usual -- build that observatory on Native American property?

Either a spiritual place -- or some NA ruin???

[havocmom]

48. Not really Native American 'property' but a sacred place: Mt Graham in AZ

see my reply above

[ZombieHorde]

47. The Vatican should leave our migration workers form Mexico alone. nt

[jmowreader]

50. They forgot to throw in a few American Leftists

American leftists can confirm the existence of space aliens. They're named Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, Carrie Prejean, Roy Moore and Joe Arpaio.

As for the aliens' effect on the Catholic Church, they seem to be driving the mainstream away from The Church. Net effect? If the space aliens are NOT stopped, expect the death of the Church within 30 years.