showing several of the impacts on the surface of Jupiter by fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet. Gaping impact zones, in some cases larger than the earth, were revealed in photographs of the giant gas planet soon after collision.
3. Other problems
“Radiation would destroy DNA on a journey between stars,” says Francis Cucincotta of the NASA Johnson Space Centre in Houston.19 Other hazards would be: the near-absolute-zero temperature of space, without a space suit; the lack of nutrients and/or oxygen in the vacuum of space, without a space vehicle; entry into Earth’s atmosphere, without a heat shield, which has been proven to burn up bacteria20; and impact with planet Earth, without a parachute.
Some idea of the force of such an impact was demonstrated by the catastrophic collision of 20 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter on July 16–22, 1994 (see images to the right).
All in all, interstellar space travel for living organisms is sheer wishful thinking.
There are no biblical or moral reasons why God should not have formed other planets, when He formed those in our own solar system, on Day 4 of Creation Week (Genesis 1:14–19).
Whether there is life on any planet other than Earth is another matter. The Bible teaches that life began on Earth through a process of commanded-by-God creation (Genesis 1:11–27). It also tells us that God’s purposes are centred on Earth. Thus God created Earth (on Day 1) before He created “the lights in the firmament of heaven” (on Day 4), which were “to divide the day from the night” and were “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” (Genesis 1:14), i.e. for the benefit of mankind.
Man and woman were both “made in the likeness of God” (Genesis 1:27). This, coupled with factors such as the Fall, the Incarnation, the redemption of mankind through the once-only death and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Coming of Christ to Earth, and the coming Judgment of all mankind, show Earth’s unique importance among the billions of billions of stars in the universe. This is despite the frequent belittling, by evolutionists, of the importance of Earth.
The above also implies that God did not create any other life forms elsewhere in the universe.21
If, however, some form of microbial life should one day be found on Mars, Europa, or elsewhere within our solar system, this would not prove that it had evolved (or been created) there. Such life could be seeded from Earth, because:
If rocks can be blasted from Mars to Earth, the process should also be possible from Earth to Mars, as physicist Paul Davies suggests.22
Bacterial spores may be able to survive the relatively short journey involved compared to interstellar travel.
Spores in Earth’s upper atmosphere could be pushed into space and then to another planet or moon by the solar wind.
There is always the risk of contamination by Earth bacteria of the surface of a planet or moon on which any man-made space vehicle lands and digs.
Why the frantic search for life on other planets?
Such a find could be used to reinforce the idea that it is easy, if not inevitable, for life to arise by itself from lifeless chemicals.
If it can be shown that life exists elsewhere in space, it would assist those who claim that Earth life began “out there” (see main text).
Projects to investigate life elsewhere in the universe overshadow more mundane Earth-directed research in attracting public interest and tax dollars!
Space-life enthusiasts like to say that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Perhaps, but they have never been able to answer the famous question posed by Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi half a century ago concerning all the other alleged civilizations in the universe: “Well then, where is everybody?” SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which now uses equipment that scans 28 million radio frequencies per second, has failed to obtain a single “intelligent” signal from outer space in over 50 years.
In April 2000, 600 astronomers, biologists, chemists, geologists, and other researchers met at