posted
I watched this DVD over the weekend called, The Privileged Planet. Has anyone else seen it? It blew me away. The idea that the conditions that support life on our planet are also intrinsic to scientific discovery was staggering. They discussed something like 20 distinct conditions necessary for complex intelligent life to exist. For example, there is a habitable zone around the sun that the earth happens to fall into. This zone plus the size of our moon makes special eclipses possible. These eclipses enable us to make scientific observations about our sun that would not be possible if the moon was a different size or if the Earth was not in its current orbit.
Combine that with the fact that if the Earth was in a different orbit, or the moon was a different size, life as we know it would not exist. They identified 20 conditions like that where livable conditions = scientific discovery. Why should the impersonal universe even care if there are observers to marvel at the universe in which they live?
This reminds me that intelligent life in the Enderverse is also relatively rare: only 3 known races. That concept is rare in the sci-fi / fantasy genre, is it not?
Did OSC make that decision based on literary reasons or scientific?
Posts: 90 | Registered: Apr 2006
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quote:Combine that with the fact that if the Earth was in a different orbit, or the moon was a different size, life as we know it would not exist.
If we were not descended from monkeys, we'd be descended from racoons. Life as we know it would not exist!
quote:This reminds me that intelligent life in the Enderverse is also relatively rare: only 3 known races. That concept is rare in the sci-fi / fantasy genre, is it not?
Four, I think-- the Humans, the Buggers, the Piggies, and the Descoladores. It's actually five, if you count the fact that some of the humans on Path are about as human as Bean...
And a small number of intelligent species is not rare in science fiction literature.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:This reminds me that intelligent life in the Enderverse is also relatively rare: only 3 known races. That concept is rare in the sci-fi / fantasy genre, is it not?
Of course, only a small portion of the galaxy has been visited. There could be many more planets inhabited with sentient life that has yet to be discovered.
Posts: 1256 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
Read Isaac Asimov's Extraterrestrial Civilizations. It empirically determines the average likelihood of intelligent life in the universe, galaxy etc. He takes that all into effect and more. When I say more, I really mean more.
275 pages of wow.
Posts: 883 | Registered: Aug 2005
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