What about… #29

Today’s post isn’t really about books, but I have to start by speaking about one that I’ve just finished. The latest novel by Dan Brown; Origin.

I have to say that I was a little disappointed. The book’s topic (about which I’ll speak further) isn’t the problem but having read all of his novels, I find this one a remake of Inferno or The Da Vinci Code or even The Lost Symbol. Robert Langdon; which is the main Charater of most of Brown’s stories, fleeing a danger with a women to try to resolve an enigma.

Usually there is something innovative which makes every book a new story, such as in “Inferno” Robert Langdon, lost his memory and was shot. In “The Da Vinci Code” everything was unexpected. In “The Lost Symbol” Robert Langdon was unexpectedly called to a meeting place to find just a severed hand waiting for him. But this one looks like a bit of every past books, Robert Langdon is in the same kind of trouble he was in every other book! Nothing unexpected.

What I DID like about this book is that it speaks a lot about art, history and science.

Now the main topic of this book is the Origin of men and its future. An atheist scientist called Kirsch made a phenomenal dicovery which cost him his life before he can share it with the world. Robert Langdon and a woman called Vidal must do the impossible to broadcast the discovery even though they are threatened to be killed by someone who wishes to stop them spreading the news, that the creation can exist without a God.

Kirsch as a believer in the Darwinian theory (but not entirely satisfied as Darwin didn’t explain how life arrived on earth in the first place) made his own reasearch.

The idea is that Life can create itself with the right ingredients and conditions; it’s a paradox when we’re aware that the univese is a world of Entropy or should we say Chaos. Let me give you some details:

We build a castle of sand by the sea, when a wave hits the castle it disorganize the sand castle into scattered grains: no more castle.

Things are irreversible, when you put a hot mug of coffee on the table, it gets cold. The coffee never magically reheat itself.

Entropy is just a fancy way of saying that things fall apart. An organized system, inevitably deteriorates. Sand castles never spontaneously appear in the universe, they only disappear.

So Kirsch enhanced a technique used in 1953 by two scientists Muller & Urey who tried to recreate the Primordial Soup, trying to create life within a flask of non living chemicals.

Chemists after them tried repeatedly using different combination of ingredients, different heath patterns but nothing worked.

But what is a Premordial Soup? After duplicating the chemicals that existed in the early oceans and atmosphere – water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen – Muller and Urey heated all of this to simulate the boiling seas. Then they shocked it with electric charges to mimic lightning and they finally let the mixture cool just as the planet’s oceans had cooled. Of course that didn’t work. So in addition to this, Kirsch added electromagnetism to a 64 year old flask belonging to Muller and Urey and that’s it; he created Primitive organism.

According to him the Premordial Soup needed electromagnetism to put chaos in order, to create life. Therefore, if life simply happened as an inevitable by product of the laws of nature we have to conclude that because life spontaneously appeared here on earth, it almost certainly did the same thing elsewhere in the cosmos. Meaning man is not unique and man is not alone in the universe.

My first reaction was the same as Robert’s in the book: if the laws of nature can actually create life, then who created the laws?

We don’t need life to happen by product of the laws to believe that other lives exists in the cosmos. Who didn’t wonder what’s up there, gazing at the night’s sky?

Those billions of stars and what’s in between, hold such mysteries that we’re unable to provide all the answers needed to cease to be amazed at what we look at. The sky (universe) is an unfriendly place for any earthly living creature, and the “luck” as some atheists would say, has put us in the perfect planet that sustains life in all sense. But of course among the multitude of different stars, it is unthinkable that we’re the only living beings in such a vast creation. What’s out there is so far that we’re not (yet) able to reach out for them. After all…. after seeing all those Alien movies saying that they are monsters wanting to destroy us in any possible way….. I’m not sure that they are so far from us for no reason. In reality, I believe that we have our own issues here, for land, for beliefs, for ethnicity… can you imagine if we had Aliens as well to negotiate with? We’re not mature enough to handle something smarter, stronger and maybe taller than us. We’re still savages fighting among ourselves, what’s out there are other creations either more peaceful or more rebellious and either of these, we’re no match for it.

Some people don’t believe in extraterrestrial life, why not?

The universe is big enough for all of us, and surely what is beyond our knowledge is far more real and powerful than what we’re aware of. We don’t need to go into other galaxies to search for life, our own has 200 to 400 billion of stars. Can you put a percentage on how many of these are such as ours? Let’s say 1%, that gives us 2-4 billion of possibilities where a developed form of life exists.

Next time you look at the skies, be sure that somewhere out there, another form of life is gazing at the same stars you’re looking at. We’re not alone, we share the same universe, the same questions, the same Creator.

If I were interested in the origin of men, among all the books available I would read this one, which is very interesting and surprising.