Preparing for the Miraculous

108 eleven talksMother, is all the same quite clear: La Terre, on ne la détruitpas, the Earth will not be destroyed. 18Such a conviction contradicts directly most of the scientificknowledge about planet Earth in particular and aboutthe universe in general. It can easily be seen as another instanceof “mystic” or New Age imagination, especially at atime that the search for “exoplanets” is in full swing. At thetime of writing more than 500 have been discovered, andtheir number is supposed to be, well, astronomical. Behindthis expensive scientific search, and quite useful for its promotion,lingers the curiosity whether there is life elsewherein the universe. The ancient Greek philosophers alreadyasked the question; Giordano Bruno answered it positively,and so did Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la pluralité desmondes during the Enlightenment, and the French astronomerCamille Flammarion in the 19th century.The popular opinion on key enigmas, even the supposedlyscientific popular explanations in the media andin most popularizing books, should be taken with a substantialgrain of salt. For example, the explanation that ourgigantic universe originated in the miraculous explosion ofsomething smaller than an atom – the Big Bang – has nowbeen generally accepted for something like half a century,and most people would be surprised to hear that there areserious scientists who still have doubts about this, whileothers talk about multiple universes, baby universes, or anall-in-one multiverse. The atom is still commonly depictedas a miniature solar system, a view abandoned by sciencein 1927. Darwin was the father of the theory of evolution?Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and others formulated coherentevolutionary theories before him, and Alfred Wallace at thesame time as he. The big apes were our direct ancestors?18 L’Agenda de Mère, vol. 12, p. 330.