by Joseph Morris
NASA recently announced that it has discovered over 5000 exoplanets, planets that are outside our solar system. There are many different types, including huge Jupiter-size worlds too close to their stars with surface temperatures of 2500oF. While they have discovered some worlds that might be similar to Earth, but larger, we don’t know if they are conducive to life.
We all remember the story of Goldilocks and how it took her a while to find just the right bowl of porridge, the one that was just the right temperature and with the just the right amount of porridge. To many scientists, Earth is what they call a Goldilocks world. It’s just the right size and distance from the right
kind of star to maintain an atmosphere with oxygen and allow for surface water. All of these are requirements for a functioning biosphere and life as we know it.
Even Earth’s history shows how fortunate we are, with life surviving five mass extinctions, i.e., extinctions that wiped out a majority of life due to natural events. The most famous, of course, is the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction when an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Some scientists maintain that we are in the middle of a sixth extinction, the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction, which began about 12,000 years ago and is caused by human activities. Human-induced climate change and other environmental impacts are continuing the human- induced extinction trajectory, far exceeding the normal “background” extinctions that would naturally occur.
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi in Great Britain, wrote: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” I’ve reinterpreted that to say: “science tells us how the universe works, and religions tells us how we should live in it.” To me, religion is more about the moral aspect of how we live our lives and our relationship with other humans and with the other creatures that inhabit the Earth. The lesson from Genesis is that God gave us this world and its up to us to figure out how to live in it.
Earth is a Goldilocks world. It’s the result of fortuitous balances of factors and conditions that have gone just right. We seem to be doing our best to screw it up. It brings me back to my favorite Midrash, Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 7:13, when God told Adam, “Look at my works! See how beautiful they are — how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.” That was written about fifteen hundred years ago. Even back then they understood that righteousness and moral responsibility included being stewards of the Earth.
The Green Team Needs You
It’s time to get the Green Team moving again. Anyone interested in participating or with suggestion/ideas for Green Team activities please contact me at: jwm@rocketscitech.com or 716-544-4576