In fact for many of them their idea of future history is that we’ll continue to live on this speck of dust until the End of the World (i.e. this planet happens) and the reign of “Heaven” starts under a totalitarian dictator of the Universe.

But what is so tragic about this is that the existence of outer space is anything but inconsequential. It could be our way out of our present energy bottleneck. The Sun is half a degree wide in the sky. The Earth, being a hundredth of the Sun’s size, is consequently only a two hundredth of a degree wide in the sky from the distance of the Sun, translating to a puny two billionth of the entire area the Sun emits light at.

That means there’s two billion times more solar energy out there than shines down on this planet. If only a fraction of that could be collected by solar power stations and beamed down to Earth as microwaves it would give us more energy than fossil fuels ever gave us. Forget about SUVs—we could all be driving tanks to work (if we like) from that. But not only that. We could desalinate and detoxify water and pump it wherever we need it. We could run heating and air conditioning in any weather and without feeling guilty about using up non-renewable resources or increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

If we managed to build space elevators then not only could we beam down energy from space, we could do agriculture in geostationary orbit on a scale that would exceed the yield of crops on the surface by orders of magnitude. Eventually rotating space habitats could also give us hundreds of times more surface to live on than the crust of this planet ever provided us with. After all, life on this planet has been little more than mold on a wall since the dawn of time. Most of this planet’s space and resources are forever locked in its molten core, where they are of little use to us.

So there is all this amazing future ahead of us, plenty of which achievable in our lifetimes if we went for it, and yet the religious (but also secular-thinking people) are simply blind to it. To them life on the surface of an Earth-like planet is all they can ever imagine, even in their science fiction. At their best they think about preserving the ecosphere and living sustainably and frugally, but they never think about becoming independent of such a fragile ecosystem as the one we’re presently dependent on.

Can you imagine what a ring system of space elevators in geostationary orbit would look like and how much living space and energy it could provide us with? I can…

http://www.ulrichschreglmann.homepage.t-online.de/tmp/ring.swf

They can’t.

This is particularly interesting, when you consider that the history of church dogma has forever been one of limiting GOD. Everything they have ever declared to be a truth about the universe or suggested that human beings must do or not do because GOD would want it that way has been a limitation of what God can be.

If the church really starts opening up to all the possibilities offered by a truly omnipotent creator, where would they stop?

If the church becomes ok with the idea of GOD putting alien beings with intelligence on other worlds, why not then be open to the idea of other universes? An omnipotent and infinite GOD must have created infinite universes - including multiple versions of earth and the human race - multiple - even infinite - versions of every human being in existence.

Would each earth have its own heaven, or could you expect multiple - even infinite - copies of you to make it into heaven. And of course, multiple - even infinite - copies of you in hell and purgatory too. All possible outcomes to all situations could, and therefore would exist, given an omnipotent creator. This makes any choice you make (to sin or not to sin) automatically moot. Given two choices, in infinite worlds you will choose one way and in infinite worlds you will also choose the other.

I think it would be a lot safer for them not to go down this particular road, and try to ignore how big “all of creation” could really be, given a truly omnipotent creator. I don’t think the Pope will be giving aliens the thumbs up (at least not speaking ex-cathadra) anytime soon - or ever. If and when we discover evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, it might be a different story, but I am sure it will be left alone until then.