an astrobiological perspective

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Today's “news” is largely follow-up on ordinary advents: primate behavior in the Middle East, ongoing geopolitical competition, public health problems, poisoned spies, crashes, bombs, bad weather....You know the story.

Yesterday, the space shuttle Discovery docked with the International Space Station.

Most all lives move on unnoted—mostly in good health (I hope), productive, peaceful, honest, learning. The prevailing story is really about a species evolving fairly well by its own designs. It's our virtue to give so much public attention to tragic exception (but it's never enough).

Questions of Meaning, ultimate coherence, and temporal continuity—quests of “Being”—belong to every version of human life. Religion serves supernaturalist childhoods of evolutionary devotion to high valuation, modernly expressed in scientific humanities. Those who have the freedom to research the cosmos, now astrobiologically, can have deep-time solidarity with the evolutionary ethos of desire for ultimate coherence and continuity that began religiously and became philosophical.

Humanity will have a permanent lunar base in a couple of decades (at one pole of our moon, entertaining godknowswhat on the hidden side). Mars will someday be terraformed. Eventually, we'll abandon the Sun.

Scientific plausibility causes me to bet that we're not the most advanced beings of our galaxy. In any case, realistic idealism can be greatly good. My understanding of what's good for development of productively creative intelligence causes me to believe that we're left “Alone” to evolve our capability to appreciate where we are.