Whiskey Steve said:
Have you ever tried to hold a magnet and get another magnet to just float in the air by perfectly balancing the magnetic pull. (I know for a fact that you have not and you never will)
There are nine planets in out solar system surrounding the sun. Each are engaged in an impossibly perfect magnetic balancing act around the sun. Furthermore earth just happens to be at a perfect distance from the sun to sustain life.
If evolution were true then think of the countless trillions of planets there would have to be with sub-perfect life sustaining conditions. Now we would have to pray (to the God which doesnt exist in this scenario) that one of these handicaped earths doesn't bump into our solar system and screw everthing up.......
There are so many vairables like the one with our planets courses surrounding earth that the possibility of our earth existing is literally one in infinity. And just because there is a probability number doesnt mean that one will ever come to pass. If you flip a coin ten times, it is probable that you will get heads five times. But you may get all tails...... In the probability of earth however you are flipping a coin with an infinite (damn near) amount of sides
Actually, if you study advanced physics, you'll learn there is an astoundingly large bit of leeway as far as maintaining an orbit around a massive object.
As for magnets, I've done that. In fact, my entire highschool AP physics class did that. We took two magnets and suspended one over the other in mid-air. It was a lab experiment. One was a regular magnet, the other was an electromagnet. We adjusted the current going through the electromagnet until the top magnet could be suspended. By measuring the distance between the two, and the current running through the electromagnet, would could figure out the exact charge on the second magnet.
As you may have guessed, I'm of Glen's mindset. I was once a devout Catholic, but have since come to my own personal realisation that there is no higher power.
For me, it seems far more plausible that the universe itself was never created, that it simply has always existed. As for "life after death" I can't say for sure, because we do not know all that makes up life, and much of physics and science is yet to be explored. For all we know, there may be more to our brains than just the matter it is made up of. There could be exotic energies which persist after the death of the biological organism.
All just speculation, and I hold it to be highly unlikely. Possible, but unlikely.
As for fathoming what it would be like to not exist, that's easy. What was it like before you were born? Don't remember? Exactly the point. You won't know, you won't care, you won't feel. You won't .... anything.
As for the concept of living forever, it is a concept that is qually impossible to physically comprehend. People may claim to, but really they are just giving it a word, not understanding it. Your brain PHYSICALLY CANNOT comprehend infinity. It's simply not possible. Just as your brain physically cannot comprehend nothingness. Your brain can think really big, or really small, but never infinity, and never zero. This is why those two numbers were the last to ever be defined (though note that infinity is still less frequently understood than zero).
As for earth being the perfect distance to sustain life, believe it or not, there is a very high chance that life exists outside earth but within our own solar system. Mars has a high liklihood for bacterial life, and it is believed it once had a more temperate climate.
Even more promising is Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Europa is covered in a moon-wide ocean. The surface is completely iced over. HOWEVER, probes have detected volcanic activity beneath the ice which has caused fissures in the surface. The only reason you don't hear a lot more about Europa is for one it takes a very long time to get there, two, we don't know if we have the technology to land on it, 3 even if we did, we wouldn't crack the ice which is many meters thick, and 4, the probably for life is so high there is ethical debate as to whether or not we want to disturb it.
Then there's Titan. Titan is very cold. Really friggin cold. Yet, many believe an entirely different form of life may exist there. Life on earth is based on water. Life on Titan, if it exists, is based on methane. Water has a triple point on earth, something not common. Having a triple point means it can exist as a solid, liquid, and vapor all around the same narrow temperature band. This is what makes life possible here on earth. Methane has a triple point on Titan. There are oceans of methane on Titan, the caps are covered in frozen methane, and there are methane clouds which condense and rain down liquid methane on the land on Titan. Just like earth only instead of water, there's methane. It is unknown what such life would look like or be structured like, but the possibility exists.
