First a brief history lesson. Sir Isaac Newton is perhaps the smartest person to ever live on this planet. He discovered the laws of optics, the laws of motion, the universal law of gravitation... and then a friend of his asked "Why are the planets' orbits elliptical instead of circular?" So he basically went off for a few months, invented integral and differential calculus, and solved the question of why planets have elliptical orbits. THEN, he turned 26.

Imagine that amazing brain. Now.. if you read his writings you'll find that when he reached the end of his understandings of the universe.. in particular when he thought about how complex it would be to calculate all of the gravitational forces of all the planets, solar systems, etc. to very very accurately predict orbits he basically threw up his hands and said it was the realm of god.

Now, some 300 years later, we have powerful computers that can simulate and calculate these things very easily. It's practically child's play for the modern astrophysicist.. none of whom alive today are one tenth as smart as Newton.

This, for all intents and purposes, is a "god of the gaps". That is to say, we attribute things we don't understand to the supernatural. It's our scape-goat. It's the cop-out we use as an excuse not to push ourselves further to understand the world around us. It's taking this leap towards faith.. for no real reason than our own ignorance, that we *leave* rational though behind. There's nothing wrong with not understanding something and admitting it.

As for the improbable things happening so often.. well the Universe is quite large. Unimaginably large. Very very infrequent things happen all the time. Here's an example. Supernovas happen about twice per century in our galaxy. That's pretty darn infrequent. Our galaxy is so huge, about a trillion stars, and in all that space and all those stars it happens so incredibly infrequently. So how do astrophysicists study such a rare occurrence, or for that matter even know that they exist? Luckily the universe is HUGE HUGE HUGE! There's approximately 30-40 billion spiral galaxies similar to ours in the universe. That means a supernova happens every couple seconds somewhere in the universe. The group that monitors visible supernovas (visible with our most powerful telescopes) sends out notifications of about 150 supernovas every year.

There's billions of people on this planet and we've been around for millions of years. Really really rare occurrences are going to happen pretty darn frequently over such a huge sample size.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/14/2012 08:07PM by Rade.