The Impact of Life on another planet for Us

There are some scientific discoveries that do much more than advance our knowledge: they create a shift in our minds as they show us the giant scale and wonderful life of God’s Universe and our place in it. The discovery of life on another planet is such a moment and now there is news that signs of a gas which on Earth is produced by simple marine organisms, has been found on a planet called K2-18b.

Part of the challenge when it comes to researching the existence of alien life is knowing where to look. Until relatively recently, the focus for Nasa’s search for life was Mars, but that began to change in 1992 with the discovery of the first planet orbiting another star outside of our solar system. Although astronomers had suspected that there were other worlds around distant stars there had been no proof until that point. Since then, nearly 6,000 planets outside our solar system have been discovered.

Now Nasa is planning the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), scheduled for the 2030s, which will be able to spot and sample the atmospheres of planets similar to our own. Also coming online later this decade is the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which will be on the ground, looking up at the crystal-clear skies of the Chilean desert. Nasa is also sending a spacecraft called Dragonfly to land on one of the moons of Saturn, Titan in 2034. It is an exotic world with what are thought to be lakes and clouds made from carbon-rich chemicals which give the planet an eerie orange haze.

During Medieval times Christian theologians accepted the Ptolemaic earth centered Greek view of the universe as an absolute universal truth. Some Christians still think that humans must be at the center of God’s creation.

Even in America today, many Christians avoid learning about new scientific discoveries. According to a recently (February 2015) completed study “Religious Understandings of Science”, among members of non-Christian religions; 42 percent of Jews, and 52 percent of Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus (taken as a group) are twice as interested in new scientific discoveries compare to only 22 percent of Protestant evangelicals.

I do not know why evangelicals believe that the rarity of life in our universe proves that God must have created life only on this planet. Perhaps they believed that if intelligent life were found to exist on other planets; it would diminish the miracle of God’s creation of Human Beings. For me the opposite is true.

The Qur’an and the Hebrew Bible teach that the Living God created the whole universe to be conducive to the universal evolution of life. The Qur’an says, “We have not sent you but as a blessing for all the worlds.” (Al-Anbiya 107) Many commentators say this refers to the 18.000 livable worlds created by Allah (the number 18 is the Hebrew word ‘life’). Our world is one of them. (Mir’at-e-Kainat, vol.1, p.77). The Hebrew Bible says in the Zabur of Prophet David, King of Israel states; “Your kingdom is a kingdom of all the worlds; and Your dominion is for all generations.” (Psalms 145:13)

I am a Reform Rabbi who first became interested in Islam 65 years ago, when I studied it at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I have continued my study of Islam off and on since that time. I now consider myself to be a Reform Rabbi and an Islamic Jew. Actually I am an Islamic Jew i.e. a faithful monotheistic Jew submitting to the will of God, because I am a Reform Rabbi.

As a Rabbi I am faithful to the covenant that God made with Abraham – the first Islamic Hebrew (Genesis 14:13) and I submit to the commandments that God made with the Hebrew People of Israel at Mount Sinai. Thus, I see scientific things from the perspective of both the Qur’an and the Torah.

Astronomers have estimated that there could be at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in just our galaxy; the Milky Way. They also said that one in six stars could host an Earth-sized planet in a close orbit.

There are other scientific studies which support a Muslim and Jewish view of God as the creator and ruler of all living beings, on all the habitable worlds. The number of observed exoplanets has almost reached 6,000.

One study in the journal Nature reported that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. Thus, complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life. They can be made naturally by stars. This means that life is not a random fluke; the universe itself is formed to create life.

Organic substances commonly found throughout the Universe contain a mixture of ring-like and chain-like components. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble those of coal and petroleum. Since coal and oil are remnants of ancient life, this type of organic matter was thought to arise only from living organisms.

The team’s discovery suggests that complex organic compounds can be synthesized in space even when no life forms have yet evolved on any planet. By analyzing spectra of star dust formed in exploding stars, the astrophysicists showed that stars are in fact, making complex organic compounds, and doing so in extremely short time scales of weeks.

Now the ALMA radio telescope has detected more than 100 molecular species, including many indicative of different star formation and evolution processes, in a galaxy where stars are forming much more actively than in our Milky Way galaxy. This is far more molecules than were found in previous studies.

Not only are stars producing complex organic matter, they are also ejecting it into interstellar space, the region between stars. Thus, exploding old stars are molecular factories capable of manufacturing organic compounds.”Our work has shown that stars have no problem making complex organic compounds under near-vacuum conditions,” said researcher Kwok. “Theoretically, this is impossible, but observationally we can see it happening.”

Most interestingly, this organic star dust is similar in structure to complex organic compounds found in meteorites. Since meteorites are remnants of our early Solar System, the findings raise the possibility that stars enriched our early Solar System with organic compounds. The early Earth was subjected to severe bombardments by comets and asteroids, which would have carried organic star dust to planet earth; that then helped create life on earth. Scientists discovered that methanol is most abundant around a very small number of newly formed stars.

In fact, the range in methanol concentration varies from negligible amounts in some regions of interstellar space to approximately 30% of the ices around a handful of newly formed stars. They also discovered methanol for the first time in low concentrations (1 to 2 percent) in the cold clouds that will eventually give birth to new stars.

If life only forms on planets with stars that have high concentrations of methanol, life would be very rare in our universe. But when scientists compared their results with methanol concentrations in comets in our own solar system they found that methanol concentrations at the birth of our solar system were actually closer to the average of what they saw elsewhere in interstellar space.

“This means that our solar system wasn’t particularly lucky, and didn’t have the large amounts of methanol that we see around some other stars in the galaxy,” one researcher said.

As a Rabbi who believes in the verses of the Qur’an and the Hebrew Bible cited at the beginning of this article, I say that random luck has nothing to do with it. More and more evidence is accumulating that the laws of nature have been formed specifically to create life.

But planet Earth is essentially a ‘dry’ planet, with only 0.02% of its mass as surface water, so oceans must have came long after it had formed. Scientists think that happened when water-rich asteroids or comets in the solar system crashed into our planet. But there was no evidence to support this theory.

For those who believe in the One God of all the habitable worlds, none of these new scientific studies are shocking. For unlike the Italian inquisition’s condemnation of Galileo, no Muslim or Jewish astronomer was ever condemned by a Muslim or Jewish inquisition, because Jews and Muslims never had an institution like the inquisition.

Also, because both Muslims and Jews had many philosophers who were critics of Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s science, most medieval Jewish and Muslim religious leaders did not feel they had to prevent new science from disagreeing with Greek science.

Thus, even as new discoveries always change the scientific understanding of God’s universe; the religious belief that the whole universe exalts God and reveals God’s glory remains the same.

As it is written in the Zabur of Prophet David, King of Israel; “The heavens declare the glory of God. The universe proclaims God’s handiwork.” (Psalms 19:2) And as the Qur’an proclaims over and over again, “All that is in the heavens and all that is on the earth exalts Allah” (Qur’an 57:1, 61:1, and 64:1)