IN THE BEGINNING...

Day 185 of the Lower Puna Eruption.

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From The Bible:  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  

Then the first evidence of life on Day 3:  And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.  

Finally, on Day 6, us:  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

To the left, of course, is the painting by Michelangelo of God creating Adam, which you can view on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican.

The essentials of the above, where you can also toss in when this occurred--10,000 years ago--are still believed by 38% of the U.S. population.

Note, however, that in 1999 the belief rate was 47%.  That difference was mostly taken over by those who feel that evolution had everything to do with where we are today, up from 9% to 19%.  Hard to believe that only two decades ago less than 10% of the USA population believed in evolution.  This was one reason I just had to include The Golden Evolution in my SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity.

Education and religion also influence belief:

                                      God Created Us          Humans
                                    in our present form        evolved
                                       within the past
                                        10,000 years

High school or less               48%                         12%

Catholic                                 37%                         11%
Protestant                              50%                          6%

No religion                              9%                          57%

Tomorrow, the current scientific theories on the beginning of life.  The field is on the order of my posting yesterday (just scroll down to the next article), when in 1976 I was part of a faculty team at NASA's Ames Research Center on Project Orion to design a telescope to detect the first extrasolar planet, for the key SETI question of that day was, are we the only solar system in the Universe.

It took until 1992, or maybe it was 2012, to officially settle this question:

An exoplanet (UK: /ˈɛk.soʊˌplæn.ɪt/, US: /ˌɛk.soʊˈplæn.ɪt/)^[4] or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Sun's solar system. The first evidence of an exoplanet was noted as early as 1917, but was not recognized as such.^[5] However, the first scientific detection of an exoplanet was in 1988, although it was not confirmed to be an exoplanet until later in 2012. The first confirmed detection occurred in 1992. As of 1 November 2018, there are 3,874 confirmed planets in 2,892 systems, with 638 systems having more than one planet.^[6]

Today, are we the only life in the Universe?  Here is some background for tomorrow:

If you want to read the above, click on the 1June2018 issue of Scientific American.

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