The movie Knowing is the latest one to bring up the subject of total Earthly destruction. Such films beg the question, are we willing to believe that there is no world populated with sentient beings in the universe where such apocalyptic destruction has ever happened? Assuming such things have happened (it would seem almost impossible to assume they haven’t), what are the implications also assuming that there is a God?
There are numerous plausible implications…
The first is that god does not care, which implicates we are not very important.
Perhaps it is a bored god, and is in need of worship, and every million years or so he turns his attention to a new race…
Perhaps god is sadistic.
Take your pick, there are many more
Is this simply a statistics question?
Well, for something I haven’t seen mentioned here before…If one borrows the idea of God from religions like LDS and assume God is only a god of Earth and it’s galaxy, and that other galaxies with life are governed by a different god and that gods allow planets to be destroyed when their purposes are complete, then the responsibility of the question involved shifts dramatically to God’s reasoning for other planets destruction and refocuses back to Earth’s destruction.
I think that most people never take the fact that they really are a small mark in the history of life into account when considering apocalyptic events. Bringing the theory of aliens into this, people assume that because they are the only KNOWN form of intelligent life that they must be the only ones in the universe. It is highly plausible that there have been other societies before us or even right now in the universe and people need to consider this when they try to predict the future of human life.
The nature of man in this regard (or at least from how I percieve it) is that we act instinctually about this topic ie- will humans be able to escape and recolonise and go back to the basics? In a few thousand years our galaxy is set to collide with the andromeda galaxy, the milky way being the smaller one, it will be destroyed by the larger andromeda galaxy (this is known as astro cannibalism) and Earth will most likley cease to be. However this will not stop stars from being formed or more galaxies colliding or other planets and forms of life from happening in the future.
God, I feel, would see this as an act of nature just as we people consider killing for meat or killing in self defense ect an act of nature. The problem with our human race is that we are trying to immortalise ourselves, why? Out of fear and the want to survive, bringing in the idea of primal instincts. We are the same as any race on this planet or any possible others that have lived and died out and I believe that the fact that we are eventually going to die out makes the opportunities we have now all the more precious. As for God, if he does exist I highly doubt he is that interested in our apocalypse when he could be watching people have doomsday sex and make fun of the retarded faces we make. Death is only the equal and opposite to life “as is one nothing without the other”-anon.
No.
Is the death of a population stretched out over a hundred years any different if it happens in an instant, both set as they are against the backdrop of eternity or the possible survival of our souls? The issue isn’t God’s compassion of lack of it, or His interest in us; it is His commitment to our free will. If He were to save one child, it would undermine the free will of the rest of us, just as it would undermine the free will of all those on other worlds if He saved ours.
We don’t know the fate of our souls, or if God even exists in the first place. In fact, it would undermine our free will if we even knew we had souls or not. All we can do it pack as much life as possible into whatever amount of time we end up with, even going to movies about the end of the world.
Pie_people
I don’t think you have the most recent data. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light/years away from the Milky Way and closing at about 100km/sec, putting the collision at about 2.5 billion years from now; and it will be tangential making it hard to know exactly when and what will happen even then.
Still your point is well taken. There will almost certainly be many calamities and lost worlds, and galactic collisions are apparently fairly common in the universe.
Moral: Eat, [think] and be merry, for tomorrow we die.