Life in the Universe (4th Edition)
4th Edition
ISBN: 9780134089089
Author: Jeffrey O. Bennett, Seth Shostak
Publisher: PEARSON
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Textbook Question
Chapter E, Problem 3DQ
Extraterrestrial Life and Your Religion. Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life have any important implications for your own personal religious beliefs? Would it affect the current "official" beliefs (if any) of your religion? Explain.
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Students have asked these similar questions
The principle cause of our intense interest in Mars in the decades before the dawn of the space age was that
Answers:
A.
a few astronomers believed that they saw evidence of an intelligent civilization on Mars.
B.
Mars has seasons just like the Earth and therefore should be inhabitable by humans.
C.
Mars has an unusual surface color and global dust storms, creating strange weather patterns.
D.
Mars has unusual orbital properties making our understanding of its motion around the Sun very difficult.
Which of the following seems least reasonable regarding life on Earth?
Group of answer choices
There is much scientific evidence suggesting that all creatures living on Earth today appear to have evolved from a common ancestor.
Louis Pasteur discredited the concept of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that even bacteria and other microorganisms arise from parents resembling themselves.
There is ample physical evidence that the earliest life forms on Earth were multicellular creatures, perhaps resembling some of our primitive fish.
When the earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago, it was a lifeless, inhospitable place.
Before the mid-17th century, most people believed that God had created humankind and other higher organisms and that insects, frogs, and other small creatures could arise spontaneously in mud or decaying matter
About billion years into its development, the Earth it was teeming with organisms resembling blue-green algae.
For which of the following reasons (select all that apply), is it useful/important to send rovers to other planetary bodies in our solar system?
O a. The engineering innovations developed to produce successful/viable rovers and landers on other planets can help lead to developments in the technology used here on Earth that may have taken far more time to develop without the limitations provided by space travel
to foreign worlds.
O b. The data collected can help improve our understanding of the evolution/development of our solar system.
O. Rovers/landers can be outfitted with various tools and equipment that can be used to inform of us of the geological histories of each of the planets they visit.
O d. More direct probes of the planetary surface are possible to detect signs of the building blocks of life.
O e. Rock samples can be used to calibrate our estimations of the age of the solar system.
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