SECOND QUESTION FIRST (it actually sounds useful)

(*) light year = 6 trillion miles; ten light years is 60 trillion miles, or 240 million times as much as 1/4 million miles)

(**the nearest star is four light years away, but the nearest galaxy is a couple hundred million light years off)

The necessary magnification to see the moon’s surface with one meter resolution, from near earth orbit or about a quarter million miles away, is orders of magnitude beyond what the Hubble Space Telescope can achieve. Proof left to the reader, but that happens to be a fact. With one meter resolution you could make out a grainy image of something *possibly* identifiable as a lunar lander. But the Hubble can’t get nearly that fine-grained a picture from a quarter million miles away. A Star ten light-years distant (*) is fine – but then its size is a lot more than 240 million meters (i.e. about 150 thousand miles.) Our sun is more like 864 thousand miles wide. The resolution needed to barely make out our moon vehicle from Hubble orbit would give us a picture of a star the size of our sun that is just ten light years away (**) about seven pixels wide. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s huge – it would consist of about 39, or pi x 49/4, pixels. For comparison, thats the size of a small emoticon. Photographic plates that include a small-emoticon-sized image of a nearby star don’t exist.

FIRST QUESTION:

Without any moon the earth’s orientation relative to the sun would wobble. For a while the north pole might be in direct overhead sunlight at the summer solstice, about like our equator’s view of the sun, but worse – think of the sun over the equator, but 24×7. Six months later the south pole would be in permanent day because the earth would be on the other side of the sun.

That’s just one possibility – the earth’s axis would wobble. A lot. Just the way it works. All of the other possible scenarios have equal likelihood, on a timeframe too short for any kind of life to proceed past the single-celled stage.

To make it worse, the earth’s magnetic field works OK because its tilt relative to its axis around the sun is only 23 degrees; the magnetic field keeps the solar wind from blowing our atmosphere away. Mars wasn’t so lucky, and Venus is somehow stuck with so much CO2 there has to be some other factor that keeps it in place. Perhaps the solar wind can’t budge it. Regardless, it’s not going anywhere.

But the earth’s magnetic field would be end-on to the sun as often as sideways. earth’s atmosphere would become like Bob Dylan’s answer, “blowing’ in the wind.” The solar wind.

Gone.

Poetry or verse?

Since the advent of Walt Whitman the need for a poem to exhibit rhyme or meter has waned; today just about anything at all will pass.

“Anything at all” isn’t something to teach. A teacher should help the student realize that poetry is powerful language, is economical, and expresses feelings or ideas that:

•are profound

•use powerful language

•use direct, simple words work very well (less is more)

•express profound ideas in novel ways

•express novel ideas in profound ways

•express powerful emotions – but never in a sloppy way

Getting there takes a long, long time. An aspiring poet should plan to keep improving for life.

Think first – run a topic around the little quarter-mile track in your brain, each angle of an idea like a stride, until it’s been around and is getting sweaty. Let it cool off, and do that to it again tomorrow. Run lots of these things around your track every day.

VERSE?  = = = = =

If your student wants to attempt meter and rhyme, a gentle start is fine, but if the student is serious, only smooth, glistening surfaces should pass muster. So-called half-rhyme or relaxed meter or varying foot count are all fine, IF AN ONLY IF something about them perfectly fits the emotion or narration in the poem.

Get a rhyming dictionary and ask Uncle Google to tell you everything he knows about the types of ‘feet’ used in formal verse. Learn what iambic pentameter is – in Shakespeare’s day every line of every play came in iambic pentameter. From this your student should infer that iambic pentameter is close to ideal for English.  Sometimes the lines might also rhyme, such as when the playwright wants to hold up a bright light and say, “LOOK – my character REALLY FEELS this!” or “PAY ATTENTION HERE.”

How to get a running start – pick a meter, such as iambic, and practice writing everything you can think of to write – a letter to your kindergarten teacher, long years ago and probably unable to remember you despite the impression this teacher made on your psyche – summarize the argument for an against some political position, write a letter to the editor, state you seven most personally held beliefs – just anything at all. Only focus on saying it in meter.

It’s like doing drills for a sport, pumping iron in the gym, learning a new dance step – just keep at it until you realize you do it even when you’re not trying.

Now write a poem using that meter and a set number of feet per line. THIS will make you not just use meter but count feet.

Finally take your poem and look for ways to stuff in rhymes. It isn’t automatic, and can drive you nuts. Just pump it!

Word of advice – do NOT think of rhymes ahead of time – you will wind up using trivial dodges; you work will shout KINDERGARTEN at you when you read it back.

Final word of advice – say you’ve written four lines, with 1 and 3 rhyming but 4 just refuses to rhyme with 2. – What to do? Rewrite line 2.

BEST OF LUCK

Christians believe that, at the instant of the Big Bang, GOD invented the periodic table and all of quantum physics. Not only that, but the periodic table was tuned just right for carbon based life, DNA, protein folding to work, and a thousand yada’s.

My GOD is an awesome GOD.

On the other hand if there is no such, then all we have is an astoundingly fortuitous physics and chemistry, and no such thing as any divinity.

I just critiqued a questioner for asking an either-or question, alleging that there should be third, fourth, etc. possibilities, but the questioner simply assumed in full naivete that no other answers could exist, just because they hadn’t come to mind at that moment.

So let’s leave it there; given that we know the universe’s size, e.g. two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe, and an age of roughly 13 billion 780 million years, surely somebody in the last couple of thousand years here on earth could have come up with several alternatives to the two I allege above.

In fact they have. They’re called novelists, for the most part.

You can simulate just about anything in a computer. Doing it with *real* DNA means running fairly close to real time.

Data point: Each new pesticide germicide antibiotic what-have-you is easy to defeat in the lab. Not the ideal case, but it helps establish a baseline. Here’s how:

1. Lay out a growth medium for the pest species to eat and thrive in, and seed it with the germ-to-be-killed.

2. Make many fine rows of the pesticide, say very very little in the outside rows, a bit more, etc. up to a good dose down the middle row.

3. Come back in a day and see what’s going on. Usually the middle row will be dead, and the outside rows will be so-so, then graduating toward dead in the middle.

4. Replenish the growth medium’s nutrients but leave the pest species in place; replenish the pesticide, also in place.

5. Rinse, cycle, repeat. At the end of a few dozen cycles, the center row may show some effect, but by then the constant addition of pesticide will make it toxic for just about anything. The outer rows will show a new version of the germ species that thrives on the stuff.

In short, you have sped up evolution, not to create a new species, but to armor-plate a private version of the pest species.

Researchers go yum-yum-yum when they get their hands on one of these, because there will be so much more to learn about its metabolism and how it has responded to the pesticide. It helps to learn how to tell, out in the field and five years from now, what kind of resistance has cropped up in the real world.

But new-species evolution tends to include things like taking chromosomes apart, making new ones etc. *That* level of evolution takes tens of thousands to millions of generations, not dozens.

Speed like that can be simulated, in a deeply crude fashion, via computer algorithms. You need to presume some approach to how many mutations occur naturally per generation per billion DNA codons, and you would need to know a great deal about how the non-gene parts work to shape, expose, express, etc. govern the operation of the gene parts.

We also have epigenetics, which operate like a cheat-sheet or cook’s adjustments to a generic recipe: “IF AT HIGH ALTITUDE MAKE THE FOLLOWING ADJUSTMENTS TO LIQUIDS AND TEMPERATURE.” Epigenetics appear to ‘take notes’ on the environment at hand, then fine-tune which genes are turned down or off, and which are turned on or up.

Human mothers who are pregnant during times of famine bear children which are likelier to become obese as adults. It’s easy to see the strategy behind that – if food is scarce, program the next few generations to eat and save all they can. Epigenetics is the mechanism that does that.

(Warming up to a neat problem to solve) The simulation  models we can make today have no way tool that can handle a real genome for something and begin to stress it, shoot mutations at it, and play out whatever effect that might have on the next generation. But once we can, – –

Most mutations will be failures. A few can confer an advantage, a new way of reacting to the world. In earth’s historuy, evolution that creates novel species has tended to happen when some significant geologic or climatic event isolates a species into multiple disconnected populations. Contiguous populations may experience drift, but will tend to arrive at a state which fits the current environment so well that ‘good’ mutations just don’t happen that much. Their skeleton, skin, musculature, yada and yada stop changing, and their fossil record stabilizes.

A change that separates one species into multiple non-interbreeding populations tends, one can see intuitively, to destabilize each of their environments at the same time. Each population should reach its own new optimal state – the duration of this in generations is huge, but measured by geologic time is pretty small. This phenomenon has a name: Punctuated Equilibrium. That’s why so few “missing link” fossils occur. The fossil record has very little opportunity to save mid-change forms simply because they happen too fast for the geologic fossil record to capture them.

Or another way, the Galapagos Islands acquired some starter population of finches at a time when no birds existed there. Over time the parent set separated into ‘occupations’ like seed eater, insect eater, nectar eater, fruit eater, and so forth. Each one developed its own bill shape, body size, etc. to handle that niche.

When Darwin arrived he found that they had adapted into populations which could interbreed but which did not, because each self-selected population had its own adaptation for seeds, fruit, bugs, etc. as its primary diet. An interbred clutch of eggs would produce ill-adapted chicks. They could not survive, so the tendency to interbreed died with them. Given a good geologic time span they would have diverged to the point where interbreeding would simply fail.

Can we model evolution in the lab? Maybe once we get good enough at simulating DNA on a computer. It’s easy to observe in retrospect via the fossil record and in tiny one-or-two gene adaptations. Doing that in the lab, to generate brand new species, would take hundreds of human lifetimes; to do it in a computer would make at least a little more sense, but would also require us to model working DNA, protein-folding, complex enzyme interactions, and a thousand yada’s.

Computers keep getting smarter – in twenty years we might ask one to think about it.

I’ll go out on a limb. I believe that GOD perfuses the Christian Bible, but I also credit the fact that Creation began when astronomers and physicists say it did. We can quibble over how that makes sense some other time – I’m only going to talk science as the scientific community knows it.

The population of stars we can ‘count’ – estimate – is roughly 100 billion per galaxy, and 2 trillion galaxies. Not many people run into these numbers, but their size likely maximizes the likelihood of life developing multiple times.

How many stars, on average, have a suitable candidate planet in orbit?

a) Presence of a full kit of elements requires that the star / planet system arise from the aftermath of a collision of two neutron stars. That is the only way current theory has found to make more than the first couple dozen elements.

b) Presence of an earth-like planet, i.e. rocks and water and iron core (for that, later) in a pretty narrow Goldilocks zone. Our planet was an ice ball for a hundred million years or so – then tectonic activity loaded the atmosphere with CO2 etc. Not going to recite the geological history of the planet here, but it has seen both ice at the equator and heat that let plants live at the poles. To this untutored brain, that says the Goldilocks zone almost has a negative width! A teeny bit colder, or a teeny bit warmer, and the planet may still have engendered cellular life, but the likelihood of it ever becoming hi-tech is slim to none.

c) Presence of a large, stabilizing moon. Evolution of species works well when the climate changes slowly. But an unstabilized planet will have its axis of rotation precessing such that there will be eras with one pole in constant daylight and one in constant darkness, part of the time. Earth has vastly better odds of evolving its plethora of species because the moon anchors its axis to about 23 degrees of tilt relative to its orbit around the sun, giving us seasons. They’re bad enough, but life keeps finding ways. If the ‘seasons’ lasted millions of years, life would still find a way – maybe.

d) That iron core. Earth’s core spins because earth spins; this provides a magnetic field, and the magnetic field deflects vast amounts of damaging particles that leave the sun. Life on board the Space Station isn’t terribly unsafe, but the area where solar emissions encounter the earth’s magnetic field isn’t a healthy place. Moon astronauts got through it fine, but they zoomed through it in a relatively brief passage, coming and going. Without that iron core we might not even have an atmosphere. Venus has a crushing super-blanket of CO2; Mars has the same density at the surface that earth has somewhere above 80,000 feet. The SR-71 got up that high; it had to go Mach 3 and above just to get enough air into its engines, and enough air hitting its wings, to stay that high. SIDE DATA POINT – without the moon, the earth’s magnetic field would have spent millions of years head-on to the sun, letting those atomsphere-depleting particles eat away at the atmosphere.

E1) Now we get to the real nitty-gritty. The shopping list you take to the hardware store includes a bunch of lipids – sheets of the stuff. The nucleic acids are already on hand, bubbling around in the hot ocean water. Every ten degree centigrade jump in temperature doubles the speed of a chemical reaction, and life in our oceans appears to do fine at temperatures fifteen or more tens of degrees centigrade above what we see on the surface. Ten doublings is roughly a thousand times faster. And there are billions of gallons of hot soupy water. Things align and break down constantly.

E2) But it takes enzymes to make RNA chains; DNA comes later. It takes other enzymes to ‘do stuff’ based on the RNA. And all of this has to happen inside a lipid shell. And the stuff trapped inside the lipid shell has to stumble across a way to replicate itself. AND the self-replicating stuff inside the lipid shell has to find a source of chemical energy because every single chemical change takes some inputs, uses energy, and results in something with a changed energy state.

E3) Energy and mass are interchangeable – combine two H’s and an O to get a three-atom molecule. This releases energy, and the H2O winds up with a teeeeensie bit less mass. Love that technical term. H2O has less mass than two free H’s and the free O. Thank Einstein for the math to figure out just how little mass that is, but it’s non-zero. In other words, to be ‘life’ this assemblage must also manage an energy budget where new chemical bindings that absorb energy, i.e. are the opposite of burning, get balanced out (paid for) by other chemical reactions that release energy.

E4) In short, the piling-together of interrelated circumstantial jackpots beggars the imagination. It works now, but how this enormously complex operation happened for a first time is beyond easy calculation.

I allege no answer to the mystery of why life exists at all. It is ‘any idiot knows’ obvious that life exists here; but there is no real future in letting idiots do your knowing for you. Numbers like sextillions of stars (a 2 with twenty-three 0’s following it) make it seem likely that some other planet, at some time, also had life arise. But my nickel says that GOD was so lavish as to make that many stars, just to guarantee that, after watching long enough, and with patience and excitement no human can comprehend, the exultation of life would occur.

We measure it as 8.8 billions from bang to our sun  igniting; at time 9.2 billion years earth coalesced. At time 10.8 billion years life had begun leaving marks in the sedimentary record; and at time 13.2 billion years sexual reproduction came along, and that (pun intended) spawned an explosion of species.

So, could that have happened somewhere else, “Long ago in a galaxy far, far away?” To me, believing that question has an easy answer is folly.

It takes power beyond the ability of a human brain to register, much less describe, to create a universe such as this one. I believe that not two but THREE god’s made the universe, except for the fact that all three of them are parts of the same GOD.

John 1:1-3 “In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was GOD, and the WORD was with GOD. All things that were made were made by the WORD.”

So there’s that part, the second person of the trinity.

Genesis 1:3 “In the beginning GOD said, “Let there be light.”

I regard that as the SPIRIT breathing out the WORD.

Your mileage may vary, but for there to be something capable of calling the universe into existence, all 13.78 billion years and, evidently, all two hundred sextillion stars in it, the ability of a human to conceptualize or even comprehend that GODness is, well, let’s be kind and say it’s insufficient.

But the idea of two or more such, bumping into each other and deciding to create nuclear physics and the table of elements, then turning them loose via a Big Bang – that does seem unlikely.

Look at it like tinker toys or LEGO. On the grand creative scale, there is the top level where objects get conceived of and made to exist, and on the next level where objects come together to make “things” i.e. clumps that not only stick together and have a shape, but are capable of some mechanical function.

Physics and the table of elements are as much more intricate than tinker toys. So is GOD is much more intricate and vast than we are. I think it’s a workable analogy to picture this world as consisting of elements which are capable of BEING assembled but SELF-assembly, i.e. DNA based life.

We may have a hard time figuring out the odds for those first lipids, enzymes, etc. to arrive at a first cell that can manage to make another cell – the odds are ‘astronomical,’ pun intended. We can’t tell whether GOD stirred the multiple millions of  cubic miles of hot primordial chemical soup, over hundreds of millions of years, on ten to the humpty-dumpty planets, or was that enough for the first cell to ‘fall into place’ at least once? (Uh, humpty-dumpty isn’t really a technical word.)

With two times ten to the twenty-third power of suns to find a likely planet in orbit around one or more of them? THIS planet did ‘get there’ and I can’t determine whether GOD stacked the deck just by the way the table of elements is tuned to work, or instead had to intervene for the first cell to come together. And for that matter, the question is way above my pay grade. 🙂

Oh, we are supposed to worry about WHO runs the universe. That’s also way above my pay grade, but my nickel says the Christian Triune GOD makes a very good candidate.

Judaism has a lengthy and coherent Scripture. It begins with an origin story, proceeds to doctrine, teachings, hymns, and prophecies, contains well over a thousand years of recorded history, and is laden with what Christians acknowledge to be prophecy.

Christianity traces itself from the birth of Jesus the Christ (Messiah), incorporating many dozens of textual references to the Jewish Scripture. It differs from all other religious instruction, both prior-to and since, in emphasizing a GOD who loves and redeems via blood sacrifice – initially under the Jewish system of temple sacrifices using spotless animals, and later by crucifying Christ, the ‘spotless’ perfect Sacrificial Lamb. He suffered death so that the entire world could be redeemed. The Christian New Testament accreted during the second half of the first Century CE, from the hands of at least eight men. My count isn’t handy, but we have many letters of Paul, gospels from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, plus James, Peter, and one or two others whose works are included but not voluminous. They wrote or dictated to scribes a total of twenty-seven books over the span of about fifty years.

Islam arose in a span of twenty years via rhymed couplets memorized by devotees because the originator, and presumably many devotees who committed them to memory, were illiterate. After perhaps as little as a century these utterances were committed to ink, collected but not in the order of their delivery, and used as the basis for a faith system which alleged to ensue from, and correct, both Jewish and Christian teachings. As to any visible connection to either the Old Testament considered sacred by both Jews and Christians and the New Testament held sacred by Christians, the Muslim Scripture has at best a vaporous connection marked almost entirely by its divergences from them.

The Muslim Scripture ‘corrects’ those earlier Scriptures by e.g. placing Moses and Elijah (I think – at any rate, a prophet who lived a thousand years after Moses) as co-contemporaries of Pharaoh and pointedly ‘corrects’ or disagrees with most of the major tenets of both pre-existing Scriptures.

Just for a minor example, the early Muslim Scriptures, delivered during the first ten of their prophet’s twenty active years, seldom if ever refer to their god as Allah – but during the second decade the name Allah, which by the way was the same name used for the Moon Goddess by ‘pagan’ Arabs in that extant culture – As I mentioned, the name Allah found usage primarily in that second decade, to the point where the Muslim writings ‘correct’ the Jewish and Christian writings by chiding them for using their own name for not being ‘Allah.’

For one, the Jewish name was considered too holy to pronounce – so the vowels from one word and consonants from another desensitize it as “Jehovah” – and when translated to e.g. English that holy name is “I AM WHO I AM.” In short, this is the name for the self-created source of the entire physical universe. Yet  Muslims take it as a matter of faith that the original and correct name of GOD was that borrowed nomen appropriated after the fact from their pagan moon deity.

So, did the Muslims actually “part ways” with Jews and Christians?

Christianity accepts Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies as taken verbatim from the Jewish Scripture. Christians read it today, devoid of the changes or “corrections” which the Muslim scripture alleges to be necessary.

In my unstudied opinion, formed by reading layman-level explanatory works from career-level scholars, the Muslim Scripture hijacks a name here and an idea there, while diverging wholesale from any actual religious teaching found in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures.

This is an uneducated guess.

First, intelligent life is pretty unstable. In one one-hundred-thousandth of the sun’s age we have gone from cave man to astronaut. No telling how much farther we’ll get, but there is now sufficient destructive power in the hands of monomaniacal tyrants to “drain the swamp” (my term) in nothing flat.

Second, life if left to develop long enough might become intelligent – but it took three billion years (sixty percent of the sun’s age) for single-celled life to invent sex (full-on gene swapping) for speciation to really take off, and another six hundred million years (twelve-ish percent of the sun’s age) for an intelligent species to arrive. Upshot – sketchy at best, even if single-celled life does come about.

Third, people who dislike the idea of evolution usually make ridiculous assertions, but they have managed to detail the enormous odds against that first single cell ‘falling together,’  sort of like a whirlwind through a million junkyards assembling a working airplane. Upshot – beyond sketchy.

Fourth, on the other side of that huge coin, THIS planet began with a mix of water and other useful elements, and lots of heat, and hundreds of millions of years, and vast millions of cubic miles to work with. The math for that is above my pay grade, but given that there are two by ten to the 23rd stars, the likelihood that some other star may have its own goldilocks-like planet which also, at some point in the last seven or eight billion years (( the elements on this planet can only have come from the collision of two massive neutron stars, so that makes the odds far skinnier than you’d think )) maybe some other star in some other galaxy has / had life develop there, too.

As a Christian who believes that GOD said “Let there be light,” and who respects the physicists who believe that happened 13.78 billion years ago, I will not deny the idea that GOD made the universe the size it is just so that HE could watch it spin and evolve life this once. As to whether HE set up life to happen more times than once, I’ll wait until the chance arises to ask HIM personally. That is, if the question even occurs to me when I get there.

‘Race’ having any connection to DNA gives some folks the willies. But there is an obvious DNA link to skin color and a VERY LARGE number of small adaptations to life where that group initially lived, ‘initially’ being in the last thousand-odd years.

‘Race’ is also a matter of nurture. Steve Martin made a movie three or so decades back featuring a dorky white guy named Navin who grew up as an adopted child of poor Southern black parents. The movie proved nothing whatsoever, but in a back-handed way tried to guess at how much nurture has to do with adult behaviors.

The United States’ history of enslaving people stolen wholesale from Africa between the early 16th and middle 19th Centuries, plus a war fought because the industrial north tried to impose economic slavery upon the agrarian south – not many people reflect on the fact that Lincoln declared slaves to be free when the war was already half-over – shows that it was the north’s deeply ironic imposition of slavery on the south that led the south to do what their black slaves didn’t have the wherewithal to do for themselves – revolt – and it didn’t end any better for the south than it did for most of the people they enslaved.

One who persecutes another winds up demeaning, belittling, and hating the one being persecuted. That’s the way persecutors lull themselves to a sound slumber every night. The north hasn’t shed any tears about the privations that war forced on the south, and sleep well ditto. Those who think blacks ‘have a place, and should learn it’ also sleep well at night.

We have most of the world’s supply thereof, or at least it seems that way. Those are the ones who, by their actions, reinforce and help define the idea of race in the U S A. While they hold those learned-at-my-mama’s-knee corrupt ideas, the working definition of race won’t go away.