Perhaps a year ago now I read a sermon by Chuck Smith from Genesis - it was a transcript of what he said. When he was in school he was taught the Earth was two billion years old. Since then that estimate has more than doubled.
You see, the more scientists study how biology really works, the more they’re convinced the universe - and Earth - must be older and older. Only two billion years wasn’t enough time for the rocks to solidify, life to begin, and then evolve into what we see today.
A couple of years ago a theory arose that the octopus had developed on another planet. You can read a news story about it here, or read the study (published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology) here.
The way I understand it, the octopus is too sophisticated to have evolved on Earth in the time available. The octopus only arrived on the scene 270 million years ago.
So let’s think this through. The experts are saying the octopus developed on another planet, and some catastrophic even knocked fertilized eggs into space. Not just into space, but above the escape velocity of the star around which the planet orbited. Then, having been embedded into a rocky asteroid, which traveled through space, then arrived in our solar system. The asteroid is on an intercept course for Earth, enters the atmosphere, and deposits that fertilized egg in our receptive oceans. Then consider that there had to be at least two eggs to have a mating couple.
Let’s do some “hand waving” math.
The fastest thing we’ve detected in our solar system was the asteroid Oumuamua. At its closest approach to the sun it was moving at about sixty kilometers per second. That’s a little more than thirty-seven miles per second. But keep in mind the vast distances between the stars. At 37.28 miles/s, it would take Oumuamua more than 21,000 years to get here from our closest stellar neighbor.
Think of the probability of an octopus developing on an alien planet, an asteroid hitting at just the right angle and speed to scoop up at least two fertilized eggs, resulting in an escape trajectory, on a vector that thousands of years later would intersect Earth’s orbit, survive reentry, and then hatch to form the octopus species.
OH! And this life form has a DNA molecule that’s pretty much the same kind of blueprint as all other life on Earth.
Another thing to keep in mind: inbreeding.
What are the chances?
Makes an Intelligent Design theory seem rational, doesn’t it?
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