Suze, over at Obsolete Childhood has introduced a new prompt called “Answer Me This.” Suze says it’s “an alternative daily prompt” to the WordPress Daily Prompt, which she characterized as “ones that totally suck and are focused upon the young people here.
Anyway, her prompt question today is this:
Is it ethical to grow fully formed, brainless clones for harvesting organs?
Hmm. When I read this question, the first thing that popped into my head was the pod factory in The Matrix where human bodies are cultivated.
I don’t know if this question is a hypothetical question, if it’s about science fiction, or if people are actually doing this or are proposing doing this, but my initial thought is:
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it.
Just a few bits and pieces that I thought I might share with you today.
Number 1 in the Nation
Mississippi Christians have erected a 14th giant cross. The latest cross — 120 feet high and 64 feet wide — towers over the town of Aberdeen, and cost $240,000 in private donations. Mike Rozier, whose company is putting up the massive crosses, says it’s money well spent, despite Mississippi’s very high poverty rate. “People say Mississippi ranks 49th or 50th of 50 states in various categoies,” Rozier says, but “we’re proud to say we’re number 1 in the number of crosses.”
The Check is in the Mail
Only 70 percent of mail intended to be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service within three to five days arrived on time last year, an 11 percent drop from 2022. A $40 billion overhaul of the system ordered by the Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has caused widespread disruptions, and state and federal officials are voicing concerns about the possible impact on mail-in ballots in the 2024 presidential election.
A Lot of Work to Do
Atmospheric concentrations of the three most potent greenhouse gases rose to new record levels in 2023, highlighting the failure by world leaders and industry to curb carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emis-sions.
While the increases in each did not quite match the record jumps of recent years, the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and livestock farming have brought the world’s CO2 levels 50% higher than they were before the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
“As these numbers show, we still have a lot of work to do to make meaningful progress in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere,” said Vanda Grubisi, director of NOAA’s global monitoring laboratory.
For this week’s Mindlovemysery’s Menagerie Friday Faithfuls challenge, Jim is asking us to write anything about how old the planet Earth is.
Astro physicists set the age of the planet Earth at about 4.5 billion years. Some religious and biblical “scholars” claim that the planet is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. It makes for very interesting and sometimes heated debates.
But from my personal perspective, how old the planet Earth is has little bearing on our lives. On the other hand, how much longer the planet will be able to sustain human life is a much greater concern for me, especially when I think about my grandchildren.
So I think we should stop looking backward and arguing about how old the planet Earth is, and start looking forward to come up with workable solutions for saving the planet Earth in order that human life can continue to exist on it.
Today is a perfect example of serendipity. For the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Friday Faithfuls, Jim Adams invited us to write about astronomy, planets, stars, constellations, or galaxies.
For her Provocative Question today, JYP asked us to find a news article or journal article about an interesting scientific finding and share why you found it interesting.
Well, just this morning I read about how two new “possibly habitable” planets have been discovered by an international team of researchers led by the University of Göttingen in Germany. They discovered these two new Earth-like planets near one of our closest neighboring stars, “Teegarden’s star.”
How’s that for serendipity? Astronomy, planets, stars, and science.
This illustration shows one way that planet TOI-715 b, a super-Earth in the habitable zone around its star, might appear to a nearby observer.
Why is this of interest to me? Well, TOI-715 b is slightly larger than Earth, measuring about 1½ times as wide, and is “fairly close to us,” at 137 light-years away, a close proximity from an astronomical standpoint. The planet orbits a small reddish star within the “conservative habitable zone,” the distance from the star that would provide the planet with a suitable temperature for the formation of liquid water on its surface, according to NASA.
And it’s not just one planet. There is a second Earth-sized planet that could be in this same system and also exhibits qualities that could make it potentially habitable. If confirmed, this second planet “would become the smallest habitable-zone planet discovered so far.
Now here is where things get hairy. If there are other habitable planets in the universe, and potentially by intelligent life, what implication does that have for the infinite, all-powerful God as the alleged creator of everything? According to the Bible, Earth was created before any other planet or star existed, including the Sun. Earth came into existence on the first day of Creation. God withheld the creation of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars until the fourth day. Earth is unique and holds center stage in God’s Creation.
So does this discovery blow up the whole notion that God created the universe — and, therefore everything, including us? Or does it just mean that God did create everything and just forgot to mention that he created other life-supporting planets to anyone?
This, That, and the Other 