Cosmosapiens summary

Though the big-bang model has been around since the 1920s, it’s still incomplete, failing to explain several observational and theoretical problems.

For instance, even the redshift evidence has holes in it.

For ages, humans have wondered if life exists on other planets or in far away galaxies, a question that remains open to this day.

However, scientists have determined that there are six conditions necessary for the existence of life.

To most of us, life seems self-evident: The cat that rubs against your leg is alive, the piece of toast on your plate is not. But defining what life is – what distinguishes the living from the nonliving – is actually very difficult.

In fact, science is still struggling to define life.

So, how did we evolve from single-celled organisms into creatures capable of enjoying this blink? The best explanation that science currently has is biological evolution – a series of changes within an organism that results in a new species.

Charles Darwin first proposed that biological evolution occurs through natural selection, a process where the strongest individuals and organisms in any given population have the best chance of survival and get the most mates, thereby passing on their characteristics to the next generation.

It’s difficult to define exactly what life is, and it’s equally hard to pinpoint precisely what differentiates human beings from other living organisms. Scientists have pointed to particular traits – such as our unique way of walking on two feet and our artistic endeavors – but there are other things to consider.

Perhaps humankind’s truly unique trait is the capacity for reflective consciousness.

Of course, humans didn’t suddenly wake up one day with reflective consciousness; it developed gradually over the course of 2.5 million years.

And this process was initially at odds with the powerful survival instincts that we’d inherited from our prehuman ancestors.

So far, we’ve come across many questions that science still can’t explain. But science’s failure to provide an answer today doesn’t entail another failure tomorrow. However, scientific insight does seem limited – and there may be questions that it simply can’t explain.

First of all, the domain of science itself has limitations, especially when it comes to observation and measurement.