Anthropocentric vision

Our anthropocentric worldview is shattered from the scientific era. Indeed, more the science explains the Universe around us, until the emergence of life and more the man seems to be a common phenomenon. The man who was at the center of creation, on a Earth blessed by the Gods, at the center of the universe, gradually loses his status only to be told since the 20th century, that the matter which it is made is an ordinary matter, that life comes from space, and therefore somewhere and that our planet is a lost island among billions of islands in infinite space.
"Science, as an expression attributed to Freud, inflicted several wounds to self-esteem of humanity by popping the anthropocentric framework to locate the man in a tiny place in the Cosmos and confined in temporal instant as short than improbable." (Pascal Picq, le monde a-t-il été créé en sept jours ?). Man has always been fascinated by the beauty of the sky and the universe. Faced with such complexity, it is normal to have a false vision.
In Prague in the early 17th century, three characters will disrupt this vision. A scientist with revolutionary ideas, a sponsor of science and a passionate mathematics.

Since ancient times, people try to ward off his fear of death and infinite spaces, and explain the world around them by the actions of spirits and gods.
Neanderthal Man (250 000 to 28 000 years) was due to the universe by the mind, spirit sun, the moon spirit, the spirit of the stars and everything else was familiar, to the extent of his anguish .
There are about 10 000 years, the universe becomes mythical spirits, is the domain of the gods.
All natural phenomena are explained then by the actions of gods, the creation of sky, earth, oceans, humans, love, war...
For the Babylonians there are 5 000 years, the god of Heaven is Tiamat, woman who creates original Ea, the god of the earth.
For the Egyptians, Ra, the sun god in his daily journey across the sky, crossed by boat back to the Nout, days, returning at night on its steps.
For Chinese, the world was created by the impact forces between the two polar opposites, yin and yang.
For the Greeks, no question of surrendering blindly to the gods but to observe natural phenomena as they are explaining.
The man then sharing the knowledge of gods, the Greek miracle, the golden age of science and philosophy that we inherit property made today (500 to 200 BC. JC).

4000 BC. JC, the Earth is at the center of the universe. Early theories about the architecture of our universe appear in Mesopotamia.
There are in fact the first recorded observation on the moon eclipses, comets and the first predictions of planetary conjunctions between them.
The Mesopotamians also learned to identify the progressive movement of the constellations in the sky, and the annual return of stars.
The Earth was at that time viewed as the center of the universe, with the other bodies revolving around it.
In Europe, the first astronomical measurements date back to around 6700 BC, when are the first rows of standing stones and the stones of Stonehenge (England). The site of Stonehenge, astronomical observatory, was the subject of many theories which predict the solstices, equinoxes, but also eclipses of sun and moon. The number of similar sites around the world demonstrates the importance given to records of the movements of the sun and moon.
In Egypt in 4000 BC. JC, it first creates the annual calendar. Having noticed that the star Sirius appeared at the same time as the annual flooding of the Nile, the Egyptians will deduce that the sun is every 365 days, at the same position in the sky relative to other stars.

And they divided the year into three seasons: the flood season, the planting season and harvest season.
Astronomy Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Arabic and Maya is based on the apparent motion of celestial bodies. Their solar calendars and lunar calendars and Venusian present only minor differences with those of modern astronomers.

Image: The orbit of Mars seen in the geocentric reference Kepler of 1580 to 1596. The Earth is at the center, orbit the sun on the outer circle. During the Martian year, the Earth-Mars distance varies in a proportion of 1 to 6.

7 centuries BC, Thales of Millet, the philosopher, scientist and mathematician takes Greek astronomical ideas of the Babylonians.
He sees the Earth as a disk floating on water and sky as a vault limiting the world. His interest in astronomy led him to observe that some stars were not all fixed relative to the others and he called planets meaning errants body. That's when humanity becomes aware of the existence of six planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Since the dawn of time, most men believed that the Moon and the Sun were planets and saw not the position of Earth in the universe, Pythagoras was one of the first to argue that the Earth is spherical. The Pythagoreans considered therefore the Earth as a sphere revolution around which revolve in concentric circles the sun, the moon, the five planets then known, and the sphere of fixed stars of heaven.
Earth has been recognized as a planet by the Greeks around the year 500 BC. JC. and 4 centuries BC. JC Aristotle shows that the Earth is spherical in speaking of the shadow cast by the Earth on the moon during eclipses. 3 centuries BC. JC, Greek Aristarchus of Samos already indicates that the Earth orbits the Sun on a circular orbit.
He is one of the first to propose a heliocentric universe, but such a revolutionary design still does not meet the approval of his contemporaries. It also places the sphere of stars much farther away from Earth orbit without prove.

However, this concept has been ignored for two millennia, since it is only since 1543 that the Polish monk Copernicus Nicolas stated that the Earth was simply one of the planets around the Sun. Of course, this theory went against the geocentric model widely accepted since Ptolemy had given a formal description.
During the long dark period for Science, the geocentric system was accepted as an inalienable truth by various schools of thought (including the Catholic Church). Finally, the idea of Copernicus was imposed because this system works better and uses less unverified assumptions as that of Ptolemy.
The latter in fact required fireworks increasingly obscure to remain consistent with the ever more precise observations.
Then the Dane Tycho Brahe and his assistant Johannes Kepler German added to the Copernican model of other improvements consistent with the observations and the new theory.

Image: Gemma Frisius, mathematician, born in Dockum (Friesland) on 9 December 1508, died in Leuven on 25 May 1555, where he taught mathematics and medicine. His treatise "De ratione locorum describendorum" (1533) contains the oldest account of the principles of triangulation and a method for determining longitudes (The History of Geodesy).

Nicolas Copernicus (1473 - 1543) therefore calls into question the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe and realize that the Earth revolves around the sun well. For the first time, it represents the universe with its center and place our sun finally all other celestial bodies in orbit around it. He was executed for heresy against the church. Finally, in 1610, the observations made by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), using his first telescope, have provided evidence confirming the vision of Copernicus.
Galileo observed, among other things, that Venus appeared on a phase similar to the Moon (ie, crescent moon, new moon and full moon) that could not be explained if the planet described an orbit around the Sun, smaller than the Earth. The system ptoléméen, despite all the tinkering imagined, could never reflect the Venusian phases. Galileo also deducted for his comments that the Milky Way consists of a large number of stars, the moon is covered with craters, the planets do not emit light, they only reflect light from the sun that Jupiter has satellites and support the fact that the Earth and planets revolve around the sun well. It will be pursued by the Inquisition, and must publicly repudiate his views known as "heretics."
But the discoveries of Galileo had much impact on the European system of thought that the explanation of how our solar system. Indeed, until this stage of our history, all believed that the Earth (and by extension, humanity) was the center around which all seriousness.

Our world, with all its imperfections, was perceived as the domain of man, while the heavens perfect and immutable, were the domain of the gods. This cosmology reveals the human spirit, is caught at fault when it was shown that certain celestial objects orbiting another star. The advent of the scientific vision of the world has not only changed the beliefs of the Church but it dealt a severe blow to other forms of magical thinking, including astrology, which initiated a decline in several centuries, desperately clinging to the idea of a geocentric universe.

Image: Galileo or Galileo Galilei (born in Pisa on 15 February 1564 and died in Arcetri on 8 January 1642) is an Italian physicist and astronomer of the seventeenth century, famous for having laid the foundations for Mechanical Sciences.

Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727) discovers the gravitational forces drawing the laws of Kepler.
It shows indeed the existence of an attractive force that would unite the sun to the planets of the solar system.
The gravitational force depends on the mass of planets and the Sun, but also the distance between them.
Universal gravity introduced by Newton will explain many phenomena such as tides, the orbits of celestial bodies, the formation of planets, stars and galaxies.
This further modifies the world view and places the Earth and therefore the man in a celestial mechanics universal.
Edmond Halley (1656-1742) explains the cycle of comets. In 1705, the British astronomer predict, using the newly formulated laws of celestial mechanics of Newton, that the comet seen in 1531, 1607, and in 1682 would in 1758. He argued that the appearance of this comet (Halley's called) is periodic, and we will make regular visits every 75 years.
Prediction that proved correct after his death.
In 1786, Pierre Simon Laplace said that our solar system was born of a "primitive nebula which occupies the space that extends beyond Uranus, the last planet known at this time.
The astronomer and physicist French develops the theory of ultra-massive objects and for the first time the concept of "black hole".

Earth appears as a mere dust of the nebula.
In 1916, Albert Einstein proposed a new framework for understanding the world and announce that there is no time or absolute space. His theory of general relativity alter notions of space and time. The latter is not flat but on the contrary, form a curve. Einstein gravity equates not with forces, but a "curvature" of space and time caused by the body mass.
Thus, the universe shaped by gravity, created by light and curved by matter, is "elastic".
Quantity to the time when Earth does not belong to man, it is relative.

Image: Isaac Newton was a philosopher, mathematician, physicist and astronomer English born 4 January 1643, best known for his theory of gravitation.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble Universe expands further. It shows, by studying the Messier 31 galaxy Andromeda, that space is populated by galaxies, and made a breakthrough by noticing that all galaxies are moving away from us.
The thesis of an expanding universe is thus recognized.
This led him to formulate a law that, more distant a galaxy is from us and its spectral shift towards red (redshift) is important.
The "Hubble Law" will be interpreted as the consequence of the expansion of the universe.
In 1948, George Gamow, American physicist of Russian origin, introduced Big Bang theory and argues that the Universe would have formed there is less than 15 billion years, following a huge explosion of dense matter.
He suggested that the various elements observed today were generated immediately after the explosion called Big Bang.
At this moment, the temperature and the extremely high density of the universe led to the merger of subatomic particles and a very short time, all the matter of the universe may have formed.
Another blow just change our vision of the world.
In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a fossil radiation through an antenna used to study the radio. This residual background is the same in all directions of the universe.

They discover a uniform set of photons filling the whole universe, which strangely seems to have no source defined.
The radio and residual confirms Big Bang theory.
The center of the universe no longer exists, the vision of our Earth is now very different from the geocentric concept was that the first observers.
The Earth is a dust nebula, the Sun a star from a banal incredibly high number of identical objects, the stars.
In 1929, in collaboration with Milton Humason, Hubble established by spectroscopy, the relationship between the distance of galaxies and the speed of removal, presently known as the Hubble law, giving rise to the concept of expansion of the universe.

Image: Edwin Powell Hubble (1889 - 1953) American astronomer.

Between 1969 and 1972, the Apollo missions grow 6 flights in the direction of the lunar soil for unlocking this new world view, which has eluded them. He wants to understand its origin, its history and its evolution through the exploration of its satellite 'dust'.
In midsummer 1969, humanity reached its goal in achieving his dream walk on the moon. Retained control of the main vessel, Michael Collins expects its lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin began their descent to the moon aboard the module Eagle.
In 1980, Alan Guth and Henry Tye suggests that at a certain moment of his birth, the universe experienced a period of astounding growth. 2 physicists including research on the work of Stefan Hawking by combining the theory of inflation in the Big Bang.
At the birth of the universe, a huge force would have turned a single point in space near infinity. Inflation allows the universe to explain the formation of galaxies from the quantum fluctuations but why the different parts of the universe are similar.
In 1992, we discover the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto discovered in 1930.
Was there one or more celestial bodies beyond the 9th planet, while only a few comets appear to come from these regions.

In 50 years, the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort found the source of all these comets. He managed to prove that the majority of them came from a single region called "Oort Cloud".
Then Gerard Peter Kuiper, born under the name Gerrit Pieter Kuiper Dutch astronomer, who hypothesizes that a ring of comets lies beyond Pluto. It will have to wait 90 years for the existence of this famous belt Kuiper is finally accepted. Our solar system now includes the Oort cloud and grew enormously, with this new vision. It now includes a large envelope body orbiting between 40 and 000 ua 150 ua 000 (0.73 pc) and thus located beyond the orbit of planets and the Kuiper Belt.
At this distance from the Sun, there is a large concentration of some comets may leave the cloud to change orbit and skim the Earth's orbit.
The direction of this dust worries landowners that we are, so this is a matter for careful monitoring on the part of our telescopes.

Image: Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905 - 1973) Dutch astronomer. He suggested the existence of an asteroid belt outside the orbit of Neptune, now called the Kuiper Belt.

The man realized that he no longer alone in the universe.
In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first exoplanet from the observatory of Haute Provence. The exoplanets are planets outside our solar system.
In examining the spectra of 142 stars, they noticed the presence of index exoplanets.
By observing the light of a star, one can indeed detect oscillations. The planet is more massive and closer to the star, the greater the induced oscillation is easy to measure. Since then, discoveries of exoplanets have succeeded with almost monotonous regularity. The man frantically search his home and launching the satellites in all directions to understand.
In 2001, the WMAP satellite takes very precise measurements of background radiation, providing a detailed picture of the origin of the universe. According Big Bang theory, the universe would come from the explosion of a "primitive" into a cataclysmic expansion, there are about 14 billion years. From this initial explosion, there remains a trace fossil issued approximately 300 000 years later, when the universe was bathed in a "primordial soup".
Man attempts since 1959 to communicate with extra terrestrial intelligence.

Cocconi and Morrison then an idea of genius. Trying to put in place of a technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization, they believe that the best frequency to use is that of 1420 MHz. Indeed the frequency of 1420 MHz corresponds to that of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.
Since no intelligent civilization can not ignore this fact, both authors believe that hydrogen may be the default setting of all the radios interstellar.
In September 1959, Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi in Nature published an article laying the theoretical foundations of a possible interstellar communication. Morrison y anticipates the value of using microwaves in attempts to communicate at very long distances and advance the conjecture of Morrison-Cocon if an alien civilization were to want to communicate, as it would use frequency of 1420 MHz, that of the atom the simplest and most common in the universe, namely hydrogen (H).

Image: In 1959, Morrison and Cocconi: If an alien civilization to communicate with us, it would use the 1420 MHz frequency, of hydrogen.

Life may no longer be a privilege landowner. In 1865, German Hermann Richter said that it is wrong in seeking the origins of life on our planet. Life could come from the depths of space, and the Earth could easily have been seeded by particles sky teeming with living creatures, cosmozoaires.
Buried at the heart of meteorites, they may cross the Earth's atmosphere without being damaged. This theory was considered seriously by most scientists. This theory, which states that life comes from the cosmos, is called panspermy.
Also attractive as it is, the panspermy does that push the mystery of the origins of life, moving from Earth to space.
If life is born at the same time as the universe, and it has always existed, that explains his presence on Earth, without solving the problem of its occurrence in the Universe. However, the synthesis of organic molecules appears to be a very common phenomenon in space. In the interstellar void, scientists have identified some 120 organic molecules containing between 2 to 13 carbon atoms. Many extraterrestrial bodies, comets, meteorites or micrometeorites contain a variety of organic molecules more or less complex.

The man now asks the universal nature of the couple carbon and water. This combination has resulted in the formation of living beings is certainly not the only one that Nature has at its disposal.
Ammonia, consisting of a nitrogen atom linked to three atoms of hydrogen (NH3), has physical properties similar to that of water, but unlike the latter, liquid ammonia is that -78 ° C and -33 ° C. Chemical reactions can take place in this solvent are much slower than that taking place in water (speed of reaction decreases with temperature).
By following a similar reasoning, the exobiologists have speculated on the existence of life forms built not on carbon but on an atom with similar properties, silicon just below carbon in the Periodic Table of Mendeleev, silicon is also tetravalent (i.e. it can form four bonds with other atoms, like carbon).
But these links are too strong and require too much energy to be broken and thus allow the many reactions essential to life.
The universe does not seem to have fun with silicium.

Thanks to the Drake equation (see against), a question that seemed insoluble the major part was divided into a series of small questions that scientists could provide clear answers. But only the number of stars in our galaxy, is roughly known, about 200 billion. Recent discoveries of exoplanets, we can also estimate the parameter fp. The number of discovered planetary systems is not sufficient to accurately calculate the percentage of stars around which planets revolve.
Things get complicated especially with the biological parameters. Have not yet solved the riddle of the origin of life on Earth, we are unable to estimate the probability of occurrence of life on a planet for its outbreak. Astronomers, however, are optimistic about the extent of the habitable zone.
The latter parameters are more problematic.
If the probability of occurrence of primitive cells on Earth might be very high, nothing says that these cells will, after several billion years of evolution, the emergence of intelligent beings. The emergence of intelligence is perhaps a little poker. In addition, intelligent life forms do not necessarily non-technological mastery. The lifetime of a technologically advanced civilization is also not known.
According to some scientists, Drake's formula is nothing other than the concentration of a large amount of uncertainty in a small space.
So it's not surprising to learn that the parameter estimates of N range from 1 million to one, our own civilization.

Simplifying so bold, we get an interesting result, where N is equal to T. The resolution of the equation is therefore to know the life of an intelligent civilization and technologically advanced in the Universe. It must be admitted that the communication window is very narrow.
The likelihood that some form of technologically advanced life to develop elsewhere in the universe would be much lower initially estimated. This could be because the factors for developing life are very numerous (hence the presence of chemical elements and the structuring of an energy source until the presence of a giant planet such as Jupiter to evacuate asteroids that would otherwise rapidly destroy life being formed).
This could be because these factors together, the likelihood that chemical elements combine to form the living are so low that this event occurred only once in the history of the universe .
No matter how low the probability that a given galaxy is an intelligent life, the galaxy in which we find at least one intelligent species by definition. There could be thousands of galaxies that have this feature, intelligent life, but obviously we are not in these galaxies to observe this fact.

And if the universe was a flamboyant illusion, a black maze splashed ghosting, lined with mirrors strange virtual...
If the magic of the very structure of the cosmos billion by the stars we see were at the zenith and the repeated reflections of only a few stars? Perhaps then there would have 1000 times fewer stars in the sky than what we see.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, might be seen several times in the sky, at other angles, with other forms apparent. And perhaps, if we have a very powerful telescope, we could see the reflections off of a small blue planet eerily familiar and inevitably, the Earth.
Hallucination, not in the eyes of Jean-Pierre Luminet, an astronomer at the Observatory de Paris-Meudon. "These are worlds that I crumpled... In such a space the trajectories of light rays emitted by any source of light using quantities of paths for us, each espousing the folds of cloth cosmic." L ' astrophysicist concedes that if this hypothesis is dear to his heart and his spirit, it is far from proven.
We must abandon the idea that poison our world view is reality and this is no small matter, then accept that mathematics can provide us with a perception of the world more powerful than us. This is further complicated when Pierre Luminet, trying to understand the shape of the cosmos.
The mollusk-universe built by Einstein in the context of the theory of relativity, turned on itself, would be smaller than the apparent world, exactly the opposite of our intuition.

Despite our telescopes, our satellites and our physics experiments, we can not really know what is the shape, the topology of space. As the ant who scampering on the wall of a cylinder, we can not know whether we live in a world curve, on a world map, in a world infinite or finite...
Finally we do not even know if the Universe has a board, a ceiling, a wall, and still less if this question has meaning. Life and intelligence have arisen on Earth after a natural evolution of physical processes inherent in the nature of the cosmos. Life can arise on any planet in the universe. The human intellect is not the epitome of what the cosmos has produced.
To understand the role of the time, Alfred Vidal-Madjar explains the "cosmic calendar", i.e. fifteen billion years of our universe spread over one year.
On January 1, zero hour, the Big Bang and so on until the appearing of our civilization over the last ten seconds of December 31. Then begins the second year of this schedule, it takes barely a second (500 years) to colonize our Solar System and a day (50 million years) to visit our Galaxy...

Image: Jean-Pierre Luminet (1951) is an astronomer, lecturer, writer and poet french specialist in global reputation of black holes and cosmology. He is director of research at CNRS.

One of the major problems in modern astrophysics is that we do not know the nature of the essential components of the universe.
The luminous matter, that we are made and the only one we see directly, appears to be less than one twentieth of the mass of the universe (4%). We now know that our universe is not made ​​up only of baryonic matter, i.e. atoms. All scientists agree that lack of mass in the observable universe to explain its stability. Some of this missing mass is matter, as we do not see it was called dark matter. For example, when objects (planets, stars, group, group of galaxies, clusters of group), revolve around a central point, their distance from the center and speed allows us to calculate the total weight of components. Thus it has been noted that the velocities of stars orbiting the galactic center does not decrease with their distance from the center but continue to be constant. This observation is in contradiction with the laws of gravitation. The only explanation is that the present mass of the galaxy continues to grow gradually as one moves away from the center of the galaxy. And of course, it is the same for large structures like galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Today ours detectors are able in certain wavelength, we show that galaxies and clusters are surrounded by a thick halo where lies the essential of the matter, the so-called dark matter. Particle physics describes the properties of the matter and teaches us that ordinary matter, called baryonic is formed of quarks (protons, neutrons) and leptons (electrons, neutrinos). So the baryonic matter, that we see, is made of atoms which include protons and neutrons surrounded by a cloud of electrons. But the matter is also available in other forms, ionized form called plasma, in the form of atomic elements (hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen) in the form of atomic clusters (nanoparticles), in molecular form (dust) in the form of vacuum energy (virtual particles) and may take the form of exotic matter such as WIMPs (hypothetical massive particles).
We know that most of the ordinary matter in the universe is composed of hydrogen and helium, but we do not know what dark matter is composed.

Humanity has continued to find that the man was not at the center of the Universe, and even the matter of which we are made ​​is not a majority, it represents only 4% of the mass of the Universe. In other words, the matter is not only that glitters and absorbs light, there are non-baryonic matter, which is not made ​​up of quarks. Our laws, those that describe the nature of our universe may also be local and not universal. If our universe is part of a multiverse then our laws are unique. And even more amazing, there would be hidden dimensions. We do not live in four dimensions (the three of space and one of time), but according to superstring theory, space-time would have eleven dimensions.
But everything changes, adapts and dies in the world that surrounds us. This endless process that dates back several billion years, we have no idea on how it evolves, its definition is to be unpredictable.
The next step is the attainment of knowledge of the genetic material, and again surprises await us.

It must be accepted to live in ignorance, live without basic certainties. Ignore the future makes people more curious and inventive.
Bossuet said: "We complain of our ignorance, but that makes it almost all the good of the world does not provide, that we undertake." Man builds his life on an absolute coincidence, and that is exactly what makes him master of movement and freedom of its future.
Because of its ignorance, makes man master of his actions. The adventure of the man has reached a turning point that will now give way to a new form of life, more powerful and better adapted to the future, ever more complex. A new life is born after another ocean, that of information.
"Ignorance is the engine of humanity is what drives people to move forward. This is what makes history." Claude Vaillancourt
Blind land that we are...