NASA’s chief scientist recently made a bold prediction about how soon she believes we will discover proof of alien life, but Creation Museum founder Ken Ham is having none of it.
“I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years,” said NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan during an April 7 panel discussion.
Stofan’s elaborated on her prediction, stating, “We know where to look. We know how to look. In most cases we have the technology, and we’re on a path to implementing it. And so I think we’re definitely on the road.”
Stofan is not alone at NASA in her optimism. John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and current associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, offered a similar predicted timeframe for this long-anticipated discovery.
“I think we’re one generation away in our solar system, whether it’s on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star,” Grunsfeld said at the event.
Ham, however, believes no amount of searching will yield the results NASA seeks, for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist.
“From a biblical perspective we shouldn’t expect to find life in outer space,” Ham states in a detailed blog rebuttal to the NASA event.
“Evolutionists are convinced they’ll find life in outer space because if evolution occurred here on Earth, then it must have occurred somewhere else,” Ham states. “According to secularists, Earth is not special. In their view, it’s just one of many places where, over the supposed billions of years of the universe’s history, life managed to come from non-life and begin the process of evolution.”
Citing supporting scriptures from both the Old and New Testaments in evidence of his views, Ham claims that extraterrestrial life is inconsistent with the Bible.
“Life did not evolve on Earth or anywhere else but was specially created by our Creator as Genesis clearly tells us,” he argues. “Isaiah tells us that Earth was formed to be inhabited (Isaiah 45:18) and Earth is clearly the focus of God’s attention. It is to Earth that God Himself came down in the person of Jesus Christ to dwell among men and die and rise again for our salvation. Christ did not come and die for Martians or other extraterrestrials—He came as the ‘God-man’ to die for mankind, descendants of Adam and Eve.”
His lengthy argument closes with a segment detailing the psychology behind many people’s quest for extraterrestrials, with their search dovetailing with their seeking answers to deeper questions like “where did we come from?” and “what’s the meaning of life?” Meanwhile, Ham offers his answer for where those questions can be answered: the Bible.
“Instead of putting our faith in the supposed existence of extraterrestrials and our hope in finding these beings,” he states, “we need to put our faith and hope in Christ and what He did for us through His death and Resurrection.”
