I’ve been genuinely intrigued at how much fiction and reality have been intersecting recently.

See, there’s this film called MOON and it follows the story of a guy working on the far side of the moon who figures out that there’s a lot more to his mission than collecting the natural resource Helium-3. It’s a fantastic piece of science fiction cinema and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and catch it while it’s still in theatres.

But after seeing it I discovered that not only is the energy source they talked about in the movie real, but it’s clean, supposedly economically viable and extremely plentiful on the moon’s surface.

More at True/Slant.

That’s what NASA is saying, and where there’s water there could be life…however microscopic it may be:

Whitish, dice-sized chunks, which were dug from the rocky red soil and warmed in the sun, vanished four days after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Phoenix probe dug them up June 15. They confirm what NASA satellites have suggested for years: Frozen water exists several centimeters beneath Mars’s surface. [...]

“When I look over this flat plain of rock and dirt, it’s amazing what we’re looking at,” said principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson, which is co- managing the project. “If you got a giant broom and swept if off, it’s a big ice sheet.”

Here’s the closeup of the before and after photos of the small chunks they’re talking about…

Very exciting stuff.

But how does this square with the Bible?

From the AP:

VATICAN CITY – Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

Sure, it would still be part of creation, but not the “creation story”…which focuses specifically on Earth.

But hey, whatever…I’m sure if aliens land they’ll figure out some way to justify it with a few passages here and there.

And to that point…

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

Okay, so what about all that “created in his image” stuff? Would the Vatican look at intelligent life forms like they would a dog or a cat?

Also…do they know something we don’t? Obviously I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy nut, but why come out with this now?

Could this have anything to do with NASA’s announcement today?

WASHINGTON — NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations.

More as it develops…