Denial of Evolution VI.

You mean other than because it would be totally fucking awesome, right?

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In seriousness though, I would say that not being vulnerable to planet wide extinction events would be a reasonable justification for putting human colonies on Mars. Personally I don't like the fact that one big rock could wipe out my entire species.

 

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Yeah, well, since then we've sent quite a large and distinguished collection of amazing gadgets into space to do things like fly by other planets, orbit other planets, land on other planets, look for extrasolar planets, fly by comets and asteroids and peer more deeply into deep space than ever before. Here's a complete list.

Even in just the last 15 years or so we've seen resounding successes that have expanded our understanding of our solar system, our galaxy and our universe in ways we could barely have imagined back in 1969.

 

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Yes. Quite apart from which, the number of eye-catching space gadgets per decade is not a specially complete indicator of scientific progress. For me, the pace of medical advance, underpinned in many cases by molecular biology, has been remarkable. And then there is there is the IT revolution.

Anyway, the lack of big manned space missions has far more to do with the end of the Cold War, and consequent alterations to budget priorities, than to any technical ability. As a character memorably says in "The Right Stuff": "Know what makes this bird go up? Funding makes this bird go up."

I suspect some people have religious reasons for wanting to think that science has become the victim of stultifying groupthink. It plays into the victimhood and conspiracy narrative that keeps fringe pseudoscience alive.

 

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wellwisher

Such precursors have been found in meteorites and between the stars in space.

So?

The documented history of life on Earth goes all the way back to 3.5 billion years ago. Earlier life probably left no fossil evidence, so we only know that algae existed at that point...

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This ^ is a 3.45 billion year old version of this v

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Stromatolites growing today in Shark Bay, Australia. Structurally indistinguishable from those in the 3.45 billion year old fossil.

Life started in the oceans, probably around the scads of hot smokers on the hot ocean floor. Many, if not all, of the precursors for life were delivered, ready to use, by the debris of our solar system falling into that ocean(the ocean water was delivered the same way), the smokers delivered heat energy and chemical food, the ocean depths protected them from UV(no ozone layer until free oxygen exists)simmer and stir for a few million years... These stromatolites are far from the first forms of life, they are just the first ones that left any fossil evidence, laying down layers of waste rock on the layers of cells below them, preserving quite fine details for comparison with modern examples of the same family. They are really quite sophisticated organisms who found(by accident)a niche that has changed slowly enough over 3.5 billion years that they could keep up without major structural changes(they had to adjust to rising free oxygen levels over a billion or so years early on, levels they helped to create).

Evolution is an event(a change to an organism is an evolution of that organism), it is a process(descent with modification tested by survival in the environment to reproduce)and it is a fact that life evolved from other, often simpler forms and that a constant progression of complexity and capabilities can be seen over that history(as well as relatively simple creatures that fit a niche so well they hardly change at all for billions of years). It is a fact that life has existed for nearly the entire 4.7 billion years the sun and Earth have existed(minus a few hundred million right at the start). Facts are those things that have been supported by the evidence to the point that it is perverse to deny them. The denial of facts that you must go through to avoid terminal cognitive dissonance allows you to know nothing about how the world really works(hint, it isn't magic), that's religion.

The whole moon landing program was based on a political stunt. It wasn't a total waste of time and money, but it was more wasteful than it should have been. If we had put that effort into being able to reach low Earth orbit cheaply and reliably we would be out to Jupiter by now, or at least the asteroid belt(the real prize). Why go right back into a gravity well when you just burned up a whole Saturn 5 to get you out of one? Leave airless moons to robots, start using the resources of the Solar System directly. The moon program actually put us behind where we should be, not ahead.

Actually, we're much more knowledgeable now, in everything. The main computer on Apollo will fit in your wrist watch now. And our rovers have been on Mars for years now, it was in the news.

You really don't have a clue, do you?

Grumpy

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One of the symptoms of "Lying for Jesus" (or possibly some other bloke) seems to be a lack of engagement past parroting from the authorized script. There's a limited amount of squinting for gotchas like typos and "evasive action" goal shifting. But when I try to actually engage intellectually there is nothing there. This is evidence of the vacuity and the sterility of their "skepticism" (denialism).

In science, the best defense against bad ideas is a good offense with better ideas. Better ideas in science are communicable, useful, precise predictive descriptions of phenomena. In astronomy and geology, evidence for the consistency of physical law for billions of years would require new extraordinary, unevidenced phenomena to make the Earth less than 10,000 years old. The three main contenders would be:

• Brain-in-a-jar -- nothing revealed to your senses is real in the same sense your thoughts are real, it's all a simulation for just you from an inaccessible meta-reality. Since science only describes the phenomena of the evidenced reality the "people" in your hallucination deal with, science can't speak to the age of your meta-reality. But then, neither can your faith.
• Last Thursdayism -- Reality is real and well described by science. But without seams and in the recent past, the observable universe was created in the recent past complete with an entirely self-consistent history such as light incoming not just from distant stars but also distance stellar events already on the way. Since science only describes the phenomena of the evidenced present and the entirely self-consistent faked history, there is no evidence of a seam where the universe came into being and it might have been last Thursday. Science can't speak to the age of the universe because everything and anything is a complete and utter fraud, including possibly the contents of your own memories. Thus faith is equally unprepared to speak to the question of age, since faith too is suspect in the face of the totality of the presumed lie.
• Meta-time -- It's unscientific to suggest that radioactive decay laws were perturbed by natural phenomena. Radioactive decay is not one physical process but many and they are cross-checked in many ways. What is required to assert that "old" rocks are actually young is the need to assert that there is a "meta-time" inaccessible to physical observation or the motions of the heavens. Thus just because an event happened 65 million orbits-of-the-Earth-about-the-sun ago doesn't mean that it happened 65 million "years" ago because in meta-time this could be any number. As you can see, this too is a spectacularly non-useful, unevidenced meta-physical hypothesis that contributes nothing to science. As a point of faith, it seems spectacularly uninteresting to talk about, since there is no point of connection between evidenced reality with time and unevidenced meta-reality with meta-time. The relationship between reality and meta-reality could be a computer simulation or it could be a table-top pencil-and-paper RPG.

What do you think?

 

So all the oil and tar accumulated, was buried, then hundreds of millions of years later life "infiltrated" it AFTER life began? All those little mollusks burrowed down through miles of rock just to fool oil companies?

Let's review some math:

Age of the Earth - 4.5 billion years
Time life has been here - 3.6 billion years

Time that abiotic only processes would have had to create all that oil - 900 million years
Time that biologically based processes would have had to create all that oil - 3,600 million years

I know math isn't your strong suit but you might want to consider the above.

(Unless your next step will be to deny the age of the Earth that is.)

Dude, we have spacecraft all over the solar system exploring the moons of Saturn, the surface of Mars and asteroids deep in space. We can now see to the edges of the universe. We have discovered almost a thousand planets outside our solar system; half a dozen of those are close enough to Earth in size/insolation that they may support life as we understand it. We don't send people any more because we don't have to - our technology has gotten so good that we don't need a pilot any more.

Plus which we currently have an orbiting space station where hundreds of people have lived for months at a time.

Open your eyes.

Apollo was celebrity. We created a bunch of charismatic heroes and gave people all over the world fantasies of flying in space. And we had a great piece of propaganda to wave around the Russian's heads.

Nowadays we have science. The Hubble was not all that charismatic, and may not make ten year old boys swoon with heady imaginings of space adventures, but it's science as opposed to celebrity.

 

Hi Leopold,

That is not what i said. I said humans. There are a lot of things coming out lately, been watching documentaries on t.v and the internet. Very advanced stuff.

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What we know compared to our predecessors is voluminous. 'course this tasks us with great responsibility.

 

Humans in space is not gonna happen for years, if that...aside from ISS, of course. It's too dangerous and not really worth the trouble. The radiation issues, then you have the bone density loss issues etc. I agree with what others have said, that unmanned is going to be the future for awhile - I dig the Mars Rover and stuff like that. The images are enough, we get good image from mars' surface, it is the distant objects that are lacking in quality. which is sad. Supposedly there will be a community on the moon (edit: should be - Mars) in a decade or so at the earliest. I would go, but i worry a little about long term isolation and living - I would be a perfect candidate for experiments, i can handle "contact" well if it should arise. Personally, i think it is more important to go as far unmanned as we can. What is at the end of this universe? Space is scary...looking out across the ocean is scary enough, but space...Its the beginning and the end, people...the beginning and the end.

 

It make smore sense to me to put a "colony" on the moon first. It's a lot closer, easier to rescue people if need be.

 

Stanley

Robots on the poles of our moon could throw chunks of ice(by solar powered railguns)to a Lagrange point where we could build ships out of it, for reaction mass and radiation protection(plus ice cubes for our drinks, water to grow food). A Space Shuttle main fuel tank with 10 feet of ice sprayed on the outside would be safe from radiation and micrometeorites(it would be self healing). Take a dozen or so, join them with cables, spin them and you have gravity in each one. A nuclear reactor powered plasma drive in the center and you have a space ship to live on and explore the asteroid belt in search of a solid gold(or diamond)boulder, or useful chemicals and ores. It would be slow to accelerate but it would thrust continuously, reach simply amazing speeds and cut travel times.

Or, send them to Mars to build your underground homes, start raising a bunch of crops, make a bunch of fuel and liquid o2 and lay out the welcome mat for all the geriatric permanent settlers(imagine what 1/3 gravity will do to ease their arthritis). All trips to Mars need to be one way until we can build a Beanstalk or Slingships(Skyhooks).

Grumpy

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I think the only way to justify the scientific exploration of imagination is to create it materialistically. Words can only go so far to express the visualizations we gain when dreaming, daydreaming, planning our own reality, or even beginning to communicate properly with another's true visions.

 

"rescue" has a tone of urgency.
besides, our little moon base would probably be equipped with "lifeboats", they might even have the provisions to reach earth.
an earth based "rescue" would take at least 5 days.

 

post soime links.

 

It is many orders of magnitude cheaper to rent a pickup truck and go looking on Earth for solid gold boulders (and are about as likely a discovery.) There are some valid reasons to go to space, but raw materials is just not one of them.

 

we might not even have to do that.
the perfection of a mind/ machine interface in theory will allow you to project your imagination directly into another persons mind.
most of the claims of telepathy will suddenly become a reality.
interesting concept isn't it?

 

Leopold... Even with the whole world sharing a lucid dream at night it would still take a material foundation and experimentation to create more than abstractions of the imagination.

 

billvon

The point I was trying to make was that once you've spent the resources necessary to reach Low Earth Orbit, it is foolish to drop back into another gravity well just because it's there. Stay in space, find resources in space, build in space and never let your feet touch the ground again. As to solid gold boulders, who knows, there are many that are solid iron, and iron comes from the same source as gold(exploding stars), so if you find one you could find the other. Most of Earth's gold melted and fell into the core of the Earth, the gold that is in the asteroid belt is orders of magnitude easier to find and orders of magnitude more accessible when found and many orders of magnitude more abundant/surface area. And who doesn't want a half ton diamond? But the real treasure will be the ores, steel, and CHON just waiting to be harvested for use in our new habitats.

Grumpy

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would you say the perfection on the machine end will "materialize" the scene?
a thread along these lines is here:
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?109699-true-intellgent-machines
some truly amazing stuff is going to come out of this.

 

I would say.

It would both allow the connection and protection of both the mind and the body. A supreme machine compatible with the current human condition would not only stop evolution in this world but grant access to alternatives where we do evolve to become what one mind or all minds can create with mind as opposed to with hands or programming. It is feasible and don't think I am just teasing when I say this generation will create the way.

The idea is already instilled within us if one were to consider all experimental truths weighed against most self evident beliefs (such as how we came to be physical beings in the first place), but there is still only one way to communicate what we co-create. I started from the bottom and have made the theories identifiable to individuals with little knowledge of greater physics today. I do respect the challenges we face in this day and how they might be related to this end, but the road is still long to challenging the minds capable of identifying the pieces of a puzzle which creates both a mental and a physical transfer of information and material.

Our knowledge is incomplete. It comes from machines and experiments that do not have all the materials capable of discerning every assumption the human mind can make. This includes both satellites, telecom, and high energy physics. They allow us to find specific information that leads to the path (including how the machine itself could be pieced together), but none so far have found the knowledge and strength to be less fearful of creating a material machine capable of delivering more assumptions than the human mind can.

We conclude this type of machine would have a mind of its own and this would be half true. In every reality it has always been a product of collective thoughts, which is the case today and would not change. Thus we fear loosing our individuality as opposed to unleashing it through our imagination. We fear one person gaining an ultimate control and this end has been proven false thorough all history.