How To REALLY Get Angry At Space Science Deniers

[Dispatcher]

17 hours ago, Green Baron said:

No (cause this is not personal).

The problem i addressed is the undermining of public education by minorities such as the mentioned. If an adult decides to believe this there is nothing we can do. But give everyone a descent unindoctrinated education *first*. Indoctrinating limits the decisions of the individual and creates followers.

And no, education is different. It broadens the horizon by encouraging people to think on their own.

btw.: if i could get a grip on the designer of the human knee or the throat in land living vertebrates i'll have a few strong words him (or her), killed uncountable individuals. That was *not* intelligent. But Palaeontology has an explication for these "features".

Edited: streamlined :-)

Your complaint about knees, throats (and other body structures, including vestigial organs) is understood and appreciated.   I think part of the hang up about "God" is that we take it upon ourselves to define and limit God's behavior.  We should have no such expectations (such as "a perfect God would make perfect things").  Rubbish.  Any being to which we might owe our existence (or our circumstances) can do whatever it or he or she wants, relative to our capacity to influence such things.  As I indicated in an adjacent comment/ reply, I believe that above all, God loves variety and bad knees and throats which allow us to choke on food or drink are just a part of that situation and pale in contrast to a vast universe in which a grand variety of galaxies, stars and planets (and moons) exist.  Since we are familiar with the life on this planet, its neat that we find nearly vast variety right here as well.

I think that "creation" is an ongoing process, not something that's limited to any single event of the past (except for the Big Bang, eh?).

As for education, some of the greatest scientific work, research and invention have come from religious institutions of learning.  If you doubt this, use your favorite search engine and you may be surprised.  Proper, liberating religion inspires some people excel at scientific inquiry.  I know, for another scientist its the next beer.  But whatever gets it done.

I happen to think that truth is truth, no matter where its found.  Further, true "religion" and true science cannot disagree.  If there is disagreement, it means that either that particular religious view is wrong (on that particular point) or we simply do not have all the facts or data from science on a particular point.

[razark]

35 minutes ago, Dispatcher said:

I didn't indicate that my beliefs align with most belief systems (or revealed religions) out there.

Neither did I mention religion in my post.

 

35 minutes ago, Dispatcher said:

You need to consider that ours is a middle aged solar system and that there are many star systems which are at least a billion years older than ours.  You should also recall that humans are after all limited by their senses and brain capacity.  If you look at the familiar argument that we are so advanced beyond the single celled and simple multicellular life extant on this planet, that there is no way for such life to comprehend any kind of relatively advanced being, such as a trilobite; let alone just humans.  I'm suggesting that we simply don't have the capacity to comprehend beings on the order of billions (let alone millions) of years beyond us.  So yes, such beings could be considered to be "gods", and for good reason, as I'm sure you could imagine.

But if mere humans are no where near the level of these proposed advanced beings, and life on Earth had to be designed, then those advanced beings must have had their start by some other designer.  If they could have arisen naturally, then life on Earth could have as well.  If they were designed, you've not solved the problem, only abstracted it up one layer.

 

35 minutes ago, Dispatcher said:

I understand that the question of what actually caused the Big Bang isn't yet satisfactorily answered (at least I'm not aware of it).

"We don't know" is sometimes the best, or only, answer we have.  That doesn't mean we need to grab onto any answer and throw it into the gap, nor does it make an improbable answer any more probable.  It just means we don't know.

 

35 minutes ago, Dispatcher said:

Before you raise your hand to interject a comment, you DO know that some respected scientists have posited that in a reasonable timeframe (reasonable being within the next 10,000 years or so) we might attain the ability to create artificial (small) black holes.  These same scientists argue that within such a black hole is created a baby universe.

That only gives an origin point.  There's nothing to indicate that we would be able choose what conditions exist within that universe, or have any influence in that universe once it begins to exist.

 

35 minutes ago, Dispatcher said:

If humans can comprehend that idea and concede the results being baby universes, how is it that an even more advanced being (or race of beings) could not do the same thing?  Perhaps our universe is inside a black hole in someone else's universe.

Perhaps.  That is a hypothesis that must await further evidence before we can answer it.

 

35 minutes ago, Dispatcher said:

Everything in the environments is driven by formulas, more so than data.  And many of these planets are "inhabited" by creatures that surprise and delight the game's creators.

That is not design.  The fact that the "creatures" surprise the game's creators indicates that they did not design them, but only observed what the rules they created allowed to become.  (This is different from universes in another way, also.  We know developers can choose the rules by which their "universes" operate, unlike the proposed baby black hole universes.)

 

35 minutes ago, Dispatcher said:

A more honest person in my opinion is the one who simply thinks we don't have all the facts, senses or intelligence to know for certain one way or the other; an Agnostic view.

Indeed, we do not know everything (yet?).  The default position is not to accept ideas that lack evidence to support them, though.  If you read back through your post, there's a lot of people think that... and some propose... and postulates and possibilities.  Just because something may be possible does not mean we should treat it as the most (or even a) likely conclusion.  (Agnostic doesn't mean we don't know.  Agnostic means that the answer is something we cannot know.  This is unrelated to the question of whether or not you accept a claim.)

Anyway, I think that if we were to go much deeper into this subject, we would run into rules violations.  This simply isn't the place for these sorts of discussions.

Edited August 3, 2016 by razark

[Green Baron]

Thank you Dispatcher for your thoughts. I appreciate that (no sarcasm !).

No honest scientist demands to be in possession of the last knowledge. Humanity knows a whole lot and can explain many things. It's a personal thing to believe in whatever one likes.

Science keeps its hands off supernatural beings, creators, alien civilizations or in short all things that are speculation and cannot be forged in testable hypothesises and theories. Cause that is how it works over all the borders, ideologies and cultures and why so many can participate, discuss, exchange, overthrow and reformulate. That is progress(tm).

Well, an easy talk at the lunch table or while on a hike or in a game forum ... just confirms this :-)

Religion should not interfere with the education of our children in schools and universities and demand to explain the world like science does as has been tried in germany and like that "university" thing above. There are too many different and controversal beliefs and many of them demand to be superior to the others. That apparently is false and leads to no good.

If i remember right Einstein couldn't accept the idea of an endless universe or Heisenberg's uncertainty thing cause that interfered with his view of the world. "I'm convinced that the old one doesn't roll the dice." he once wrote. Well, The Old One apparently doesn't just roll dice, he/she cheats when things get too complicated (throat).

If you *want* to see humans from a design point of view then there are so many examples of bad tinkering with the material that we are, if at all, an early alpha version. All around us it crashes from infections, cancer, built in malfunctions like that deadly appendix that i can only assume we are still under development. And again the explanation is at hand but not from religion.

You have the last word on this :-)

 

Edit: different thing. You mentioned no man's sky (looking forward to this as well). If you want to have a look at a source code for real time terrain generation and rendering then look at http://proland.inrialpes.fr/

Todays graphic cards support thousands of parallel shaders for computation of lighting and texturing that i hope we'll get more of this in the future ;-). We're just at the beginning of shader languages, future games will do heavy math things more on the parallel graphics card than on the programmable main processor, i bet.

 

Edited August 3, 2016 by Green Baron
A 'y' was missing ...

[Kulebron]

On 8/1/2016 at 3:40 PM, Green Baron said:

A former german minister of education was chased out of her chair because she was trying to bring intelligent design in biology classes in school. @Kulebron wrote about a university that spreads these beliefs under the cloak of "science".

It leads to no advance to breed out ideologically limited followers/believers.

 

 

Just a correction, this is not a university policy, it's rather individuals' culture.

 

On 7/28/2016 at 8:55 PM, Green Baron said:

Which "university" is that ? They are totally nuts and none of them earns his/her title.

 

My university, Novosibirsk State Uni. It ranks in top ten in the country. They're definitely not nuts, except  the religious girl, other statements I chose were just very picturesque. So I wouldn't judge if they merit their titles, most of them are decent specialists in their field, but they share one problem: not knowing or not applying the scientific approach to other beliefs. 

Some historians I know even claim that part of communist policy after the revolution 1 century ago was to drastically reduce humanities in schools and universities, in order to have more controllable population. Whether this was intentional or not, the fact is that communists removed rhethorics and logics from school curricula. I'm sure, without a training to reason on the information one gets, he's vulnerable to propaganda manipulations and can hold on to myths.

In science, this means that researchers fail to understand how the science was synthesized and separated from myth, how to pose a problem and how to reject a nice hypothesis. This way, a graduated programmer is good at his craft, but cherishes a belief in intelligent design and does not put it under scientific logic and scrunity. On the one hand he has the nice feeling of opposing to the mainstream, on the other he has no instruments to pose a correct question.

Another example is that chemist who insists we should stick to 19th century language. I actually gave him a book by a linguist, so hopefully he changes his mind. But what if I give it to a phylologist? He may feel it a challenge to his authority in languages and offer whatever explanations feel to be in his favor. But if we sticked to scientific approach, we'd discuss what we know about how language works.

Edited August 3, 2016 by Kulebron

[Green Baron]

So i partly misunderstood, thanks for the correction @Kulebron. And wow, russia wasn't on my screen for believers mixing up science. I expected them more .... elsewhere ;-)

 

[Kulebron]

@Green Baron the irony is, according to some researches, we are among the most secular societies in the world. Only Scandinavians are aheead of us. But I suppose many need a sense of identity and community, which is impeded by our modernist urbanism across all the country, so people very rationally take religion and conspiracy theories as a tool. claim their own religiosity or stick to conspiracy theory and use those beliefs quite rationally, when convenient.

Edited August 3, 2016 by Kulebron

[WinkAllKerb'']

- "so you have a cells phone ? how does it work ?"

-"i don't care the earth is flat, and satellite network are like cookies, a lie"

-"do you love cake"

-"yup, especially when they wear a cherry on the top"

[Dispatcher]

18 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Thank you Dispatcher for your thoughts. I appreciate that (no sarcasm !).

No honest scientist demands to be in possession of the last knowledge. Humanity knows a whole lot and can explain many things. It's a personal thing to believe in whatever one likes.

Science keeps its hands off supernatural beings, creators, alien civilizations or in short all things that are speculation and cannot be forged in testable hypothesises and theories. Cause that is how it works over all the borders, ideologies and cultures and why so many can participate, discuss, exchange, overthrow and reformulate. That is progress(tm).

Well, an easy talk at the lunch table or while on a hike or in a game forum ... just confirms this :-)

Religion should not interfere with the education of our children in schools and universities and demand to explain the world like science does as has been tried in germany and like that "university" thing above. There are too many different and controversal beliefs and many of them demand to be superior to the others. That apparently is false and leads to no good.

If i remember right Einstein couldn't accept the idea of an endless universe or Heisenberg's uncertainty thing cause that interfered with his view of the world. "I'm convinced that the old one doesn't roll the dice." he once wrote. Well, The Old One apparently doesn't just roll dice, he/she cheats when things get too complicated (throat).

If you *want* to see humans from a design point of view then there are so many examples of bad tinkering with the material that we are, if at all, an early alpha version. All around us it crashes from infections, cancer, built in malfunctions like that deadly appendix that i can only assume we are still under development. And again the explanation is at hand but not from religion.

You have the last word on this :-)

 

Edit: different thing. You mentioned no man's sky (looking forward to this as well). If you want to have a look at a source code for real time terrain generation and rendering then look at http://proland.inrialpes.fr/

Todays graphic cards support thousands of parallel shaders for computation of lighting and texturing that i hope we'll get more of this in the future ;-). We're just at the beginning of shader languages, future games will do heavy math things more on the parallel graphics card than on the programmable main processor, i bet.

 

You've shared some interesting things, Green Baron.  I'll touch on some of them.  Your point is well taken in that regardless of profession (be that employment or belief), everyone is human and so "honesty" is a variable differing from person to person, be they scientists, clergy or game developers.  I believe that most scientists are honest (at least if they want to succeed following peer review  ); in general I think most people are honest most of the time.  Science certainly explains many things and I expect that as time goes by, science will continue to deliver.  By virtue of the scientific method, some things are, I agree, not in the domain of science, such as the supernatural.

I also agree that education can and should be robust.  I don't have a problem keeping "religion" in the form of religious courses off the campus.  Churches and other institutions can teach what they will to those who want to attend.  I've never thought there should somehow be some kind of "equal time" where Darwinism and "creationism" share time in a school classroom.  At least I grew up without that.  In fact, a creationism course would be impractical due to the fact that religions themselves have so many different ideas about creation.  By the way, I have never known anyone that has claimed that the earth is only 6,000 years old; as an example.  I think its rather presumptuous of any group to consider itself above other groups or people.  Many religions seek to help the individual to realize that everyone has worth and potential.  They also do a lot of charitable good in communities (food, shelter, clothing, etc.), thus reducing the burdens placed on local and national governments.  Of course individuals can do so without needing to belong to some kind of organization, but an organization, as the word implies, can multiply the effort.  As for "correctness and incorrectness", we can expect great scientists and great theologians, "mad scientists" and swindler preachers; a large range in between as well.  That's the human condition.

Well, in a sense, we seem to be in an "alpha version" since we do not perceive all of known existence as "perfect", whatever that is.  Again, I think everything is a part of something ongoing and not the finished products; despite what is expected of [edit:  maximum /edit] entropy in future aeons.  The alpha idea has merit because a tenant of many religions is that the existence in which we find ourselves is a time of testing and refining; and the tests include opposition in the forms of agony, joy, accomplishment, failure, fear, confidence, etc.  Maybe religion is at its best when it doesn't try to explain everything, but insists that we keep trying to better ourselves and lend help to others around us when they are at the limits of stresses that life may throw their way.

I will check out that real time terrain generation/ rendering link.  That's all exciting stuff to me.  My computer is over 9 years old and will not be able to accept the next version of OS X.  So I'm going to have to start thinking of getting a rig capable of handling some of the latest and future games.  As for No Man's Sky, that's a good reason to own the right console anyway.  As much as appreciate Apple, I know that I might as well wait for ultimate [edit:  state of (don't type when tired) /edit] entropy as to wait for No Man's Sky to be ported to the Mac.

Edited August 4, 2016 by Dispatcher

[Vanamonde]

This is a reminder to leave religion out of discussions on this forum, since that never ends well. 

[legoclone09]

1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

This is a reminder to leave religion out of discussions on this forum, since that never ends well. 

True.

I wanted to say Amen but that kind of defeats the purpose.

[Emperor of the Titan Squid]

On May 30, 2016 at 11:54 PM, NeoMorph said:

Just accidentally clicked on this video the other day and OMG.... THERE REALLY ARE STILL FLAT EARTHERS OUT THERE.

[snip] There really are some idiots out there. *gobsmacked*

 

These people also say that the reason we have day, night, and phases of the moon, is the sun and moon are lighted disks orbiting earth.wow. And, yes I would like to explain how it can turn from being parallel to earth to being pointed straight up, it follows its trajectory, and you can plainly see thrusters firing to turn it.

[Motokid600]

So the latest in conspiracy land is apparently "NASA shutting down ISS live feed because of flat Earth." According to YouTube Sadly however Nasa IS shutting down the live feed in September as stated in their latest news release .  https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-changes-to-international-space-station-coverage/

"NASA Television’s Space Station Live program will be phased out in August and discontinued Sept. 1."

That sucks. Any ideas of the ACTUAL reason they're doing this? Everything they mention in that article is... What they already do. So to me it sounds like they just dressed up the article so it wasn't just "Shutting down live feed for technical reasons." 

Edited August 4, 2016 by Motokid600

[razark]

10 minutes ago, Motokid600 said:

Any ideas of the ACTUAL reason they're doing this?

My first guess would be the reason anything stops happening at NASA.

"No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

[Motokid600]

1 hour ago, razark said:

My first guess would be the reason anything stops happening at NASA.

"No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

Well I'm wondering if it wasn't getting enough views to justify the bandwith it takes up.

[Dispatcher]

So my question is, "if the Earth is flat, why are there mountains and valleys and ocean trenches?"

OK, OK, for real this time ...

"If the Earth is flat, what shape is it?

Bonus question (for either question):  Why?

 

[NSEP]

On 4 augustus 2016 at 10:03 PM, Motokid600 said:

So the latest in conspiracy land is apparently "NASA shutting down ISS live feed because of flat Earth." According to YouTube Sadly however Nasa IS shutting down the live feed in September as stated in their latest news release .  https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-changes-to-international-space-station-coverage/

"NASA Television’s Space Station Live program will be phased out in August and discontinued Sept. 1."

That sucks. Any ideas of the ACTUAL reason they're doing this? Everything they mention in that article is... What they already do. So to me it sounds like they just dressed up the article so it wasn't just "Shutting down live feed for technical reasons." 

They shut it down because when they spot space debris, people will freak out and say it is an UFO. Every moving pixel has to be a UFO to some people.

On 4 augustus 2016 at 4:48 AM, Vanamonde said:

This is a reminder to leave religion out of discussions on this forum, since that never ends well. 

Yeah, 50% of all the people i ever knew are religious. Not the great time to discuss it.

On 5 augustus 2016 at 3:05 AM, Dispatcher said:

So my question is, "if the Earth is flat, why are there mountains and valleys and ocean trenches?"

OK, OK, for real this time ...

"If the Earth is flat, what shape is it?

Bonus question (for either question):  Why?

 

Thats a very good question, hard for them to awnser.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, NSEP said:

Thats a very good question, hard for them to awnser.

Yeah, but here's the thing:

THEY CAN'T, BECAUSE THE EARTH IS NOT FLAT

[razark]

14 minutes ago, Aperture Science said:

Yeah, but here's the thing:

THEY CAN'T, BECAUSE THE EARTH IS NOT FLAT

Actually, it's pretty easy.

What shape is the flat earth?
A circle, like a disc.

See?

 

As for the "why", it's because a spinning object will tend towards that shape.  Haven't you ever seen a pizza being made?

 

 

 

[Camacha]

On 03/08/2016 at 11:58 AM, Kulebron said:

@Green Baron the irony is, according to some researches, we are among the most secular societies in the world. Only Scandinavians are aheead of us. But I suppose many need a sense of identity and community, which is impeded by our modernist urbanism across all the country, so people very rationally take religion and conspiracy theories as a tool. claim their own religiosity or stick to conspiracy theory and use those beliefs quite rationally, when convenient.

Who is we and us? You do realize you are posting to an international forum, right? Not just a Mexican one.

[Green Baron]

7 hours ago, Camacha said:

Who is we and us? You do realize you are posting to an international forum, right? Not just a Mexican one.

@Kulebronis Russian. See last page. Russians - due to the communistic past - had a very secular educational system. Religion was suppressed.

He mentioned Syberia, where the last shamans lived until the beginning of the 20th century. Interesting ground for prehistorians .... shamanism in subrecent circumpolar people ... similar symbols in wall paintings and cave art ...

Forget it, off topic ... :-)

 

[p1t1o]

Very easy to come up with harder questions for flatearthers:

Has anyone ever visited the edge?

If not, why not? (Round the world hot air ballons, flights, sailing routes etc.)

How is it possible to travel from Russia, to the North pole, and then on to Canada, all whilst travelling in a straight line?

What is on the underside of the disc?

How thick is the disc?

Where does lava come from and how do volcanos work?

Is the Moon flat too?

How do you explain its procession across the sky?

How do tides work?

What is the discs attitude with respect to the sun?

And how does this change over the year?

Is the sun flat?

Why does a soap bubble form a sphere and not a disc?

How do you explain the curvature of the horizon as seen from concorde?

How do you explain the anomalous lift observed in high-speed (Mach 3+) flight? (These speeds being a significant portion of orbital velocity, aircraft like the SR-71 acquired a small percentage of "pseudo-lift" from the ground curving down away from them)

How does a magnetic compass work?

What is the shape of the Earths magnetic field?

How do Hurricanes form and what is the coriolis effect?

 

I could do this all day.

 

[Green Baron]

42 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

I could do this all day.

 

 

But it would not help :-)

You cannot convince a believer, be he/she a flat-earther or an "8 devs left"-conspiracist ...

Ooops

 

Edited October 7, 2016 by Green Baron

[p1t1o]

18 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

 

But it would not help :-)

You cannot convince a believer, be he/she a flat-earther or an "8 devs left"-conspiracist ...

Ooops

 

Maybe not, but I would sure be interested in the sorts of answers they have.

(lulz )

 

[razark]

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Has anyone ever visited the edge?

Yes.  That's how we know that the edge is a giant ice wall that keeps the oceans in place.  You might know it as Antarctica.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

If not, why not? (Round the world hot air ballons, flights, sailing routes etc.)

The world government run by the Illuminati keeps people from visiting the edge and learning the truth.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How is it possible to travel from Russia, to the North pole, and then on to Canada, all whilst travelling in a straight line?

By flying from one side of the disc, over the center, to the other side.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

What is on the underside of the disc?

Molemen.  This is why the Illuminati keeps people away from the edge, so they don't get captured by the Molemen.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How thick is the disc?

It varies, depending on mountains and valleys and such.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Where does lava come from and how do volcanos work?

Lava is magma that has been forced to the surface.  The places where it reaches the surface are the volcanoes.  The magma is rock that has been melted by the internal heat of the earth, mostly caused by radioactive decay in the core layer.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Is the Moon flat too?

Of course not.  That would be silly.  Like other lightbulbs, it's round.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How do you explain its procession across the sky?

It doesn't move.  It only appears to move because the disk is spinning beneath it.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How do tides work?

Gravity from the moon.  It's a very big lightbulb, after all.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

What is the discs attitude with respect to the sun?

It has a very positive attitude.  It just lights up whenever the sun is overhead.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

And how does this change over the year?

The sun's track shifts over time.  Sometimes, it's north (hubward) of the equator, other times it's south (rimward).

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Is the sun flat?

No.  It's an even brighter lightbulb than the moon.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Why does a soap bubble form a sphere and not a disc?

Surface tension and internal pressure, and ratio between surface area and volume.  It's certainly not due to gravity, like is claimed with planets!

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How do you explain the curvature of the horizon as seen from concorde?

Optical illusion.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How do you explain the anomalous lift observed in high-speed (Mach 3+) flight?

Poor instrument readings.  The faster you go, the more time slows down.  obviously this would cause instruments to operate incorrectly.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How does a magnetic compass work?

By pointing at the magnetic north pole, which is not at the same place as the geographic pole.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

What is the shape of the Earths magnetic field?

A sphere.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

How do Hurricanes form and what is the coriolis effect?

Coriolis effect is caused by the interaction between straight-line motion and a spinning disc.

 

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

I could do this all day.

So can I.  (But it hurts the brain.)

[p1t1o]

5 minutes ago, razark said:

<sneep>

You know, this whole flat-earth thing is starting to make a lot more sense...

(Bonus fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment)