"Some cranks in their parents' basements believe..." "that life down here ..." "Down here," as in their parents' basements?
Giorgio's bad tan, bad hair and ridiculous refusal to properly pronounce "astronaut" and "extra-terrestrials" are usually entertaining.
Is it possible - as some astronaut theorists contend - that Giorgio's hair is the result of back-engineered extraterrestrial technology recovered from the Roswell crash of 1947? * * The Trek BBS is not responsible for cooleddie's abuse of Kahlua and painkillers and does not necessarily share his delusional opinions.
We have no explanation how his hair happened under the known laws of physics. This means that it must have been growing in zero gravity. What is he hiding?
I find it difficult to believe that a forum full of Star Trek fans, people who ostensibly are mostly humanist by definition, would think that humans created their own civilization and great accomplishments by their own agency! Preposterous!!!!
I'm waiting for The Hair... er... Giorgio, von Daniken, Coppens, et al to address the 12/21/12 bit in an upcoming episode. The world didn't end, the aliens/gods, didn't return. I've just amused myself by watching some older episodes and they spent so much time on it they have to spin it somehow.
Here's something a bit new...the-great-filter-theory-suggests-humans-have-already-conquered-the-threat-of-extinction... http://io9.com/5970501/the-great-fi...ve-already-conquered-the-threat-of-extinction This is related to the Fermi Paradox posts I made earlier in the thread. Food for thought, though I'm not sure I'm buying it.. Also, an excellent book I bought after seeing it mentioned in the article.. http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Alie...Extraterrestrial/dp/0387955011?tag=io9amzn-20
I don't think humans are 100% extinction-proof, however, I do think we could survive a lot of things that most other species could not. Besides, there are billions of us. Even if you whittle that down to a few thousand, that is a survivable number of people to prevent extinction. I think our ultimate limit, given current technology, would be the destruction of our atmosphere (that is, making it unbreathable by us.) Even then, I suppose we could make indoor environments and grow plants. However, none of the Biosphere projects actually panned out, so it's debatable whether we could really survive this way long-term.
100% of anything is not possible, and we are certainly not extinction proof...related to the existence of aliens...think of the Kardashev scale of technological development. What if we can control the entire output of energy of our planet, then solar system and sun. These would be lofty advances, and a seriously powerful civilization, but even those could fall prey to cosmic catastrophes...let's go further beyond: what if our major cultural goal is to survive, well..everything! Can we harness the energy of a galaxy? Can we force evolve ourselves to live beyond the extinction of the universe...into multiverses? It's problematic, if a new universe has new physical laws, even if we survive the "end of the universe" we might me winked out of existence. Taking it way back to modern Earth...man has the power to change much of what he has done, and space travel is a fact, we just need advancements to take us to another level..resource exploitation, habitat expansion, etc. It's my oipinion that a totally renewable human civilization is not possible within this biosphere, we can make some inroads to being responsible and renewable, but if man progresses as he has shown to, he will expand. It's inevitable. Early native populations destroyed their habitats, many disappeared, same with animal populations...we have the brain to take evolution out of the realm of nature and go beyond it. We can never avoid threats of extinction, but we can mitigate it if we spread out! RAMA
For most extinction scenarios, we've become nearly invincible for the moment being. But one has actually increased substantially with the ease and abundance of travel – a global pandemic. A devastating one is more likely than ever, and it can cripple our civilization to a point where we are vulnerable. It can become difficult to sustain it as it is now, and we can revert by necessity to a more simple way of life where survival is less likely. Now, you can be optimistic that the memory of the great past, including the surviving physical records and artefacts to support it, will inspire the fallen civilization to rebuild and restore everything, even if it takes many generation to do so. So it should take much much much less time than what it took us to get where we are now (which was not that much to begin with). But you never know...
There was a scientific study done late in the Cold War during the 1980's that postulated that if somebody could construct a thermonuclear device so powerful that its explosive yield would reach or even exceed 50,000 megatons that its detonation on dry land would cause enough of a catastrophic blast effect and global fallout that it would kill every single human being on the face of the planet except those who were in survival bunkers and shelters deep underground and who didn't emerge for at least two to three years after the explosion. The key point of that being, naturally, that somebody would survive a nuclear war. At the height of the Cold War the cumulative explosive power of all the world's nuclear arsenals was somewhere around 16,000 megatons, less than a third of the power of the theoretical "Mankind Killer" and with the exception of the most dire anti-nuclear activists of the time it was assumed that there would still be a substantial human population on the planet even after the wake of a Cold War nuclear conflagration (albeit one thrown back to the time of the steam engine if not the Dark Ages). The chances of every single human being perishing short of a major asteroid, meteorite or comet nucleus collision on the scale of or even worse than the Yucatan impact of 65 million years ago are pretty slim. Not impossible, but they're not great.
I found myself wondering the other day who the bigger loon was, The Hair or David Hatcher Childress. I came to the conclusion it's Childress. I think Tsoukalos is simply in it for the money, he's marketing himself and his show and having a laugh all the way to the bank. I'd be surprised if he honestly beliefs a fraction of what he says. Childress on the other hand, I get the impression he genuinely believes everything he says.
I don't really want humanity to go extinct next weekend, but the fact that we eventually will is not particularly troubling. I mean, given that every single one of us as individuals becomes extinct, what's the big deal?
Like you, I find the show interesting. I don't necessarily believe all of their hair brained theories and they defiantly lose me when they start talking about how the Pyramids were ancient Nicholas Tesla like power plants. However, I think they ask some great questions especially related to how very ancient people were able to move stones in some cases weighing over 100 tons up a mountain without even pulley technology available to them. For those very critical of the show I really don't find this type of conjecture demonstrably different then the faith that Christians have that Jesus made water into wine and even he brought Lazarus back from death. Nor is it any different that both Christians and Jews believe that Moses heard "god," speaking from a burning bush and/or he inscribed commandments to be followed onto stone. Both stories are told both in churches and on television as 100% fact and not to be questioned.