That's what I'm thinking. Maybe tie it into climate change, pollution or any of the other ways we're messing up the planet since that's probably a greater threat to human civilization than nuclear war at this point.
Cosmos - With Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Thread starter Greylock Crescent
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As well as being trolling we don't permit hate speech like this here even in "jest". Infraction issued, comments to PM.
Last week's episode was credited to Neil deGrasse Tyson himself. Tyson is not a "journalist," but an astrophysicist who is the director of the Hayden Planetarium.
The same way as any thought experiment. Science begins with asking questions, and that's what the Drake Equation does. The fact that we don't know what numbers to plug in for the various terms is exactly the point of the Equation. It's meant to illustrate how many unanswered questions there are, and that's meant to motivate us to try harder to figure out answers to some of those questions in hopes that someday we might be able to plug an actual number in for one or more of those variables.
That is a shot of the original, isn't it?
No, they didn't. One of the species they showed was dimetrodons, which are often mistaken for dinosaurs but are actually synapsids, an early ancestor of mammals. The other species looked like some kind of gorgonopsid, another type of synapsid that died out in the Permian-Triassic extinction event.
I believe Sagan actually said that we aren't really sure of the variables at this time and showed several different possibilities. It's pretty clear to anyone who is actually paying attention to it that it's a thought experiment. I'm pretty sure the spaceship of the imagination isn't real either despite looking really good.
In that case, you've missed the point. His story wasn't to illustrate a "moral lesson about science", it was a cautionary tale about a society that was afraid to have its preconceptions challenged - which you've just vividly illustrated, by the way.
Again, this was not a story about the Church suppressing science. No matter how many times you repeat this assertion, such repetition will not make it correct. This was a story about a society suppressing free, independent thinking. Tyson himself clearly states that Bruno wasn't a scientist and wasn't doing science. Therefore, this story is about Bruno's persecution for daring to have a radically different worldview, not science.
That Bruno's revelation happened to be correct makes the story more poetic, but isn't the fundamental purpose of the story. And, once again, Tyson explicitly highlights this fact.
Considering the original Cosmos spent plenty of time demonstrating that we do, indeed, have hard-wired, innate behaviors and instincts (via the reptilian portion of our brain, as one example), I'm pretty sure this version will touch on similar ideas.
Yep. I took the screencap myself. It's from the very first on-screen shot of the Ship, just after Sagan says, "Come with me."That is a shot of the original, isn't it?Will this do?
A little too photon torpedo. Although the origininal looked a bit like a sea urchin.
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Amaris
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I don't understand your reference to "anti-nukes." My point was in response to a post that questioned having biology and evolution in a program about the Universe.
I thought I was seeing things at first... then figured, "Okay, somebody goofed." This is one error that will definitely be noticed and commented on. But shouldn't they have caught it in post-production?Nice concept--but my only nitpick is that they showed dino bones in the Permian extinction! Augh!
The dense asteroid belt I can take--when a big one breaks up it is going to be dense right there for a bit. We show planets on textbooks really close together (out of scale) for clarity. Besides, textbooks are expensive enough as it is.
But dino cadavers in the Permian? Oh well, the overall point was made. Besides, Neil was in front of a greenscreen the whole time or he would have caught it.
See, I thought I was missing something, too. I saw the dinosaurs and I figured either the wrong graphic was put in the wrong place, or they moved to another era without saying as such.
But again, it doesn't matter how many actual numbers you have in an equation that multiplies them all together, because as long as one number is unknown your equation remains absolutely useless, producing anything from negative infinity to zero to positive infinity, depending on what that one term turns out to be, unless of course one of the other terms happens to be zero, in which case you don't need the equation at all because the answer is going to be zero.
The equation is something surrounded by the trappings of science (it's an equation!), but doesn't really fit with science because the only way to test it is to already have the answer it purports to provide, or a statistical subset of that answer.
You can crank out a similar equation for the number of warp-capable star ships in the universe, or the number of intelligent species who are green, breathe methane, square dance, and watch wrestling. In fact, you can generate an infinite number of such equations covering all possible questions about a census of the universe, and it still doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know.
It's like an idiot test.
Algebra is useless?
Um, no. You must've got that off a silly TV show. Bruno wasn't executed for having a "different worldview", he was executed for heresy and blasphemy. His "worldview" was pretty irrelevant to his trial, in which he was charged with speaking against the Catholic Church and its priests, dealing in magic, the occult, and reading omens, preaching against the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Mary, transubstantiation, mass, and the Holy Trinity, and teaching reincarnation and that souls can inhabit beasts. He was burned at the stake, his soul cast into oblivion, and his remains dumped in a river.
It wasn't his internal beliefs that got him killed, it was his religious treason and trouble making. He was sold out and accused by a Venetian nobleman in a very liberal city teaming with Muslims, Jews, Protestants. He was sold out because he had promised to teach some memorization tricks to the nobleman and then tried to leave before he'd taught much of anything, so the nobleman was enraged and locked Bruno in the attic and threatened him with dire consequences if he didn't continue his lessons. Bruno refused, so the nobleman (from a long family of doges of Venice) penned an angry letter to the Inquisition, saying:
I, Zuane Mocenigo, report by obligation of my conscience and order of my confessor that I have heard Giordano Bruno of Nola say, while conversing in my home: that it is a great blasphemy for Catholics to say that break transmutes into flesh, that he is an enemy to the Mass, that no religion pleases him, that Christ is a wretch, and that if he did such wretched work as deluding the people, he could easily have predicted that he would be hanged, that God has no distinction of persons, as this would constitute an imperfection in God, that the world is eternal and that there are infinite worlds, because he says that he wants to do what he is able to do, that Christ performed apparent miracles and was a magician, and likewise the apostles, and he had a mind to do as much as they and more, that Christ showed reluctance to die, and fled death as long as he could, that there is no punishment of sins, and that the souls created by nature pass from one animal, and that just as brute animals are born by spontaneous generation, so are human beings when they are born again after a flood.
He revealed plans to make himself the head of a new sect under the name of a new philosophy. He said that the Virgin could not have given birth, that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against God, that friars should have neither the right to debate nor incomes, because they pollute the world and are all asses, that our opinions are the teaching of asses, that we have no proof that our faith finds merit with God, and that to lead a good life it is enough to do to others as we would have them do to us, and that he laughs at all the other sins, and he marvels that God can bear such heresies from Catholics. He says he wants to tend to the art of divination, and draw the whole world behind him, that Saint Thomas and all the doctors of the Church know nothing in comparison with him, and he would so enlighten all the best theologians in the world that they would have not a word to say to him.
The angry letter went for several pages. That got Bruno picked up by the Inquisition in Venice, where he recanted and begged forgiveness, which was granted. But then the Roman Inquisition requested his extradition. Normally Venice denied all such requests, and Rome's interest was in Bruno's German contacts, which could spell serious trouble in a period of revolution and religious war, and there's Bruno, apparently trying to start a new powerful revolutionary sect set against the Catholic faith, and a sect that must've seemed the work of Satan, at that.
Meanwhile, back in the modern world, the University named after Cardinal Bellarmine, who convicted Bruno of blasphemy and heresy, went on to win the 2011 NCAA men's division II basketball championship! That makes it pretty obvious which side God is on. One guy gets burned to death and dumped in a river. The other guy has his team cut down the nets.
In other words ... he was executed by a paranoid, authoritarian society that was intolerant of his view of the world. The lesson being, intolerance and closed-mindedness are the antithesis of the scientific process.
Algebra is useless?
x=a*b*c*d*e*f*g*h*i*j, where a through k are all unknown, is pretty freakin' useless, as algebra goes.
But you could expand j with the relation that j=m*n*o*p,
and get
x=a*b*c*d*e*f*g*h*i*m*n*o*p, where a through p are all unknown, making the useless equation somewhat larger and more impressive looking.
Myself, I would simplify it to x=k*y, where k is the unknown product of all but one of the unknowns, y is the unknown variable that isn't included in k, which while equally useless, is easier to remember.
It's like a complicated equation that a third-grader would invent as they just followed an obvious trail of thought about how many birthday presents they might get.
If you had the numbers that made it useful, you wouldn't use the equation, you'd just punch the numbers into your calculator.
Or, you know, you can admit that algebra basically deals with at least one (and usually several) unknowns. And that such unknowns do not make an equation useless. And, in fact, those unknowns are what make the equation useful to begin with.
In other words ... he was executed by a paranoid, authoritarian society that was intolerant of his view of the world. The lesson being, intolerance and closed-mindedness are the antithesis of the scientific process.
By that measure, Nazi war criminals weren't executed for starting a war of aggression that killed millions of people, they were executed for having a different worldview. The Allies were just being narrow minded and intolerant.
What got Bruno such prominent attention in part was the charge that he was going to stir up serious, serious trouble during a period of very brutal religious wars in which scores of people were getting killed over questions of faith and allegiance. He wasn't trying to get people to abandon such bloodshed in the name of science or tolerance, he was going to create and lead a new religious sect that taught that the Catholics were blasphemers and a stench in the nostrils of God. He was burned at the stake before he could raise and lead his army of religious nuts of a different flavor.
We've Godwined already?In other words ... he was executed by a paranoid, authoritarian society that was intolerant of his view of the world. The lesson being, intolerance and closed-mindedness are the antithesis of the scientific process.
By that measure, Nazi war criminals weren't executed for starting a war of aggression that killed millions of people, they were executed for having a different worldview. The Allies were just being narrow minded and intolerant.
The Nazis were executed for war crimes against humanity ... not crimes of thought or speech.
Or, you know, you can admit that algebra basically deals with at least one (and usually several) unknowns. And that such unknowns do not make an equation useless. And, in fact, those unknowns are what make the equation useful to begin with.
Exactly. Without the unknowns, algebra has no purpose.
Or, you know, you can admit that algebra basically deals with at least one (and usually several) unknowns. And that such unknowns do not make an equation useless. And, in fact, those unknowns are what make the equation useful to begin with.
The output is a purely linear function of every single input, which is pretty darn useless. If it had some sums and differences thrown in it might actually be worth looking at, but as it is, you could sum it up as:
The number of intelligent bipedal organisms with binocular vision in the universe is exactly one fourth the number of their feet and eyes, a variation on counting sheep by counting their legs and dividing by four. But set it to music and add some special effects and people apparently lap it up as all but proving that we must be on the verge of faster-than-light travel because we've got a handle on the number of alien species out there.
In truth, the number of confirmed observations of aliens is running neck and neck with the number of confirmed sitings of angels, ghosts and demons, and our reasoning that they must be out there has no better scientific basis than people's belief that angels must exist. At present, there's no evidence of either one, just a gut feeling that something must be so.
Reasoning about population numbers in the absence of anhy observed data is just idle speculation, like calculating the number of Orcs in Middle Earth. Early scientists crunched numbers on angels, too. The angels dancing on the head of a pin was addressed by the Royal Society, as was the contention that the human soul must consist of nothing but fire.
Galileo once computed the size of Hell based on an educated guess as to the size of human souls, the number of humans who had lived and died, and how much space each soul would probably be allowed. Then he did engineering calculations on the roof stability of the required void, assuming central Italian geology, and showed that Hell is probably not a physical cavity located north of Rome.
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Amaris
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We've Godwined already?
The Nazis were executed for war crimes against humanity ... not crimes of thought or speech.
Alfred Rosenberg was executed pretty much for thought crimes, having been a shaper of Nazi philosophy. He wrote books and made posters, and was guilty of "crimes against peace." The issue is that some ideas are very, very nasty and can lead to millions of deaths. Bruno lived in one of those periods, and was accused of trying to start a new heretical religion that would incite extreme hatred toward Catholics. At the same time he was also said to be trying to get back into the Church's good graces and return to Rome to become a teacher. Go figure.
We made up most of the war crimes after the fact, in the Nuremberg code, reasoning that we shouldn't tolerate such aggressive behavior and a whole bunch of people should hang for it.
My cousin was executed at Nuremberg for not thinking "Hmm... I should probably mention that I was under orders, because they're probably looking to hang the big fish, not the people commanding the boat."
Of course the dumbass got his crew captured by the Somaliland Camel Corps, and for that I blame the Reichsmarine for not teaching submariners the basics of mounted camel cavalry desert combat, ignorantly reasoning that those skills wouldn't be needed in the North Atlantic U-boat packs attacking Allied convoys. Boy were they wrong. They were also wrong about not needing winter clothing when invading Russia, and the need to put society on a scientific basis where the nation pays strict attention to racial hygiene and advances the cause of true socialism.
Bruno was not even the first with the infinite universe and multiple world's idea, and the ideas didn't stop there. He also had ideas about what God was doing on all those other planets, and how all those souls would be coordinated in 7,000 years, and blah blah blah. It's like portraying the Heaven's Gate cult members as comet scientists.
Did you see my post where I said they weren't dinosaurs, but synapsids? They were in the right period. It's just that we've been brainwashed into assuming all prehistoric animals that look even vaguely reptilian are dinosaurs, even though there have been many that weren't.
