Much like Halley's Comet as described in last week's Cosmos, early humans ascribed cosmic phenomena to the whims of some heavenly god... when in actuality, it was just a comet. I bet that origins of the Noah's Flood story come from an actual event. There probably was some kind of flood, and it was probably catastrophic, but by no means was it all-encompassing and worldwide. It was embellished to the story we have today.
I love Cosmos, and one of the reasons is that we need scientific literacy to replace superstitious handwavery. Now, I'm not talking about people of faith. I don't mind if people have faith in God, gods, or what have you, but even today, and I mean literally today, a friend of mine who is devoutly religious (she's fundamentalist Christian) said that there's a pink Moon coming, and that it's a sign that God will be making some kind of judgment. That is why I'm glad Cosmos is here, because the handwavery is still around, and is more profitable than ever, which keeps it in the public eye. So when Neil presses home the fact that the universe is older than a few thousand years, and that natural space phenomena has nothing to do with any religious belief, I cheer a little.
One of the more likely candidates is the Black Sea deluge hypothesis in which the Mediterranean catastrophically breached through the Bosporus to pour into the Black Sea with the flow of 200 Niagara Falls. At the time (somewhere between 7800 and 5600 BC) the Black Sea shorelines were occupied (possibly densely), and the remains of human structures have been found about 100 meters below the current water level. If this were the source of the flood story, then someone probably noticed that the Med was starting to pour in (cutting a deeper and deeper channel as the trickle turned into a stream) and tried to warn people living below. One of them then built a boat or raft large enough to hold his family, sheep, and goats and floated around on the Black Sea as he watched the local villages disappear under water, never to be seen again. Meanwhile the steam from the giant falls would've fallen as enormous amounts of rain. The boat would've made landfall far inland from the areas that had been inhabited, so the survivor would've found the Earth "depopulated." Whether people would keep jabbering about such an event for thousands of years afterwards is a big question, but the entire region seems to have different versions of a giant flood story.
Especially when Tyson discusses it with such lovely imagery - talking about keeping the galaxy (and universe) in the dark with such beliefs.
Agreed. It's akin to Carl Sagan's reference to science as a candle in the dark, dispelling the blackness inherent in ignorance, with the light of fact and reason.
The flood myths found in that part of the world, including the Noah myth and the Greek Deucalion & Pyrrha, are adaptations of the Sumerian Utnapishtim flood myth from The Epic of Gilgamesh. Sumeria was in Mesopotamia, in the flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. ("Mesopotamia" = "Land Between Rivers" in Greek.) Thus, massive floods were a frequent fact of life in the region, so it was natural that the myth of a Great Flood that engulfed the entire world would emerge there.
Every single thing mentioned in the Bible just happened to be around the guy writing it. That's why it never mentions anything interesting like otters, kangaroos or bio-luminescent fish. We're lucky that major sections aren't devoted to some guy's pet name for his donkey or long rants about how annoying sand is.
Well, first off, there were hundreds of "guys," since it's basically an anthology of religious writings from many eras and sources. And second, very little of it is firsthand reporting. The Gospels, for instance, weren't written by people who actually knew Jesus, but by people recording the traditions and teachings that had grown up around him after his death. And as I said before, a lot of portions of the Bible are probably transcriptions of oral accounts that had been passed down for many generations.
Mom watched Cosmos with me this morning. She liked it, but what got her attention was when Neil started talking about how fast we move through the universe. She thought the Sun didn't move, that our solar system was stationary, and when Neil explained that it moves at a half a million miles per hour around the Milky Way, that just blew her mind. Then she learned that one of the first men to theorize about black holes, John Michell, had been a church rector, a parish priest. I explained that contrary to what some may think, Cosmos isn't against people of faith, it's against ignorance being put before knowledge. She liked that, too. I told her, "faith can be a wonderful thing, but when one's faith is in direct contradiction to scientific fact, it's time to re-examine that faith." The only minor nit I have is that I didn't like the switch between km/h and mp/h, which happened several times. I had to convert the numbers for her, because the switching confused her a bit.
I was fiddling with a time travel story a few years ago and the above fact suddenly occurred to me - earth rotates; the continents move; the earth orbits the Sun; the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way; the Sun actually "bobs" up and down as it orbits as well; the Milky Way moves toward the Great Attractor... So what if my main characters "pop" back in time 70 million years to visit the dinosaurs? Will their time machine reappear in the same physical location on Earth, the way HG Wells' machine did? Or will it reappear in the location in space where Earth WILL BE on the date they leave, and thus floating in space where Earth won't be for another 70 million years? I decided to hand-wave it with "The time travel effect seems to be fixed in place by local gravity, so don't worry." But it's a hell of an interesting thought, IMHO.
That's great that your mom learned some new things. One thing you could tell her in addition to all that, is if she were to live long enough (tens or hundreds of thousands of years), the familiar constellations wouldn't look the same at all. ALL the stars are moving, and in time, our night sky won't look familiar at all. We won't even have the same Pole Star in 25,000 or so years. Astronomers tend to think in metric, but the Cosmos production people know that their main audience tends to think in imperial. Canada's been metric for decades, but I still think in either system, depending on what's being measured. So I was mentally converting the kph numbers, too. I think it was Gregory Benford who wrote a time travel novel that takes that into consideration - that it's not enough to go back in time; you also need to be at the right location, or you'll find yourself either in mid-air, underground, out in airless (and planetless) space, etc. Same with Robert Silverberg's Up the Line novel. The book starts out in New Orleans, but the protagonist's Time Courier job is to escort tourists on trips to the Byzantine Empire. He has to go to modern-day Istanbul to pick up his tourists, and then they can go back in time for their tour.
You would still need a central frame of reference, though. All motion is technically relative. You could go a step further in your conjecture: what happens if the universe itself is moving, maybe rotating around something bigger than a universe? What if a group of universes are rotating around something bigger than that? There's no end to the possibilities. I think having gravity play a role in creating a frame of reference is a good idea. As your "time machine" travels through time, it still obeys the laws of physics (apart from the time travel part) and stays anchored to the fixed point on Earth. It moves with the Earth.
Thanks. I had absolutely no idea that Patrick Stewart is an actor. That's why it confuses me terribly that when I saw him in Dune and TNG and Lady Jane and even Robin Hood: Men in Tights, he wasn't wearing his Praetorian Guard costume from I, Claudius. The point is, his voice is distinctive enough and iconic enough (I can tell it's him in a car commercial, even when he's speaking with an American accent) that it's distracting.
Yup, most scifi that uses time travel rationalises it this way, that gravity wells affecting both time and space creates an anchor point for both in determining the point of ingress to a different time plane. Your departure point and arrival point are warped to meet the two temporally separated gravity points as the termini. Which could mean targeting gravity points is a key part of time travel. Maybe.
Embarrassingly enough, I was not sure whether or not it was Sir Patrick...until I read these latest posts. Sincerely, Bill
I guess Patrick should just never work again, then, if it causes people such confusion to hear his voice. Good thing he and Ian Mckellan have this newfound livelihood of taking funny pictures wearing bowlers!
Where he was brilliant I might add... Distinctive and iconic yes, but only enough to say, "Oh cool, Patrick Stewart's doing a voice-over," not enough to tear my hair out and scream "OH MY GOOOOD!! CAPTAIN PICARD'S DOING A VOICE-OVER!! NOW THE ENTIRE THIRTY FIVE MINUTES I DIDN'T HEAR HIS VOICE IN THE REST OF THE SHOW IS ROOOOOOINNED!!!"