I'm not sure I agree. But if you believe the laws of physics don't apply so "inflation" could happen, so the Big Bang could happen then so be it. I don't subscribe to that. It's quite apparant everytime they find out the math doesn't fit the theory, they change the rules. I am enjoying exploring the "Electric Universe", and I'm especially intrigued by the youtube vid about comets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H7C57PVb-4 The "Thunderbolt Project" seems interesting and (I know I'm just getting started) doesn't require new laws of physics and math to support. Maybe you can explain why when VOYAGER 1 and 2 left the solar system? None of the BBT predicitions that support the BBT were true. I'm not in any camp right now, and don't like being put in one. But if I end up in a "camp", then let it be the one that is open to all different theories. You can also put me in the "I love TBBT show" camp. I get a good belly laugh each time I watch that show.
No idea, but under the Big Bang theory (which resists efforts of inflationary theorists to rename it the Giant Crack, Boom, Whoosh theory), the universe is undergoing expansion at extremely high velocities, and us along with it. On top of that, our sun is flying about the center of the galaxy and the Earth is whizzing around the sun, so that we're never at rest. If you had any sense, you would keep your seatbelt fastened at all times, even at the dinner table. You might even want to wear a helmet. And remember, we are all the products of an unregistered and certainly illegal explosive device of unknown origin.
I see we've entered the "well, my arguments have all been annihilated so now I'm just going to make jokes" era of the thread.
I didn't even know about it until recently. I remember the footage of Sagan there, and just assumed it was an infrequent guest that appeared only every once in awhile. Really looking forward to tonight's episode. The Future..as it should be...but then too... The best quote from all the animated historical bits was Faraday expressing his belief that scientists were all noble men who loved to share data back and forth, and Davy just smiling for a moment before dashing that idea to bits. I had first hand experience with that. In a very, very small role, I helped famed Storm Chaser and researcher Matt Biddle, who authored this report on an F-5 tornado that almost hit downtown Birmingham: http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/research/qr/qr116/qr116.html APPENDIX H: ALL Photos by Matthew Biddle or Jeff Wright. © 1999 Matthew D. Biddle Loring Rue seemed quite hostile when I initially wanted to share data. (Matt has had health issues, and wasn't able to go to one meeting with the epidemiologists. Loring was working on his own paper, of course: http://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Abs...il_8,_1998_Tornado__Assessment_of_the.14.aspx So I was also naïve. Speaking of which I wish I could believe that... For the moment...http://lisnews.org/penn_jillette_and_libraries "stopping crime is a legitimate government function, but public libraries are not, since he wouldn't hold a gun on anyone and force them to create a library" But if someone gets thrown out of their foreclosed home at gunpoint in the dead of winter at the behest of a bank--Mr. Libertarian has no problem with that...worse http://librarycity.org/?tag=penn-jillette If there is ever a big disaster, I see I will have to form my own Bundy type militia to defend my local branch from book burners, here in the Bible belt, lest we see this again: http://o.canada.com/news/politics-a...-23000-to-cull-materials-from-seven-libraries This anti-infrastructure mentality is everywhere now. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/14/scranton-pennsylvania-bankrupt-minimum-wage Ted Cruz should never walk in front of me on a stairwell, or I might have him do a leap for all mankind.
Fantastic episode this week. It really felt very reminiscent of the original - honest about the challenges we face, but hopeful and optimistic about our future.
*watches tonight's episode* *watches teaser for next episode* *grabs popcorn and waits for thread to implode due to the density of the approaching crackpot denialism*
While I like it that the show is broadening its coverage of history to include prominent women and non-Westerners, there are apparently some inaccuracies in its portrayal of Enheduanna. For one thing, she's not the earliest person whose name we know, since we know the names of her parents (King Sargon and Queen Tashlultum), and of Sargon's father, and other earlier people. She's just the earliest poet (or author) we know by name, and one of the earliest women we know by name. For another thing, she was animated to appear sub-Saharan African, but the Akkadians were a Semitic people, not unlike the present-day inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Apparently she looked kinda like this: http://www.transoxiana.org/0108/Images/roberts_enheduanna-detail.jpg I liked the stylized animation in the fall-of-Sumeria sequence. Very Tartakovsky-esque. I also like the idea of giving us a glimpse of next year on the Cosmic Calendar. That's something the original never did. But then, the original was made in more pessimistic times, when it seemed nuclear annihilation was all but inevitable. Sagan's discussion of the Drake Equation presented a one-percent survival rate for technological civilizations as an optimistic estimate. This episode, while acknowledging the danger we face from climate change (which is apparently going to be covered in more depth in the next episode 2 weeks hence), was much more hopeful about the future. The panspermia discussion was also a nice addition beyond what was known in the time of the original series. I knew most of this already, but I don't think I'd really been aware of the model about passing through stellar nurseries and exchanging comets and meteoroids. Or at least I hadn't seen the idea presented so clearly and compellingly. I liked the analogies among the various ways life and intelligence pass along their messages to the future. And I liked the acknowledgment that the Sumerians told the flood myth a thousand years before the Old Testament version told it differently. That should give the Biblical literalists one more thing to scream and holler about.
^ There was certainly a lot more about the episode to like than dislike (including the previews for upcoming content). For me, this was one of the better episodes thus far.
Aside from the African Sumerian, the episode as some other mistakes. Over the past four billion years a Chixculub size impact occurs about once every 100 million years. In the panspermia part NGT said that for a billion or so years asteroids were hitting the Earth hard enough to completely vaporize the oceans, and that this was happening every 10 million years or so. To vaporize the oceans, using the impact energy as efficiently as possible, would take an impactor about 6,000 times heavier than the Chixculub asteroid, and there aren't very many asteroids that big, and there certainly weren't hundreds of them slamming into the Earth for billions of years. In fact, scientists estimate we got hit with about 70 Chixculub size impacts, and the largest supposed impactor would be only a tenth as large as what NGT was saying hit us so frequently, so as to make his self-panspermia storyline sound plausible.
I loved this week's optimistic ending. I do hope we reach such a future, because right now, we're kind of surrounded by idiots who have control of almost everything.
I didn't take the idea that we're going to become a new species as very optimistic. That generally takes some heavy culling or selective breeding. I think we'd better stay with the genes we've got.
Finally watched my first episode of Cosmos tonight, I'm profoundly impressed. I loved every minute of it, I learned something new, loved Neil deGrasse Tyson and the episode's tone and ultimate optimism was absolutely great. Not what the episode said. No she wasn't. She was animated to appear dark-complexioned, which is not the same thing. (Strictly speaking still too dark, probably, especially since the upper crust of her civilization are known to have lightened their complexions with a talc-based equivalent of pancake makeup, but not ultimately that big a deal.)
It doesn't matter in the slightest how you "take it." We will either evolve or become extinct, since I very much doubt we're one of the species that stays stable and successful for tens or hundreds of millions of years like the trilobite or some kinds of dinosaurs. Just going to space, living in space (especially in different kinds of gravity), and living on new planets will change us over time.