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Instead of Revamping Hubble, Replace It
Neil Halelamien writes "Astronomy Magazine reports that an international team of astronomers has proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or human repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build, less than the estimated cost of a service mission."
.. than the hubble. And scientists would get more bang for the buck to replace the hubble than to send up a robot which would have a likelihood of failure.
This plan seems like a really good idea. Why hasn't anyone else... never mind.
It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build
Yes, and for a limited time this baby can be yours for ONLY $999,999,999.99!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Hey, Why build something you can repair when you could just buy a 10 pack of disposables. Sure, it might be *less* wasteful to build a new one from scratch, but it just seems such a sign of the times. Maybe they could get Gillette to sponsor the project.
meh
Of course we all want a new telescope. However, the Hubble scope is already in orbit. If it is not repaired, it will stop working. There's no guarantee that this new scope would be built any time soon. So, while we all would like a faster, better telescope, perhaps we should focus on the fact that we already have Hubble up there.
The $1 billion cost is not just parts, it's mostly the money to launch the shuttle, pay for mission support, etc.
Even if they can build a replacement for less then $1B, it would still be about one billion more than repairing it.
These guys might be good astronomers, but their math ain't that super.
Can we get this lens right the first time, too? :)
The coolest voice ever.
...but there will be no refit.
Build a replacement and fix Hubble either around the same time or in the near future and have two working space telescopes for scientists to use.
Yes, I know.. money.
There is no spork.
A lighter Hubble-like probe may be fine to take up in Atlantis, Discovery, or Endeavour.
Plus, the main reason Columbia would have been the most likely candidate for Hubble servicing was because it was too heavy to dock safely with ISS, thus the other three had to stay on ISS duty to make sure it got built on time (or eventually, as is the case now, since "on time" keeps changing).
That, though, may still be the biggest obstacle. There's very little chance of using a shuttle in the next five years for anything but ISS missions. The best chance for this telescope would be to design it to be launched on something else, like a D-4 Heavy, but that would make it that much more difficult to build because of volume limitations.
not necessarily, a lens is a lens, they can i think change the CDD and com easily
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May as well just fix/upgrade the one thats up there.
Well, if they want to shave another $10 million off that price tag, there's always SpaceX and the Falcon I.
Of course, they'll want to purchase the extended warranty with that one...
Oh damn, I really should have reworded that. The $1 billion includes the costs of not only construction, but of the launch as well. From the release:
Norman told the committee that it would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to launch HOP, which he stated would continue and even expand upon the flow of science and discovery that has made the original Hubble Space Telescope a "national treasure."
How about we send a robotic telescope instead? One with arms so that it could fix the Hubble, look at the stars and then hurl large rocks at the teeming citizens below...
" Except we lost the only shuttle that could get it up there."
Except had you read the article you would have noticed the plan would use an Atlas 521 rocket to put it in orbit instead of a shuttle
There are still shuttles and shuttles are not the only way to send something into space. Shuttles are usually the very last option since they are far from being the most cost-effective solution. There is no problem with a new satelite.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
1B isnt anything compared to the overall amount on repairing and operating the old hubble. Note that the advanced technologies today, are hundreds of times faster and more efficent. 1Billion over 5 years
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
The willingness of private investors to put up capital to service such markets shouldn't be underestimated. This is an exciting area of endeavour, just as is space transportation as witnessed by the recent investments in that field by adventurous angel investors.
Indeed, historically there has been a pattern of private financing of cutting edge telescopes without even a promise of any return at all. We can expect the private sector to step up to the plate if the government will stop pretending it is the source of innovation in technology and instead the source of funding for public-domain scientific research.
From a brief history of private endowment of telescopes:
In this stage, which lasted (roughly speaking) from the late 1800's to the middle of the 1900's, rich benefactors donated the money to establish observatories although they themselves were not practising astronomers. I gave some examples and anecdotal histories in class. For instance:
(i) James Lick made his fortune by funding "gold rush" hopefuls in San Francisco. He provided them a grubstake by buying up their land cheaply, and wound up owning most of what is now downtown San Francisco. He wanted to build an enormous pyramid in the city to commemorate himself, but was persuaded by the Regents of the University of California to build an observatory instead: Lick Observatory, just east of San Jose.
(ii) A man named Yerkes made his fortune building street car systems, and donated the money for the Yerkes 40-inch refractor, still the largest such telescope in the world. It is at Williams Bay, north of Chicago, and is operated by the University of Chicago. Yerkes was apparently quite an unscrupulous businessmen, by all accounts, and was never favoured with the respect which he hoped his endowment might buy for him.
(iii) David Dunlap made his fortune in Ontario silver mines, and was interested in astronomy. After his death, his widow donated a lot of money to the University of Toronto, who built the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill. When it opened in 1935, it was the second-largest telescope in the world.
(iv) The Carnegie Foundation, established by the Scotsman Andrew Carnegie, funds many philanthropic endeavours, including public libraries. It provided the money for the famous 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, which saw first light in 1950.
Amazingly, the days of such generosity are not completely gone: the new Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea are being provided by a Mr. Keck, the head of Standard Oil (I believe). The total cost is in the region of 200 million dollars; the telescopes are operated by the University of California.
Seastead this.
What sort of private entity needs a fucking space telescope?
One that makes its money by selling images from that telescope to research institutions, of course.
If the research institutions aren't willing to pay enough to the private entity to keep it in the black, then the images obviously aren't worth what the telescope (and supporting organization) costs to operate. (If nobody is willing to pay the research institutions enough to pay the telescope-operation entity, then obviously the research institutions aren't worth it either).
on the other hand, some of those students will get to work on building the new scope itself - which is an opportunity rarely available.
interesting dilemma for the future graduate students.
Astronomers have been fond of calling the Hubble as "the space telescope"...which is a mistake if you think about it. The word "the" implies that there will be only one space telescope at the present time.
If you think about it, it's always better to have a fleet of space telescopes, instead of just one.
I guess we were mentally stuck at the concept of "reusable" space missions (e.g., space shuttle orbiters) and made it difficult to design a mission "on the cheap" with disposable parts. There, we aimed our goals too high. Maybe we should have experimented more wiht cheaper disposable missions and then after that we should've started thinking about more advanced stuffs.
Because the ISS and the Hubble are at 2 completely different orbits and different speeds. Matching the two would cost an enormous amount (in satellite terms) amount of fuel, and would be potentially extremely dangerous (ever see that MST3K episode where they ding the hubble?) so unfortunately this idea is completely out of the question.
drunk chemists
The ISS and Hubble are in the same orbit right next to each other?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I'm not bailing you out of this one Mike. This is your dishwater, you bath in it.
Would it not be much cheaper to make the images it sends back using Photo Shop? I mean, think of the savings!
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
So... when are we going to get the "Bill and Melinda Gates" Super Orbiting Scope ? I'm sure Bill can easily afford the $1Bil... ;)
Wouldn't the backside of the moon be the ultimate place?
On the backside of the moon there is a minimum of lightpollution with the advantages of (some) gravity.
You can have a bigger telescope that can be controlled via earth or directly.
It would be an excellent complement to a moonbase that will be very handy when building a ship for mars.
The moonbase would also be excellent to learn to create a selfsupporting environment for a marsbase.
But what do I know... Maybe the aliens already have reserved the backside of the moon...
It is time to say goodbye. been saying this for a while now. THere was a good article on spacedaily a while back too:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/hubble-04p.html
in fact they suggested even building 2. If Hubble keeps going a while longer, (it could go 2010 with luck) we would then have 2 scopes going!
Dont get me wrong, its been fantastic, but it is in essence 70's tech with upgrades bolted on. I think some of the bits are still original - they have been going a long long time, so when they blow thats it. There are a lot of things that can be done better too..
Tech has moved on - time to stop putting money into Hubble, great tho the old horse has been..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
No sane person would buy the Hubble.
(1) Unless you have the means to "service" it, it will end up to be a short-lived investiment.
(2) To download raw data gathered with the Hubble, you have to use governmental communication facilities such as TDRS, etc. Check out how expensive its bandwidth usage is.
(3) It will eventually tumble down onto the earth one day. You will be held responsible to bring it down to the safe place (e.g., ocean). To do so you have to possess technology and skill for a controled re-entry.
(4) what the hell would the private entity do with a space telescope?
I could go on and on and on...
...rather than the construction. "We built this ourselves, but got Gilette to raise 'er."
Sorry, it's very early AM for me, and my brain's still a bit... random.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Why can't we sell it or donate it to another country as a gift if they are willing to take over upkeep?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I submitted the story, and because of some sloppy wording on my part a number of people now think that the $1 billion doesn't include the cost of launching the rocket. In actuality, it does include this cost already.
From their poster, here are the figures which go into the cost estimate (written as low/high estimate):
Spacecraft: $135M/$165M
Observatory ATLO: $80M/$100M
Deorbit Module: $5M/$10M
Optical Telescope Assembly: $150M/$210M
SI Mods: $20M/$30M
SI Integration: $5M/$10M
FGS: $30M/$55M
Fee: $64M/$87M
Contingency: $128M/$174M
Launch Vehicle: $130M/$150M
Total: $747M/$991M
Again, my apologies for wording my submission poorly.
From a sentimental standpoint I really like the idea of recovering the Hubble and sticking it in the Smithsonian. I've been told that it is a feasible idea, aside from the ridiculous cost. The Hubble really was one of the technological icons of the 90's.
The components using CCD's can be changed and have been numerous times, but it's still expensive to design and manufacture them. The separate costs of all those little developments could probably be more cheaply consolidated in one brand new telescope.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but on rare occassions this policy can yield what are, for lack of better phrasing, naive answers to realistic questions. Capitalism, and the principle that personal ownership intrinsically yields personal responsibility, do not ALWAYS apply, contrary to what many of us have been raised to think. Part of the entire reason the space program is NOT left to either market forces or to private ownership, is that it is not profitably for any firm to do so. Think about it: we all love the pictures Hubbel sends back, but how many of us are willing to pay $1.50 for each chance to see them. Privitization only works based on the economic principle of perspective-profit driven firm action. here, there IS no likelihood for profit. So all that would happen to our dear Hubble is that it would end up abandoned, as many fear it is being so abandoned now (which it is not). Granted the point that in post 9-11 government funds might best be spent elsewhere, I still argue that by now allowing NASA to continue its relative monopoly over the space program (i say "relative" because factually, NASA does quite a bit of outside contracting), what will be the end result is what we all do NOT want to happen: the end of the space program in full.
If it was their own money? Well, think about it. You can repair a dying telescope, or you can build a much better one. From this point, it seems better to just repair it. However, building a better one WOULD BE CHEAPER. So, if it was their money, I think they'd all arrive at the decision to replace it.
I don't get what you're complaining about the taxpayer stuff for. A REPAIR MISSION WOULD BE MORE EXPENSIVE.
- Super hi-rez!
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- All colours, races, ages!
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Find your higher calling today!"Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
But that would mean NASA having to admit they were wrong. Remember when they first made the shuttle, and it was supposed to be the end of all their problems, with missions going up every other week and making space travel being really cheap. I think for some reason that if they would have kept with the old apollo or saturn rockets, that they would have done much more important stuff in space instead of worrying about doing complete overhauls after every trip on something that is supposed to be "reusable". It's like saying that you're car is reusable, but every night, when you're done with it, we'll swap out the engine for a new one, and replace the entire outer body.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Let's think about this logically for a second. Building a new version of the hubble will give us a better telescope, create extra jobs for 65 months AND be less expensive than the mission to repair our existing telescope. Now, you say it's a bad thing that this is being considered?
I understand and agree that americans tend to throw out more than they should, especially in the realm of automobiles, but you've picked the wrong example to illustrate that.
Though you're just a troll, I'll bite.
You're wrong. If the investiment on military alone could sustain super-power status, then the evil empire CCCP would have been around and threating the mighty western civilization today.
Do you know what happened to the Soviets?
In my journal, I have described why a super-power nation needs to invest money into natural science and cutting edge technology to remain a super-power.
So... when are we going to get the "Bill and Melinda Gates" Super Orbiting Scope ? I'm sure Bill can easily afford the $1Bil... ;)
Sorry, they're busy fighting AIDS in Africa ;).
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The whole technology gone into the Hubble was based on 1970 and 80's cutting edge technology, pal...I still remember the day the Hubble's instrument used a photo-sensitive 1-dimensional, 512-element diode to sample data...
The true technological icons of the 90's are about to come in space.
(4) what the hell would the private entity do with a space telescope?
Ever fry ants with a magnifying glass? Well, multiply that by 1000.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Wasn't this the original plan before people let their knee-jerk reactions get the best of them? This plan is obviously better than the one the save Hubble. There is no question Hubble is begining to show its age. Why risk 1.5 billion on a "rescue" mission, when there is no guarantee that some other aging system won't malfunction in another 6 months anyway? Would we be willing to spend another 1.5 billion fixing that? No, the answer is clear: Build a new Space telescope using newer, cheaper, smaller, more powerful technology. To me, it is like the Social Security isuue. It's obvious the current system is broke and won't be able to sustain itself. Lets scrap it and come up with something better that will be more cost efficient with better results. Why people come up with these knee-jerk reactions defending a broken system is beyond me. Just afraid of change I guess.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Uhm... http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /webb_ngst_030108.html
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
The Smithsonian already has a Hubble Test Vehicle. It might be nice to have the real thing but, as you pointed out, from a cost perspective it's totally impractical. Most of the National Air and Space Museum's space hardware (except for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules) are replicas or test articles because there's no way (or no economical way) to get satellites and interplanetary probes back for exhibition.
...that the scientists get the lense size right on their first try this time around. Don't want to be sending up another replacement, to replace the replacement for the original replacement... and yes, that sentence does make sense when you think about it ;-]
If Bill finances Hubble II, he'll insist that it run Windows XP. Just imagine a Hubble with viruses. And I don't even want to think about spyware...
Two in Earth orbit to provide immediate redundancy and a longer baseline for simultaneous observations (triangulation), then put one in an orbit perpendicular (or nearly so) to the ecliptic (with a planetary slingshot, might even have to send it around Jupiter to get enough delta-vee). This will give #3 a much longer baseline, a unique viewpoint and clearer seeing (less solar system junk between it and targets).
Make them a bit more redundant, too, multiple independently steered comms links, multiple cross-linked power sources, redundant navigation gear, that kind of thing. Repair will not be an option for #3, and even for #1 and #2 bumping up the cost by $200M is a great investment if it doubles the useful life of each 'scope.
I've often wondered about the effect of barrel-bottom-scraping on a lot of these missions. Cassini cost $3G, but what else could they have done given $4G? Added another half-dozen Huygens-sized landers? One for a second site/go at Titan, one each for Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, Encelades, Mimas? Added more propellant for a longer mission, more instruments for a more informative mission?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The Hubble space telescope was sent into orbit via Discovery. We still have that one.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
Why would it take so long to build a replacement? Would the majority of the time be spent on programming? Could we not save a little time by sending it up there with minimal programing and, basically, the ability for us to upgrade it's firmware? I just don't understand why the building should take THAT long.
This would give you a "lens" much bigger and clearer than the current one, more suitable for stretching the muscles of the newer generation of imaging devices.
It would also be sensible to spend an extra kg or 2 to put in a turret with several of each kind of imager that they want to use mounted on it. That way, if one breaks or degrades it's not such a showstopper. Something as grossly mechanical as a turret does contain moving parts, but isn't anywhere near as delicate as the instrumentation it carries. Providing it with several independent drives and positioning systems would be relatively trivial.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If one is making an iso-fruitopic comparison one also needs to remember that the costs of a repair mission are probably pretty accurate (they've done a few already) while the costs of building a new scope and launching it are wild-ass guesses.
...but even so, adding launch costs of $150M doesn't upset the applecart.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No one in their right minds would want to buy a space telescope. The trade only hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant
number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds.
(with apologies to Douglas Adams)
Real life is overrated.
Cave homes have a long history and are still being built. They have good temperature regulation, are quiet, and use up less arable land than a conventional house.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If history has taught us anything, it is that the replacement is only cheaper if it works perfectly the first time. I suspect the cost estimates are based on current test practices which are insufficient for ensuring that it will work perfectly the first time, as we have repeatedly proven through screw-ups in the past. Thus, the probability leans towards the costs being far higher than estimated, whether as a result of doing extra testing or as a result of going back and fixing the mistakes later.
Of course, the worst case scenario would involve trying to figure out a way to get a shuttle to the LaGrange point (which I'm told is impossible without significant modifications to the current shuttle).
If I believed for a single second that they could replace the Hubble with a new one that worked correctly for less than the cost of repairing it, I'd be shouting "dump it" as fast as the next guy, but I'm far too cynical to do anything more than laugh at the notion.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
You don't get 12t up to a 750km orbit with a bottle rocket.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A new Hubble with a primary mirror 2.4 meters in diameter will have the exact same angular resolution as the old Hubble with a primary mirror 2.4 meters in diameter.
Hah!
In any case, I think my karma's already been maxed out for a few years now.
EUR7700 per kg? Or should we use Francs? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What's the point in even replacing it, anyways? yea, that thing is old, but do we really need to go through the trouble of taking Hubble out and replacing it? Hubble's been doing fine so far, and we will have to go through the trouble of either loading it up in the shuttle with the Astronauts and bringing it back or crashing it in the Atlantic. Both options are time consuming, and if we crash it, we wont be able to salvage the parts. so, take the time to do that and add it to the time it takes to build the new telescope and the time to launch it and everything and we vould have just fixed Hubble 5 times over.
If you could point Hubble back to earth, I could imagine a market for the ultra detailed (approaching what the military could achieve) photos it could take. The intelligence services of a few small countries that couldn't afford their own spy satellite would be happy to rent time, until the thing gave out for good.
But I bet the telescope's namesake would be rolling in his grave...
My rights don't need management.
Sheesh, it took em this long to realize that? Consumers have known for years that if you just wait a bit the technology vastly increases while the price decreases. When we bought our Pentium 1 years back, it cost ~3-4 thousand dollars. When we bought our Pentium 4, it cost about 1 thousand dollars. Now do I even NEED to state the ammount better a P4 is than a P1? On top of that, there is no real way of upgrading a P1 to the speeds of a P4 short of completely replacing everything and just keeping the case.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Very bad for astronomers. Not to mention having to install MS Media Player XVIII to get the DRM to view the images.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I wondered whether the Bush administration's willingness to junk Hubble was a symptom of the same American retreat from Science as th pressure to give "Scientific Cretionism" equal support and prestige in America's schools.
That retreat from knowledge is a crying shame.
I had a buddy who always referred to it as "Scientific Cretinism -- I'm sorry Creationism".
As I have already written in my article, the White House has no intention to pay for a fourth servicing mission, and I doubt it will pay for a new telescope. They seem to prefer to spend $80 billion for Iraq. Very simply, science isn't in the roadmap of Washington anymore. However, if anybody is willing to advocate a servicing mission, I can help.
Since when is a new Hubble telescope an IT-related topic? Am I alone in asking, "WTF??"
More along the lines of churning money through Bill's pharma companies while at the same time using the US Trade people to slap down competitors who would have had the medication there years ago otherwise.
And on top of this, the Africans are slowly discovering that the simplest, cheapest and most effective AIDS "drug" is monogamy.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Placing the financial burden for maintaining a resource on the folks making use of it makes substantially more sense than placing it on unwilling 3rd parties; anything else lends itself to suboptimal resource allocation.
http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/book/chpttwelve.pdf
(1) The Hubble's mirror is designed to achieve its optimal spatial resolution at 280 nm, which is in the ultra-violet regime and not ideal for snapshot through atmosphere.
(2) It is a poor satellite for infrared picture. And its IR instrument on board is designed to capture faint objects, not the bright sources on earth (i.e., any object on earth may be too bright to see for the Hubble).
(3) the compensation for atmospheric disturbance is not readily available with the Hubble. That still needs to be done on the ground and that's the post-processing data cost that you will still have to bear (ain't cheap).
Remember, the Hubble is designed to take astrophysical data, not aereal photos on ground. One of these days people have to understand that engineers builds "stuff" to optimize the use for whatever it is intended for.
If we don't love Hubble's images enough to pay for them -- perhaps, when push comes to shove, we don't really want the space program as a whole that much.
(On a different topic, and no longer playing devil's advocate: Why the hell is a "post 9-11" government so different from a pre 9-11 government as to rebalance priorities so much? Some people died. It happens every day, and it's about time we @$#% well get over it).
To be honest, I do not entirely understand the great fuss over the fate of the Hubble telescope. It has had a long and immensely successful career probing the reaches of the universe, but it is getting old.
I guess many people think that once the Hubble is gone, there will be nothing to replace it. But the Next Generation James Webb telescope has been in development for years, and is currently scheduled for deployment in 2011. With this in mind, decomissioning the Hubble doesn't seem such a tragedy.
Not necessarily. The corrective optics in Hubble (because the mirror was ground wrong) reduce the effective resolution.
i say we blow it up like they do with the casinos... f-in a.
You only need adaptive optics when you're trying to image through our turbulent atmosphere. Images from space are diffraction-limited -- the only way to get higher resolution is to build a bigger telescope.
Here are his instructions to Abram, who was renamed Abraham: "Look attentively, I pray thee, towards the heavens, and count the stars, if thou art able to count them". (-;
On a more serious note, yes, the rise of the Religious Right presents a steadily increasing problem. Did you know that "religious nuts" are responsible for the separation-of-church-and-state provisions in both the US and Australian Constitutions? A chap by the name of Alonzo T Jones dunnit. The Powers That Were wanted to enact blue laws, so Mr Jones and crew first directed them to a literal reading of Exodus 20, and then when the politicians switched to walling off Saturdays instead of Sundays, convinced them to - if there is such a word - deshrine religious holidays in the law: make sure that none were enforced, all were permitted.
From your tone, you would like to outlaw what you see as religion, which would in reality be outlawing every religion but one: Atheism. Let's put this another way: you would make Atheism the State Religion as the Religious Right would make a concensus "Christianity" the State Religion.
Not only is Atheism a social disaster (France tried it, along with China and the USSR, North Korea and numerous others; go read the dismal record if you want to get depressed), but it's actually being done by stealth all across Western society as we type, using the exact same Constitutional provision intended to prevent it. The Religious Right is both a reaction to this and an excuse for it. If they get their way, we'll be living in a Puritan state, re-living the Dark Ages. If they don't, we'll be reliving Lenin's purges. The end of both their actions or yours will be a disaster, either way.
What we really need is to properly enforce the Constitution. To do this, simply formally recognise Atheism as a religion and enforce the existing no-religious-preferences rules rigorously. That would both starve the Religious Right of fuel by removing an excuse to react, and begin to remove the existing shackles from science. Scientists today are forced to ensure that their work fits within Materialist (Atheist) dogma, or face systematic attack from powerful religious forces. Without that handicap, they'd be free to explore a lot more options.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
if they build a new one, why not sell the old one to someone else and let them worry about maintaining it.
otherwise its only going to burn up in the atmosphere, this way you could make money on it too
That's what Einstein believed. Yet, regardless, he was somehow able to make a contribution.[/sarcasm]
Regardless your argument doesn't hold water. No matter how it was all created, it looks like there are interesting places to go (and possibly exploit) out there. It'll happen someday, if the human race lasts long enough.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
reducing government spending. I think Hubble should not be repaired and not be replaced. Unpopular opinion on here, I know.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
...the longer it will be until Hubble is replaced. And one day, it will fail, so the obvious answer is to shut up and start building the sucker.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's a great idea, but $1 billion? They'll go over budget.
I post all kinds of incendiary stuff, even in support of unpopular-on-SlashDot ideas like creationism and my karma's been slammed against the stops since the day they put the cap on. There's no point in being careful with your posts.
Considers FleaPlus's UID (this is actually my third ID, I have no idea what happened to the first two). Hmm. "In our day, don'ch'a remember, we had real Karma, not this namby-pamby limited-to-fifty stuff. You could open 'er up and have karma races!" (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
1) Send shuttle on risky repair mission. Estimated cost- 1.7 to 2.4 Billion dollars and potentially up to seven lives.
2) Develop and build complicated robot gizmotron that might or might not be able to do the job. Estimated cost- 1.6 Billion
3) The hell with it, just build a new one. Use the same basic design updated with latest technology and these replacement parts we developed for the old one and shoot it up on an expendable booster. Estimated cost under a billion.
Hmmm..... I like option 3!
Believing that God exists is a religion. If your God is all fuzzy and distant like Antony Flew's, it's called Deism but it's still religion. Believing that God does not exist is religion. Believing that God's existence is unprovable one way or another is religion.
Religion as a principle has nothing to do with monks, fasting, cathedrals, stained-glass windows or wearing saffron robes. These are all what you might call implementation details. Some forms of religion manifest obviously, some do not.
Clear?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The way this issue should be addressed in (again dare I say) scientific and economic terms would be based on the value of the scientific research Hubble can perform versus the lost opportunity costs from the interval when there would be no such telescope available.
Not the reality, but a deliberate exaggeration to clarify the issue: Imagine that we needed a space telescope to detect asteroids that were liable to strike the earth. In that case, we would absolutely need to keep the Hubble in service until a replacement telescope could be prepared--and better to have several in orbit all the time.
Unfortunately, the current reality is that this is mostly a political issue, and the deeper danger is that scientific research is not important to the religious fanatics in charge, since they already know all the answers. It's not a matter of spending $1 billion on Hubble or committing $0.5 billion for a better replacement--it's that they would prefer to spend zilch on science and $200 billion on getting rid of Saddam. (If Saddam was worth $200 billion, it certainly makes one shudder to imagine the costs for getting rid of the other tyrants, since Saddam was one of the weakest and least important ones.)
Actually, this is tightly linked to politics surrounding the Space Shuttle. I heard this story from the same fellow who wrote most of Reagan's Star Wars speech (though he specifically disavowed the specific bit about Star Wars). He was chancellor of the UT system at that time. The Space Shuttle part was actually related to Nixon, however. As Apollo was winding down, NASA went to Nixon with a very ambitious proposal for a much more flexible kind of Space Shuttle system, but Nixon said it was *way* too expensive. The current version was actually the third or fourth reduced proposal. In the long term, the compromise was bad pretty much every way you slice it. America's manned space program is nearly dead, and 13 astronauts and one teacher are very dead.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
...of having a meaningless life if you already have one so confusing and painful that you can't even think. (-:
There is some merit, however, in the breeding licence. Certainly, you've offered a powerful and immediate motivation to pass.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Do you love particle physics and super-colliders enough to pay for them?
Not sure. The promise of cheap, abundant energy if only we can figure out how to make fusion-based power generation practical is quite an alluring one -- enough to tempt me to throw at least a few bucks that way each year. Right now, of course, the decision is made for me.
But then you'd not be reading this, thanks to CERN's WWW development?!?
Maybe, maybe not. Just because something comes about one way doesn't mean it wouldn't have come about a different way otherwise.
...is to have the Army build and launch Hubble II.
Bill it as a spysat (heck, you could even add some real spysat features to it that operated independently and up the mass from 11.5t to 12t).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not really, remember that the new scope would mostly be just another hubble, built off the same design plans, with the 'additional work' being the work previously planned for the service mission, but done on the ground.
I don't read AC A human right
NASA IS REPLACING HUBBLE ALREADY... and in the interrum Hubble WORKS... and works WELL!!
s are still underway for the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, which would be launched in 2011."
The new Space Telescope is called "The James Webb Space Telescope." It is (via specs) better than Hubble.
From hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/future/
"Plan
If you guys, and that O'Keefe bozo (formerly) at NASA have their way, a WORKING, and SCIENTIFICALLY SIGNIFICANT telescope will be left to die even while it's STILL producing amazing results!!
And in space, NOTHING is a done deal. Sure we can do better than Hubble. But until said better telescope is in orbit AND working, we need to leave Hubble in place. Otherwise we have a multi-year downtime between two missions... and a potentially LONGER downtime if Webb (et al) fails.
I submitted similar input to NASA during their request for comments about the Hubble-Webb transition.
Please, don't get cocky about this. Sure, we have some high profile successes of late (Mars Rovers, Cassini/Huygens), but before that, NASA's better-faster-cheaper lost two Mars mission (one via a metric/English conversion error), and a Shuttle. Plus ESA's Huygens had one xmitter failure, losing directional data.
-Pie
Beautiful stars better see.
Crap should be shouted down, always. Evolution, no matter what you or 44% of Americans think about it, isn't religous or a bad scientific theory.
Those who do not accept the basic tenets of evolution are usually not well educated about what it is and isn't, or are not careful thinkers. Such people will not succeed in science, except for perhaps in some minor way, so no great loss.
I submit that if 44% of the US population do no accept evolution, science and science educators need MORE SUPPORT, not less, and that perhaps the largest degree of blame falls with extreme popogandists (e.g. pathlights.com, not exactly the NAS is it?).
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
That's astronomer NOT astrologer. And if you work for nasa part of your taxes goes to paying for nasa projects just like every other american.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
I was going to post something similar to this.
I'll add that the James Webb Telescope will work at longer wavelengths than Hubble, and will not duplicate Hubble's UV capability. In that sense, I would support the proposed Hubble "copy" that would fly the to-be-orphaned new Hubble Instruments, especially as seeing as how there's no ultraviolet spectroscopic capability in the near term.
I suspect this idea is dead in the water given where James Webb Space Telescope is at the moment. It is viewed by Washington and most of the astronomical community as Hubble's replacement, and attempts to propose new ultraviolet telescopes to advance Hubble's current science have not fared well.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Sounds like Grandpa's old axe. I still have it. Well, Dad had to replace the handle in '68. And the head wore out in '92, so had to replace that too. But it's still Grandpa's axe. And oh, don't forget, a lot of the glitches in the original were due to time constraints.
Is it a good idea to even HAVE a deadline for this kind of project?
You only need adaptive optics when you're trying to image through our turbulent atmosphere. Images from space are diffraction-limited -- the only way to get higher resolution is to build a bigger telescope.
The techniques of adaptive optics are used in space to compensate for mechanical stresses of space travel, temperature variations, manufacturing flaws, etc. They are used on the new Spitzer Space (infrared) Telescope.
Basically, if you want a bigger telescope, then adaptive optics (or at least something similar) is the way to do it.
These comments do express the opinions of my employers, and, personally, I think they're complete rubbish.
Not very much at all...which is why they were installed in the first place. They did decrease the throughput, which is why all the new instruments have been designed with optics to compensate for Hubble's flawed primary.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
One of the suggestions for fixing the hubble's gyros was to include gyros in an experiment package. This got me to thinking:
Why are the gyros not a plugin item?
Why is the plugin not to essentially the same standard as the experiments.
While the primary optical path (including covers) and any docking connections and the like are a one-of and optimally should be special-purpose structures, virtually all the rest of the telescope's infrastructure - gyros, computers, batteries, etc. - could be built into pluggable modules. (Even attitude / station-keeping thruster assemblies and their tankage could be puuggable.)
Perhaps the replacment could be designed that way?
Making things pluggable would reduce the on-station time for service missions - whether repair, upgrade, experiment-change, or replace-consumables. It would also simplify building unmanned robotic service vehicles for the telescope, and reduce the likelyhood failure in robotic service missions.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But...
This makes so much sense! We know the Hubble has been a extraordinary success. The basic architecture is sound. The 'problem' it attacked (basically, getting above the atmosphere) is obviously real.
So, refactor! Take the overall design, study it closely, decide *both* what worked well and should be kept, and what needs improvement, and make a incremental but substantial re-design.
This works in our field (software), it will work for space-based instruments as well.
Do the simple thing!
Sigh! Doing the simple thing just ain't sexy. Oh, well...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Looking through your links, I see a lot of rhetoric, but no actual information. As for mathematical calculations, I can accept that biological molecules could not form completely randomly, since they didn't need to. Chemical reactions (whether biochemical or not) are not totally random. They rely on the interactions between atoms. With large numbers of atoms, it is impossible, even today, to fully model all the interactions. In 1967, it was totally impossible.
Also, atheism is not a religion.
Oh, and scientific truth does not depend on popular opinion.
Wow, obviously you're not a photographer (or at least not a very professional one.) I would never compare a $100 sigma lens to some $1,500+ Canon L glass. I'm not saying the Hubble is cheap and crappy, but why spend $2 billion upgrading the hubble when they can just build a new one for half that?
Just a question from the crowd, why was Columbia noticably heavier than the other three shuttles?
Crap should be shouted down, always. Evolution, no matter what you or 44% of Americans think about it, isn't religous or a bad scientific theory.
I'd just like to take the time to point out that the theory of evolution was only accepted for two reasons (speaking of the past, not now):
1: It was an explanation that did not involve a god. This was incredibly important because it got support from atheists and scientists who were sick of "God did it" being used as an explanation for something people didn't understand instead of doing research. It is also more in keeping with Occham's Razor (though some would argue this).
2: At that time, the universe was thought to be infinite. This is probably the most important reason because it means remotely-possible==certain. Hence a monkey randomly hitting keys could write the entire text of the Bible given an infinite amount of time (or an infinite number of monkeys in a very short time). Now that we know there are only 10^80 atoms in the universe, and that the univese is only about 15 billion years old (less than 10^20 seconds), such comparisons would be rediculous. Eg if 10^80 monkeys typed 3.5 million characters every second since the begining of the universe, they would have a chance of 3.5*10^6*10^80*10^20/26^3500000 10^106/10^350000 = 10^-3499993 of typing out the text of the King James version of the Bible. And that was being far more generous than possible. Mathematicians consider 10^-300 impossible. So without an infinite number of tries, monkeys typing out particular sequences is laughable.
For those who care, the simplest bacteria has 600,000 base pairs. In the case of life, it is unreasonable to expect a particular sequence, though nobody knows how likely it is that a particular sequence would form a living cell (or at least self-replicating). Also, the probability is drastically increased if the item is allowed to be created in chunks rather than whole, or if a certain amount of errors was tolerable, both of which apply to evolution but I can't do the math.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
One thing I didn't entirely follow from the articles, though I didn't read them all, is this going to be placed in high enough an orbit that it won't decay enough to hit the atmosphere before its useful lifetime is up. I'd imagine that if that were the case it would preclude servicing with a shuttle mission if it were to have a major failure early in its life, not that thats ever happened :)
Would hope that they are planning to either put it in a high enough orbit it will last for 10-15 years or that they put a module in to boost its own orbit, though that would probably add to the cost and complexity of building it.
To me the deorbit module is a lot less important than a module to boost the orbit. All the hand wringing over Hubble reentering of its own accord is misplaced in my opinion. Chances are not many big pieces are going to survive reentry, the earth is still a relatively empty place and its not much more risk than a mid size meteor.
@de_machina
It was the oldest of the shuttles. Wow, I only had to try 5 times before the 20 second filter decided I was worthy. *rage*
X
for less than the price of a servicing mission sounds smart. Sorry for being cynical, but it sounds so smart that I doubt it will never happen.
No data, no cry
It's lens, not lense. And it's not a lens, it's a mirror. And it wasn't the wrong size, it was figured with a slight spherical abberation. And it wasn't the designers or engineers that got it wrong, it was the company that made the mirror for them; a backup made by Kodak was actually made per spec and has no such problem. And besides, they fixed that years ago, 100% fixed. And the image processing techniques that they were forced to develop due to the mirror problem are still being used on both space and ground based telescope imagery.
...attempts to propose new ultraviolet telescopes to advance Hubble's current science have not fared well.
And so sadly, we are about to enter a long period where we will no longer be able to explore the detailed composition of any predominantly non-molecular astronomical object that's not at moderate redshift.
The Hubble has no boosters, so there's no provision for controlled deorbit. It has only reaction wheels for orientation. If no visit is paid to at least strap on a de-orbit pack, the Hubble will reenter in an uncontrolled fashion.
The US is a signatory on a treaty which prohibits us from allowing dangerous space junk from entering in an uncontrolled fashion over populated areas. Therefore we have to visit the Hubble at least to deorbit it.
If we're going there anyway, why not put on the de-orbit pack AND new batteries, instruments, gyros, etc?
you are so funny...
But that funding will have to be cut or will be worthless due to the massive increase in inflation that's around the corner since it's what we like to call "Deficit Spending" or "printing money to fund projects rather than increasing productivity".
/rant
Sure, you can spout all this stuff out but it's no different than a hillbilly with a Big Screen TV. It's fun to act rich but sooner or later you have to pay for it.
That said, I am for Tax Cuts but the money we've spent in IRAQ and on the "War" on "Fear" to the alarming benefit of Private Military Companies (PMC's) (wiki) would be better spent in my eyes on the furthURing of the knowledge of humanity. Alas, I'm sure they have plans into the future for such things, I just wish we could have it today. And I wish Bush and Co. could convince me that we're doing the right thing, rather than reiterating the same buzzwords (freedom, liberty, terror, fear, Iraqi "people", evil, etc.)
Cool! Amazing Toys.
And also to Atheism, in a big way. If you are an Atheist, it logically follows either that you are responsible for everything (ie, helplessly overloaded with responsibility) because you are the highest authority around or nothing (irresponsibility) because nobody is the highest authority around. Guess which way people turn if left to themselves?
Social communism is an attempt to provide a system which is equitable built out of people who are inherently selfish. This is like making bricks out of sand. You have to glaze (torture) the sand to get it to hang together at all, you still lose lots, and you still have to settle for building low ceilings because your bricks are not very strong.
Taking Christianity as antitypical of Atheism (hypothetically, any form of Deism is "opposite" to Atheism), one immediately stumbles across the Golden Rule as the key to and core of everything. Any society built on the Golden Rule is going to work much better than one built on busybodies or selfishness. And they do.
It used to be that I puzzled over how people can take that and twist it into the strictly hierarchical and constantly clashing institutions which call themselves Christian, but no longer.
People who do that are simply expressing the latent Atheism exemplified in the fall. They know better than God how to organise things, with inevitable results. The Christianity winds up being more or less just a label.
"Pie in the sky when you die" doesn't work. That's only deferred gratification, and not noticeably more meritorious than immediate gratification. The only motivation which lasts and is effective is agape, a word which in Koine Greek has a slightly different meaning to modern Greek. And Atheism has no rationale for agape. In essence it makes us responsible for ourselves and one another in a non-invasive fashion.
The central planning to which you refer is a natural abdication of responsibility which would be healthy if it was a planned abdication to a perfect ruler. I guess you could call the prole's-eye-view of it the "ying" or surrendering side of Atheism.
Those picking up the responsibility are the "yang" or conquering side of Atheism, which would work just fine if they were altruistic but people generally don't even start that way, let alone remain it.
Sooner or later the leaders start regarding themselves as in some way more important than the led, power auto-centralises even more, and always there is the cumbersome feedback lag and massive data loss between the ploughman and the president to contend with.
Organisations like the Papacy are simply central planning for the large political and financial organisation it sits atop. The organisation directs power to and through itself, not to any supernatural deity.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, your two points are also CRAP. Darwin himself pushed no theology with evolution, and to the extent the theory flew in the face of widespread religous beliefs, that would tend to make the theory HARDER to accept, not easier. Darwin was raised Christian, moved to theism, and settled into agnosticism. Alfred Wallace, a co-discovered of natural selection was also agnostic and was quoted as saying "I cared and thought nothing about [religion]." I think the years of careful observation coupled to the twenty years Darwin spent working on his ideas prior to publication was a bit more important to the acceptance of evolution than their religous implications. The implicit assumption in your point is that all scientists are athiests out to somehow disprove religion, which again, is CRAP.
The second point. While there some may have believed in an infinite universe at the time, and I'm not at all sure that this opinion prevailed, it wasn't based on science. There was certainly no consensus. The sun's power source was unknown. Radioactive dating, and radioactivity itself, was unknown. More importantly, all the nonsense about probabilities and bases pairs is CRAP, since DNA was not recognized until the middle of the 20th century. Who was to say in Darwin's day what was slow or fast, or about how much time was needed? Even though geology couldn't put hard numbers on the age of the Earth, geology alone was sufficient to question a young Earth of 6000 years.
So I'm calling crap. Especially if you "can't do the math." Cite some serious sources, not creationists or their lackeys. I'm not an atheist, but I am a scientist who defends critical thinking and accuracy. I don't even know why you're bringing this up other that to perpetuate myths that hurt science and scientific literacy. The fact that evolution was accepted, and the fact it is still accepted, is that it is scientific and testable, and meets the tests.
Why don't you think evolution was accepted on its merits? Why create this myth that it was initially accepted for political and philosophical reasons, if not to discredit it?
In astronomy, early scientists like Copernicus and Galileo either lived in fear of the church, or were outright destroyed by it, because they pursued better explanations in the face of authority. Nothing sticks in science because it contradicts a religous belief, but rather because it passes experimental verification.
Why not post something thoughtful related to the Hubble Space Telescope rather than spreading misinformation about evolution???
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Plenty of UV expertise at Wisconsin, where I almost went for grad school. I was a FUSE post-doc for a few years, and have written more than one paper on ultraviolet spectroscopy. Lots of transitions there that provide important diagnostics. A good friend of mine is at Boulder with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) group (COS is one of the instruments that was slated to go onto Hubble, before). They'll get by, but we're definitely losing unique scientific capability.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I'm inclined to think that a new Hubble, without the flawed mirror, which should give the new one a field of view much larger than the error corrected range of the existing Hubble has, is a worthwhile project. I've seen figures of 17 times the image area, and that is not something to sneeze at. I'm not a huge expert in optical matters, but the glasses put on Hubble to fix it cannot do anything but restrict its field of view rather seriously.
With new imaging devices that are both larger, and potentially more sensitive by a factor of 20 or so, one figure I saw earlier tonight, the new one could very well break even more new ground in scientific research.
And I'd like to also remind those that think the James Webb scope to go up in about 5-6 years, as a Hubble replacement, is a highly false assumption as its sensors aren't really designed to cover visible light wavelengths. Each has its job, and the Webb cannot do what the Hubble is doing, and vice-versa. Both will make great contributions to our scientific knowledge.
One thing I'd like to see changed in the new Hubble is the gyroscopes. It seems to me that an optical gyro would not only be longer lasting than the mechanical units used now, but potentially far more accurate. Is there a technical problem with them that I am not aware of that makes the mechanical gyro the only useable method?
The reaction wheels that steer the existing Hubble seem to have been pretty dependable, so that weight at launch time is certainly justifiable and of course, unlike steering rockets, do not leave potentially damaging particulate matter in the orbital vicinity. They are also run from a replenishable power supply, the solar wings.
I'd also question the "from day one" approach to de-orbiting it by the planned attachment of the rocket motor designed to drop it in the pacific at the end of its life. Mechanical things in a vacuum tend to freeze up and not work after a while, and if the new one gives us a projected lifetime of 15 to 20 years, who is going to run up and fix it when it doesn't fire as planned? Good question that...
Its also a good question as to how do we replace the batteries which it will probably need at least 2, maybe 3 sets of them in its projected service life?
This seems like an ideal time to design in an easily changed by robotics cartridge carrier for the batteries, something a very simple minded robotic mission could do by designing into the side of the scope, the robots docking hooks, which when all are engaged, would automaticly position the rest of the robot to do the rest of the job autonomously.
I hope they do it, and I hope I live to see its results. Its my tax money, and I vote to do it, asap since I'm already 70.
--
Cheers, Gene
I'm sure you've heard of Stanley Miller of Urey and Miller lightning-in-a-jar fame? Now go and follow the rest of his career. He's spent since 1953 (ie over fifty years of his life) trying to make more complex organic molecules in plausible (or even implausible) environments, and came up empty. Nor was he able to do anything about racemisation, which is of course natural, and fatal to any molecules-to-man programme.
Miller also went looking for evidence of the reducing atmosphere his original experiment required, and came up empty there too. You might also want to consider the earlier work of Walther Löb, Oskar Baudisch and Edward Bailey, and DE Hull's followup to Miller which ended with: Every dictionary I can find defines it as positive disbelief in the existence of any deity. That's a religious position.
No robes, chanting or stained glass are required when forming a religion, although there is actually a Church of Humanism. Yes, really! I don't know whether they have a big mirror across the front, or what the story is, but it exists.No? Then what's a peer-reviewed journal for?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How do you explain away the many successful scientists who are both out-and-out Creationists and dare to say so despite the risk of being branded heretic and burned at the academic stake for it?
I don't have to, because there are not "many" if by "creationist" you mean disbeliever in evolution, natural selection, etc. Rare, rare, rare. It's possible to get a PhD in science and hold any number of irrational beliefs, but most scientists don't because irrational beliefs are the antithesis of scientific thought. How about we instead talk about the overwhelming number of scientists who are secure about evolution? I'm sure you've heard about Project Steve?
Again, most of the creationist hacks I come across usually argue against what they think evolution is, rather than what the theory actually is. For instance, evolution says nothing about the origin of life, just of species. That's "uneducated" in my book.
Personally, you should peddle your creationist non-science someplace other than slashdot, and, at the least, some thread other than one about the Hubble Space Telescope.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
...and only if they stay on and intact. They don't cover you for kissing, blowjobs and the like. And even in perfect conditions, they don't always work.
Better a condom than completely bare sex, but thinking of a condom as a magic bullet against AIDS is kind of suicidal. Monogamy is at least an order of magnitude more effective.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
TalkOrigins isn't fond of publishing effective rebuttals to their own material, especially not until they have a reasonable-sounding answer to publish alongside it. This is why the answers on their site all look so final, complete, authoritative and above all, comforting. However, several such rebuttals live on TrueOrigin, and occasionally CreationSafaris publishes one.
Also, GRISDA publishes evolution-oriented news essentially without comment, a constant stream of which goes unanswered by Talk.Because it would be untrue. Science as a principle is impatial WRT questions of diety, supernatural causes are generally treated as error factors, much the same as any other engineering problem. Western science as a collective institution is on the other hand extremely hostile to anything smacking of God or even design and regularly takes an unscientific stand against the whole concept, everywhare from the lab to Congress.
Take for example these clowns, whose broken HTML seems to have been a little fixed since I told them about it. But not much. The password is 7seven7:Nice and neutral, hey? Despite this, they absolutely refuse to have me (or anyone else seriously supporting Creation) speak at one of their lectures, for free or otherwise, under any circumstances. And won't say why. The only item on their speaking agenda which mentions creationism is entitled Built on Sand: The Collapsing Creationist Tower and their news items are 100% oriented toward how bad it is that ID or Creation should get any kind of foot in an academic door.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'd like to clear up a misunderstanding you have about how evolution works. You seem to be making an analogy between the likelihood of a given DNA sequence being assembled by chance vs. the likelihood of the King James Bible being typed by chance.
No, I am explaining why an analogy used in support of evolution would have been so rediculous no one could have accepted it if the universe was not thought to be infinite.
But evolution isn't chance. It's inheritable change.
No, that only works when you already have a creature able to reproduce. Like I said, the simplest bacterium is 600,000 base pairs, which is nowhere near what would be necessary. I understand that the first creature is thought to have been much simpler, but they have yet to say how much simpler.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
An administrator overseeing the grants for said clowns' site wants them to rename it because it's misleading. (-:
Have a look at the reviewer's comment in the password-protected docs. That is, if you don't fear being done under the DMCA for typing in "7seven7". Still, I suppose it's better than "password". Or follow the direct link, which - not containing any JavScript - doesn't ask you for a password.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The religion in question is Atheism.
Atheism is not a religion. It is a either a lack of belief that God exists or a positive belief that God does NOT exist. This is just as much a religion as beliefing that I don't have 3 arms is a religion. I dont seem to have 3 arms, so I believe I dont have 3 arms.
Your claims that any evidence to the contrary is discarded or reinterpretted is simply not true. In fact if evolution didn't work, we would not be able to breed specific breeds of dogs, cats, flowers, etc etc.
Do creationists believe that the Dodo bird is still alive in the wild? Either God never created a Dodo bird, or perhaps the Dodo bird was unfit.
evolution works. That is almost indesputible. The fact that creationists think that evolution is a theory of creation however suggests that they don't know what evolution even is. the theory of evolution does not attempt to explain the origins of life or the universe.
One could extrapolate backwards and attempt to use evolution to explain the origins of life, however even if God created life in some predetermined form. The evidence is overwelming that evolution has been working since then.
Evolution does not rule out the possibility of a Creator.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
OK, I like this post better than your previous one. I read the previous one as very disingenuous, arguing that evolution was accepted primarily because scientists were athiests and that they thought there was infinite time for it to work. I called crap, because I disagreed strongly with those two notions, especially the "primarily" part.
If you want some more math, assume a 10% error rate is acceptable, and use something one tenth as complex as the simplest known bacteria (60,000 base pairs) as the target. Then we have 54000^6000*4^6000 ~= 4^47162*4^6000 == 4^53162 correct combinations of 60000 base pairs. (explanation of figures 54000^6000 is the number of places you can put an error to the power of the number of errors, 4^6000 is the number of possible errors if placed in series ~= means approximately equal and if you don't know what I did there don't bother talking to me) Now 4^53162/4^60000 = 4^-6838 ~= 10^-4116 is the probability that a string of 60000 base pairs will be close enough. Again with a generous one try per atom in the known univers per second since the big bang, this is 10^106*10^-4116 == 10^-4010, which is still well within the "impossible" range. Of course, feel free to tell me I suck at math if you can correct me. Although I do think my little overestimate with regards to hom many trys chance gets should make up for any inaccuracies.
Now, the problem here isn't your math, but your assumptions. You're doing a calculation assuming that somehow this entire bacterium, or at least its DNA, self-assembles from random. First, evolution does not address the origin of life. It addresses the origin of species. Therefore such math has no direct relevance to the core ideas of evolution (mutation, natural selection, variance across a population, changing environmental pressures). Second, no non-Creationist would make the claim that bacteria self-assembled from random processes. Presumably selection processes would have been involved and you don't do it all at once, and you don't do it from random. There are theories for how it could have happened, none of which are as robust as evolution, but with much more reasonable "odds" than what you suggest.
But that whole topic is beyond the scope of a slashdot thread on Hubble.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
One thing I didn't entirely follow from the articles, though I didn't read them all, is this going to be placed in high enough an orbit that it won't decay enough to hit the atmosphere before its useful lifetime is up.
The proposed telescope would be at 750km, whereas the original Hubble is at 600km. For comparison, the ISS ranges between 340km and 400km. The Space Shuttle can only go as high as 643km, and wouldn't be able to service the proposed probe.
Now, the problem here isn't your math, but your assumptions. You're doing a calculation assuming that somehow this entire bacterium, or at least its DNA, self-assembles from random.
I think it is a fair assumption. Something that self-replicates has to exist before evolution can make things easier. But you're right about my assumptions, I just pulled them out of my ass but I think they are reasonable.
First, evolution does not address the origin of life. It addresses the origin of species.
But "evolution" does address the origin of life, because that is how the word is used (most people think evolution makes god redundant, since it explains life). The Theory of Evolution is the more specific one regarding speciation. Sorry to be a nitpick, but you were also being a nitpick.
Presumably selection processes would have been involved and you don't do it all at once, and you don't do it from random.
Repeat after me, natural selection won't work unless you have something to select from. And yes, there is a minimum that you must do all at once and you must do it from random. Maybe this minimum is simpler than 1/10 of the simplest bacteria (it would have to be about 1/1000 of the simplest bacteria for my example assuming one try per atom in the visible universe per second since the big bang to fail). I've heard of self-repicationg clay structures, but they don't mutate, and aren't remotely related to DNA anyways. Oh, and you also want your proteins to match your DNA, I don't know how that works though.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
But "evolution" does address the origin of life, because that is how the word is used (most people think evolution makes god redundant, since it explains life). The Theory of Evolution is the more specific one regarding speciation. Sorry to be a nitpick, but you were also being a nitpick.
Only, it doesn't. If evolution is taught as an explanation of the origins of life, then it is being taught wrongly. It does not attempt to make claims about life's origins, nor should it. It's imho not a theological theory, since it does not claim or disclaim that God created life.
Besides, in my personal opinion anti-evolution is a political tool. It's a form of misdirection designed to keep people in line inside their religious community, and focus their attention in manageable ways so they wouldn't start asking themselves why the core principle of Jesus' teachings (helping those in need) is so ignored by today's political establishment (to the point that a fifth of america is living below the poverty line, despite it being feasible to all but erase poverty if the political will was there). Same thing with abortion. It's all politics.
I don't find your assumptions reasonable at all.
Also, when I say evolution, I mean "The Theory of Evolution," and assume everyone else does, too. They should at least, because they often then go on about how it's "just a theory" and again are being sloppy about the definition of a scientific theory. You can't nitpick enough on this, since this is the kind of crap that shows up in school board meetings where someone tries to slip in some version of creationism as also "just a theory" when it isn't scientific and hasn't passed any tests. Nitpicking back.
The assumption of 1/10 of a bacterium is outrageous, for instance. The primitive Earth can make amino acids, easy, and other moderately complex organic molecules. From there you need merely the minimum self-replicating unit to get going, a piece of RNA perhaps, and there are scenarios to construct it that are plausible. Not necessarily likely, but much more plausible than the numbers you're slinging. You might check out this NASA page with more information.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Nonetheless, AO can't push things beyond diffraction limits. If you want to improve your resolution past diffraction, you're going to have to increase the size of the scope.
Also, do you have a reference for your claim that Spitzer uses AO? I couldn't find a single mention of that fact, anywhere. In fact, I can't find a mention of *any* spaceborne imaging system that uses AO.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Interesting read. Has a lot more facts and references than my own posts, but its author fails math class. Here are two of his errors:
At the moment, since we have no idea how probable life is, it's virtually impossible to assign any meaningful probabilities to any of the steps to life except the first two (monomers to polymers p=1.0, formation of catalytic polymers p=1.0). For the replicating polymers to hypercycle transition, the probability may well be 1.0 if Kauffman is right about catalytic closure and his phase transition models, but this requires real chemistry and more detailed modelling to confirm.
No, probability is never equal to one. Yes it can come really frigging close, but I don't see any error margins and I can't assume there are any since this is not a measurement but a pure number.
Let's go back to our example with the coins. Say it takes a minute to toss the coins 4 times; to generate HHHH would take on average 8 minutes. Now get 16 friends, each with a coin, to all flip the coin simultaneously 4 times; the average time to generate HHHH is now 1 minute.
Here he again assumes a probability of one. The probability of at least one of 16 people flipping 4 heads in a row on their first try is 1-(1-1/16)^16 ~= 64% although it is also likely that more than one person will flip 4 heads.
Overall worth a read, but he should get his math straight before accusing others of doing bad math.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
While I agree Creationism isn't science, almost by definition (it doesn't use the Scientific Method), I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? Maybe I'm demanding this because I'm used to a more rigorous (and arguably, the only) science, that is to say, physics.
Then, for those of you who feel more comfortable with soft sciences (i.e. "stamp-collecting" sciences), well, where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"? Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
As you should see, if you can see as an objective scientist, evolutionism is not such a great science either---it's better than Creationism simply by virtue of just trying to imitate real sciences. Modern biology would benefit greatly from de-emphasis of evolution in the curriculum, and avoiding the turning-away of quite a few bright students who could have made great contributions in the fields of molecular biology and others (egh, never bothered to learn all the little fields in biology).
If you recall that there are small packet of people disbelieving Special Relativity (mostly trolls and Darwin Award candidates, but recently some research suggested that the second postulate of SR may be wrong in the long run---i.e. speed of light is variable over time comparable to the age of universe), despite a wealth of experimental evidences, well, why aren't you surprised that evolutionism is so well-accepted given the lack of unambiguous experimental (or, as is the case, "observational") evidence?
Let's say I have a mobius strip. A true mobius strip, no edges, just one connected surface.
If I throw it in the air and let it float down, what is the probability that, if it lands, it will land with that surface touching the ground?
p = 1.0.
p(1+1=2 for the set of real numbers)? 1.0
Your math sucks, by the way, or possibly you just can't read. He doesn't assume p=1 for anything in the coin example: if you can make 4 flips per minute, and you need a p(.5^4)=0.0625 event, it will on average take you eight trials (8 minutes, in this case). If you have 16 people doing this, on *average* at least one person will flip HHHH in the first minute. Where the fuck does a probability of one come in?
Take your own advice.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Er... I'd like to inform you that Gregor Mendel never lived to see his work ('wouldn't call it "life's work" since that wasn't his occupation) brought to light. One anecdote I heard (can't recall source; it's not on Wikipedia) was that Mendel sent his paper to Darwin to look over, and it was overlooked (or deliberately ignored). In any case, at the time of Darwin, people had no idea about inheritable traits, much less the physical manifestation of the carriers of those traits.
Also, many of Darwin's ideas (who knows what they are, I never read The Origin of Species myself) about evolution (or whatever is going on in nature, evolution or not), is thought to be wrong now---of course, that's not to say that it detracts anything from the current view of evolution as we have now; it's just a warning for those who make a god of Darwin, having escaped another god.
Couple reasons - once upon a time (some of it was taken out around STS-109, I believe) it still had extra instrumentation from its time as the shakedown vehicle. Also, there were certain modifications made to reduce weight over time, as the newer shuttles were built.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
You seem to be particularly full of shit today.
Atheism is not a religion. It is a either a lack of belief that God exists or a positive belief that God does NOT exist. This is just as much a religion as beliefing that I don't have 3 arms is a religion. I dont seem to have 3 arms, so I believe I dont have 3 arms.
You seem to have not defined religion and are also building a straw man argument (that any belief, supported or not, constitutes a religion). Religion is basically a bunch of beliefs relating to stuff like god(s), the afterlife, and where we came from. Please note that some religions don't believe in any gods (I think Hinduism or Buddism was one, they believe in reincarnation but not a god). So be careful not to define religion as belief in a god(s), if you ever do define it.
Your claims that any evidence to the contrary is discarded or reinterpretted is simply not true. In fact if evolution didn't work, we would not be able to breed specific breeds of dogs, cats, flowers, etc etc.
You've never heard of natural selection, have you? Few and stupid are those that dispute natural selection. Less obviously, mutations can cause inability to breed with one's former species, but I have yet to see anything useful evolve.
Do creationists believe that the Dodo bird is still alive in the wild? Either God never created a Dodo bird, or perhaps the Dodo bird was unfit.
Do evolutionists believe that the Dodo bird is still alive in the wild? Either evolution never created a Dodo bird, or perhaps the Dodo bird was unfit. Or maybe man wiped them out.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
That's the price of another stealth bomber. What are we going to do without another stealth bomber???? Christ, we'll lose the war on terror! We can't lose the war on terror! Our enemies will think we're weak if spend money on anything but weapons!!!
My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.
- priests: Richard Dawkins and his ilk
- prayer: I've personally heard a number of Atheists pray to a "Holy Shit!"
- creation mythology: "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded, eventually forming hydrogen, stars, planets, slime, monkeys and philosophers."
- armageddon mythology: "In the end of time, we're all gunna freeze in the dark." Fimbulwinter, anyone?
- afterlife: "There is definitely no afterlife. WYSIWYG."
Atheism is defined in English dictionaries as (and the French word, athée, is essentially the same):- Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
- The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
- Godlessness; immorality.
That last is kind of derived from the revolution mentioned above, and it's not pertinent to this part of our discussion anyway. The first two are definite statements of belief. Atheism is defined entirely by religious statements, therefore Atheism is a religion.This applies whether you personally want to be considered as "religious" or not.
Perhaps you have religion confused with sacerdotalism, which is where all of the priests, ornamentation and other hocus pocus (itself a corruption of hoc est curpos meum, the Catholic forgiveness formula in Latin) comes from. If this is the case, then you can proudly state with a clear conscience that "I am not sacerdotal!"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...went to Kuro5hin, dunno if he's still there. Glad to see it's still alive, though.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The Hubble is a very good bit of hardware that should not be wasted. However maintaining it in it's current operations is impractical. Slap an Ion drive on the back of it and send off on a slow drive to lunar orbit. As nasa is planning on going back to the moon, technologies for landing sizeable payloads will have been developed by the time the hubble is there. And hey presto there you have your first telescope for a land based lunar observitory. Use the houseing, mirror (which could be repaired easliy once on the ground), lenses and store anything left over to be recycled for something else later on. If things cost so much to get into space, find another use for it when it's primary function has ended.
Not at all. You can show me your two arms, I or a medic I trust can examine you and verify the presence or absence of a third. You cannot show me a singularity exploding to form a universe, nor hydrogen condensing from that explosion, nor abiogenesis proceeding unaided or nor proto-monkeys turning into men. Or indeed anything of the sort.Would that be natural selection, or random mutation at work? Please, clue us in on this one, since artificially selected Mendellian genetics is all that's in evidence to us. Mendellian genetics does not produce new species, or new information of any kind it only split (and mixes, if you bend the definition of "species" a little) existing species. Think of a kaliedoscope. It doesn't put any more shiny things into the 'scope, it only shuffles the ones that are already there. And that's not evolution.To cut a long story short: no, it doesn't work. Genetics works, which is fine and cool and fantastic since God required each wee beastie to reproduce "after his kind". Evolution is a completely different matter. I really don't know where to start, there's so much missing here. Hmmm. How about with a careful definition of evolution? And see if you can avoid these fallacies, too. It will save a lot of time and anguish.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Our dear friend Mr. Gates can fund his own mission to install a Microsoft kernal as part of the robo-drive-through-Hubble-repair-mission.
Any combination of the above producing an average improvement in a species (or indeed adding any constructive information at all) is not fine by Creationists.
BTW, look up the mortality rates on Sickle Cell Anaemia before trotting that old saw out again, and bear in mind that no new information is being added here, the recipient of this "blessing" is in fact being permanently, heritably damaged, and the damage happens to lessen the impact of one contagion in one area.It certainly is! For a full-fledged professor, you're not doing so well.
Evolution does indeed speak to the origins of life - it would be utterly, utterly pointless if it did not do so. That branch of evolution is called "Chemical Evolution" and it necessarily overlaps the other big branch, "Biological Evolution".
If you define "Biological Evolution" as "change in a species over time" then on one hand I have no problem with that kind of evolution - God predicts the degradation of the world, and behold: extinctions and weakening species left and right.
On the other hand, the definition is so pathetically weak that it doesn't actually mean anything useful. So we turn to a "real" definition of evolution - or two.
Hello, Oxford Dictionary: "The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years."
Hello, Evolutionist Zoologist Gerald A Kerkut (died last year, sad to see him go especially since he was very rational and sporting): "The theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form." The "single source" part could be argued, since multiple sources are getting popular again, but you get the idea.
This, I have a problem with, for lots and lots of reasons. Where shall we start? Bats? Squid? Pick a species?
Project Steve appears to be non-functional. Does it really have no links or is that still a placeholder?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Evolution is a faith-based position, or to be pedantic it is a position necessary to a particular statement of faith, to wit, Materialism. Materialists needed a Creation narrative of their own, and they chose a very long one.
To have 44% of your population disbelieve a particular faith is not amazing.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Click here, here, here, or here. There's also this bloke who while not a PhD still has a string of interesting achievements to his name.
You could have more names if you cared, but you evidently don't. You got these by not posting as an AC.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The religion in question is Atheism.
Atheism is not a religion. From your very own cited source:
Atheism
1. Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
2. The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
2. Godlessness; immorality.
Religion:
1. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
2. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
Given that 44% of the US population do not accept evolution....
Argument from numbers fallacy. If 44% of the US population jumped off a cliff, would you follow them? How many people in America today believe in psychics, mediums and alien abductions?
There was a time when an opinion poll would've shown that the vast majority of people believe the earth is flat and the sun goes round it (both views, incidentally, which Christianity still argued for long after science showed them to be false)
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
It might never land.
More fool you for suggesting a thought experiment built out of unobtainum. (-:
A real Möbius strip might land on edge.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you guys, and that O'Keefe bozo (formerly) at NASA have their way, a WORKING, and SCIENTIFICALLY SIGNIFICANT telescope will be left to die even while it's STILL producing amazing results!!
Fine, you want it up, YOU pay for it. Organize a group of astronomers and research agencies and let them foot the bill for repairing Hubble. Maybe you can form a company to foot the bill using investment capital and then sell time on the Hubble.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
You can't find any because they don't exist, the poster you quoted is just making shit up.
No spacecraft uses AO because there is no need. Compensation of thermal effects is done by proper mechanical engineering design, not in the optics.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Spacecraft: $135M/$165M
Observatory ATLO: $80M/$100M
Deorbit Module: $5M/$10M
Optical Telescope Assembly: $150M/$210M
SI Mods: $20M/$30M
SI Integration: $5M/$10M
FGS: $30M/$55M
Fee: $64M/$87M
Contingency: $128M/$174M
Launch Vehicle: $130M/$150M
Total: $747M/$991M
Hey, you forgot:
finding a distant galaxy that looks like goatse...... priceless.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
While I agree Creationism isn't science, almost by definition (it doesn't use the Scientific Method [wikipedia.org]), I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Good points. I don't believe in random genetic mutations being the basis of evolution for a second, and of course I don't believe that a God created organisms in all their myriad shapes and forms throughout the history of Earth.
There is something innate in all this, such as creatures that can change color to match the background, that seems to be there in the DNA to be used. But also there is learned instincts that are passed on as well. That is part of evolution, and it isn't random or a mutation.
I think the answer lies with how both physical and learned evolution is carried forward in the DNA, but I also think that evolution as described is non-sensical. The terminolgy is made fancier to hide the nonsense, but the parent's post points about what is required for evolution to be hard science is right on.
rd
I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? Maybe I'm demanding this because I'm used to a more rigorous (and arguably, the only) science, that is to say, physics.
Evolution prefectly adequatly explains the apearance of antibiotic resistant bacteria populations.
Then, for those of you who feel more comfortable with soft sciences (i.e. "stamp-collecting" sciences), well, where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"?
It isn't that easy to devise an experiment to test many things in physics. Yet nowhere near this kind of fuss is made about ideas such as singularities...
Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
You can quite easily measure what proportion of a population of organisms survive in a certain environment.
Darwin himself pushed no theology with evolution, and to the extent the theory flew in the face of widespread religous beliefs,
There is both belief and dogma in origanised religion.
that would tend to make the theory HARDER to accept, not easier. Darwin was raised Christian, moved to theism, and settled into agnosticism. Alfred Wallace, a co-discovered of natural selection was also agnostic and was quoted as saying "I cared and thought nothing about [religion]." I think the years of careful observation coupled to the twenty years Darwin spent working on his ideas prior to publication was a bit more important to the acceptance of evolution than their religous implications.
IIRC Wallace had to work hard to persuade Darwin to publish.
The implicit assumption in your point is that all scientists are athiests out to somehow disprove religion, which again, is CRAP.
Gregor Mendal was a monk, Albert Einstein was a deeply religious man. Plenty of scientists, both modern and ancient, would see no conflict between science and religion. Some might even claim that it is their faith which has inspired them to find out how things work.
In astronomy, early scientists like Copernicus and Galileo either lived in fear of the church, or were outright destroyed by it, because they pursued better explanations in the face of authority.
The persecution of Galileo looks to be more about the Vatican retaining political power than anything else. After all the cosmological models which were orthodox at the time appear to have more to do with Aristotle than anything in the Bible.
In fact, since there are about 4 million letters in the Bible, we only need 26 monkeys and 4 million seconds, or roughly 47 days.
:)
Also depends what language and how much of the Bible you need to get started. Maybe if you were to just do the Torah in Arameic it would come out closer to 6 days
"Less evolved" isn't correct. "Less developed" certainly is. It's demonstrable that a first-trimester embryo is only as complex as a lower animal. Killing lower animals has never been against Christian ethics.
There can be no doubt that you're destroying human potential - for good or ill. That is a different argument however.
The assumption of 1/10 of a bacterium is outrageous, for instance. The primitive Earth can make amino acids, easy, and other moderately complex organic molecules.
You can produce detectable amounts of these chemicals using a few litres of mixed gasses in an experiment running for a few days. If you assume the same processes going on in the atmosphere of a planet for millions of years you'd have huge quanities of such chemicals. Even of those which didn't form very often.
44%???? Where do you get that? 4.4, maybe even 14%, I will believe. But Americans are not that foolish or stupid. I am not saying that evolution is the answer (it is a theorey, but it has a lot backing it), but there is no more proof of creationism, than any of the other religious ideas (do you really think that some god threw up the world? and yet it has just as much proof; None) .
As to the suffering, I think of Gallileo, Corpernicus, and Kepler vs. the christian church. And that was with LOADS of proof that the solar system was helicentric. Worse that was over a number of centuries.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There was a time when an opinion poll would've shown that the vast majority of people believe the earth is flat and the sun goes round it (both views, incidentally, which Christianity still argued for long after science showed them to be false)
The former being an especially daft one for Christianity to have ever supported. Considering Eratosthenes had proved this not to be the case nearly 300 years before any Christian Church existed.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? ...where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"? Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
Okay, I'll bite, even though this is dangerously close to feeding a troll... First of all, your account of what makes a "good scientific theory" seems to only allow theories about systems confined to very limited spaces, time scales, energy levels, and complexities. Can we have a "good scientific theory" in the area of astrophysics? We're never going to reproduce a neutron star in the laboratory. We can't experiment on a black hole. We better hope we never see a supernova up close and personal. We can only make models, and compare this to what we see in the (long ago and far away) universe through powerful telescopes. This isn't signifacantly different from the evolutionary science of making models and comparing this to what is observed in the (long ago and nearby) fossil record.
Yes, there are some differences. Biological systems pack a lot of complexity in a small space, and this complexity limits the extent to which numerical predictions can be made. On the other hand, at the bottom level of DNA and simple cellular processes, the theory of evolution has underpinnings that can and have been tested to the highest standards of scientific methodology. For an example:
- Hypothesis: this particular sequence of DNA is the gene for a particularly sweet ear of corn.
- Prediction: if the DNA is copied into a standard variety of corn,
the modified kernels will have a 10-12% increase in sugar content.
- Experiment: use a modified virus to copy the DNA segment, grow some of the modified and unmodified corn in the same conditions, test
resulting sugar content.
This kind of thing is being done all the time by agro companies. This is down and dirty basic science. For a more cutting edge example:- Hypothesis: mutations accumulate in human mitochondrial DNA at a fairly steady rate of number of mutations per generation.
- Prediction: for people whose genealogy is known for many generations, the number of differences in their mitochondrial DNA will correlate well with the number of generations to their last common maternal ancestor.
- Prediction: for a large sample of a regional population, the variations in mitochondrial DNA will point to a small number of maternal ancestors at some time corresponding to establishment of that population or a major environmental hardship for that population.
- Experiment: gather DNA samples from people with known genealogies
and samples of regional poplulations. Check the correlations, verify the predictions.
This particular avenue of hypothesis/prediction/experiment I've been hearing about in the last couple years.My point is that there is tons of science being done in evolutionary theory that matches your hypothesis/prediction/experiment model, as well as tons that is the gather data/classify examples "stamp collecting" model. There is no "lack of unambiguous experimental evidence", as you put it, nor is there a lack of unambiguous observational evidence. The only lack is in your knowledge of that evidence.
"The Space Shuttle can only go as high as 643km, and wouldn't be able to service the proposed probe."
The obvious downside being if it fails at launch or early in its life the whole thing is lost. Obviously if its cheaper to build a new one than send the shuttle launch to repair it, a sad commentary on the cost of shuttle launches, you can launch another, but if it takes 5 years to build a new one you are dead in the water for a long period.
The ability to service Hubble with the Shuttle proved priceless, you wonder if this new Hubble will regret not having that luxury.
I wonder if the CEV will be able to reach it if they actually manage to ever build one.
@de_machina
# Hypothesis: this particular sequence of DNA is the gene for a particularly sweet ear of corn.
# Prediction: if the DNA is copied into a standard variety of corn, the modified kernels will have a 10-12% increase in sugar content.
...
# Hypothesis: mutations accumulate in human mitochondrial DNA at a fairly steady rate of number of mutations per generation.
# Prediction: for people whose genealogy is known for many generations, the number of differences in their mitochondrial DNA will correlate well with the number of generations to their last common maternal ancestor.
# Prediction: for a large sample of a regional population, the variations in mitochondrial DNA will point to a small number of maternal ancestors at some time corresponding to establishment of that population or a major environmental hardship for that population.
are not about evolution, per se. They are in the realm of molecular biology (a field of biology that I have the most respect for (well, if it's not obvious from the fact that it's the only field I could name)).
If you need a little pricking, I ask you this question: where, in your hypothesis and prediction, did you use the assumption (axiom, if you will) that the fittest survive? What your example shows is that there is something called genetic trait (and there has been no doubt about that since Mendel's work (which was ignored by everyone including evolutionists in his time) was accepted), and the fact that there is a chain of molecules (DNA) that contains such genetic information, which could, by some means unknown, can be changed (mutation) from time to time.
That's exactly what I mean by "evolution should be de-emphasized". Before the discovery of DNA, evolutionism was the only thing that kept biology outside theology---now that we have DNA and are able to see cells (one crucial part of biology---as important as atomic theory, according to Feynmann) directly, we don't need evolution for such ideological purpose anymore---and we never needed it for theoretical framework.
Can we have a "good scientific theory" in the area of astrophysics?
This is precisely the reason astronomers (note, there's a slight difference between astronomers and astrophysicists) are held in low esteem among physicists. But, even so, it's possible to have a resemblence to hypothesize-predict-experiment method: only that it's modified to hypothesize-predict-observe. Remember that the fundamental problem with evolutionism is not really the experiment part---it's the prediction part: theory of evolution is not able to give a concrete prediction which can be verified or disproven by experiment or observation.
Furthermore, the difference is that biology is "made" to depend on the theory of evolution by the incumbent biologists. There is no reason molecular biology need such assumption as "fittest survive and the tiny modifications in each generation 'builds up' to give rise to different species." We don't need evolution to make better crops or medicines. Physics, on the other hand, does not depend on astrophysics and puts it in the proper place---where newest theories of physics can be tested (by observation), and thus, by the process of Scientific Method, which must be modified most often and thus is wrong much of the time.
PS. BTW, I believe (I don't know which context it was taken from) when Rutherford said that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting, he meant that either a science has useful, mathematical theory that can be backed by experiments and observations (this is a paradigm led by classical and modern physics) or a science has absolutely no theory (nothing that's worth noting, anyway) and, lacking theory, resorts to collecting as much factoids as they can, without being able to make any sense out of the stamps they collected.
And somehow, you are going to show that it was (in an objective way) "fit for survival"?
Of course, it was fit for survival because it survived, right? That's just about as logical as the anthropic principle.
Evolution prefectly adequatly explains the apearance of antibiotic resistant bacteria populations.
And how those bacteria became multi-celled algae and eventually even mammals? Evolution claims too much, given what experimental/observational evidences it can have.
It isn't that easy to devise an experiment to test many things in physics. Yet nowhere near this kind of fuss is made about ideas such as singularities...
Because nowhere near the kind of fuss biologists make about evolution is made about ideas such as singularities by physicists. Some physicists couldn't care less (by profession, at least) if singularities existed or not---can you say the same about evolution (by biologists)?
...but if it takes 5 years to build a new one you are dead in the water for a long period.
Why build one when you can have two for twice the price?
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
NASA has not been fully funded. What GWB has been and is doing is cutting a number of other projects (ISS, hubble, X-33 (in fact, just about all X projects)), talked about adding some money, but doing nothing.
As to science on mars, jupiter, saturn, when do you think these projects were formed up? Last year? Sorry, these were done for the last decade. Basically, these are from poppa bush/clinton time frame.
Now, as doing comparisons, I do have heard of Clinton doing LSD (but I do not doubt it). I have seen a lot of evidence of GWB doing drugs (coke, pot, etc), and it was an open secret in dallas that he used to deal coke, the same way that Clinton got around. So be careful of what you push.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The four or so inferometric telescopes have resolutions as good as Hubble, down to .001 arc-second. Recently a planet (90X Jupiter size) was imaged orbiting a star.
However these dont have Hubble's field of view or 24/7 optimal viewing hours. Further more, image the scientific leaps you'd get putting this technology in space.
I'm well aware that it was based on 70's and 80's technology, but it earned it's fame in the 90's, which is why I call it an icon of the 90's, not a product of the decade.
It certainly is! For a full-fledged professor, you're not doing so well.
I'm doing very well. Evolution, with a capital "E", that was the original point of this assinine creationist aside in an astronomy thread, as proposed initially by Dawrin, and the thing in the school textbooks mentioned above, is ONLY about speciation.
You've just proven my point, that you don't know what the "Theory of Evolution" is. There is no accepted scientific theory for the origin of life. There is a very well-accepted scientific theory for how life, once it existed, evolves. Call it a castle in the sky, or whatever you want, but please educate yourself on what you're talking about it.
And in general, take your religious pseudo-science and keep it out of astronomy threads in the future, please. You posted a lot in this thread, and essentially all off-topic. You're a waste of space here, and a waste of my time.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Your definition of "scientific method" is antiquated and quite facile. If you had cared to read the rest of the Wikipedia entry that you cite, you would have seen that the notion of science is much more complicated than simply following a mythological "scientific method".
Wikipedia includes some good points such as the theory ladennes of observation and science as a sociological practice.
The notion of science as being "objective" is quite dead among those in the know. You might want to pick up "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn, as the first example of a popular (i.e. read my millions) challenge to the notion of a "scientific method"
While I haven't read Kuhn, I've read him quoted in another book (a book about history of psychology), and he sounded like another ignorable (no, not ignoble, I mean ignorable) philosopher---as Feynmann says, philosophers say lots things about what's absolutely necessary for science (or simply about science), and they are wrong. Granted, my impression of him may be wrong, but his ideas about paradigm and revolutions of new ideas (and breaking of paradigm) is, well, simply not applicable in many cases---most notably, physics.
Ask any physicist---no matter what new discovery is made, no matter what happens, the physics that are taught today will continue to be taught: We know that Newton's Laws are incorrect. We still teach it in introductory physics. Why? Because it has proven to be correct (to a good approximation) under given conditions, and it gives good introduction to more advanced and more correct theories. Kuhn's ideas are applicable only to fields like psychology, which many respectable people would deny, is science.
Of course, I must admit using a somewhat narrow definition of science (one that doesn't include social science or political science, the greatest oxymoron I've ever known). Perhaps I should have said "physical science" since that would be narrow enough to exclude all social science junk and have possibility of including biology (to be on topic of this thread :).
And I do agree that Scientific Method might be antiquated, and it is not most definitely a cookbook recipe---followed step-by-step. In all cases, I don't think any scientist would disagree that the value of a theory is measured by its ability to predict. And I believe theory of evolution (specifically, "survival of fittest" and "emergence of new species as result of accumulation of small changes") is a little short on this prediction part, and a little too much on explanation (and we know, disregarding Occam's Razor, any fairy tale can explain all that evolutionism can) part.
PS. Oh, and no, science is not objective in its entirety(I don't think I claimed it to be---I only remember saying something like "see as an objective scientist"; and I think that only amounts to claims of existence of an objective person (which, in itself, is probably in doubt)). However, science (at least "experimental science") is based on experimental (or observational, where experiments cannot be performed---but those are on the lower rungs of science) verifications and is (or at least should be, when the principle of experimental verification is followed rigorously) very immune to personal biases
well, perhaps you should read Kuhn (or anyone) before dismissing their works. in this case, Kuhn might be particularly relevant, as he was a physicist. So please, don't call his ideas "wrong" before reading them, or about them.
As for your comments about objectivity and observations, again, you might want to read a bit of the research into this area before making such bold claims.
...and not just better reliability: cheaper, too. The USSR has had some (often rapidly censored if possible) spectacular engineering misses, but many of their more interesting engineering accomplishments have also gone unsung.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Forex the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos vary over time and in response to environmental pressure - and back again. This is evolution in the first sense, but speaks strongly against Evolution in the second sense. It speaks of animals designed to vary. If they were going to Evolve, species would branch off from the variants and become even more extreme rather than returning to morphological home base when the selective pressure eased. They don't. And you can save a lot of time here by reading this or something like it before bringing up sickle cell anaemia, peppered moths, Archaeopterxy or any of the many other canonical failures in Evolutionary reasoning.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
People who do this kind of thing all the time specified the USD$150M launch vehicle to get 12t up to 750km. Maybe the Russkies could do it for even less?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You picked up on Dawkins and dropped everything else.
PS, since you disparage him so much, perhaps you'll prefer this link.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You seem to be particularly full of shit today.
I must be having a good day.
You seem to have not defined religion and are also building a straw man argument (that any belief, supported or not, constitutes a religion).
No. My position was the opposite of that. My position is that mere belief does NOT itself CONSTITUTE RELIGION.
You are the one who, as you say, is full of shit. I am not commiting a straw man argument, you are generalizing the scope of my CLAIM way beyond the scope of the actual language (in fact to include its own opposite), and then accusing me of commiting a straw man argument because my claim doesn't encompass the scope that YOU have extended it to.
I didn't claim that a belief is a religion. I said Atheism is NOT a religion.
I also didn't try to ARGUE that atheism is not a religion I simply CLAIMED it was not a religion, and put forward a claim that believing or not believing that one has 3 arms is as much a religion as atheism.
Since you seem to be taking the position that atheism is in fact a mere belief. Then I take it that you agree that atheism is NOT a religion.
Religion is basically a bunch of beliefs relating to stuff like god(s), the afterlife, and where we came from. Please note that some religions don't believe in any gods (I think Hinduism or Buddism was one, they believe in reincarnation but not a god).
Thanks for the background.
At least we can both agree that atheism is not a religion.
So be careful not to define religion as belief in a god(s), if you ever do define it.
First you complain that I didn't define religion. And then you accuse me of defining religion as a belief in god. I said.
"Atheism is not a religion. It is a either a lack of belief that God exists or a positive belief that God does NOT exist."
I did NOT say "Atheism is not a religion because religions all include the belief of God and atheists don't."
You've never heard of natural selection, have you? Few and stupid are those that dispute natural selection.
I have heard of natural selection. It is the Creationists who dispute natural selection. And if it is your position that Creationists are all stupid, I would not dispute that. Natural Selection forms a fundamental basis of the theory of evolution which creationists dispute.
Since you are relying on natural selection to support your position, I take it that you concede that the theory of natural selection is in fact correct?
Less obviously, mutations can cause inability to breed with one's former species, but I have yet to see anything useful evolve.
Man.
(although I concede that man's usefulness is debateable.)
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
And if you think he was ridiculed, try this dude, or perhaps the classic example of scientific orthodoxy turning on their own, only 40 years later to realise that they botched it big time. The punishment for academic heresy isn't burning at the stake any more, that kind of thing is too open, rasies bad press and gets frowned upon. Nowadays they're a little more subtle: they only burn your career and reputation at the stake - and then say, behold, for there are no reputable Creationist scientists. Again I say: well, duh? What do you expect?OK, you go around and cross off any evolutionist who makes money from the sales of books and like materials and we'll call it quits.Like hell it does. Back up that assertion with a shred of evidence, go on!No worries, cross off every scientist with a direct financial interest (e.g. job security) in pushing or at least shutting up about evolution and we'll call it fair again.He certainly has - and that's exactly what was originally asked for. So here it is, why are you complaining? And why should I provide any other examples if you're just going to define them out of existence?
You're given Creationist Biologists, but you immediately disqualify any who aren't Evolutionists, because they're not Evolutionists. Tap, tap, is this thing on? Earth to Walkingshark, come in Walkingshark, is there anybody in there? Halloooo? <waves>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You had better do some research on that. It was not until 1869 that the Catholic Church decreed excommunication for all abortions. Prior to the time, abortion was considered a sin against marriage (by breaking the link between sex and procreation) and only murder after the fetus had recieved a human soul. Thomas Aquinas wrote that a fetus first had a vegatative soul, then an animal soul, and finally a human soul when it was fully formed. See this site
How about with a careful definition of evolution?
:http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/articles_debate s/evolutiondefinition.htm
:
The first page of the source you cite
Is very interesting. it states
""Evolution is a generation-to-generation change in a population's frequencies of alleles or genotypes. Because such a change in a gene pool is evolution on the smallest scale, it is referred to more specifically as microevolution"1 [emphasis in original]. This type of "evolution" is widely accepted by evolutionists and creationists alike and is not in dispute."
considering my usage and my statement:
"evolution works. That is almost indesputible.[sic] The fact that creationists think that evolution is a theory of creation however suggests that they don't know what evolution even is. the theory of evolution does not attempt to explain the origins of life or the universe."
Looking at the entire paragraph it is clear I was not referring evolution as a theory which attempts to explains the origin of life. That theory is referred to as "molecules-to-man evolution" in that source. (and beyond the scope of Charles Darwin's original theory of evolution)
In any event. there you have it.
As I said before.. I was debating atheism, not evolution.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
And yet, I'll take my Nikon 50/1.8 prime (which ran 99, new) against pretty much every other Nikon lens out there at 50 mm. Cost is not everything when it comes to glass.
That said, there is no reason to upgrade the Hubble if we can reasonably cheaply launch a new one. Hell, if we could launch a new one for *exactly the same cost* as repairing the Hubble, we should do that. We'd get more overall science out of it, because we'd have Hubble functioning until it fails, plus the new one.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
A contagion that, without modern medical treatment, is often deadly. A contagion that happens to occur quite regularly in the area where sickle cell anemia originated (as you said, it is a mutation generally confined to the population in Africa, one of the malarial hotbeds of the world). This to me points to evidence that evolution works fine - the mutation is *only* net-beneficial in areas where malaria is common, and only appears in those areas; in fact, its distribution nearly matches the distribution of malaria in Africa.
Look at it this way - mortality without treatment for childhood (first infection) malaria is high. Mortality for sickle cell is high. However, without the sickle cell mutation, all children are at risk of malaria. With sickle cell mutation, 25% are malaria risks, 25% are sickle cell risks, and 50% are likely to survive without complication from either. Net benefit, which shows that natural selection works exactly as expected - traits that develop and provide a net benefit to the breeding phase of the organism in question are generally passed on and will eventually become dominant traits, while traits that develop and provide a net disadvantage tend to disappear. The key here is *net* - while sickle cell can provide a disadvantage, the net result to breeding organisms is advantageous, in that 50% of the population is protected against a major disease endemic to the area within which sickle cell is common. Allow me to quote:
In other words, malaria is a natural force providing a selection mechanism to encourage the spread of the hemoglobin S gene throughout at-risk populations. This mechanism lacking, the negatives of hem-S outweigh, and the gene does not spread. Natural selection in action, a lovely example.
The combination of natural selection and random mutation has produced a net benefit to that section of the human species living in Africa. If malarial parasites were endemic worldwide, the likelihood is that the sickle-cell gene (or similar genes, like the ones for thalessemia, hemoglobin C/E, etc.) Anyone who tries to deny it is living in a dream world, or doesn't understand what natural selection implies.
(Note: I am personally undecided on the mechanism of speciation - however, natural selection as a method for gradual change over time is far too well supported for me to argue with.)
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Your math sucks, by the way, or possibly you just can't read. He doesn't assume p=1 for anything in the coin example: if you can make 4 flips per minute, and you need a p(.5^4)=0.0625 event, it will on average take you eight trials (8 minutes, in this case). If you have 16 people doing this, on *average* at least one person will flip HHHH in the first minute. Where the fuck does a probability of one come in?
Moron. Learn some math before insulting my own. While on average it will take 16 flips to get one HHHH, on average it will take more than one set of 16 flips to get at least one HHHH. Because they are done in sets, what happens is that sometimes more than one person flips HHHH in the first set of 16 flips, and sometimes nobody does. And it will never take less than one set of flips to get HHHH but sometimes take more than one set of flips, so on average it will take more than one set of flips, which then translates to more than one minute. I hope that you can understand this now that I explained it without any math.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
First off, on average it will take slightly less than 11 sets of flips to get one HHHH, not the 16 you stated. Not sure where I originally got 8 from, but we were both wrong on that.
.36^(n-1)*.64 (n-1 unsuccessful trials, one successful trial).
Do you want to calculate the expected average value, or shall I?
P(mins) = 1 is ~.64
P(mins) = 2 is ~.2304
P(mins) = 3 is ~.0829
So on, so forth. P(n mins) =
Now, expected value, which is what you are talking about. E(min) = P(min)*val = 1.553 minutes, in this case. So, you could look at it as you being right.
Or you could recognize that the other way to go about this, the realization that when the cdf crosses 0.5, you've hit the point at which 50% of the time you will have succeeded, yields a 1 minute average trial.
It's nice that you wanted to use small words, but its okay, I do understand statistics. Possibly better than you, since you don't even bother to check your own math.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
This is some kind of apples-to-oranges joke, right?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Now, expected value, which is what you are talking about. E(min) = P(min)*val = 1.553 minutes, in this case. So, you could look at it as you being right.
Glad we agree on this. The guy is wrong, it takes more than one minute, on average.
Or you could recognize that the other way to go about this, the realization that when the cdf crosses 0.5, you've hit the point at which 50% of the time you will have succeeded, yields a 1 minute average trial.
Well, it seems we disagree here. Just because more than 50% of the trials take one minute doesn't make the average time per trial one minute. Reread what he said average time to generate HHHH is now 1 minute., then realize that he said the average time to generate HHHH, not the time the average generation of HHHH takes (the latter would be useless anyways, given the context).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The mean time to generate HHHH is more than 1 minute. This is because of the phenomenon you explained, essentially because this is a discrete distribution, not continuous.
.5 (cdf(x) = 0.5), that means that exactly one half of the time, you will require X trials *or less* to generate the desired result. In other words, the median value. Which is often used as an average value, especially when you have a situation where your value is bounded on one side and not the other, but the high end is unlikely, since it allows less influence from high outliers. So, basically, we have the word "average" being interpreted two different ways - one more common, but both correct.
Do you understand what a CDF is? It's the cumulative density function; when the value of the CDF hits
Didn't read it, so I don't have the context, but I think we can both agree that there was no assumption of p=1.0 anywhere at this point.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Natural Selection? OK.
Genetics? OK.
Random Mutation? OK.
So far, it sounds like you aren't talking about real creationists. I don't happen to believe that our Universe had a supernatural creator. But I don't know of a way to prove or disprove whether the Universe was initially created by a supernatural being.
It would hardly surprise me to learn you can find lots of people with scientific training, who believe those three ideas reflect how actual, observable phenomenon, one can see, when biological organisms reproduce, who still believe the Univerise had a creator.
What!
You are going to have to explain this.
You accept that a random mutation can be an improvement, or could be an adaptation to a change in environment -- correct?
You accept that this mutation is inheritable -- correct?
But you assert that "an average improvement" is "not fine"?
Are you going to try to tell us that there are little angels floating around, making little miracles, to balance out those random beneficial mutations, so that species don't change? Lol.
So, do they conduct periodic genetic audits?
James Usher read the bible, interpreted it literally, counted on his fingers, and asserted that God's seven days of creation occurred 6000 years ago. So, where do you agree with Bishop Usher, and where do you differ?
You accept that the Earth is just one planet, among many, circling on star, among billions in our Galaxy, which is just one, not really different than any other?
You seemed to be accepting that species evolve, and go extinct. This is something Bishop Usher wouldn't accept. But you won't accept that life could arrive from a stew organic chemicals without divine intervention?
Do you think God created the basic Universe 15 billion years ago, and then waited 12 billion years, before he created the first life on Earth? Or do you think God created life, and a Universe with a forged date-stamp, all at the same time?
If you believe the Universe might have a forged date stamp, how do you know it existed even ten seconds ago? How do you know it existed before you started reading this sentence? Maybe God created life, and the Universe with the forged date-stamp, including all your childhood memories, 9 seconds ago?
I put in incendiary posts constantly and my karma's been jammed against the stops for years. Go figure.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Please don't bother bringing up Sickle Cell Anaemia, which is semi-lethal dysfunctional blood condition making you unattractive to a disease, calling that an improvement is kinda like claiming that the answer to robbery is to be poor.
No again, at least in the general sense. Unless you believe in Darwin's "pangenes" or Lamarckianism, mutations are generally not heritable. Since all observed mutations are damaging, anything which was inherited is going to - on average - cripple or kill the organism rather than improve it.Mutations are, however, reknowned for causing sterility - or to put it another way, for invoking a racially homeostatic mechanism.
That I do. Mutations destroy and disrupt, they do not build up, organise or create. This is their character.No. The observations (or in many cases compilations of others' observations) of Halton Arp and co are showing with increasing definition that we are indeed in a special place in the universe.I suspect that before you confront that point (and do go and confront it properly, don't dismiss it on the word of the maniacs at t.o), you should really be considering the ramifications of a special place existing at all.
They change, and go extinct. If by "evolve" you mean degenerate, then yes.I won't accept either that life self-organised from organic stew, or that such a stew ever existed for it to self-organise from, divine intervention or not.You would need divine intervention for either, since firstly the only stews that form by accident are simple, racemised and poisoned, and secondly even if you somehow against practically every observation of physics got an idealised protein soup, self-organsing that into enough DNA etc to make something self-reproducing is a very, very, very long uphill battle on loose shale. So long, in fact, that the universe doesn't contain anything like the required amount of ammunition.
No. Neither. I think that the date-stamp is being badly misread.To be more specific, the date stamps which are even legible are vague, yet often conflicting and nobody can show that the clocks that they all run by were either set right in the first place or ran smoothly since.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Since humans are hardly going to be the majority (by either numbers or mass) of mossie feeding stations in the area, you can't even say that having 2/3 of the survivors anaemic has reduced the mosquitos' range noticeably.
Also, 25% of your population is not expressive, and therefore vulnerable to malaria anyway. From this we learn that the mutation is not necessary to the survival of humans in that area.Absolutely true, but it has not improved the species, and neither of the two population groups look like dying out or speciating.
You could only imagine it being an improvement on a planet totally swamped in mossies, with nowhere to run - and even then it's still not really an improvement, only a destructive second-best coping mechanism which is revealed as a massive burden again if the mossies are ever removed from the equation.
There's more to say on the point, but that should get you started.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you don't have molecules-to-man, you don't have the rest. If evolution doesn't explain the origins of life (chemical evolution) then it has nowhere to begin. Working with development of life (biological evolution) is essentially pointless if there's nowhere to start.
As an Atheist, that's also foundational for you. No molecules-to-man equals no explanation for something as basic as how we got here, it equals no substantial basis for disclaiming God. That's what Richard Dawkins' "intellectually satisfied Atheist" soundbite was all about.
Microevolution is a bit of a misleading misnomer, but Evolutionists won't accept "variation within a kind" as a term so we're more or less stuck with it. Darwin's finches, ironically enough, are a striking example of this. Food became hard to find on the Canaries, so the finch populations there shifted towards longer beaks. Much jumping up and down about "evolution in action" ensued, but then when conditions improved, the birds normalised again. Not evolution, but a variation in kind already incorporated into the birdies' cute little genes.
Your original assertion was "evolution works", and neither chemical evolution nor biological evolution come within hailing distance of working.
I can understand you dismissing chemical evolution, since biological evolution looks so much more plausible at first glance. As with so many other things, the harder you look at it, the worse it gets. Darwin was only able to propose it by assuming that cells were just little blobs of jelly - if he'd known what we do today about the cell, he would have abandoned the whole idea immediately. Yes, it would have made Grandpa Erasmus with his e conchis omnia grumpy, but Charles was at least open and honest enough to know a lost cause when he could see one in all its glory. A pity so few of his fans would follow suit.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Google has this word indexed today and this
page is the only entry. We'll see what happens
next
I'm not asking you to like it, but I am calling you a moron for not checking the figure yourself. Google is only a click away so you've no real excuse.I see you've done no research here, either.
Not only was this the political church of the Dark Ages, and not only did most of the scientists and churchmen of the age side with Galileio, but Galileio actually got into trouble for being rude and political rather than because of any perceived deficiencies in his theory.
You might also want to consider the Jews who were lynched during the Black Plague because the plague didn't touch them. And why didn't it? Because they were following the hygiene rules from an old, outmoded, inaccurately copied compilation of tribal myths, formerly known as The Old Testament.
For some inexplicable reason, the science scattered through the Bible is 100% accurate, even down to naming Arcturus as highly mobile (Job 38:32) and Orion as a cluster (Job 38:81). It also says that the Earth is suspended in space, not embedded in any crystal spheres (Job 26:7). Pretty damn good for a bunch of primitive tribesmen and you'll notice that it stands with Galileio, not with the politicians. No, the Bible is not a science textbook, but yes, the science in it is accurate.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Put it another way: everybody believes something about how the world works, and none of us was there to see it put together and take notes. That something, whatever it is, is a religious position.
Also, you're trying to arrogate a position for your own religious stance by claiming for it a solid basis on uninterrupted logic. You're fooling yourself. Reasoning from the known chemical and physical properties of atoms, the number of such in the known universe (10^81), the number of ways in which they can be arranged and the maximum amount of time (~10^18 seconds) they've had to so arrange themselves does not lead to the conclusion that life is possible. And yet life is all around us.
The only rational conclusions are either that materialism is hogwash or fundamental science is badly, badly wrong in practically every "hard" branch. And no, Evolution is not science. Evolution, as in molecules-to-man, is an interpretation overlaid on science by Atheists desperate to feel, as Richard Dawkins put it, "intellectually fulfilled".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that the Russian launchers have a better history of reliability than either the Shuttle or most of the conventional Western launchers. So they are cheaper and more reliable - just not politically correct.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...if you email me the URLs of some of your recent posts that you're pleased with, I'll park them to one side and consider modding them up when I next get points (typically about every 4 days). Use my forename at cyberknights com au rather than the FDNS address, lest your message get drowned in spam.
It'll help your karma a lot if you don't charge in defiantly with all guns blazing as Step One of your responses. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Good on you. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yes, it can be transmitted by kissing, accidental inhalation of ejecta, many different ways.
Yes, remaining pure is even more effective than monogamy, but unfortunately it's not heritable.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Is the mutation really nett-beneficial? When the mosquitos go away again, the population will be left with a 25% mortality rate from this "benefit" and two thirds of the survivors weakened. It may have reduced the death-rate temporarily (or not, we may have simply seen more Africans born instead), but in the long term, the toll (in deaths and less-productive members) from it is going to be humungous.
You do know that there's no penalty for having a single hemoglobin-S gene, right? So none of the survivors will be weakened. The only exception is that people with two variant hemoglobin genes will often suffer sickle cell, or similar. However, the variant sickle cell genes
Further, I make no assumption that its designed to get rid of mosquitos - its designed to *protect* humans. In fact, you could argue that it would be mutually beneficial to the mosquitos, as it is likely to keep more humans alive, giving the mosquitos increased feeding sources. So everything you say about "When the mosquitos go away" is meaningless - if the mosquitos went away, the trait would disappear fairly quickly. The argument on natural selection as evidenced by the hem-S gene has nothing to do with mosquitos, except insofar as they provide the external selective pressure. The presence or absence of hem-S has no real effect on the mosquitos.
Also, 25% of your population is not expressive, and therefore vulnerable to malaria anyway. From this we learn that the mutation is not necessary to the survival of humans in that area.
Not necessary. Just useful. Natural selection doesn't require that something be required for it to be selected; it just requires that it be better than the alternatives.
Absolutely true, but it has not improved the species, and neither of the two population groups look like dying out or speciating.
I would argue that yielding a higher local survival rate *is* improving the species.
As to your die-out claim, there's another malaria-preventing mutation, hemoglobin-C. Hemoglobin-C's distribution in populations at risk of malaria is slowly dwindling, as it provides less protection from malaria than hemoglobin-S. So, in fact, there is a population group dying out. Also, the gene incidence for hemoglobin-S in Africa can be as high as 46% (areas in Uganda), while their descendents in the US have significantly lower incidences, less than 10%. That shows me two population groups dying out due to their genotype being less suitable than an available alternative.
How do you explain the gene incidence distribution for variant hemoglobins following the distribution of malaria, if not by natural selection? Wherever malaria is a large problem, you find a variant hemoglobin - Latin America, Africa, SE Asia. Where malaria isn't a problem (and not because of treatment, but because of climate), you don't find these variants - Northern Europe, Russia, Canada. Explain that without natural selection.
You could only imagine it being an improvement on a planet totally swamped in mossies, with nowhere to run - and even then it's still not really an improvement, only a destructive second-best coping mechanism which is revealed as a massive burden again if the mossies are ever removed from the equation.
It is an improvement wherever malaria is a large problem. I wouldn't argue it is an improvement to the species as a whole, but it is an improvement to the species in a given environment. Which is all natural selection is about.
Basically, you seem to have a strange idea about what natural selection implies. The variant hemoglobin/malaria issue provides strong evidence for the correctness of the theory of natural selection as a mechanism for intraspecies change.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Sorry, I mistyped. Hemoglobin-C is believed to be replacing hemoglobin-S, due to the significantly less severe symptoms for CC individuals as compared to SS ones, while it still provides malaria resistance. (Modiano 2001).
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
...now we wait for /. to come to the party.
They will be granted a "+1 Interesting" each when the next mod points roll around. That still leaves three points unspent, so if you make any more good posts in the next week or so, email them to anything in the cyberknights.com.au domain.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
In order for Evolution to work (capital E for molecules-to-man rather than the vague and prevaricating "change over time" definition), you need to find creative mutations that stick.
If you can't do that, you're just diluting the genetic information available, site by site, with junk. It's like scraping a nail or scourer across a CD and calling it "added information" - it's almost entirely added entropy, and entropy is your enemy here.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Adding randomness/entropy is not adding information. As you said, selection selects from existing information, it doesn't add anything. You still lack a mechanism for adding information. Selection does indeed operate on randomness, where it is made accessible by expression. Selection removes the entropy again. Selection is, in a way, a limiting entropy filter.
If a mutation (in real life, a set of mutations are required since a single mutation is easily erased by the wonderful cross-checking built into the DNA transcription machinery) could add a structure which was genuinely advantageous, you might have a point.Not exactly.
The homeostatic machinery itself would select strongly against reproduction of a "costless" mutation even if once could be identified. No nominally helpful mutation has been identified which has arrived without a significant burden of negative properties as an intrinsic part (a "cost") of the mutation. Neither the DNA machinery nor external "natural" selection is able to separate the good and bad effects.
The genetic burden of these destructive effects is also cumulative, so the one good mutation cannot wipe out all of the baddies without also wiping out itself, and the nett effect has always been negative, entropic.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I appear to have used a word which carries a specific technical meaning in a way that conveyed the technical part of the meaning to you but not the common-use meaning, and did not intend to.
Adding randomness in the gross sense screws things up, which is not predicted by this piece of information theory. From that experience we learn that the pure information theory application is too simplistic to be useful here.
Bringing the argument back to 0, 1 or even 2 bits of information unfortunately files off all of the meaningful sidebands. What you are addressing with core information theory is very clear and elegant and has essentially zero relevance for Evolution in real life.
I could make cute assertions about not adding a "B" but adding a "?", however that wouldn't make it really clear that the problem does not fit into this framework at all, so can't really be sensibly addressed by it.
Perhaps you can tell by the way I'm re-approaching the statement from several slightly different angles, but I'm struggling to think of a clear illustration for just how poor a fit it is.
Let's try an analogy. Consider replacing one heat tile on a space shuttle with a random object - a brick, a food mixer, a cat, a block of styrofoam or perhaps more appropriately a tile from a different part of the shuttle. Information theory says that we've added information to this shuttle, which clearly distinguishes it from other shuttles. Real life says we're about to need another seven astronauts. We haven't added useful information. "Useful" is a concept a long way up the cognitive scale from an individual base-pair.
In the field, there might be billions or trillions of a particular lifeform to experiment with, and so if a significant portion of them mutate and don't die off, there ought to be perhaps thousands to millions of different extant mutations in the population for selection to work with.
In practice, there aren't. Many articles have been written about the surprising stability of E. Coli alone. E. Coli is not evolving. Yet if the information theory above was a valid application, it would obviously and continuously be so.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Information theory criticisms are common amongst creationists; thus, I assumed you were working from one. I have no clue what you are trying to refer to with "meaningful sidebands", but the principle works just the same for however many bits of information you want to extend it to; its just math, it doesn't care how many bits you want to use. I wouldn't even have brought it in, if it weren't so typical that it would be brought in by the creationist side of this argument. It isn't really the right framework to address the problem, but it does hold gross truth to apply to the problem at hand. If you want to drop the information theoretic aspect of it, I'd be happy to.
Your analogy is wrong. Why? It's very simple.
99.9% of the time, replacing that heat tile with something random would kill the shuttle. 0.1% of the time (probably less, but the exact probability is relatively unimportant) we get something that works - is useful, to use your terminology. 0.1% of those work *better* than the original. Are we agreed that these are all possible? Because that is exactly why randomness (increased entropy) is essential.
The second stage is natural selection; in this stage, we look at the designs and reproduce the most successful ones. Thus, over time our shuttle would become a veritable brick spacehouse, nearly impervious to heat. Lots of trials? Lots of time? Absolutely. But the mechanism works.
You're struggling to explain it not because its unclear, but because you are wrong.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
When you write about something, there is lots that you can't put into words, but you can do stuff that a photo can't, for example, you can describe smells, sounds, the temperature, wind, your own feelings, all manner of stuff that won't fit through the lens, and some of which might drastically change a listener's perception of the scene. OTOH, the sensor behind the lens captures an enormous amount of detail which words could never adequately convey, even though you published an encyclopaedia describing just one scene. Video would also capture sound and motion, but at a lower resolution. Each method loses some richness somewhere, and that can be important.
Here is where those sidebands come into play, and we run into several critical features of the situation which completely invalidate your approach. Interestingly enough, natural selection is one of the key problems in your scenario.
Problem number one: suppose that the Shuttle started out with a high-wing design, but that turbulence rendered it much less practical than the present configuration. So sooner or later we get a randomly mutated Shuttle in which one of the wings is lower - and it promptly destabilises on re-entry and scatters itself all over the landscape. Then one fine aeon we get another Shuttle with both wings a little lower - but because the main spar has to run through the body instead of across it, the SSME's don't work so well any more, so it never hits orbit. It seems obvious that massive changes are going to be disruptive enough to prevent an advancement in wing placement by large steps. This is opaque to the probability theory you're using.
Problem number two: we get a Shuttle with one wing only a centimeter lower than the other. We are hopeful that our candidate is the first in a long line leading to low-winged Shuttles. We watch and wait expectantly, but since the difference in wings conveys no immediate advantage, our Shuttle is not selected for an the low-wing gene is eventually diluted to extinction by the many, many copies of the high-wing gene. This is also opaque to the probability theory you're using.
Problem number three: Shuttles take resources to build. You get a finite number of Shuttles over a finite span of time to experiment with. The probability theory so far deployed is too simplistic to incorporate such limitations, but they have decisive effect on the possible outcomes.
You may well argue that there are a lot of microbes with very short generation times, and there are, but it's still a very long way short of enough candidates to explain the supposed derivatives we now see - and of course the argument disintegrates completely when faced with whales, turtles or macaw, all of which have quite long generational times.
There are many more problems, but it's a busy day today.
Not to mention incapable of making orbit. Oh, well...
Even if I were to cede you that in its entirety, which I don't, the mechanism han't got anything like the traction to explain what we observe.
Problem number four: not all of the unhelpful modifications will have
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I saw an old Pogo cartoon, maybe republished in one of Carl Sagan's books, where two characters pondered this question.
(Pogo was written about Washington politics. But it was set in a dark swamp, and the characters were cute little swamp creatures. The characters were often fishing from a dilapidated skiff.)
In the strip in question, as near as I can recall, went like this:
Panel one: "Did you ever think, that we live in a Universe, full of stars, all circled by planets,, and that each of them could have life on it, just like us?"
Panel two: "Or maybe the Earth is unique? Maybe it is the only inhabited planet in the whole Universe? Maybe we are completely alone?"
Panel three:
Panel fout: The other critter replies: "Either way, it is a sobering thought."
So, how about giving us the 25, or 50 word summary of Arp's reasoning?
Degenerate is a value lade, anthropocentric term. I think biologists prefer to use terms like adapted or adaptive.
Consider zebra mussels, they were well adapted to living in the Great Lakes. And when they were accidentally introduced there, there was a population explosion. If the Great Lakes environment were to change, they might not be adapted any longer. They could die off.
Langauge shapes are thoughts. Certain ideas were literally inconceivable until some genius invented the terms to talk about them. May I suggest that you disrupt your ability to give the other view a fair examination if you restrict yourself from using the terms you challenge.
In that great 13 part series, "The Ascent of Man", Jacob Bronowski talked about sitting beside his little new born daughter, and marvelling at how perfect her little hands were. He describes thinking, "Her little hands are so perfect, I couldn't design something so perfect I I had a million years!" Then he says, "Of course a million years is how long it took."
Your assertion that the assembly of simple life, or proto-life, from a "stew", was impossible, is unproveable. It is an assertion based on faith, not fact. Just as if I were to assert the opposite I would be relying on faith, not fact.
Hold on, you said you accepted "Natural Selection". Now it sounds like you don't. Of course mutations that kill the individual before they can reproduce are not inherited. Is that all you mean? But where do you get the idea that "all observed mutations are damaging"?
- Since observation shows us redshifted objects clustered into "shells" around us, we must be near the middle of stuff; and
- since the focus of the changes in redshift is consistent and not exactly on us, it's not an instrument or observation error; and
- since the data has been gathered by different observers at different observatories at different times, it is not an experimenter's error, and nor is it transient; and
- since many physically associated objects with different redshift and a smooth redshift gradient between them exist, redshift is probably not (or not primarily) a measure of expansion; and
- since it involves the entire visible universe, it's not a localised effect (hyper galactic explosion or whatever); it follows that
- We are a cosmic stone's throw from the center of the universe.
How unlikely is that?Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is just local granularity... so what?
I don't know what you mean by physically associated objects or smooth redshift gradient.
You write this as if you knew the shape of the Universe. You know that the Universe has a center? A finite but unbounded Universe would not have a center. How do you know that the Universe is not finite but unbounded?
Well, it is an amusing argument. Would you challenge the interpretation of the fossil record that, not only does it include extinct animals, but absent are the species found today? If so, how do you account for this apparent absence?
Do you discount molecular biology? Molecular biologists argue that we can measure how closely related individuals are by looking at their genes. Do you reject that the same technology that can establish paternity, or link a suspect, or forensic remains to a blood stain, can measure how closely related different species are?
So, if new species don't evolve from old ones, how do you explain the genetic consanguity?
In an earlier comment you said that we didn't live in a young Universe with a forged date-stamps -- that the various date stamps were being misinterpreted.
You realize that leaves you a lot to explain?