Slashdot Mirror
Ice Age Beasts Blasted from Space
ianare writes "Eight tusks and a bison skull all show signs of having being blasted with iron-nickel fragments, typical meteorite material. Raised, burnt surface rings trace the point of entry of high-velocity projectiles; and the punctures are on only one side, consistent with a blast coming from a single direction. But the team was astonished to find the animal remains were about 35,000 years old, rather than from the known impact of 13,000 years ago."
"For us the difficulty is that we see patterns but we don't understand what the underlying process is; so it becomes difficult to ascribe causation," he explained.
Therein lies the problem of ever ascribing certainty to any one event causing mass extinctions or any other climatological or biological shift. Earth is built with so many complex systems that it will almost always be a large combination of factors that result in change.
I got a catholic block.
Small meteors hit the earth all the time, its a long shot but maybe this animal was just in the wrong place place at the wrong time.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Sorry, part of being a true scientist is not afraid to say you were wrong. By clinging to falsities to advance an agenda, you're no better than any creationist.
Yeah, science should totally just abandon making hypotheses about anything controversial, because it might be grounds for anti-science groups to speak out against!
I don't mean to be obnoxious, but that is about as anti-scientific as it gets. Manipulating facts and theories to play politics is pretty much the antithesis of science. Please don't ever suggest something like that again.
I got a catholic block.
Don't you find your desire for censorship/alteration of findings to be a bit ironic?
Why were the scientists surprised? Do they think that no meteorites fell to the Earth at any other time? That seems weird.
They're only 35000 years old - they are not fossils! They are simply old remains and are still bones, not rock.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
If you love knowledge and truth, then you must honor it. Not exploring or publishing certain ideas out of spite is no less anti-science and anti-reason than any creationist notion. --The only difference is that creationists champion ignorance out of foolishness. You are suggesting we do it out of fear and anger. I'm not sure which is worse.
-FL
What are you are missing here is that creationists cannot be "right" in any scientific sense because it's not science. And what useful way of knowing about the world is there other than science?
And frankly, even if creationism were the "truth", that wouldn't matter. Science doesn't purport to deal in "truth." Science exists to come up with reasonable, useful explanations for real-world phenomena. Creationism is unreasonable because it makes too many assumptions, and it's useless because it makes no predictions.
What do you want us to do? Shall we throw up our hands, say "god did it", and shut down our universities?
Ooookay, then. How do you explain the 10,000 year old frozen baby mammoth carcass found in Siberia a few years ago, then? Also, how did they cross the land bridge into the Americas without being able to tolerate cold during the Ice Ages?
Maybe the plasma arcs that supposedly explain meteor craters better than kinetic impact are somehow responsible...
This is classic crackpottery.
The Crackpot wants to claim that they are really a Revolutionary, that they have investigated the weak edges of science and found a fundamental problem, that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and that they hold the solution. A solution that up-ends the existing theories. They will claim that the reason they and they alone were able to discover this solution is because the Science Establishment is too set in their ways, too dogmatic, and simply refuses to question or investigate those areas where the science is weak and various mysteries inadequately explained. They will claim that the only reason that they are given the label "Crackpot" is because the Science Establishment is afraid of their ideas. The Science Establishment hates Revolutionaries, you see, and will not accept the scientific evidence the Revolutionary brings to bear no matter what.
Of course this is nonsense. Real Revolutions happen and up-end the "Establishment", they're just uncommon. Because in most cases, the existing science is by and large good and well established and supported by mountains of evidence. Einstein was a Revolutionary and General Relativity was a Revolution. His theory completely changed how we view the nature of the universe, and one of our most basic assumptions -- that Time itself is constant across all frames of reference. Quantum Mechanics was a huge Revolution in Science, again reversing some of our most basic assumptions about the universe. Yet these Revolutions are now the Scientific Establishment, by the simple virtue of the experimental evidence these Revolutions brought to bear, and now these theories are also supported by mountains of evidence, equally difficult to up-end.
So what then is the difference between the Crackpot and the Revolutionary? Well a major difference is that the true Revolutionary explains the new, explains the experimental data that the old theory cannot, but just as importantly also explains the experimental data that the old theory explained. Relativity didn't prove that Newtonian physics was wrong, it simply showed it to be an approximation for common conditions. It didn't suddenly come out and say "No, actually you can approximate gravitational attraction using the cube root of the distance between masses!" because anyone can drop an object and track its position and see that, in fact, Newton's Laws are correct within the precision of any available measuring device. Quantum Mechanics didn't prove that simpler models of atoms were completely flawed and false -- because all that chemistry you did in high school works just fine using those simpler models. QM only explains what the simpler model cannot.
The Crackpot's theory, on the other hand, cannot explain the existing evidence. The Crackpot, desperate to prove that they are Revolutionaries, then must try to deny the existing evidence, and deny the large successes of the existing theory at explaining the existing evidence.
This is the case with the Electric Universe shlock our "unwelcome celebrity" champions -- it actually tries to replace Newtonian (and relativistic) mechanics with electricity and plasma. Not just show that some of the difficult to explain parts of the universe (dark energy etc) are better explained with electricity, but that extremely easy and well explained parts of the universe (like meteor impacts, planetary motion) are also explained. It's this attempt to shoe-horn their theory into places it doesn't belong, to up-end science that needs no up-ending, that reveals the Crackpot.
Of course that's the point where most people stop reading. The Crackpot th
The enemies of Democracy are