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Astronomers Detect Mysterious Radio Signals Coming From Outside Our Galaxy (sciencealert.com)
This week the New York Post reported on "powerful radio signals which have been detected repeatedly in the same exact location in space," generating as much energy as the sun does in a whole day, in "the only known instance in which these signals have been found twice in the same location in space." Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes Science Alert:
Back in March, scientists detected 10 powerful bursts of radio signals coming from the same location in space. And now researchers have just picked up six more of the signals seemingly emanating from the same region, far beyond our Milky Way... Currently, the leading hypothesis for the source of the Milky Way's FRB is the cataclysmic collision of two neutron stars, which forms a black hole. The idea is that as this collision happens, huge amounts of short-lived radio energy are blasted out into space. But the repeating nature of these distant signals, all coming from the same place, suggest that can't be the case... the most likely hypothesis at the moment for these outer-galactic FRB is that they're coming from an exotic object such as a young neutron star, that's rotating with enough power to regularly emit the extremely bright pulses.
But the New York Post thinks it's aliens.
But the New York Post thinks it's aliens.
http://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/malware-used-in-dnc-breach-found-tracking-ukraine-military/d/d-id/1327778
Donald, you don't have to cover for Putin on every story. Just the ones where he undermines our national sovereignty, like your election did.
According to the paper, a few milliseconds.
Jesus never existed.
Let me start with saying that I have no personal stake in whether or not Jesus was a historical figure. I don't really care about the historicity. However, I DO care about the validity of historical arguments, and you're making a statement here with certainty that is completely unjustified.
Basically, rather than objectively evaluating the evidence, you're stacking the deck unfairly against the other side. The reality is that there isn't really a way to CONFIRM the existence of Jesus after 2000 years, but using criteria applied to other historical figures from that era, Jesus has a stronger than average case for historicity. What that means is that if you're going to apply your same criteria for discounting Jesus to other historical figures, be prepared to throw out around 1/3 of the text of most textbooks with titles like "Ancient History," along with hundreds of other historical figures that we don't commonly doubt the historicity of.
There are absolutely no contemporaneous accounts that speak of Jesus. Not a single one. As far as the historical record is concerned he just did not exist. There's not a single carving, sculpture, poem, painting, drawing or mention of him from the time in which he supposedly lived.
Please reference the fraction of non-elite persons in a non-central Roman province that have such contemporaneous records at that time. Writers, aristocrats, and government officials have records of their existence. Not children of carpenters. And even for elite folks, the details are often quite sketchy and we often have to interpolate information from historians who wrote of these events a century or two later.
There is not a single mention in him in military records or dispatches back to Rome (and surely anyone who could command huge gatherings of people in a potentially disruptive province should be of interest). He is not mentioned in the records of Herodâ(TM)s court nor is he mentioned in the records of the Temple or by any Priests.
What the heck are you talking about? Do you have any sense of the small number of such records that exist today? There are no detailed accounts of "Herod's court" nor any detailed extant "records of the Temple" or writings of contemporary priests. These sorts of records simply don't exist today for the most part, and the few that do exist are incredibly fragmentary. It's not like we have some sort of "daily log" of events for Roman soldiers and "happenings at the Court and at Temple." (And we do have a number of possible references in the Talmud, though there's a lot that's unclear there.)
Surely if he was believed by some to be a prophet and others to be a false prophet some mention of the ruckus he was causing in Judean civic and religious society should have been recorded.
Unless his "ruckus" wasn't as notable as you think. We DO have evidence that there were a number of claimants of "false messiahs" who went around Judea during that era. We don't really know much about most of them, because why would we about some guy who was followed around by a small group of people who mostly did NOT "cause a ruckus" at first (recall that Jesus's message, at least as recorded, was mostly peaceful).
Anyhow, as for records aside from the Bible, there are several. First, you have Josephus, and your other reply to another post is either ill-informed or disingenuous, because while there ARE likely forgeries in Josephus (notably the Testamonim Flavianum), there are other passages that most historians accept as very likely to be genuine.
Then you have Tacitus, one of the MOST respect
Sorry, but this is utter bullshit, and in fact the exact opposite is true. As I said before, there are absolutely no contemporaneous accounts that speak of Jesus. Not a single one.
And again, there are literally hundreds of well-known historical figures that we could say the SAME THING about. Are you also going to go on a quest to remove them from history books on the same basis? (Homer, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Democritus, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, etc., etc. The best you can say about most of these figures is that they MIGHT have existed as a physical person, but we don't have clear evidence. And that's a perfectly fair assessment. Yet you somehow want to claim that you can PROVE Jesus didn't exist.)
There are, however, plenty of accounts both written and physical of other well known figures who existed around the time during which Jesus supposedly lived.
Yep, and plenty of OTHER figures for which we have similar evidence to Jesus, i.e., no contemporary evidence, and only references by 3rd parties from decades or sometimes centuries later.
But not a single record ANY ANY KIND exists for a guy who (supposedly) walked on water, fed 5,000 people with "five barley loaves and two small fish", who healed the sick, cured the blind, raised a man from the dead, healed lepers, and who then died and then came back to life.
And at no point did I EVER argue that such a person existed. As I said, there was a dude named Jesus wandering around Judea in the first century or so, he was apparently killed by Pontius Pilate, and he apparently became the inspiration for folks who would later identify as "Christians." Beyond that, I think a lot of stuff is likely fabricated, as you do. BUT, we seem to have a number of sources for the dude existing.
The most reasonable explanation, the ONLY one that makes any sense at all is that he didn't exist, which is why he left not a single trace whatsoever.
I'm not going to go on with this argument, since there are plenty of better sources out there you could just be reading to realize how ridiculous this all is. But let me just point out what I consider the most serious flaw in all your "most reasonable explanation" -- we have absolutely NO ONE in the centuries after Jesus existed who made the claim that Jesus did NOT exist as an actual human.
If there were even the slightest doubt or rumor that that was true, it would be a boon not only to the enemies of Christianity (Romans, Jews, etc.), but to early Christian sects that are now described as heretics, many of which would have WELCOMED a Jesus that had no physical existence (the Gnostics, perhaps most prominently).
It takes a certain kind of hubris if you know anything about the early Christian heresy debates to look back at all of that and say that if ANYONE suspected Jesus wasn't a real "in the flesh" person that many groups would not have argued that to promote their causes.
So, at a minimum, what we do know is that within a few decades after Jesus's death, EVERYBODY -- from "mainstream" Christians to heretics to Jews who wanted to argue against this new emerging religion to Romans who persecuted them actively -- seemed to think... for whatever reason... that Jesus (called "Christ" by followers) was supposedly based on a real person. We know that to be true, based on historical evidence.
Beyond that, you can choose to believe the historical sources that would be more than sufficient for the existence of plenty of other folks, or you can doubt them and doubt the existence of many historical figures (as many scholars doubt the existence of other major historical figures like Socrates, etc.). I frankly don't give a crap. But don't go around saying you have PROOF that Jesus didn't exist.