Steel swords, steel mines and other metals have been known to exist, recovered in mass heaps under burial mounds all along the great finger lakes region in upstate new york. That is common knowledge in the north now.
You're not LDS? Really? Curiously, I happened to live in Skaneateles for a decade or so, and I say that you are -- let's put this politely and simply say "mistaken" rather than full of metabolic digestive byproducts up to your eyebrows.
Rather than taking the trouble to detail the specific, multiple instances in which you are mistaken, let's just cite one pretty good reference:
that collectively proves you wrong, in detail, in nearly every possible instance of the many, many instances of anachronism and complete, utter failure of archeology to find anything that even the most dedicated LDS fanboy could interpret with all of the world's best hermeneutical exports as be "verification" of the absurdities in TBOM.
and work through a very, very detailed, line by line critique.
Personally, sir, I am suspicious of your claim not to be a Mormon, if you are sufficiently credulous that you think that there were sheep and horses and elephants and steel swords and that the Nephites sailed to the Americas using magnetic compasses and all the rest. But then, there are people who believe that it rained 40 days and 40 nights and covered the Earth with water to the top of Mount Everest (6 inches of rain per minute on every square foot of the Earth's surface) while all of the species that would have been killed by this (which is pretty much all of the Earth's species) were preserved from death in a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart ventilated by a single carefully described window roughly 1 square meter in cross-sectional area. There is apparently little to no limit on the folly of fools, is there?
Or, you could note that in all probability a substantial fraction of the cast and production staff and delivery system for this movie, like all movies, is composed of individuals of widely varying sexual preferences including many who are gay. It is also almost never the case that all the people who make a movie are fully paid off when the movie is finished -- at the very least the producers, the directors, the cast, and other contributors get a percentage of the take in addition to the writer(s) of the screenplay. Orson Scott Card might actually have been paid substantially up front for the movie rights and have done very little in the production and might only get a comparatively thin slice of the pie.
Also, Orson Scott Card has plenty of money -- seriously -- with or without the movie. He's a public figure, has written many, many books, and a fair number of them have been bestsellers. He can almost certainly remain visible in his opposition to gay rights for the rest of his life on his existing wealth and income regardless of how the movie does.
It is impossible to boycott all of the people who oppose gay marriage or other gay rights. Unless they are vocal/visible, it is impossible to even know who they are, although if you happen to know the religious preferences of an individual you might be able to make a good guess. Boycott the Baptist Church? Sure, if you want to call "not being religious" a boycott. Boycott every restaurant, car dealership, grocery store owned or managed by a Baptist, including ones that are vocal about gays? Not possible, not in the South where I live. Mormons are even more invisible. Boycott the entire 1/6 of the world that is Muslim? In your dreams.
At least OSC is up front about his position. That means it can be sensibly opposed. Or better yet, ignored.
How is that surprising? TBOM is America's first Science Fiction novel, after all! Steel swords and old world plants and animals in America, magnetic compasses, a Middle East with unrecognizable geometry -- it's clearly an alternate history steampunk novel ahead of its time.
So OSC didn't have far to go. With that said, I think Ender's Game is a decent novel. Perhaps his only decent novel. Not exactly a unique idea even as SF novels go, but enjoyable enough to read.
In the end, it's like Chick-Fil-A. It's hyper-Christian (closed on Sunday), its founder/owner is fond of gay-bashing, but it has damn good chicken and the actual people who work there are often lovely and courteous. Boycotting CFA over this issue is probably overkill. Ditto boycotting Ender's Game, the movie, or OSC books in general (aside from the fact that many of them are mediocre, which is a good reason not to buy anything).
After all, what's really at fault isn't any individual person here, it is "religion" -- believing scriptural dogma just because, for better or worse, to the complete exclusion of common sense, concern for human dignity and rights, and the simplest of honest ethical principles. All religious scriptures are fantasies, science fiction, mythologies, stories, and generate an enormous amount of pain and suffering in the world through the agency of those raised within the religions who cannot seem to differentiate fantasy from reality, or use anything like actual human judgment or rational ethical principle to make ethical decisions.
Double ditto. I've written magazine articles on beowulf-style supercomputers I've built at home (I used to write a column for "Cluster World" magazine in the brief time that it existed, but I also wrote an article or two for more mainstream computer mags). I have also set up clusters for companies I've founded and helped others set up corporate clusters. Some of what are arguably the world's largest parallel supercomputers -- Google's cluster, for example -- are not government funded. Many others aren't government funded, they are built by companies that sell products to many entities, among them (perhaps) the government. Aerospace engineering companies all need supercomputers to do computational fluid dynamics on hull designs, for example. Ordinary engineering companies use them to do finite element analysis. Gaming clusters are by any sensible definition a highly parallelized, dynamically partitioning supercomputer.
Ever since the invention of PVM and open source versions of MPI, anybody with a small pile of computational resources and a network has been able to implement a beowulf-style supercomputer built from them, an architecture so successful that nearly all of the supercomputers built in the world today are basically "beowulfs". I've helped a few dozen individuals (one at a time, not via my book or magazine articles) build beowulf clusters at home just to dink around with for fun, or to learn a new job skill, or to set up a learning cluster at a small community college or university. No government funding, often out of pocket funding or repurposing old computers that are lying around. Not all of these clusters could beat Moore's Law, which has inexorably eaten Amdahl's Lunch after a few years (that is, by the time they were built it was often the case that a single processor over the counter computer at the high end of clock and so on would beat the small cluster made of older systems) but there is no doubt that they were supercomputer architecture with substantial (but sublinear) speedup compared to single threaded execution times for a suitable parallelized chore.
Besides, it is useful to remember that your cell phone would have been considered a munition a bit over a decade ago. A better thing to state is that everybody buys supercomputers because almost every processor based system from navigation systems in cars to cell phones to tablets to personal computers is, these days, a supercomputer. My i7 laptop has four cores, eight contexts, and exhibits linear speedup on in-cache embarrassingly parallel code out to eight simultaneous tasks because Intel has done a pretty amazing job of internally parallelizing the execution subsystems for the contexts. It beats the hell out of almost all of the small clusters I've ever built, including clusters with many, many more nodes. Build even a small stack of i7 systems on a gigabit or better network -- two, for example -- and you've got a sixteen core supercomputer with a complex communication topology (variable speeds and nonlinear thresholds, as the i7 does stop giving you the purely linear 8 way speedup for large enough tasks and drops down to a bit over four -- again an instance of "superlinear speedup" of parallel code even WITHOUT using a fancy tool if you simply count cores instead of context and ignore internal parallelism for certain kinds of code that permits a single core to be managing memory I/O for one task while executing the other).
Hey, don't disrespect physicists in parallel computing. Some of us actually understand how to do it properly and agree with what you state. Superlinear speedup is not precisely unknown, but it is rare and depends on architectural "tricks" that typically preserve Amdahl's law at a low level but apparently violate it at a higher level. In the naivest, stupidest example, if we didn't count cores instead of processors, even embarrassingly parallel code would exhibit superlinear speedup on a single processor system. Replace core count with internal ALUs, pipelines, SIMD/MIMD in the architecture, onboard vector units, etc, and one can get the same sort of thing per core for just the right code.
I am deeply skeptical of any sort of toolset that purports to be able to either statically or dynamically partition a given set of upper level code to get superlinear speedup. I won't say it is impossible to build a set that "works" for some fraction of the parallelizable code in the Universe, but given the complex tradeoffs between computation and communication in different communication topologies and task partitionings, this is not a problem that has a simple universal solution and I suspect that in lots of cases an experienced parallel programming human being could spend a half day analyzing the code and architecture and beat (or tie, as the USUAL rule is going to be no meaningful superlinear speedup boring for coarse grained parallel or embarrassingly parallel code) the output from an automated tool.
An interesting example of a tool that does this sort of tuning (semi-empirically!) that works is ATLAS, the automatically tuned linear algebra system. Basically it does a search of the space of partitionings and algorithms to determine the best combination of the two for performing basic linear algebra functions (BLAS) and then implements it in a transparent library. It is semi-empirical because it is nearly impossible to predict the overall effect of every combination of SSE support, clock speed, bus speed, core architecture -- it is a lot easier to just go and find out. But the problem ATLAS solves is comparatively simple relative to even static task partitioning on heterogeneous computational resources with variable costs for core-to-core communication, especially in today's multicore world where one has different speeds between cores on a processor, between processors in a system, between systems, between general purpose processors and special purpose e.g. GPU/vector processors, where the communication topology itself can have a major impact on the kind of parallel speedup any given task has.
This, then, is the interesting part as you note, and who knows, maybe they've built a sufficiently intelligent system to get nominally superlinear speedup (or hell, who cares, just getting close to optimal speedup sublinear or not) from a meaningful fraction of the space of possible parallizable code. But God couldn't get superlinear speedup on fine grained synchronous parallel code with long range coupling out of any multi-node scalable parallel architecture available in the real world today, no matter how fancy the partitioning tool.
Aw, now you are being rational. C'mon, when somebody sees a transluminal neutrino, traps a magnetic monopole, measures a signal that might possibly be the long lost Higgs boson, you can't go around doubting it. Where would climate science be if one doubted the spaghetti-snarl output of all of the GCMs and Hansen's predictions of 5 meter SLR by 2100? Where would medicine be if we doubted that oat bran and fish oil pills prevent heart attacks? Where would the Middle East be if all of a sudden all of the Muslims, Christians and Jews suddenly doubted the Bible, Koran, etc, especially the good parts where he promises land to this or that group or gives it permission to enslave or otherwise abuse non-believers?
Next you're going to tell me that "dark matter" might ultimately turn out to be a lot more brown dwarfs than we think there are instead of new physics that enables interstellar transportation. Spoilsport.
Curiously, I did this too (physicists all love big sparks and explosions, I guess:-)
I built it to melt metal in my basement. So (being twelve and stupid at the time) I struck the arc, and bang, there it was tremendously bright. I happened to be in bare feet standing on the damp basement floor, so I grabbed a handy nail in a pair of metal pliers, wrapped a paper towel around the handles, and stuck the nail into the arc (and mind you, I didn't have anything like eye protection, I'm standing there in my shorts and tee shirt, right?).
After I picked myself up off of the floor, I thought "Damn, I guess I needed more paper towels". So I rewrapped the handles in a double layer of paper towels and stuck the nail into the arc again.
After I picked myself up off the floor a second time, I shook myself off, unplugged the arc lamp, and never ran it again (probably saving my vision, my heart, my life, and perhaps the house...) But it did work to make me smarter! So did taking a hit of 100,000 volts or so through a fluorescent tube straight from a homemade Tesla coil!
I can't imagine what I was doing, risking burning my family alive, the tragedy of my death, my eyesight... Wait, insight fading, fading....
Hey, has anybody got a roll of magnet wire? What would happen if we drove a carbon arc from a really big Tesla coil in a stream of pure Deuterium gas? I bet we could get thermonuclear fusion going in my basement!
I've shot myself (by accident) with a 410 shotgun at close range (blowing off my thumb in the process) and -- d'ya think? First person shooters where people get shot repeatedly and overrun a heath kit and are suddenly better (and didn't just die as their limbs and organs were blown off or perforated) aren't realistic?
Damn. Who knew?
I'm taking back my original copies of Duke Nukem and Doom, and trading them in for a realistic game like Mortal Combat or World of Warcraft.
Or let's rewrite all first person shooters so:
a) Getting shot triggers dog zap collars or taser clips attached to various parts of your body set to a level that is not quite lethal. Make love, not war, Baby...;-)
b) If you persist in play after you get shot the first time (non-fatally) and eventually get shot and die (Ouch! Twenty minutes on the floor twitching before your muscles will work again!) you never, ever get to play the game again. In fact, you have to sell your computer and join the peace corps to help villagers in South India build waste treatment plants and safe wells.
Still not realistic -- take it from me, getting shot hurts like hell even when it doesn't kill you but merely maims you a bit -- but far more instructive...
Sauron had nukes and biologicals and binary nerve gases, silly beanie. The only reason hobbits survived the first war at all is because their little hobbit holes double as fallout shelters and their immune systems were strong from walking around all of the time without shoes. Also, hobbits are very fond of mushrooms and other alkaloid-containing herbs and have evolved a remarkable resistance to toxins. Their powerfully detoxifying livers are roughly a third of their body weight, after a lifetime of quaffing and smoking pipeweed.
So no, not the most powerful force. "Cannon fodder" would be the right term. In fact, they were just the right size to shoot from cannons.
Just for the record, I'm a PhD physicist, graduated from and teach at a major research university, and think both ID and creationism are utterly absurd propositions, repeatedly confounded by observation after observation. Believing in things without evidence, or in the teeth of directly contradictory evidence, is certainly possible for anybody, including physicists who should know better, but it almost invariably involves being brainwashed when they were too young to know better or think critically into thinking that antique scriptural writings had some magical cachet that simply looking at the world and letting it speak for itself does not.
Evidence directly contradicting creationism in physics starts with this little thing called the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy. This law states in essence that we have never observed the mass-energy content of the Universe being increased or decreased (outside of the tiny transient violation in quantum theory). Ever. Not as far away as we can see with the biggest telescopes. Not as far back in time as we can see with the biggest telescopes. Not in the laboratory. Not in any physical theory that works to explain a whole host of experimental observations not directly concerned with energy. Not in our everyday lives, where I can be confident that the bed in my bedroom is still there when I cannot see it because mass-energy is conserved.
Empirically, there isn't any good reason to believe that anything, ever was created ex nihilo, let alone everything. It's as silly as believing that the dark side of the moon contains a full-featured Disney resort underneath a crater somewhere, just because we haven't looked (yet), or if you think that is too easy to falsify, believing that there exists a full-featured Disney resort on a moon orbiting the fourth planet orbiting Arcturus, or a full-featured Disney resort "in Heaven" (making it really impossible to obtain either positive or negative evidence.
Then (since you bring it up) there is the information theoretic argument. Both creationism and ID sweep under the rug the entire issue of information theory and intelligence and entropy. Here's precisely how idiotic it is:
We observe complex structure in the real Universe. One asserts -- without proof, and rather in contradiction to both everyday observation of a multiplicity of entirely natural complex forms and common sense -- that complex forms cannot occur naturally. To explain them, we invoke intelligence that must have designed/created the complex forms, the basic teleological "watch implies a watchmaker" argument for God. But of course this makes God even more complex, and by the same argument, even more unlikely to have occurred naturally! The hypothesis thus begins with a special exception -- a natural entity, God, is permitted to have infinitely more complexity than any complexity we observe in nature, all because somebody has a hard time believing that complexity in nature can come about without an active intelligence designing it. Who designs the designer?
Entropy is even worse. All of our observations of "intelligence" involve considerable structure and a fairly rigorous state-switching mechanism supported by physical biology and/or electronics. Entropy is (literally) the log of the missing information (to a physicist) and there are theorems concerning energy, entropy, and heat generation in switching mechanisms supporting intelligence. To be able to perceive time at all -- to enable free will, the ability to act on the basis of an uncertain future -- one requires a point of view that has incomplete information. The derivation of the Nakajima-Zwanzig equation for the time evolution of an open (quantum) system embedded in a larger Universe typifies how intelligent agents have entropy bleed into them from an uncertain external universe, and hence can exhibit non-deterministic behavior. God by definition
Aww, don't say that. My atoms just celebrated their 13,783,913,225th birthday and now you've hurt their feelings. I just hope they don't react by joining the free radical movement.
Hey, it works with me and lobster. There they are, relatively stupid crustaceans, ripping up and eating fish and the like and surely not deeply into philosophy. Then bang -- a few days later, at least some of their molecules have become -- me! Along with a few molecules of succulent melted butter that have joined other lipids that are a part of me around my belly that I could stand becoming not-me.
I'll bet I'd be delicious, slow roasted with garlic until all that fat comes dripping down over the roast, or with my belly meat cured and turned into "long bacon". More a savory dish than a sweet one.
Granted, but now invert it back to the question. We will never meet aliens. We might at best meet their "seed ships". Those seed ships would no doubt be equipped with AI, AI at a level that would made them "the alien intelligence" we are likely to meet. Either they are programmed to avoid already settled planets entirely (wise for so very many reasons unless you are CERTAIN that you have the biggest guns in the galaxy) or else they (think they) have the biggest guns in the galaxy and consider evolution of the fittest to be the fundamental axiom of morality, in which case the robots will proceed to sterilize the planet, or at the very least wipe out all species that could be a threat and greatly simplify the existing planetary ecosystem, and then bioform it to meet their needs and crank out lots of little B.E.M. bottle babies to take it over.
Either way, we'll STILL never meet the real aliens. One way we MIGHT -- briefly -- have a clue that they were out there. If I were a galaxy-travelling AI with the second directive, I'd just stop my ship out in the Oort cloud, pick a half dozen 10 km asteroids, build fusion-driven ion jets onto them, add moderate directional control and drop them so that they would all arrive at once, with little warning, at six selected spots on the surface of the Earth. Then wait 100 years or so for the worst of the extinction event weather swings to damp down and bring in the clowns. The only hint we'd have that there are aliens in the Universe would be the enormous improbability of a six asteroid extinction event, at most one year before it happened (one year if they don't stealth the asteroids by e.g. painting them flat black or fitting them with a mirrored cone facing the sun to reflect all incident sunlight sideways). I rather think that truly paranoid aliens would arrange it so we would have no more than a day of warning or no warning at all. Most humans would see the flash of the rock that killed them, and within minutes the shockwaves and pyroclastic flow would arrive, transforming them into dust in seconds. Scattered survivors in e.g. submarines that survived the underwater shock waves and tsunamis of the oceanic hits would come back to a surface with no human built structure standing, no food, no plants, no animals, and an Earth with near-unit albedo and millions of teratons of surplus ocean water and fine-grained ash and dust in the atmosphere. First there would be dirty rain, then cleaner snow, and the Earth would ice up, quite possibly all the way to the equator.
One would hope that the aliens would have done this before, and would have the patience to wait out the mini-ice age or the technology to bring ice ages to an end, but I don't think that even with our technological knowledge a single human would survive an attack such as this for a full decade after the event (and bear in mind that "six" and "10 km" are variables that can be adjusted to reduce that probability further still). If we had a year's warning, we could probably build or retrofit underground bunkers capable of preserving humans for that decade, but our future prospects would still be bleak. We'd still have a hostile alien roboship with effectively unlimited free energy (it can refill it's deuterium supply from the moons of Jupiter, for example) sitting on top of a gravity well in a solar system that is chock fully of rocks. There is no depth we could build a shelter that could survive a second wave of smaller rocks dropped directly on any shelters revealed by e.g. a heat signature or electromagnetic radiation or simple observation from orbit. And remember, they've got a whole century to ensure that they got every last one of the vermin inhabiting what will eventually become a steaming warm jungle or a nice dry desert or whatever their idea of an "ideal" environment is.
All of this (to them) would be entirely justified. If we were fitter than they are to spread all over the galaxy and beyond, we'd wipe them out instead of them wiping us out, right?
Or, it's at least equally possible that far more advanced creatures have a an advanced morality/compassion/value set that recognizes that the only hope lesser beings have of becoming greater ones in the one, short, pain-filled lifetime they have is being eaten by those greater beings.
In which case, when they land, their first words might well be, "Wow! Who brought the mustard..."
a) Because there aren't any aliens to meet b) Because even if there were, they might not be within (fill in the blank with) N>3 light years from us. c) Because absolutely trivial physics suggests that for ANY constructed object to travel N > 3 LY, or 18 trillion miles, it would require stupendous amounts of energy. At one kilometer per second -- 1 megajoule per two kilograms of payload -- it would still take 300,000 YEARS to travel ONE light year. To cut travel time down to 300 years, one would have to travel at 1000 kilometers per second, at an energy cost of 1terajoule per two kilograms, and shortly after that one has to start paying a relativistic penalty and get less and less benefit for each doubling in energy cost. Any propulsion system that involved reaction mass would have to lift MANY orders of magnitude more mass, multiplying this already absurd number by a much larger absurd number.
True, there is always the chance of new physics, of "warp drives" and other such stuff, but that so far is pure science fiction, and if anything the fact that we AREN'T up to our armpits in smelly alien suggests that either there REALLY aren't any aliens to meet or that there is no such new physics out there to discover.
I love SF, and am a physicist and thrilled at the prospect of new physics, but when answering an open ended question it is always better to base the answer on what is known, not what MIGHT be true, if life were a Heinlein novel. Based on known physics, we'll never meet aliens because it is effectively impossible to travel in person between the stars.
Sending one's genetic code, OTOH, might be doable, if you could get it past the customs and immigration people who might not be thrilled at us cloning a potentially hostile competitive species and raising it out of all natural cultural context just to say high to a life form that didn't evolve on Earth.
It is fair to note that we have never observed an act of creation, in the literal sense. Indeed, the correct statement of the relevant, empirically supported physics is:
Mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed, but simply changes form.
More sophisticated field-theoretic statements conserve "information" as fundamentally as mass-energy, but the point is that these are conservation laws, things we have never observed to fail in an enormous range of observations and experiments and spacetime scales ranging from cosmology to the smallest scales we can currently measure.
The really, really interesting question is why anyone would have a "creation" theory for anything, given that we have yet to make a single concrete observation of a creation event of any sort, anywhere, at any time, or even find a way of inferring that such an event once upon a time might of occurred. All we have ever observed is things that already existed changing form. The Universe we can observe is a dance of existing stuff back as far as we can see in time, away as far as we can see in space, at all scales from the largest to the smallest that we can measure.
There is an interesting information theoretic argument that essentially proves that for an omniscient God to not be inconsistent, it has to be the Universe. In order to be omniscient and self-knowledgeable, the irreducible information content of God has to precisely match the irreducible information content of the Universe, defining the Universe as everything that exists (which must include God, if God exists). All of our observations of "sentience" or a sense of passing time involve entropy, and our understanding of reasoning and sentience as a dynamical state that changes over time further suggests that it is almost certainly meaningless to assign a property such as "sentience" to a Universe per se, no matter how complex, and the assertion of entropy as a measure of state change over time contradicts zero-entropy perfect knowledge. So there isn't any really great reason to conclude that the Universe is any sort of sentient God, but that's pretty much the only model (besides God as the really big and powerful but entirely mortal and time-bound space alien with technology that looks like magic) that isn't egregiously inconsistent.
Surely you jest. The Bible is disproven repeatedly. It is massively internally self-contradictory (and hence literally cannot possibly be true in its entirety). The book of Genesis is disproven -- not just not proven to be true, but proven to be false, proven to contradict a great deal of empirically founded, macroscopically and microscopically consistent knowledge, things that we accept as almost certainly true, beyond any sane question, every day.
It is difficult to even know where to begin in listing the problems in Genesis, as it isn't even approximately or metaphorically correct in its description of creation -- it has things in the wrong order, an absurd order temporally, it has nothing whatsoever that describes the actual processes any rational person would infer looking at the actual data. It gets the age enormously wrong. It gets the size wrong. It gets the structure wrong. It posits the story of a truly absurd flood (6 inches of rain a minute for 40 days straight to barely cover Mount Everest) and a Wal-Mart sized wooden boat ventilated through a carefully described one-square-cubit window in which every species on Earth that would be killed by such a flood -- which would be damn near every species on Earth -- was preserved. It describes a creation process for humans that never happened and is directly contradicted by the fossil record, introduced as an equally absurd explanation of theodicy -- the contradiction between believing in a compassionate and loving God and the existence of evil. It asserts that the Earth is the center of all things, floats on the ocean, and is surmounted by a solid bowl of sky hung with lights and pierced with holes through which God pours rain. It asserts that the stars can be shaken down by things like Earthquakes.
The "history" of the Bible is equally absurd and is contradicted repeatedly by archeology. Again it is difficult to know where to begin, but Tubal Cain as an "artificer of iron" is an excellent example, given that any Biblical timeline would put Tubal Cain several thousand years before the iron age. Iron, in other words, literally hadn't been invented yet. There isn't a shred of evidence outside of the assertions of the Bible itself that Moses ever existed (any more than there is evidence for Adam and Eve, or Noah, or any of the other figures from Genesis or Exodus). Jesus clearly was not omniscient or clued in on this, as he asserted on more than one occasion that Noah and the flood was a real person and real event (generally when predicting a similar apocalyptic event that never happened).
Besides, even if the Bible (old testament) were a nearly perfect history, instead of an obvious collection of fables, myths, legends, a mish-mosh of earlier Sumerian legends that dates no earlier than the first thousand years or so BCE that would not constitute any sort of evidence for the truth of its creation myths, any more than the creation myths of the Hindu religion are "proven" when somebody discovers that e.g. Mathura from the Mahabharata actually existed at some point in the past. I can write entire fantasies about (say) the Civil War with all sorts of characters that never existed and events that never happened and yet salt the story with references to things that did happen and people that did exist. I can even insert space aliens, or (in the case of the Iliad) with Gods. Does the Greek pantheon of Gods actually exist because they are characters in the Iliad and we've now discovered the site of ancient Troy? Does this prove Greco-Roman paganism, creation myth and all?
Look. I mean that quite literally. Forget the big bang and just look. You can, if you look for it, find and follow the entire historical argument and evidence for estimates of the size and age of the Universe. It isn't hidden, and isn't mysterious. Nor is it the product of "scientists with an agenda" unless that agenda is doing their best to figure out what really happened by letting the world speak for itself rather than taking an antique mythology written
... of course. Because if you have to explain it at all to anyone over the age of five, nothing less than a clearing blow to the head will work. One hard enough to clear that head of most of the superstitious brain matter that resides within it.
I say this with a rather enormous amount of experience on the subject. Absolutely no scientific or rational or empirical argument will convince someone that their religious beliefs are wrong. The entire sub-field of cognitive dissonance in behavioral psychology is devoted to understanding why this is so and how to deal with it, but its empirical conclusions are that a human deep in the throes of CD is not going to be pulled out of it by a silly little thing like facts, not even the blatant in-your-face failure of the core belief. There is even evidence that the more absurd the belief and the more humiliating its failure the stronger the denial becomes, the more powerful the state of CD itself becomes.
So don't bother pissing into a category four hurricane, my friend. Radiometric dating will not work. Astrophysical observation will not work. Paleontological observation of the orthogonality of human and dinosaur fossils will not work. Attacks on the core scriptural mythology (showing that it is absurd and self-contradictory and filled with evil and not in agreement with known geography or facts) will not work. Arithmetic (for example, showing the absurdity of a 5-6 inch per minute world-spanning rain that lasted 40 days -- the rate and time required to cover Mount Everest -- while preserving several million species in a handmade wooden boat the size of a Wal-Mart with no air conditioning nor heating nor ventilation for an additional half a year) will not work. Nothing works. If mere rationality or evidence worked, it would already have done so.
Had he expressed hatred or prejudice based on their religion, like the AC above did with Islam...
Fuck Christianity. The only thing it has going for it is that it's not quite as evil as Islam.
...that would be bigotry. You know... picking A religion as being "more evil" based on current political situation, when every single flavor of Abrahamic religion has uncountable crimes to answer for, and those others aren't much different either.
Pointing out that all brands of Christianity are the same fairytale (only told a bit differently) is just telling the truth.
Just like pointing out that all religions are evil as they teach the people to build their view of reality based on a delusion - basically, inducing billions with cognitive dissonance bordering on insanity.
Meanwhile, staying politically correct and letting them carry on with their delusion without at least pointing out the most glaring flaws in it - that would be hypocrisy. Also, infliction of harm through inaction.
Sadly, this is deeply insightful and correct. I do think it is possible to sort religions and sects out very roughly in order of the overt evilness of their scriptural precepts and functional memes, but it is much more difficult to project this evil onto individuals who nominally belong to such a sect. That is because we live in an age of heresy unheard of before, where everybody feels perfectly free to makes stuff up and alter the fundamental scriptural precepts and memes at will. Hence if you point out (correctly) that the position of most Southern Baptist churches is that homosexuality is a sin:
then of course somebody will turn around and point out an exception. And since we outlawed burning people, hanging people, torturing people, jailing people, silencing people, persecuting people, prosecuting people, and otherwise using force majeure and mortal sanction to enforce rules against choice, there have been plenty of exceptions, in fact being heretical is the post-Enlightenment post-Protestant normal, with an ever increasing divergence of belief. So although it is absolutely true that the official position of the Catholic church is one that opposes the use of birth control, in the US nearly all Catholics would be considered heretic by the non-heretical standards of Catholicism 400 years ago, and most sexually active Catholics use birth control. One can also compare Bellarmine's Letter to Galileo (which lays out its formal dogma concerning the ad literam interpretation of scripture and the horrific doors of heresy and contradiction that are opened by allowing it to be "interpreted" according to the discoveries of the science Galileo and others were in the process of inventing) to modern reality, and note that all of those predictions have, in fact, come to pass.
The point in the end is that none of this matters. One can take any of the scripture-based religions and note countless contradictions in their scriptures and that will not falsify them in the minds of individuals who nominally subscribe to it (but then lay on a small mountain of individual heresies according to their individual whim) because they will, as you note, willfully engage in a rich mixture of the practices associated with cognitive dissonance to avoid confronting the contradictions. Hermeneutics, exegesis, head in the sand syndrome, or simple denial, one cannot prove them wrong and hence they consider themselves "free" to continue to believe an absurd mythology (modified to suite their particular personality).
And this will still not make that mythology true! Or make it probably true, the only kind of truth a good Bayesian can acknowledge. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, perhaps, but it also damn well isn't evidence for, and the default state of belief, the
... in Durham, in spite of the fact that alligator reproduction is an excellent bellwether and they are abundant a mere 150 miles away due East on the coast. 1 degree is 70 miles North, 4 to 6 is (say) 350, so by now there should be alligators in Virginia on the coast and central NC where I live FROM the coast. Alligators can only reproduce when a winter is frost free, as temperature determines the gender of the alligators in the egg. First and last frost in Durham haven't discernibly changed in the forty years I've lived here, starting back in the last "the Ice Age is starting" panic in the early 70s. There have been some bitterly cold winters and some remarkably warm ones -- much like the winters over all of the last century. We've set 100 year records for snowfall in the last 13 years, had a snow and ice storm on the Outer Banks (and inland) where it never seems to snow in mid-April, and had a killing frost in May, three full weeks after our supposed last-frost date. We've had winters where the Bradford Pears and Redbuds started to bloom in mid February (easily a month early), where it hasn't snowed at all, when you could sunbathe in mid-January, at least if you picked your days.
This winter was amazingly normal. A handful of small snowfalls, a few warm days, but mostly cold, often wet and cold, with lots of frost. The Bradford Pears and Redbuds still haven't bloomed, although we've had a few days of really nice spring-like weather (quite seasonal) and it didn't frost last night although it did the night before. The massive snows of winter all fell to the west or to the north, never quite reaching us here (except as cold nasty rain a few degrees above freezing -- got a lot of that).
There's plenty of scientific evidence of warming, as long as you pick your days, pick your events, pick your years, pick your starting points, and don't look at all the evidence that contradicts it. As everybody knows, scientific studies prove that green jelly beans cause Acne.
But what about all those reactors that blew up or melted (in TFA)? Or were they cheating and just bombarding the nickel with slow neutrons? One would think that if they produced an exothermic reaction even one time and weren't complete Pons and Fleishman nutcases they'd be able to pick up the beta (if not gamma) signature of the events. I'm also a bit curious as to just where the energy produced "comes out". They assert that no gamma rays happen. They get electron and neutrino out. Presumably we're talking about order of MeV/event, so the reaction produces order of MeV electrons (we hope, as energy going into neutrinos is gone forever) and a certain amount of lattice recoil in the now-copper nucleus. MeV electrons seem to have enough energy to produce an electron-positron cascade and convert at least some of the energy into X-rays (ionizing radiation). Probably relatively easily stopped (as is the beta itself) but the process would likely not be "radiation free". Finally, those same electrons seem as though they have the right general range of energy to be captured by the hydrogen nuclei (or would, if they didn't scatter on the way in and if there was any sort of cross-section) leaving open the possibility that the electrons themselves would create the requisite electron excitation and some sort of chain reaction might be possible.
Interesting idea, in other words, but TFA doesn't clarify the underlying physics to the point where it is really intelligible.
Well, except for the fact that ozone is an important GHG -- one of the three most important ones, from the spectroscopic data -- albeit one that is most common in the stratosphere where it warms the tropopause from above, rather than in the troposphere...
Slashdot Mirror
Steel swords, steel mines and other metals have been known to exist, recovered in mass heaps under burial mounds all along the great finger lakes region in upstate new york. That is common knowledge in the north now.
You're not LDS? Really? Curiously, I happened to live in Skaneateles for a decade or so, and I say that you are -- let's put this politely and simply say "mistaken" rather than full of metabolic digestive byproducts up to your eyebrows.
Rather than taking the trouble to detail the specific, multiple instances in which you are mistaken, let's just cite one pretty good reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_and_the_Book_of_Mormon
that collectively proves you wrong, in detail, in nearly every possible instance of the many, many instances of anachronism and complete, utter failure of archeology to find anything that even the most dedicated LDS fanboy could interpret with all of the world's best hermeneutical exports as be "verification" of the absurdities in TBOM.
Or you can visit one of my other favorite sites:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/BOM/index.htm
and work through a very, very detailed, line by line critique.
Personally, sir, I am suspicious of your claim not to be a Mormon, if you are sufficiently credulous that you think that there were sheep and horses and elephants and steel swords and that the Nephites sailed to the Americas using magnetic compasses and all the rest. But then, there are people who believe that it rained 40 days and 40 nights and covered the Earth with water to the top of Mount Everest (6 inches of rain per minute on every square foot of the Earth's surface) while all of the species that would have been killed by this (which is pretty much all of the Earth's species) were preserved from death in a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart ventilated by a single carefully described window roughly 1 square meter in cross-sectional area. There is apparently little to no limit on the folly of fools, is there?
rgb
Or, you could note that in all probability a substantial fraction of the cast and production staff and delivery system for this movie, like all movies, is composed of individuals of widely varying sexual preferences including many who are gay. It is also almost never the case that all the people who make a movie are fully paid off when the movie is finished -- at the very least the producers, the directors, the cast, and other contributors get a percentage of the take in addition to the writer(s) of the screenplay. Orson Scott Card might actually have been paid substantially up front for the movie rights and have done very little in the production and might only get a comparatively thin slice of the pie.
Also, Orson Scott Card has plenty of money -- seriously -- with or without the movie. He's a public figure, has written many, many books, and a fair number of them have been bestsellers. He can almost certainly remain visible in his opposition to gay rights for the rest of his life on his existing wealth and income regardless of how the movie does.
It is impossible to boycott all of the people who oppose gay marriage or other gay rights. Unless they are vocal/visible, it is impossible to even know who they are, although if you happen to know the religious preferences of an individual you might be able to make a good guess. Boycott the Baptist Church? Sure, if you want to call "not being religious" a boycott. Boycott every restaurant, car dealership, grocery store owned or managed by a Baptist, including ones that are vocal about gays? Not possible, not in the South where I live. Mormons are even more invisible. Boycott the entire 1/6 of the world that is Muslim? In your dreams.
At least OSC is up front about his position. That means it can be sensibly opposed. Or better yet, ignored.
rgb
How is that surprising? TBOM is America's first Science Fiction novel, after all! Steel swords and old world plants and animals in America, magnetic compasses, a Middle East with unrecognizable geometry -- it's clearly an alternate history steampunk novel ahead of its time.
So OSC didn't have far to go. With that said, I think Ender's Game is a decent novel. Perhaps his only decent novel. Not exactly a unique idea even as SF novels go, but enjoyable enough to read.
In the end, it's like Chick-Fil-A. It's hyper-Christian (closed on Sunday), its founder/owner is fond of gay-bashing, but it has damn good chicken and the actual people who work there are often lovely and courteous. Boycotting CFA over this issue is probably overkill. Ditto boycotting Ender's Game, the movie, or OSC books in general (aside from the fact that many of them are mediocre, which is a good reason not to buy anything).
After all, what's really at fault isn't any individual person here, it is "religion" -- believing scriptural dogma just because, for better or worse, to the complete exclusion of common sense, concern for human dignity and rights, and the simplest of honest ethical principles. All religious scriptures are fantasies, science fiction, mythologies, stories, and generate an enormous amount of pain and suffering in the world through the agency of those raised within the religions who cannot seem to differentiate fantasy from reality, or use anything like actual human judgment or rational ethical principle to make ethical decisions.
Sigh.
rgb
Wow, that sounds almost like -- the theory of evolution. Sorta. Kinda. Well, maybe not...
Double ditto. I've written magazine articles on beowulf-style supercomputers I've built at home (I used to write a column for "Cluster World" magazine in the brief time that it existed, but I also wrote an article or two for more mainstream computer mags). I have also set up clusters for companies I've founded and helped others set up corporate clusters. Some of what are arguably the world's largest parallel supercomputers -- Google's cluster, for example -- are not government funded. Many others aren't government funded, they are built by companies that sell products to many entities, among them (perhaps) the government. Aerospace engineering companies all need supercomputers to do computational fluid dynamics on hull designs, for example. Ordinary engineering companies use them to do finite element analysis. Gaming clusters are by any sensible definition a highly parallelized, dynamically partitioning supercomputer.
Ever since the invention of PVM and open source versions of MPI, anybody with a small pile of computational resources and a network has been able to implement a beowulf-style supercomputer built from them, an architecture so successful that nearly all of the supercomputers built in the world today are basically "beowulfs". I've helped a few dozen individuals (one at a time, not via my book or magazine articles) build beowulf clusters at home just to dink around with for fun, or to learn a new job skill, or to set up a learning cluster at a small community college or university. No government funding, often out of pocket funding or repurposing old computers that are lying around. Not all of these clusters could beat Moore's Law, which has inexorably eaten Amdahl's Lunch after a few years (that is, by the time they were built it was often the case that a single processor over the counter computer at the high end of clock and so on would beat the small cluster made of older systems) but there is no doubt that they were supercomputer architecture with substantial (but sublinear) speedup compared to single threaded execution times for a suitable parallelized chore.
Besides, it is useful to remember that your cell phone would have been considered a munition a bit over a decade ago. A better thing to state is that everybody buys supercomputers because almost every processor based system from navigation systems in cars to cell phones to tablets to personal computers is, these days, a supercomputer. My i7 laptop has four cores, eight contexts, and exhibits linear speedup on in-cache embarrassingly parallel code out to eight simultaneous tasks because Intel has done a pretty amazing job of internally parallelizing the execution subsystems for the contexts. It beats the hell out of almost all of the small clusters I've ever built, including clusters with many, many more nodes. Build even a small stack of i7 systems on a gigabit or better network -- two, for example -- and you've got a sixteen core supercomputer with a complex communication topology (variable speeds and nonlinear thresholds, as the i7 does stop giving you the purely linear 8 way speedup for large enough tasks and drops down to a bit over four -- again an instance of "superlinear speedup" of parallel code even WITHOUT using a fancy tool if you simply count cores instead of context and ignore internal parallelism for certain kinds of code that permits a single core to be managing memory I/O for one task while executing the other).
rgb
Hey, don't disrespect physicists in parallel computing. Some of us actually understand how to do it properly and agree with what you state. Superlinear speedup is not precisely unknown, but it is rare and depends on architectural "tricks" that typically preserve Amdahl's law at a low level but apparently violate it at a higher level. In the naivest, stupidest example, if we didn't count cores instead of processors, even embarrassingly parallel code would exhibit superlinear speedup on a single processor system. Replace core count with internal ALUs, pipelines, SIMD/MIMD in the architecture, onboard vector units, etc, and one can get the same sort of thing per core for just the right code.
I am deeply skeptical of any sort of toolset that purports to be able to either statically or dynamically partition a given set of upper level code to get superlinear speedup. I won't say it is impossible to build a set that "works" for some fraction of the parallelizable code in the Universe, but given the complex tradeoffs between computation and communication in different communication topologies and task partitionings, this is not a problem that has a simple universal solution and I suspect that in lots of cases an experienced parallel programming human being could spend a half day analyzing the code and architecture and beat (or tie, as the USUAL rule is going to be no meaningful superlinear speedup boring for coarse grained parallel or embarrassingly parallel code) the output from an automated tool.
An interesting example of a tool that does this sort of tuning (semi-empirically!) that works is ATLAS, the automatically tuned linear algebra system. Basically it does a search of the space of partitionings and algorithms to determine the best combination of the two for performing basic linear algebra functions (BLAS) and then implements it in a transparent library. It is semi-empirical because it is nearly impossible to predict the overall effect of every combination of SSE support, clock speed, bus speed, core architecture -- it is a lot easier to just go and find out. But the problem ATLAS solves is comparatively simple relative to even static task partitioning on heterogeneous computational resources with variable costs for core-to-core communication, especially in today's multicore world where one has different speeds between cores on a processor, between processors in a system, between systems, between general purpose processors and special purpose e.g. GPU/vector processors, where the communication topology itself can have a major impact on the kind of parallel speedup any given task has.
This, then, is the interesting part as you note, and who knows, maybe they've built a sufficiently intelligent system to get nominally superlinear speedup (or hell, who cares, just getting close to optimal speedup sublinear or not) from a meaningful fraction of the space of possible parallizable code. But God couldn't get superlinear speedup on fine grained synchronous parallel code with long range coupling out of any multi-node scalable parallel architecture available in the real world today, no matter how fancy the partitioning tool.
rgb
Aw, now you are being rational. C'mon, when somebody sees a transluminal neutrino, traps a magnetic monopole, measures a signal that might possibly be the long lost Higgs boson, you can't go around doubting it. Where would climate science be if one doubted the spaghetti-snarl output of all of the GCMs and Hansen's predictions of 5 meter SLR by 2100? Where would medicine be if we doubted that oat bran and fish oil pills prevent heart attacks? Where would the Middle East be if all of a sudden all of the Muslims, Christians and Jews suddenly doubted the Bible, Koran, etc, especially the good parts where he promises land to this or that group or gives it permission to enslave or otherwise abuse non-believers?
Next you're going to tell me that "dark matter" might ultimately turn out to be a lot more brown dwarfs than we think there are instead of new physics that enables interstellar transportation. Spoilsport.
rgb
Curiously, I did this too (physicists all love big sparks and explosions, I guess:-)
I built it to melt metal in my basement. So (being twelve and stupid at the time) I struck the arc, and bang, there it was tremendously bright. I happened to be in bare feet standing on the damp basement floor, so I grabbed a handy nail in a pair of metal pliers, wrapped a paper towel around the handles, and stuck the nail into the arc (and mind you, I didn't have anything like eye protection, I'm standing there in my shorts and tee shirt, right?).
After I picked myself up off of the floor, I thought "Damn, I guess I needed more paper towels". So I rewrapped the handles in a double layer of paper towels and stuck the nail into the arc again.
After I picked myself up off the floor a second time, I shook myself off, unplugged the arc lamp, and never ran it again (probably saving my vision, my heart, my life, and perhaps the house...) But it did work to make me smarter! So did taking a hit of 100,000 volts or so through a fluorescent tube straight from a homemade Tesla coil!
I can't imagine what I was doing, risking burning my family alive, the tragedy of my death, my eyesight... Wait, insight fading, fading....
Hey, has anybody got a roll of magnet wire? What would happen if we drove a carbon arc from a really big Tesla coil in a stream of pure Deuterium gas? I bet we could get thermonuclear fusion going in my basement!
rgb
Wait, didn't Stanley Stupid figure this all out years ago, when he shorted out his automobile?
But then he -- uh, insight fading, insight fading...
What were talking about?
rgb
I've shot myself (by accident) with a 410 shotgun at close range (blowing off my thumb in the process) and -- d'ya think? First person shooters where people get shot repeatedly and overrun a heath kit and are suddenly better (and didn't just die as their limbs and organs were blown off or perforated) aren't realistic?
Damn. Who knew?
I'm taking back my original copies of Duke Nukem and Doom, and trading them in for a realistic game like Mortal Combat or World of Warcraft.
Or let's rewrite all first person shooters so:
a) Getting shot triggers dog zap collars or taser clips attached to various parts of your body set to a level that is not quite lethal. Make love, not war, Baby...;-)
b) If you persist in play after you get shot the first time (non-fatally) and eventually get shot and die (Ouch! Twenty minutes on the floor twitching before your muscles will work again!) you never, ever get to play the game again. In fact, you have to sell your computer and join the peace corps to help villagers in South India build waste treatment plants and safe wells.
Still not realistic -- take it from me, getting shot hurts like hell even when it doesn't kill you but merely maims you a bit -- but far more instructive...
rgb
Sauron had nukes and biologicals and binary nerve gases, silly beanie. The only reason hobbits survived the first war at all is because their little hobbit holes double as fallout shelters and their immune systems were strong from walking around all of the time without shoes. Also, hobbits are very fond of mushrooms and other alkaloid-containing herbs and have evolved a remarkable resistance to toxins. Their powerfully detoxifying livers are roughly a third of their body weight, after a lifetime of quaffing and smoking pipeweed.
So no, not the most powerful force. "Cannon fodder" would be the right term. In fact, they were just the right size to shoot from cannons.
rgb
Just for the record, I'm a PhD physicist, graduated from and teach at a major research university, and think both ID and creationism are utterly absurd propositions, repeatedly confounded by observation after observation. Believing in things without evidence, or in the teeth of directly contradictory evidence, is certainly possible for anybody, including physicists who should know better, but it almost invariably involves being brainwashed when they were too young to know better or think critically into thinking that antique scriptural writings had some magical cachet that simply looking at the world and letting it speak for itself does not.
Evidence directly contradicting creationism in physics starts with this little thing called the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy . This law states in essence that we have never observed the mass-energy content of the Universe being increased or decreased (outside of the tiny transient violation in quantum theory). Ever. Not as far away as we can see with the biggest telescopes. Not as far back in time as we can see with the biggest telescopes. Not in the laboratory. Not in any physical theory that works to explain a whole host of experimental observations not directly concerned with energy. Not in our everyday lives, where I can be confident that the bed in my bedroom is still there when I cannot see it because mass-energy is conserved.
Empirically, there isn't any good reason to believe that anything, ever was created ex nihilo, let alone everything. It's as silly as believing that the dark side of the moon contains a full-featured Disney resort underneath a crater somewhere, just because we haven't looked (yet), or if you think that is too easy to falsify, believing that there exists a full-featured Disney resort on a moon orbiting the fourth planet orbiting Arcturus, or a full-featured Disney resort "in Heaven" (making it really impossible to obtain either positive or negative evidence.
Then (since you bring it up) there is the information theoretic argument. Both creationism and ID sweep under the rug the entire issue of information theory and intelligence and entropy. Here's precisely how idiotic it is:
We observe complex structure in the real Universe. One asserts -- without proof, and rather in contradiction to both everyday observation of a multiplicity of entirely natural complex forms and common sense -- that complex forms cannot occur naturally. To explain them, we invoke intelligence that must have designed/created the complex forms, the basic teleological "watch implies a watchmaker" argument for God. But of course this makes God even more complex, and by the same argument, even more unlikely to have occurred naturally! The hypothesis thus begins with a special exception -- a natural entity, God, is permitted to have infinitely more complexity than any complexity we observe in nature, all because somebody has a hard time believing that complexity in nature can come about without an active intelligence designing it. Who designs the designer?
Entropy is even worse. All of our observations of "intelligence" involve considerable structure and a fairly rigorous state-switching mechanism supported by physical biology and/or electronics. Entropy is (literally) the log of the missing information (to a physicist) and there are theorems concerning energy, entropy, and heat generation in switching mechanisms supporting intelligence. To be able to perceive time at all -- to enable free will, the ability to act on the basis of an uncertain future -- one requires a point of view that has incomplete information. The derivation of the Nakajima-Zwanzig equation for the time evolution of an open (quantum) system embedded in a larger Universe typifies how intelligent agents have entropy bleed into them from an uncertain external universe, and hence can exhibit non-deterministic behavior. God by definition
Aww, don't say that. My atoms just celebrated their 13,783,913,225th birthday and now you've hurt their feelings. I just hope they don't react by joining the free radical movement.
rgb
Hey, it works with me and lobster. There they are, relatively stupid crustaceans, ripping up and eating fish and the like and surely not deeply into philosophy. Then bang -- a few days later, at least some of their molecules have become -- me! Along with a few molecules of succulent melted butter that have joined other lipids that are a part of me around my belly that I could stand becoming not-me.
I'll bet I'd be delicious, slow roasted with garlic until all that fat comes dripping down over the roast, or with my belly meat cured and turned into "long bacon". More a savory dish than a sweet one.
rgb
Granted, but now invert it back to the question. We will never meet aliens. We might at best meet their "seed ships". Those seed ships would no doubt be equipped with AI, AI at a level that would made them "the alien intelligence" we are likely to meet. Either they are programmed to avoid already settled planets entirely (wise for so very many reasons unless you are CERTAIN that you have the biggest guns in the galaxy) or else they (think they) have the biggest guns in the galaxy and consider evolution of the fittest to be the fundamental axiom of morality, in which case the robots will proceed to sterilize the planet, or at the very least wipe out all species that could be a threat and greatly simplify the existing planetary ecosystem, and then bioform it to meet their needs and crank out lots of little B.E.M. bottle babies to take it over.
Either way, we'll STILL never meet the real aliens. One way we MIGHT -- briefly -- have a clue that they were out there. If I were a galaxy-travelling AI with the second directive, I'd just stop my ship out in the Oort cloud, pick a half dozen 10 km asteroids, build fusion-driven ion jets onto them, add moderate directional control and drop them so that they would all arrive at once, with little warning, at six selected spots on the surface of the Earth. Then wait 100 years or so for the worst of the extinction event weather swings to damp down and bring in the clowns. The only hint we'd have that there are aliens in the Universe would be the enormous improbability of a six asteroid extinction event, at most one year before it happened (one year if they don't stealth the asteroids by e.g. painting them flat black or fitting them with a mirrored cone facing the sun to reflect all incident sunlight sideways). I rather think that truly paranoid aliens would arrange it so we would have no more than a day of warning or no warning at all. Most humans would see the flash of the rock that killed them, and within minutes the shockwaves and pyroclastic flow would arrive, transforming them into dust in seconds. Scattered survivors in e.g. submarines that survived the underwater shock waves and tsunamis of the oceanic hits would come back to a surface with no human built structure standing, no food, no plants, no animals, and an Earth with near-unit albedo and millions of teratons of surplus ocean water and fine-grained ash and dust in the atmosphere. First there would be dirty rain, then cleaner snow, and the Earth would ice up, quite possibly all the way to the equator.
One would hope that the aliens would have done this before, and would have the patience to wait out the mini-ice age or the technology to bring ice ages to an end, but I don't think that even with our technological knowledge a single human would survive an attack such as this for a full decade after the event (and bear in mind that "six" and "10 km" are variables that can be adjusted to reduce that probability further still). If we had a year's warning, we could probably build or retrofit underground bunkers capable of preserving humans for that decade, but our future prospects would still be bleak. We'd still have a hostile alien roboship with effectively unlimited free energy (it can refill it's deuterium supply from the moons of Jupiter, for example) sitting on top of a gravity well in a solar system that is chock fully of rocks. There is no depth we could build a shelter that could survive a second wave of smaller rocks dropped directly on any shelters revealed by e.g. a heat signature or electromagnetic radiation or simple observation from orbit. And remember, they've got a whole century to ensure that they got every last one of the vermin inhabiting what will eventually become a steaming warm jungle or a nice dry desert or whatever their idea of an "ideal" environment is.
All of this (to them) would be entirely justified. If we were fitter than they are to spread all over the galaxy and beyond, we'd wipe them out instead of them wiping us out, right?
The tragedy is that this i
Or, it's at least equally possible that far more advanced creatures have a an advanced morality/compassion/value set that recognizes that the only hope lesser beings have of becoming greater ones in the one, short, pain-filled lifetime they have is being eaten by those greater beings.
In which case, when they land, their first words might well be, "Wow! Who brought the mustard..."
rgb
a) Because there aren't any aliens to meet
b) Because even if there were, they might not be within (fill in the blank with) N>3 light years from us.
c) Because absolutely trivial physics suggests that for ANY constructed object to travel N > 3 LY, or 18 trillion miles, it would require stupendous amounts of energy. At one kilometer per second -- 1 megajoule per two kilograms of payload -- it would still take 300,000 YEARS to travel ONE light year. To cut travel time down to 300 years, one would have to travel at 1000 kilometers per second, at an energy cost of 1terajoule per two kilograms, and shortly after that one has to start paying a relativistic penalty and get less and less benefit for each doubling in energy cost. Any propulsion system that involved reaction mass would have to lift MANY orders of magnitude more mass, multiplying this already absurd number by a much larger absurd number.
True, there is always the chance of new physics, of "warp drives" and other such stuff, but that so far is pure science fiction, and if anything the fact that we AREN'T up to our armpits in smelly alien suggests that either there REALLY aren't any aliens to meet or that there is no such new physics out there to discover.
I love SF, and am a physicist and thrilled at the prospect of new physics, but when answering an open ended question it is always better to base the answer on what is known, not what MIGHT be true, if life were a Heinlein novel. Based on known physics, we'll never meet aliens because it is effectively impossible to travel in person between the stars.
Sending one's genetic code, OTOH, might be doable, if you could get it past the customs and immigration people who might not be thrilled at us cloning a potentially hostile competitive species and raising it out of all natural cultural context just to say high to a life form that didn't evolve on Earth.
rgb
It is fair to note that we have never observed an act of creation, in the literal sense. Indeed, the correct statement of the relevant, empirically supported physics is:
Mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed, but simply changes form.
More sophisticated field-theoretic statements conserve "information" as fundamentally as mass-energy, but the point is that these are conservation laws, things we have never observed to fail in an enormous range of observations and experiments and spacetime scales ranging from cosmology to the smallest scales we can currently measure.
The really, really interesting question is why anyone would have a "creation" theory for anything, given that we have yet to make a single concrete observation of a creation event of any sort, anywhere, at any time, or even find a way of inferring that such an event once upon a time might of occurred. All we have ever observed is things that already existed changing form. The Universe we can observe is a dance of existing stuff back as far as we can see in time, away as far as we can see in space, at all scales from the largest to the smallest that we can measure.
There is an interesting information theoretic argument that essentially proves that for an omniscient God to not be inconsistent, it has to be the Universe. In order to be omniscient and self-knowledgeable, the irreducible information content of God has to precisely match the irreducible information content of the Universe, defining the Universe as everything that exists (which must include God, if God exists). All of our observations of "sentience" or a sense of passing time involve entropy, and our understanding of reasoning and sentience as a dynamical state that changes over time further suggests that it is almost certainly meaningless to assign a property such as "sentience" to a Universe per se, no matter how complex, and the assertion of entropy as a measure of state change over time contradicts zero-entropy perfect knowledge. So there isn't any really great reason to conclude that the Universe is any sort of sentient God, but that's pretty much the only model (besides God as the really big and powerful but entirely mortal and time-bound space alien with technology that looks like magic) that isn't egregiously inconsistent.
rgb
Surely you jest. The Bible is disproven repeatedly. It is massively internally self-contradictory (and hence literally cannot possibly be true in its entirety). The book of Genesis is disproven -- not just not proven to be true, but proven to be false, proven to contradict a great deal of empirically founded, macroscopically and microscopically consistent knowledge, things that we accept as almost certainly true, beyond any sane question, every day.
It is difficult to even know where to begin in listing the problems in Genesis, as it isn't even approximately or metaphorically correct in its description of creation -- it has things in the wrong order, an absurd order temporally, it has nothing whatsoever that describes the actual processes any rational person would infer looking at the actual data. It gets the age enormously wrong. It gets the size wrong. It gets the structure wrong. It posits the story of a truly absurd flood (6 inches of rain a minute for 40 days straight to barely cover Mount Everest) and a Wal-Mart sized wooden boat ventilated through a carefully described one-square-cubit window in which every species on Earth that would be killed by such a flood -- which would be damn near every species on Earth -- was preserved. It describes a creation process for humans that never happened and is directly contradicted by the fossil record, introduced as an equally absurd explanation of theodicy -- the contradiction between believing in a compassionate and loving God and the existence of evil. It asserts that the Earth is the center of all things, floats on the ocean, and is surmounted by a solid bowl of sky hung with lights and pierced with holes through which God pours rain. It asserts that the stars can be shaken down by things like Earthquakes.
The "history" of the Bible is equally absurd and is contradicted repeatedly by archeology. Again it is difficult to know where to begin, but Tubal Cain as an "artificer of iron" is an excellent example, given that any Biblical timeline would put Tubal Cain several thousand years before the iron age. Iron, in other words, literally hadn't been invented yet. There isn't a shred of evidence outside of the assertions of the Bible itself that Moses ever existed (any more than there is evidence for Adam and Eve, or Noah, or any of the other figures from Genesis or Exodus). Jesus clearly was not omniscient or clued in on this, as he asserted on more than one occasion that Noah and the flood was a real person and real event (generally when predicting a similar apocalyptic event that never happened).
Besides, even if the Bible (old testament) were a nearly perfect history, instead of an obvious collection of fables, myths, legends, a mish-mosh of earlier Sumerian legends that dates no earlier than the first thousand years or so BCE that would not constitute any sort of evidence for the truth of its creation myths, any more than the creation myths of the Hindu religion are "proven" when somebody discovers that e.g. Mathura from the Mahabharata actually existed at some point in the past. I can write entire fantasies about (say) the Civil War with all sorts of characters that never existed and events that never happened and yet salt the story with references to things that did happen and people that did exist. I can even insert space aliens, or (in the case of the Iliad) with Gods. Does the Greek pantheon of Gods actually exist because they are characters in the Iliad and we've now discovered the site of ancient Troy? Does this prove Greco-Roman paganism, creation myth and all?
Look. I mean that quite literally. Forget the big bang and just look. You can, if you look for it, find and follow the entire historical argument and evidence for estimates of the size and age of the Universe. It isn't hidden, and isn't mysterious. Nor is it the product of "scientists with an agenda" unless that agenda is doing their best to figure out what really happened by letting the world speak for itself rather than taking an antique mythology written
Uhhh, April first was YESTERDAY.
Oh, wait! I see what you mean! This post went back in time and really appeared yesterday!
Good show.
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... of course. Because if you have to explain it at all to anyone over the age of five, nothing less than a clearing blow to the head will work. One hard enough to clear that head of most of the superstitious brain matter that resides within it.
I say this with a rather enormous amount of experience on the subject. Absolutely no scientific or rational or empirical argument will convince someone that their religious beliefs are wrong. The entire sub-field of cognitive dissonance in behavioral psychology is devoted to understanding why this is so and how to deal with it, but its empirical conclusions are that a human deep in the throes of CD is not going to be pulled out of it by a silly little thing like facts, not even the blatant in-your-face failure of the core belief. There is even evidence that the more absurd the belief and the more humiliating its failure the stronger the denial becomes, the more powerful the state of CD itself becomes.
So don't bother pissing into a category four hurricane, my friend. Radiometric dating will not work. Astrophysical observation will not work. Paleontological observation of the orthogonality of human and dinosaur fossils will not work. Attacks on the core scriptural mythology (showing that it is absurd and self-contradictory and filled with evil and not in agreement with known geography or facts) will not work. Arithmetic (for example, showing the absurdity of a 5-6 inch per minute world-spanning rain that lasted 40 days -- the rate and time required to cover Mount Everest -- while preserving several million species in a handmade wooden boat the size of a Wal-Mart with no air conditioning nor heating nor ventilation for an additional half a year) will not work. Nothing works. If mere rationality or evidence worked, it would already have done so.
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Had he expressed hatred or prejudice based on their religion, like the AC above did with Islam...
Fuck Christianity. The only thing it has going for it is that it's not quite as evil as Islam.
...that would be bigotry.
You know... picking A religion as being "more evil" based on current political situation, when every single flavor of Abrahamic religion has uncountable crimes to answer for, and those others aren't much different either.
Pointing out that all brands of Christianity are the same fairytale (only told a bit differently) is just telling the truth.
Just like pointing out that all religions are evil as they teach the people to build their view of reality based on a delusion - basically, inducing billions with cognitive dissonance bordering on insanity.
Meanwhile, staying politically correct and letting them carry on with their delusion without at least pointing out the most glaring flaws in it - that would be hypocrisy.
Also, infliction of harm through inaction.
Sadly, this is deeply insightful and correct. I do think it is possible to sort religions and sects out very roughly in order of the overt evilness of their scriptural precepts and functional memes, but it is much more difficult to project this evil onto individuals who nominally belong to such a sect. That is because we live in an age of heresy unheard of before, where everybody feels perfectly free to makes stuff up and alter the fundamental scriptural precepts and memes at will. Hence if you point out (correctly) that the position of most Southern Baptist churches is that homosexuality is a sin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_Baptist_churches
then of course somebody will turn around and point out an exception. And since we outlawed burning people, hanging people, torturing people, jailing people, silencing people, persecuting people, prosecuting people, and otherwise using force majeure and mortal sanction to enforce rules against choice, there have been plenty of exceptions, in fact being heretical is the post-Enlightenment post-Protestant normal, with an ever increasing divergence of belief. So although it is absolutely true that the official position of the Catholic church is one that opposes the use of birth control, in the US nearly all Catholics would be considered heretic by the non-heretical standards of Catholicism 400 years ago, and most sexually active Catholics use birth control. One can also compare Bellarmine's Letter to Galileo (which lays out its formal dogma concerning the ad literam interpretation of scripture and the horrific doors of heresy and contradiction that are opened by allowing it to be "interpreted" according to the discoveries of the science Galileo and others were in the process of inventing) to modern reality, and note that all of those predictions have, in fact, come to pass.
The point in the end is that none of this matters. One can take any of the scripture-based religions and note countless contradictions in their scriptures and that will not falsify them in the minds of individuals who nominally subscribe to it (but then lay on a small mountain of individual heresies according to their individual whim) because they will, as you note, willfully engage in a rich mixture of the practices associated with cognitive dissonance to avoid confronting the contradictions. Hermeneutics, exegesis, head in the sand syndrome, or simple denial, one cannot prove them wrong and hence they consider themselves "free" to continue to believe an absurd mythology (modified to suite their particular personality).
And this will still not make that mythology true! Or make it probably true, the only kind of truth a good Bayesian can acknowledge. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, perhaps, but it also damn well isn't evidence for, and the default state of belief, the
... in Durham, in spite of the fact that alligator reproduction is an excellent bellwether and they are abundant a mere 150 miles away due East on the coast. 1 degree is 70 miles North, 4 to 6 is (say) 350, so by now there should be alligators in Virginia on the coast and central NC where I live FROM the coast. Alligators can only reproduce when a winter is frost free, as temperature determines the gender of the alligators in the egg. First and last frost in Durham haven't discernibly changed in the forty years I've lived here, starting back in the last "the Ice Age is starting" panic in the early 70s. There have been some bitterly cold winters and some remarkably warm ones -- much like the winters over all of the last century. We've set 100 year records for snowfall in the last 13 years, had a snow and ice storm on the Outer Banks (and inland) where it never seems to snow in mid-April, and had a killing frost in May, three full weeks after our supposed last-frost date. We've had winters where the Bradford Pears and Redbuds started to bloom in mid February (easily a month early), where it hasn't snowed at all, when you could sunbathe in mid-January, at least if you picked your days.
This winter was amazingly normal. A handful of small snowfalls, a few warm days, but mostly cold, often wet and cold, with lots of frost. The Bradford Pears and Redbuds still haven't bloomed, although we've had a few days of really nice spring-like weather (quite seasonal) and it didn't frost last night although it did the night before. The massive snows of winter all fell to the west or to the north, never quite reaching us here (except as cold nasty rain a few degrees above freezing -- got a lot of that).
There's plenty of scientific evidence of warming, as long as you pick your days, pick your events, pick your years, pick your starting points, and don't look at all the evidence that contradicts it. As everybody knows, scientific studies prove that green jelly beans cause Acne.
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But what about all those reactors that blew up or melted (in TFA)? Or were they cheating and just bombarding the nickel with slow neutrons? One would think that if they produced an exothermic reaction even one time and weren't complete Pons and Fleishman nutcases they'd be able to pick up the beta (if not gamma) signature of the events. I'm also a bit curious as to just where the energy produced "comes out". They assert that no gamma rays happen. They get electron and neutrino out. Presumably we're talking about order of MeV/event, so the reaction produces order of MeV electrons (we hope, as energy going into neutrinos is gone forever) and a certain amount of lattice recoil in the now-copper nucleus. MeV electrons seem to have enough energy to produce an electron-positron cascade and convert at least some of the energy into X-rays (ionizing radiation). Probably relatively easily stopped (as is the beta itself) but the process would likely not be "radiation free". Finally, those same electrons seem as though they have the right general range of energy to be captured by the hydrogen nuclei (or would, if they didn't scatter on the way in and if there was any sort of cross-section) leaving open the possibility that the electrons themselves would create the requisite electron excitation and some sort of chain reaction might be possible.
Interesting idea, in other words, but TFA doesn't clarify the underlying physics to the point where it is really intelligible.
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Well, except for the fact that ozone is an important GHG -- one of the three most important ones, from the spectroscopic data -- albeit one that is most common in the stratosphere where it warms the tropopause from above, rather than in the troposphere...
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