> We very well may be causing this, which would be bad, but what if we are not?
It would still be bad. We're screwed either way.
Or more optimistically, we're going to be forced into the terraforming business right here at home, whether we want to or not.
More realistically, we'll just spend more and more time fighting over the remnants of depleted resources and the juiciest parts of a decaying environment until there's nothing left to fight over.
> I am listening to Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR book, and I'll admit I have my doubts now about global warming claims. Or at least I'm more skeptical now about claims from either side. Suffice it to say, Crichton is normally a very astute researcher for his books, even though he obviously bends the truth to make his fiction more interesting.
Why the hell anyone would rely on a fiction writer to inform them about the state of the world is beyond me.
Or if you do, you should at least be a dedicated geek and get your spin on reality from Star Wars or The Matrix.
> Can anyone explain if the curent theories still speculate that eventually all the matter in the universe will be sucked up by black holes? Also, once that happens will the black holes (as the only remaining objects in spacetime) start attracting each other?
Here is the most interesting thing I've ever read about the fate of the universe.
> Another point, umm, people or nations arming themselves is supposed to REDUCE tension?
That's why the non-proliferation treaty has a clause forbidding the authorized owners of nukes from "inducing" other nations to acquire them.
Arguably our administration's threatening posture toward Iran and North Korea (and Iraq, earlier) is just as much a violation of the treaty as their attempts to obtain the weapons is.
> keep in mind most of the people killed by the nukes were civilians who had committed no crime. Perhaps their deaths were justified to end the war, but they were innocent people and it was pure horror for them. [...] There are always many pointless deaths of good people on either side of a war.
Yes, it's the bombing of cities that I don't like. But it's the fact of the slaughter rather than the mechanism. The use of nukes can be no more than a symbol of the problem, since they only accounted for a tiny fraction of the casualties. Nukes, firestorms, saturation bombings, executions, starvation, or merely having the front line roll back and forth across your town town a few times: the end result is the same.
The USSR suffered as many civilian casualties as it did military casualties: about 12,000,000 people, no nukes required. Such is the harvest of global industrialized warfare. Let August 6th be a symbolic date for asking whether we want to get into that again.
> That's my main worry, what I liked was the kind of controlled chaos of the idea
Yeah, I like that too. Unfortunately, on the internet, once your site reaches a high enough profile every dickhead in the universe feels obligated to do whatever they can to screw it up.
> It always seemed a little silly to me that anyone even without so much as a valid logon could change the content of these pages.
It worked semi-OK for a while, but a few months ago it became a popular trolling spot, and now if I look at my watchlist once a day I'll find about half a dozen acts of outright vandalism. I just don't have time to keep up with it anymore.
> I think the biggest problem is edits to 'contraversial' posts, like "Intelegent Design" or "Joseph McCarthy".
Yes, stuff that can be spun for the purposes of nationalism, religion, politics, or racism have always been problems. Nationalism gets inserted into all kinds of articles about history, archaeology, language, etc. Religious spin is creeping into everything.
Another problem is that if you try to work on stuff that makes a coherent set of articles, you find yourself transgressing on someone's assumed turf on every hand, making it nigh impossible to enforce consistency across the whole set.
I was once very gung-ho on Wikipedia, but now I've all but given up on contributing to it. I think I've pulled up my watchlist about once in the past two or three months.
I still use it as a quick reference for all kinds of topics, though.
> If what you said was true, then proving "true=false" should be possible, and logic has some serious problems.
It is possible to prove a contradiction, if your axioms embed a contradiction.
Thus proofs are no better than the axioms that they're built on. And we don't have any axioms about the real world, so proofs about the real world have a weak point where the logic is grounded on the reality. We might reasonably take various facts as axioms if they are extremely well supported empirically, but that means the proof is ultimately built on an empirical argument.
There's just no getting away from empiricism when dealing with the real world. Thus scientists tend to balk at the word 'prove', at least in its formal sense.
And of course, our current administration is doing everthing in its power to hide or discredit science that produces results that don't support its agenda. With bad luck, it might rise to the level of those phenomena linked above.
> While I agree with your sentiments about Presidents opinions on science, I'd like to know what position, exactly, you think Mr. Bush is planning to run for that he'd need votes from anyone.
He's a Party man. He wants to make sure uneducated biblical literalists continue to vote Republican against their own best interests, so that whoever comes after him can continue looking out for the interests of the oil industry.
> > Also, once you get away from the small circle of intellectuals peddling ID
> That's an oxymoron: intellectuals don't peddle creationism.
The idea does rather jar at first hearing, but I think its old news that some intellectuals will peddle propaganda for bad causes.
Given the money trail for ID, there's a strong suspicion that its primary proponents are actually a branch of neocons who think religion is the ideal tool for controlling the masses, and thus that ID is at its core political, not religious.
> One more thing you forgot to mention. Intelligent design is the hypothesis that SOMETHING created all of this.
Strictly speaking, that is an overstatement: what intelligent design's leading proponents actually say is that "something" intervened here and there in the history of biology. I.e., they say that "something" designed the E. coli flagellum (whatever 'designed' means), but they don't claim that "something" created the universe, the earth, life, or even merely the E. coli.
> Fanatical Christians attempt to twist Intelligent Design to only include God as the possible creator, but that destroys it's standing as science.
ID never had a standing as science to begin with, since it's nothing but a collection of logical fallacies and misrepresentations of fact marshalled to provide a faux existence proof for some poorly defined entity.
And the role of "fanatical Christians" is unsurprising, since the whole point of ID is to give them a perceived basis for their beliefs about origins. Of course, the intellectuals behind the movement intended "mum's the word", since it will never get past the courts with people putting an overt religious interpretation on it, but unfortunately for them the rank and file didn't get the memo.
> For it to be actual science and to even be able to compete with evolution, it HAS to take into account that aliens or some other type of intelligent being besides a Deity created earth and all of us.
Its problem is worse than that: people should reject ID because it's transparently bad pseudoscience, even before the question of religious motivation ever arises.
> It does absolutely nothing to further their religious agenda, yet for some reason they cling to it like Jesus himself.
If "religious agenda" includes casting doubt on the status of the theory of evolution, it is perceived to have exactly that agenda. (I qualified that as "perceived", since AFAICT ID hasn't been adopted by anyone who didn't already reject evolution before they heard of it.)
> If Bush believes Intelligent Design, why aren't any of his goverment agencies providing any funding to study it?
ID "scientists" don't actually study anything. The simply came up with some lame arguments that a Creator^w Designer must have been involved in the history of biology, and they're done. All they do now is write books and make the speaker circuits trying to get people to buy in to it. I don't think they've even come up with any new arguments for several years now; all I'm hearing as minor variations on their old claim that evolution couldn't have produced the E. coli flagellum. Plus the usual whining about persecution because scientists won't give them a free pass.
> 2. In a similar vein, "law" in a scientific sense means "theory which has stood up so well and so long that although it's possible to disprove it, that doesn't look likely to happen." Evolution in this sense is a "law" to the same degree as Newton's laws of motion (suitably modified by Einstein) or the laws of thermodynamics.
No, laws and theories are entirely different. A law is an observed regularity in nature, such as Newton's laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. A theory is a well-supported model that explains some phenomenon or set of phenomena. Theories don't get promoted to laws.
Ideally laws, like other phenomena, should have an associated theory to explain why nature does in fact behave according to that law, but if a law is sufficiently well supported empirically then we can go ahead and make use of it while its explanatory theory remains on the wish list.
> I will go a little farther. I have been to some lectures on Intelligent Design. I found them deeply disturbing. They where full of at best bad science if not out right lies. I found them deeply disturbing on religious grounds. Part of my faith is a belief that lies do not serve God.
Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren't pandering to critical thinkers like you; they're pandering to those intellectual bottom-feeders who don't want their kids to learn anything in school that is in conflict with ancient myths about the nature of the world.
> Intelligent Design is a collection of holes in evolutionary theory. It is very much scientific.
No, and no. "I don't think evolution could do that" isn't a hole in the theory of evolution. Behe misrepresents what we actually know about evolution in order to construct his argument. Dembski's argument depends on there not being any mechanism at all, whether evolution or anything else. You won't learn anything about evolution by reading up on ID.
> The rational response from those in the evolutionary camp is to poke around at the holes and see if they can't be resolved.
If you want to find the holes in evolutionary theory ask a biologist, not a disguised creationist apologist. Or pick up a journal that deals with evolutionary biology, where gaps and problems with our understanding of evolution are treated regularly and forthrightly.
> Teach the critique of evolution. Teach that we don't know how some things work. In a science class, don't teach that these mean there must be a Designer. Is this unreasonable?
Is that what we do in other fields, in public school science classes? How much time do we spend telling gradeschoolers about our inability to stitch QM and GR together? And if it gets mentioned at all, is it used to cast doubt on the utility of those theories?
I think treating the holes in well established theories is a job for grad students and established researchers. I didn't need to know about Goedel's theorem when I was learning my multiplication tables.
> But if you can't admit it might have a place in a philosophical discussion (NOT a scientific discussion), we have nothing further to say.
Well, excuse us for disagreeing with you.
> And saying it was created by Creationists is a red herring. It doesn't matter who "created" it. The concept is what it is.
And the concept is: paint up creationism with a veneer of pseudoscience, and maybe you can sneak it past the courts in the USA. It has no further utility, except as a pool of examples of misrepresented facts and faulty reasoning.
> Intelligent Design certainly has a place in the classroom. But not the biology or science classrooms. I'd hope that we've evolved, no pun intended, to the point that we can agree that this might belong in, say, a philosophy classroom.
Why does it belong in a philosophy classroom? It's pseudoscience, not philosophy.
I suppose if you think of logic as a branch of philosophy then ID could usefully be hauled out as an example of defective logic for dissection on the first day of a course on logic, or maybe in an advertising class as an example of the selling power of substituting spin for substance, but otherwise it doesn't belong in any curriculum at all.
> It is not creationism, as it rejects six-days creation
Actually, if you look at the transcripts of their recent testimony in Kansas, you'll find that many of the leading advocates of ID adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy about how old the world is.
Also, once you get away from the small circle of intellectuals peddling ID, you'll find that the overwhelming majority of people who buy in to it are just old fashioned creationists who think ID is a scientific validation of their neolithic belief system.
Slashdot Mirror
> We very well may be causing this, which would be bad, but what if we are not?
It would still be bad. We're screwed either way.
Or more optimistically, we're going to be forced into the terraforming business right here at home, whether we want to or not.
More realistically, we'll just spend more and more time fighting over the remnants of depleted resources and the juiciest parts of a decaying environment until there's nothing left to fight over.
> I am listening to Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR book, and I'll admit I have my doubts now about global warming claims. Or at least I'm more skeptical now about claims from either side. Suffice it to say, Crichton is normally a very astute researcher for his books, even though he obviously bends the truth to make his fiction more interesting.
Why the hell anyone would rely on a fiction writer to inform them about the state of the world is beyond me.
Or if you do, you should at least be a dedicated geek and get your spin on reality from Star Wars or The Matrix.
> There's nothing like leaving your arse exposed during war time.
Like these guys?
There's an even easier method for determining whether a guy is looking at teh porn or teh still life painting.
Unless of course he has friut fetish.
> Can anyone explain if the curent theories still speculate that eventually all the matter in the universe will be sucked up by black holes? Also, once that happens will the black holes (as the only remaining objects in spacetime) start attracting each other?
Here is the most interesting thing I've ever read about the fate of the universe.
> Another point, umm, people or nations arming themselves is supposed to REDUCE tension?
That's why the non-proliferation treaty has a clause forbidding the authorized owners of nukes from "inducing" other nations to acquire them.
Arguably our administration's threatening posture toward Iran and North Korea (and Iraq, earlier) is just as much a violation of the treaty as their attempts to obtain the weapons is.
> keep in mind most of the people killed by the nukes were civilians who had committed no crime. Perhaps their deaths were justified to end the war, but they were innocent people and it was pure horror for them. [...] There are always many pointless deaths of good people on either side of a war.
Yes, it's the bombing of cities that I don't like. But it's the fact of the slaughter rather than the mechanism. The use of nukes can be no more than a symbol of the problem, since they only accounted for a tiny fraction of the casualties. Nukes, firestorms, saturation bombings, executions, starvation, or merely having the front line roll back and forth across your town town a few times: the end result is the same.
The USSR suffered as many civilian casualties as it did military casualties: about 12,000,000 people, no nukes required. Such is the harvest of global industrialized warfare. Let August 6th be a symbolic date for asking whether we want to get into that again.
If you want to reduce their stress, don't send them to Mars!
> That's my main worry, what I liked was the kind of controlled chaos of the idea
Yeah, I like that too. Unfortunately, on the internet, once your site reaches a high enough profile every dickhead in the universe feels obligated to do whatever they can to screw it up.
Like Slashdot, for example.
> It always seemed a little silly to me that anyone even without so much as a valid logon could change the content of these pages.
It worked semi-OK for a while, but a few months ago it became a popular trolling spot, and now if I look at my watchlist once a day I'll find about half a dozen acts of outright vandalism. I just don't have time to keep up with it anymore.
> I think the biggest problem is edits to 'contraversial' posts, like "Intelegent Design" or "Joseph McCarthy".
Yes, stuff that can be spun for the purposes of nationalism, religion, politics, or racism have always been problems. Nationalism gets inserted into all kinds of articles about history, archaeology, language, etc. Religious spin is creeping into everything.
Another problem is that if you try to work on stuff that makes a coherent set of articles, you find yourself transgressing on someone's assumed turf on every hand, making it nigh impossible to enforce consistency across the whole set.
I was once very gung-ho on Wikipedia, but now I've all but given up on contributing to it. I think I've pulled up my watchlist about once in the past two or three months.
I still use it as a quick reference for all kinds of topics, though.
> If what you said was true, then proving "true=false" should be possible, and logic has some serious problems.
It is possible to prove a contradiction, if your axioms embed a contradiction.
Thus proofs are no better than the axioms that they're built on. And we don't have any axioms about the real world, so proofs about the real world have a weak point where the logic is grounded on the reality. We might reasonably take various facts as axioms if they are extremely well supported empirically, but that means the proof is ultimately built on an empirical argument.
There's just no getting away from empiricism when dealing with the real world. Thus scientists tend to balk at the word 'prove', at least in its formal sense.
> Presidents' views will never affect actual scientific discovery or prevailing scientific opinion.
Not if our system of checks & balances holds up, though the recent trends in villification of the judicial branch seems to presage a problem there.
At any rate, there have been notable instances in other countries where politics gave rise to abberant science:
- Lysenkoism, in Stalinist USSR
- Deutsche Physik, in Nazi Germany
And of course, our current administration is doing everthing in its power to hide or discredit science that produces results that don't support its agenda. With bad luck, it might rise to the level of those phenomena linked above.> While I agree with your sentiments about Presidents opinions on science, I'd like to know what position, exactly, you think Mr. Bush is planning to run for that he'd need votes from anyone.
He's a Party man. He wants to make sure uneducated biblical literalists continue to vote Republican against their own best interests, so that whoever comes after him can continue looking out for the interests of the oil industry.
> > Also, once you get away from the small circle of intellectuals peddling ID
> That's an oxymoron: intellectuals don't peddle creationism.
The idea does rather jar at first hearing, but I think its old news that some intellectuals will peddle propaganda for bad causes.
Given the money trail for ID, there's a strong suspicion that its primary proponents are actually a branch of neocons who think religion is the ideal tool for controlling the masses, and thus that ID is at its core political, not religious.
> the existinence of god can both be 'proven' and 'disproven' through logical convention.
You can prove anything through logic, if you're given a free hand at chosing your axioms.
If you're completely shameless, just adopt the desired conclusion as one of your axioms...
> One more thing you forgot to mention. Intelligent design is the hypothesis that SOMETHING created all of this.
Strictly speaking, that is an overstatement: what intelligent design's leading proponents actually say is that "something" intervened here and there in the history of biology. I.e., they say that "something" designed the E. coli flagellum (whatever 'designed' means), but they don't claim that "something" created the universe, the earth, life, or even merely the E. coli.
> Fanatical Christians attempt to twist Intelligent Design to only include God as the possible creator, but that destroys it's standing as science.
ID never had a standing as science to begin with, since it's nothing but a collection of logical fallacies and misrepresentations of fact marshalled to provide a faux existence proof for some poorly defined entity.
And the role of "fanatical Christians" is unsurprising, since the whole point of ID is to give them a perceived basis for their beliefs about origins. Of course, the intellectuals behind the movement intended "mum's the word", since it will never get past the courts with people putting an overt religious interpretation on it, but unfortunately for them the rank and file didn't get the memo.
> For it to be actual science and to even be able to compete with evolution, it HAS to take into account that aliens or some other type of intelligent being besides a Deity created earth and all of us.
Its problem is worse than that: people should reject ID because it's transparently bad pseudoscience, even before the question of religious motivation ever arises.
> It does absolutely nothing to further their religious agenda, yet for some reason they cling to it like Jesus himself.
If "religious agenda" includes casting doubt on the status of the theory of evolution, it is perceived to have exactly that agenda. (I qualified that as "perceived", since AFAICT ID hasn't been adopted by anyone who didn't already reject evolution before they heard of it.)
> Yes, birds on the Galapagos Islands adapted, but they didn't evolve from turtles or the like.
Right; they evolved from therapod dinosaurs instead.
> How likely is it that some primordial ooze evolved into everything we see today?
How likely is it that some primal creator exists and created everything we see today?
Does the addition of an unevidenced middle man actually improve the odds of having the final result?
> I can't prove my views, and people with opposing views can't prove thiers, so we both should be allowed equal time. Tis the only fair way to be.
Equal time for everyone? Muslims and Zoroasterians? Scientologists and Raelians and Heaven's Gateans? People who think The Matrix is for real?
How 'bout we stick to teaching stuff that is grounded in fact?
> If Bush believes Intelligent Design, why aren't any of his goverment agencies providing any funding to study it?
ID "scientists" don't actually study anything. The simply came up with some lame arguments that a Creator^w Designer must have been involved in the history of biology, and they're done. All they do now is write books and make the speaker circuits trying to get people to buy in to it. I don't think they've even come up with any new arguments for several years now; all I'm hearing as minor variations on their old claim that evolution couldn't have produced the E. coli flagellum. Plus the usual whining about persecution because scientists won't give them a free pass.
> 2. In a similar vein, "law" in a scientific sense means "theory which has stood up so well and so long that although it's possible to disprove it, that doesn't look likely to happen." Evolution in this sense is a "law" to the same degree as Newton's laws of motion (suitably modified by Einstein) or the laws of thermodynamics.
No, laws and theories are entirely different. A law is an observed regularity in nature, such as Newton's laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. A theory is a well-supported model that explains some phenomenon or set of phenomena. Theories don't get promoted to laws.
Ideally laws, like other phenomena, should have an associated theory to explain why nature does in fact behave according to that law, but if a law is sufficiently well supported empirically then we can go ahead and make use of it while its explanatory theory remains on the wish list.
> I will go a little farther. I have been to some lectures on Intelligent Design. I found them deeply disturbing. They where full of at best bad science if not out right lies. I found them deeply disturbing on religious grounds. Part of my faith is a belief that lies do not serve God.
Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren't pandering to critical thinkers like you; they're pandering to those intellectual bottom-feeders who don't want their kids to learn anything in school that is in conflict with ancient myths about the nature of the world.
> Intelligent Design is a collection of holes in evolutionary theory. It is very much scientific.
No, and no. "I don't think evolution could do that" isn't a hole in the theory of evolution. Behe misrepresents what we actually know about evolution in order to construct his argument. Dembski's argument depends on there not being any mechanism at all, whether evolution or anything else. You won't learn anything about evolution by reading up on ID.
> The rational response from those in the evolutionary camp is to poke around at the holes and see if they can't be resolved.
If you want to find the holes in evolutionary theory ask a biologist, not a disguised creationist apologist. Or pick up a journal that deals with evolutionary biology, where gaps and problems with our understanding of evolution are treated regularly and forthrightly.
> Teach the critique of evolution. Teach that we don't know how some things work. In a science class, don't teach that these mean there must be a Designer. Is this unreasonable?
Is that what we do in other fields, in public school science classes? How much time do we spend telling gradeschoolers about our inability to stitch QM and GR together? And if it gets mentioned at all, is it used to cast doubt on the utility of those theories?
I think treating the holes in well established theories is a job for grad students and established researchers. I didn't need to know about Goedel's theorem when I was learning my multiplication tables.
> But if you can't admit it might have a place in a philosophical discussion (NOT a scientific discussion), we have nothing further to say.
Well, excuse us for disagreeing with you.
> And saying it was created by Creationists is a red herring. It doesn't matter who "created" it. The concept is what it is.
And the concept is: paint up creationism with a veneer of pseudoscience, and maybe you can sneak it past the courts in the USA. It has no further utility, except as a pool of examples of misrepresented facts and faulty reasoning.
> Intelligent Design certainly has a place in the classroom. But not the biology or science classrooms. I'd hope that we've evolved, no pun intended, to the point that we can agree that this might belong in, say, a philosophy classroom.
Why does it belong in a philosophy classroom? It's pseudoscience, not philosophy.
I suppose if you think of logic as a branch of philosophy then ID could usefully be hauled out as an example of defective logic for dissection on the first day of a course on logic, or maybe in an advertising class as an example of the selling power of substituting spin for substance, but otherwise it doesn't belong in any curriculum at all.
> It is not creationism, as it rejects six-days creation
Actually, if you look at the transcripts of their recent testimony in Kansas, you'll find that many of the leading advocates of ID adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy about how old the world is.
Also, once you get away from the small circle of intellectuals peddling ID, you'll find that the overwhelming majority of people who buy in to it are just old fashioned creationists who think ID is a scientific validation of their neolithic belief system.
> While Mr. Bush was reportedly reluctant to make news on this topic, he apparently felt it was an issue he could not duck.
Like we need Presidents' opinions on what makes good science. Does anyone care what Clinton thought about string theory? Should anyone care?
This is nothing more than a way of appealing to the votes of social conservatives.