....where Ezekiel the even documents his encounter...
The Bible is full of what we call supernatural encounters and stories. We label as supernatural anything that does not fit into the materialistic Western worldview.
Jesus Christ, who claimed to be God, backed up this claim by rising from the dead. Modern Western materialistic minds refuse to believe this and other biblical stories, because it is simply entirely outside of most modern people's worldview.
SETI is limited by this paradigm which only accepts that which fits into a naturalistic model, with no room for anything outside of that, because that definition is supernatural.
Jesus said: John 6:38 For I came down from Heaven, not to do My own will but the will of Him who sent Me.
I don't think that this place called heaven emits any electromagnetic signals that SETI could pick up. It is probable that heaven is not part of his time space dimension at all, but we don't know.
Jesus said: John 4:24 God is a spirit, and they who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.
What exactly is a spirit? Is a spirit subject to the physical laws that we are familiar with?
Many, if not most UFO reports are for phenomena that cannot be explained by materialistcally limited scientific explanations. Human senses and their scientific extensions are able to only grasp a minute fraction of reality.
....If I was in his position, I would have let it go.....
I heartily agree with you, but apparently the moderator classified your opinion as flame bait. The Slashdot moderation system is broken, because it stifles minority voices who disagree with the mostly left-wing liberal/secular minded majority here.
For centuries, it was not possible for humans to intervene significantly when somebody got desperately ill. Nowadays medical science can do astounding things, but it also comes with significant costs. In the end however, the patients and the doctors, not whoever happens to be paying the bill, should decide at what point nature should be allowed to take its course.
....religious people are more likely to end treatment and let themselves die.....
True Christians, those who actually believe all words of Jesus Christ have no fear of death. They believe what Jesus said:
John 11:25 Jesus said to her, I am the Resurrection and the Life! He who believes in Me, though he die, yet he shall live. John 11:26 And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?
For those who don't believe Jesus, there is also a resurrection, in order for them to be judged by how they lived their life here on earth:
Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment,
....Remember, mother nature doesn't believe in politics. She doesn't even believe in us and doesn't consider us to be special in any way. (Sorry God!)".....
Your entire very erudite sounding post is based on your worldview, the assumption, belief, that there exists no God who controls what you call mother nature. If your assumptions, your belief, is wrong about the existence of God who made this earth and controls it, then the conclusions you make are also wrong.
Your Western materialistic, secular belief is contradicted by millions of others, specifically Christians. Neither your Western materialistic beliefs nor those of the Christians can be scientifically proven. Christians believe that the God who made, owns and controls the Earth made a promise as recorded in the Bible, his word to mankind:
Genesis 8:22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
That to me, and millions of others is a far better scenario than that painted by you and other doomsayers.
Christian belief, contrary to yours, also holds that humans are a special creation of God made for eternal communion with him. Millions of us Christians celebrate this communion many times throughout the year.
.... My view is that there are no inalienable rights....
That is a fundamental disagreement you have then with those who founded our country and wrote the Constitution. This document carefully enumerates these fundamental human rights and constrains government from taking them away.
You're definitely right in that there have been and still are many brutal societies. Do you want our government to become one also?
(....If you want those "inalienable" rights, then you need to work for them...)
How exactly do you propose to do that? What if what you think your rights are, conflict with those of what your neighbor thinks they ought to be? Since we live in a democratic society, are the ideas of your neighbors automatically correct ones, as far as what rights are concerned, if they are the majority? Does might make right? If not, why?
....there exists a standard of morality outside of ourselves....
That is exactly this belief system that made possible the Holocaust. The Nazis, convinced a sizable number of Germans, the Jews were subhuman. They need to be exterminated. In their eyes they were right, were they?
In our world today, the unborn are not children in the making, but mere pieces of tissue that can be done away with. The Supreme Court and other branches of government said so, so it must be right. Is it?
The worldview, that says that right and wrong is whatever we agree is right and wrong, leads to disaster. Yet that is the worldview of the majority today, at least in the West. Is the evidence of the history and the evidence of the present not good enough for you?
The founders of our country realized that humans are endowed with inalienable rights. With inalienable rights given by God, come also inalienable rules given by that same God. You and many others apparently do no longer hold this to be true.
....It could literally take months to restore services to some areas....
It amazes me at the mountains of ignorance being displayed here in most of the posts. Nobody ever even talks about what such a solar storm is actually all about. What does the expelling of large amounts of charged particles from the sun actually do to Earth? What is the mechanism by which these particles could affect our modern lifestyle? Would such a solar storm really actually destroy the electrical grid and the communication systems? What is the mechanism of such destruction? Is there not anybody on all of Slashdot that could explain what is really going on?
The problem is really very simply explained like this:
The electrical currents from the sun flow through the earth. If, instead of going through the earth, these currents flow through some big, long distance power transmission lines, they mess up the transformers at each end. Transformers are made for alternating current, but get very unhappy when they are forced to carry any direct current. At the power plant such a transformer will draw a large current from the generator which will subsequently trip off-line. So yes, this will bring down the power grid and result in widespread power failures. However, protective devices such as circuit breakers, which are there for reasons other than a solar storm, will prevent permanent damage to the equipment.
When a solar storm subsides, after a day or two, everything can be started back up, the circuit breakers reset and all will be OK.
As for satellites, and anything else that is sensitive in space, there will be permanent damage. The inhabitants of the space station would likely be dead from radiation, although that is not 100% sure. Satellite Communications and GPS systems could be knocked out permanently.
Even though people would get their electrical power back in short order, they would not likely be able to watch their favorite TV shows for a long time. Now that might be a catastrophe for some!
....transformers to overload and burn out,... All transformers, everywhere are protected by overcurrent devices, which would shut them down long before permanent damage can be done to them.
What a solar storm does, is induce large DC currents in the earth. Because the low-voltage connections of all transformers, usually the center tap, are grounded, any potential Earth currents can take the lower impedance paths through these transformers and power lines. Because the direct currents magnetize the iron cores, the transformers are no longer operating the way they normally do. A transformer connected to a generator, for example, will present a virtual short-circuit, causing the protective overcurrent devices on the generator and the transformer to open.
So yes, such a solar storm could cause they electric grid to fail in places, but it would be very unlikely to cause permanent damage. Also, the longer the transmission line, the more of the earth it would bypass. This means that long transmission lines will fail sooner than shorter ones. Another factor is the resistivity of the earth in the region of the transmission line. In the eastern half of the American continent, the earth resistance is higher than in the West. This means that the East Coast of North America is more vulnerable, because a larger fraction of these solar storm induced earth currents would flow through the lower resistance power lines.
So while it would be disruptive, most people can live for a day or two without electricity. The recent winter storms have proven that. The damage to our satellite systems however could be much more serious and disruptive in the long-term.
Yes, you do have control over your actions. You can do what is good for someone else or you can be selfish. You can be honest with your dealings concerning your fellow man or you can be devious. I am talking about much more basic human behavior than mere enforcement of religious practices, such as divides Christians from Muslims and others.
(...we are born with knowledge of good and evil....)
You are correct about that one, but the question is why. Who or what established this knowledge in the first place. Is it encoded in our genetics? If so how did it get there by any atheistic mechanism? According to the Bible, this ability to know good and evil came to mankind as a result of disobedience to God's command.
(....You already claim that humanity is tasked with following God's laws....)
No, man's task is to love God and out of that love be gladly willing to submit only to God's righteous rule. Read the Ten Commandments. Jesus Christ sums up human responsibilities this way:
Matthew 22:37 Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Matthew 22:38 This is the first and great commandment. Matthew 22:39 And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22:40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
(.... of Jesus dying and somehow bearing responsibility for everyone's sins...)
I know that I have come up short in the obedience toward this basic law, as expressed above. If you are honest with yourself, you will have to admit that you are in the same boat as I in this regard. If God is just, and he is, then he will have to execute the punishment for breaking this law demands. This punishment for everybody is eternal death. So by law, you and I and every person on this planet is condemned. We are in effect altogether on death row.
However, the governor of the universe, Almighty God has decreed that if any person who has always obeyed all of his laws, is willing to take the decreed just punishment, then the persons on death row can go free if they want to. You or anyone else on this prison planet can accept a free pardon by simply believing in the person and work of Jesus Christ and that he indeed is willing to set free all those who simply believe. Everyone can believe, no matter what their station in life, intelligence or any other factor is. Faith is universal.
God himself set his seal of approval on this transaction by raising the God man Jesus Christ from the dead. All of the religious founders and gurus, whoever they may be are dead, their bodies still moldering in the grave.
This is the essence of the Christian gospel message, which has nothing to do with any religion. Every human being that has ever been alive on this planet, including you and I, will one day stand before Jesus Christ. If you believe him and the Gospel message, he will welcome you as your Savior, but if you reject Him now and his message, he will be your judge who will sentence you according to whether you have always obeyed his supreme commandment.
Your belief system, your worldview in this life, is of greatest importance, both now in how you live your life as well as afterwards.
I certainly agree with you there. It was the Jewish religious leaders who manipulated the Roman government to have Jesus crucified. Jesus, who claimed to be God in a human body, did not come to earth to found another religion. There has always been an overabundance of religions.
All religion is bondage, but Jesus Christ came to give us life, abundant life, not only here on earth, but forever. He proved his claim, then rising from the dead, overcoming our biggest enemy -- death. When he was here on earth he made some wild claims, such as this:
John 11:25 Jesus said to her, I am the Resurrection and the Life! He who believes in Me, though he die, yet he shall live. John 11:26 And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?
If this statement is not true, then it is the boast of the most preposterous deceiver or madman that ever walked on this earth. I believe that he was speaking the truth. This is why I have received life in his name.
..... I submit that we, including you, don't know of a standard outside of mankind.....
Those that wrote the American Declaration of Independence, believed that there is a giver of basic human rights, namely God our Creator. God cannot be proven or disproven, only believed in or disbelieved in. With God-given rights, bestowed upon every human being by him, not by government, come rules and responsibilities for every individual and society at large.
Whether a person believes or disbelieves in God, will color everything else in their life. Mankind needs moral standards of behavior, just as we need the laws of physics. The God who revealed himself, by becoming human in Jesus Christ, is the one who came up with the laws of nature and the laws of human behavior.
Just as we have no control over gravity or the charge of the electron, so, ultimately we have no control over what is right and what is wrong. The difference is that when we disobey physical laws, the result is almost immediate all the time. The disobeying of God's moral laws is more along the line of sowing and reaping. It takes a while for evil to grow up and bear fruit. It also takes a while for good to grow up also and produce fruit. The godly seed sown by our forefathers has produced a bountiful harvest. However, increasingly, the departure from God's rightful rule is beginning to bear fruit. The economic mess we're in right now is the inevitable result of the sins of greed and rampant selfishness.
The humans are a prideful creature who thinks he is in charge of his own destiny. God, in his instructions for living, the Bible, says we humans are like lost sheep needing a shepherd. It is not very flattering to be labeled sheep, because among domestic animals, sheep are the dumbest and most helpless.
God and his standards of behavior cannot be proven scientifically, but his laws can be obeyed for our good or flaunted for our harm.
...Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished.... which means you would have to abolish the majority beliefs of the people in the USA and in most other countries. Good luck with that!
What makes you think that your beliefs, your secular worldview is the correct one? There is not one person on this entire earth that does not have a worldview, a belief system. You are no exception to this incontrovertible fact.
...climatologists "just believe" that AGW is happening....
If they really believed that, then why did they have to cook the data, suppress dissenters, as well as stiffing anyone who had legitimate FOIA requests? If the data it really says what they believe and hope, why was there a scandal as revealed by the stolen e-mails and other shady activities of so-called scientists?
....they don't ever bother to probe the question of how such biases affect things like "scientific consensus,"....
Is there any human being alive whose worldview does not affect how such a person interprets incoming information? Here in our so-called technological, materialistic West, especially here on Slashdot, the "There is no God" and nothing beyond the physical natural dimension exists -- worldview colors everything. This has not always been so, and even today, the majority of the world population believes there are other dimensions beyond what science can deal with. Mankind needs a standard outside of himself. If man is the measure of all things, then anything by definition of the majority is right.
If the majority or those in power decide that the murder of certain classes of human beings is acceptable, then by that definition it IS acceptable. The first step in classifying certain groups as non-human is the beginning of the slippery slope. The Nazis decided that the Jews and others were Untermenschen, subhuman, and therefore it was OK, in fact necessary, to exterminate them. In the USA and in Europe, the unborn are declared to be non-human, mere fetuses, biological tissue. Therefore it is no crime to murder unborn children. That same materialistic reasoning can be applied to other classes of human beings, such as for example the aged and infirm.
If on the other hand, the underlying worldview is that worldview upon which this country was founded, namely that there is a God, who gives inalienable rights but also responsibility, then ALL humans have great value, especially the helpless ones.
So it is no surprise then, that the underlying worldview, their belief system, is foundational to the outcome of this or any other study like this. Is it really necessary to spend a big pile of money on something that everybody knows or at least ought to know?
John 17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
Jesus Christ claimed to be God, living a perfect life among us in a human body. He came out of eternity and entered into time and space. He proved by his resurrection that he has power over death. He called God his father and invites those who believe him, Christians, to also call God "Our Father...."
Can anybody call himself a Christian and not believe the Christ of the Bible?
....It's also very possible for to set something like this up without no IT help at all.... You are forgetting that these were Macs. Unlike Windows, Macs do not require sophisticated I.T. assistance to do rather complicated things. In this case however it looks like someone at the very top must have authorized the I.T. to install this specialized software on these laptops. It seems reasonable to believe school administrators, that this was done for theft reasons. I think, at the very least, that whoever authorized wrongful use of this otherwise legitimate software, should lose their job.
Which is totally false! The Darwin theory's famous evolutionary tree is pure fiction. All creatures come in distinct groups. These groupings are not necessarily the same as what scientists have termed species. Evolution in the sense of all creatures having a common primeval ancestor is NOT according to observations and experiments. Many, if not all creatures, adapt to some extent to their environment, but at all times they remain distinct in their groupings. Dogs are always dogs, even though there are many breeds of dogs and cats always remain cats even though there are many kinds of cats. Humans always have been humans, will never be anything else. Apes have always been apes and never were human and will they ever be.
....We need warp drive, subspace, wormholes, or something else....
All of the posts on this subject make the assumptions of a Western scientific/materialistic worldview. There are other views, such as the Bible for example, which open other possibilities for exploring the universe.
The first and foremost problem to overcome is physical mortality. Jesus Christ claimed to be God and proved this claim by overcoming death. As far as I'm concerned, that would be a prerequisite to being able to explore the vast universe.
The second problem is to get rid of the limitation of mass. This means that a complex material spaceship would not be needed, in order to leave the earth for other worlds. Read the account of the ascension of Jesus Christ. He did not need a fiery rocket or other kind of vehicle to simply depart the surface of the earth to travel to another world.
Science has conditioned us to only think in terms of the physical, material part of reality. Einstein taught us that the speed of light is a physical limitation because of energy and mass. He also taught us that matter and energy are directly interchangeable. He had nothing to say on the speed of thought. Does gravity have a speed limit and could it be reversible given the right conditions? We read in the Bible about God and the spirit world and its inhabitants of demons and angels. These cannot be perceived by science. Does that mean they don't exist?
...The other big question is can we reverse the trend....
There are two worldviews. Western materialistic worldview or belief system which contends that we can do something about it and the Eastern worldview which doubts that mankind, not some higher power is in charge of this planet. I believe, that ultimately mankind is not in charge of their destiny. This is contrary to Western beliefs, but there are millions of people on this earth, that would agree with that. Human destiny as a whole is fixed and there is nothing we can do about it.
as well as zillions of viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware and mountains of spam. When a PC gets infected with these, it is not usually a life and death situation, as it can be with a phone. A phone has to be at least 1000 times more reliable and dependable. Can you imagine loading a unknown app with a virus which breaks the phone? Can you imagine someone trying to dial 911 and nothing happens because the phone got some malware?
No, Apple has done the right thing with their store in preventing just any Tom, Dick and Harry Hacker from infesting the the iPhone, at least not the ones that have not been in jail broken. Cyber criminals would love to be able to do to the millions of phones out there, what they have done to the PC and its users. Apple has built security into the device, not added it on as an afterthought.
.... Over a few generations, all bacteria will be resistant. That's evolution.....
I would call that adaptation. That is vastly different from a theory that says birds came from reptiles or people from apes. Just because an organism, such as bacteria, adapt to a toxic environment doesn't make a new organism. It's still the same old bacteria with a new capability.
Can you give some examples of that? What I mean by that is actual observed FACTS, not interpretations or conjectures. By its very nature, evolution is historical. No one is making evolution happen today. Besides that, there is no consistent definition of the word "evolution". If that word is applied in the sense of bacteria gaining new capabilities or an organism becoming resistant to some environmental factor, then that can be indeed shown scientifically today. On the other hand if it is applied to one kind of organism changing gradually over time into another kind of organism, then that is not a scientific fact.
Scientists have tried to make revolution happened in the laboratory, by raising thousands or millions of generations of E. coli or fruit flies. So far at least, E. coli are still that and fruit flies still remained fruit flies. Scientists have bred E. coli with new capabilities and grotesque fruit flies with extra heads and other anomalies. In the end however, they were still recognizable as fruit flies.
One of the many things that evolutionists postulate, is that birds evolved from reptiles. That is an assertion that cannot be proven by any modern scientific procedure. To get around that problem, evolutionists resort to immense periods of time. The problem is, that even in tens of millions of years, there is not enough time to turn a heavy earthbound creature into an efficient flying machine.
Of course creation cannot be proven scientifically. In the end, there are many aspects of evolution that have to be believed by faith, because they cannot be demonstrated in the laboratory neither have they been observed as occurring today in nature.
...You have provided no evidence that an AI agent "cannot have personality"...
I guess you missed the part about a computer being a deterministic machine, but as humans are not. The question is: are the mind and the brain one and the same? Western materialistic thinking answers in the affirmative, but others believe that there is an immaterial aspect to humans. It is called various names, such as mind, soul or spirit.
In order for us to perceive information, it has to become physical, but information itself is not physical. Software has no mass. If you would weigh a blank hard drive on the most accurate scale that can be devised and then again after you have recorded a terabyte or so of information on it, you would not measure any difference. Information has no speed limit. What is the speed of thought? Because we lives in a physical body with a physical brain in a material world, normally information has to be manifested to us play a physical mechanism.
....But what does your suggestion have to do with consciousness?...
Nothing! It all depends on how we define "intelligence". If we define intelligence as requiring consciousness, that would be very limiting. A computer can have intelligence, at least in my mind, but it cannot have personality.
Another problem is that at least today's computers are all deterministic. It is possible to know all inputs and the program and from that predict the output. With humans it is not possible to know all the inputs, neither is it possible to know the program and therefore it is impossible to correctly predict the output. However for a computer to be useful, it does not have to mimic a human being in all respects, but only be able to perform simple human tasks.
One such human task might be to take a bin full of various electronic parts and chips and stuff them in the correct places on a printed circuit board. We already can do little to, but anything at all complicated, still needs to be done by cheap human labor.
Slashdot Mirror
....where Ezekiel the even documents his encounter...
The Bible is full of what we call supernatural encounters and stories. We label as supernatural anything that does not fit into the materialistic Western worldview.
Jesus Christ, who claimed to be God, backed up this claim by rising from the dead. Modern Western materialistic minds refuse to believe this and other biblical stories, because it is simply entirely outside of most modern people's worldview.
SETI is limited by this paradigm which only accepts that which fits into a naturalistic model, with no room for anything outside of that, because that definition is supernatural.
Jesus said:
John 6:38 For I came down from Heaven, not to do My own will but the will of Him who sent Me.
I don't think that this place called heaven emits any electromagnetic signals that SETI could pick up. It is probable that heaven is not part of his time space dimension at all, but we don't know.
Jesus said:
John 4:24 God is a spirit, and they who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.
What exactly is a spirit? Is a spirit subject to the physical laws that we are familiar with?
Many, if not most UFO reports are for phenomena that cannot be explained by materialistcally limited scientific explanations. Human senses and their scientific extensions are able to only grasp a minute fraction of reality.
....If I was in his position, I would have let it go.....
I heartily agree with you, but apparently the moderator classified your opinion as flame bait. The Slashdot moderation system is broken, because it stifles minority voices who disagree with the mostly left-wing liberal/secular minded majority here.
For centuries, it was not possible for humans to intervene significantly when somebody got desperately ill. Nowadays medical science can do astounding things, but it also comes with significant costs. In the end however, the patients and the doctors, not whoever happens to be paying the bill, should decide at what point nature should be allowed to take its course.
....religious people are more likely to end treatment and let themselves die.....
True Christians, those who actually believe all words of Jesus Christ have no fear of death. They believe what Jesus said:
John 11:25 Jesus said to her, I am the Resurrection and the Life! He who believes in Me, though he die, yet he shall live.
John 11:26 And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?
For those who don't believe Jesus, there is also a resurrection, in order for them to be judged by how they lived their life here on earth:
Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment,
....Remember, mother nature doesn't believe in politics. She doesn't even believe in us and doesn't consider us to be special in any way. (Sorry God!)".....
Your entire very erudite sounding post is based on your worldview, the assumption, belief, that there exists no God who controls what you call mother nature. If your assumptions, your belief, is wrong about the existence of God who made this earth and controls it, then the conclusions you make are also wrong.
Your Western materialistic, secular belief is contradicted by millions of others, specifically Christians. Neither your Western materialistic beliefs nor those of the Christians can be scientifically proven. Christians believe that the God who made, owns and controls the Earth made a promise as recorded in the Bible, his word to mankind:
Genesis 8:22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
That to me, and millions of others is a far better scenario than that painted by you and other doomsayers.
Christian belief, contrary to yours, also holds that humans are a special creation of God made for eternal communion with him. Millions of us Christians celebrate this communion many times throughout the year.
.... My view is that there are no inalienable rights....
That is a fundamental disagreement you have then with those who founded our country and wrote the Constitution. This document carefully enumerates these fundamental human rights and constrains government from taking them away.
You're definitely right in that there have been and still are many brutal societies. Do you want our government to become one also?
(....If you want those "inalienable" rights, then you need to work for them...)
How exactly do you propose to do that? What if what you think your rights are, conflict with those of what your neighbor thinks they ought to be? Since we live in a democratic society, are the ideas of your neighbors automatically correct ones, as far as what rights are concerned, if they are the majority? Does might make right? If not, why?
....there exists a standard of morality outside of ourselves....
That is exactly this belief system that made possible the Holocaust. The Nazis, convinced a sizable number of Germans, the Jews were subhuman. They need to be exterminated. In their eyes they were right, were they?
In our world today, the unborn are not children in the making, but mere pieces of tissue that can be done away with. The Supreme Court and other branches of government said so, so it must be right. Is it?
The worldview, that says that right and wrong is whatever we agree is right and wrong, leads to disaster. Yet that is the worldview of the majority today, at least in the West. Is the evidence of the history and the evidence of the present not good enough for you?
The founders of our country realized that humans are endowed with inalienable rights. With inalienable rights given by God, come also inalienable rules given by that same God. You and many others apparently do no longer hold this to be true.
....It could literally take months to restore services to some areas....
It amazes me at the mountains of ignorance being displayed here in most of the posts. Nobody ever even talks about what such a solar storm is actually all about. What does the expelling of large amounts of charged particles from the sun actually do to Earth? What is the mechanism by which these particles could affect our modern lifestyle? Would such a solar storm really actually destroy the electrical grid and the communication systems? What is the mechanism of such destruction? Is there not anybody on all of Slashdot that could explain what is really going on?
The problem is really very simply explained like this:
The electrical currents from the sun flow through the earth. If, instead of going through the earth, these currents flow through some big, long distance power transmission lines, they mess up the transformers at each end. Transformers are made for alternating current, but get very unhappy when they are forced to carry any direct current. At the power plant such a transformer will draw a large current from the generator which will subsequently trip off-line. So yes, this will bring down the power grid and result in widespread power failures. However, protective devices such as circuit breakers, which are there for reasons other than a solar storm, will prevent permanent damage to the equipment.
When a solar storm subsides, after a day or two, everything can be started back up, the circuit breakers reset and all will be OK.
As for satellites, and anything else that is sensitive in space, there will be permanent damage. The inhabitants of the space station would likely be dead from radiation, although that is not 100% sure. Satellite Communications and GPS systems could be knocked out permanently.
Even though people would get their electrical power back in short order, they would not likely be able to watch their favorite TV shows for a long time. Now that might be a catastrophe for some!
....transformers to overload and burn out,...
All transformers, everywhere are protected by overcurrent devices, which would shut them down long before permanent damage can be done to them.
What a solar storm does, is induce large DC currents in the earth. Because the low-voltage connections of all transformers, usually the center tap, are grounded, any potential Earth currents can take the lower impedance paths through these transformers and power lines. Because the direct currents magnetize the iron cores, the transformers are no longer operating the way they normally do. A transformer connected to a generator, for example, will present a virtual short-circuit, causing the protective overcurrent devices on the generator and the transformer to open.
So yes, such a solar storm could cause they electric grid to fail in places, but it would be very unlikely to cause permanent damage. Also, the longer the transmission line, the more of the earth it would bypass. This means that long transmission lines will fail sooner than shorter ones. Another factor is the resistivity of the earth in the region of the transmission line. In the eastern half of the American continent, the earth resistance is higher than in the West. This means that the East Coast of North America is more vulnerable, because a larger fraction of these solar storm induced earth currents would flow through the lower resistance power lines.
So while it would be disruptive, most people can live for a day or two without electricity. The recent winter storms have proven that. The damage to our satellite systems however could be much more serious and disruptive in the long-term.
.....we have control over our own actions.....
Yes, you do have control over your actions. You can do what is good for someone else or you can be selfish. You can be honest with your dealings concerning your fellow man or you can be devious. I am talking about much more basic human behavior than mere enforcement of religious practices, such as divides Christians from Muslims and others.
(...we are born with knowledge of good and evil....)
You are correct about that one, but the question is why. Who or what established this knowledge in the first place. Is it encoded in our genetics? If so how did it get there by any atheistic mechanism? According to the Bible, this ability to know good and evil came to mankind as a result of disobedience to God's command.
(....You already claim that humanity is tasked with following God's laws....)
No, man's task is to love God and out of that love be gladly willing to submit only to God's righteous rule. Read the Ten Commandments. Jesus Christ sums up human responsibilities this way:
Matthew 22:37 Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
Matthew 22:38 This is the first and great commandment.
Matthew 22:39 And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Matthew 22:40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
(.... of Jesus dying and somehow bearing responsibility for everyone's sins...)
I know that I have come up short in the obedience toward this basic law, as expressed above. If you are honest with yourself, you will have to admit that you are in the same boat as I in this regard. If God is just, and he is, then he will have to execute the punishment for breaking this law demands. This punishment for everybody is eternal death. So by law, you and I and every person on this planet is condemned. We are in effect altogether on death row.
However, the governor of the universe, Almighty God has decreed that if any person who has always obeyed all of his laws, is willing to take the decreed just punishment, then the persons on death row can go free if they want to. You or anyone else on this prison planet can accept a free pardon by simply believing in the person and work of Jesus Christ and that he indeed is willing to set free all those who simply believe. Everyone can believe, no matter what their station in life, intelligence or any other factor is. Faith is universal.
God himself set his seal of approval on this transaction by raising the God man Jesus Christ from the dead. All of the religious founders and gurus, whoever they may be are dead, their bodies still moldering in the grave.
This is the essence of the Christian gospel message, which has nothing to do with any religion. Every human being that has ever been alive on this planet, including you and I, will one day stand before Jesus Christ. If you believe him and the Gospel message, he will welcome you as your Savior, but if you reject Him now and his message, he will be your judge who will sentence you according to whether you have always obeyed his supreme commandment.
Your belief system, your worldview in this life, is of greatest importance, both now in how you live your life as well as afterwards.
....Religion is a vector for manipulation,...
I certainly agree with you there. It was the Jewish religious leaders who manipulated the Roman government to have Jesus crucified. Jesus, who claimed to be God in a human body, did not come to earth to found another religion. There has always been an overabundance of religions.
All religion is bondage, but Jesus Christ came to give us life, abundant life, not only here on earth, but forever. He proved his claim, then rising from the dead, overcoming our biggest enemy -- death. When he was here on earth he made some wild claims, such as this:
John 11:25 Jesus said to her, I am the Resurrection and the Life! He who believes in Me, though he die, yet he shall live.
John 11:26 And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?
If this statement is not true, then it is the boast of the most preposterous deceiver or madman that ever walked on this earth. I believe that he was speaking the truth. This is why I have received life in his name.
..... I submit that we, including you, don't know of a standard outside of mankind.....
Those that wrote the American Declaration of Independence, believed that there is a giver of basic human rights, namely God our Creator. God cannot be proven or disproven, only believed in or disbelieved in. With God-given rights, bestowed upon every human being by him, not by government, come rules and responsibilities for every individual and society at large.
Whether a person believes or disbelieves in God, will color everything else in their life. Mankind needs moral standards of behavior, just as we need the laws of physics. The God who revealed himself, by becoming human in Jesus Christ, is the one who came up with the laws of nature and the laws of human behavior.
Just as we have no control over gravity or the charge of the electron, so, ultimately we have no control over what is right and what is wrong. The difference is that when we disobey physical laws, the result is almost immediate all the time. The disobeying of God's moral laws is more along the line of sowing and reaping. It takes a while for evil to grow up and bear fruit. It also takes a while for good to grow up also and produce fruit. The godly seed sown by our forefathers has produced a bountiful harvest. However, increasingly, the departure from God's rightful rule is beginning to bear fruit. The economic mess we're in right now is the inevitable result of the sins of greed and rampant selfishness.
The humans are a prideful creature who thinks he is in charge of his own destiny. God, in his instructions for living, the Bible, says we humans are like lost sheep needing a shepherd. It is not very flattering to be labeled sheep, because among domestic animals, sheep are the dumbest and most helpless.
God and his standards of behavior cannot be proven scientifically, but his laws can be obeyed for our good or flaunted for our harm.
...Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished....
which means you would have to abolish the majority beliefs of the people in the USA and in most other countries. Good luck with that!
What makes you think that your beliefs, your secular worldview is the correct one? There is not one person on this entire earth that does not have a worldview, a belief system. You are no exception to this incontrovertible fact.
...climatologists "just believe" that AGW is happening....
If they really believed that, then why did they have to cook the data, suppress dissenters, as well as stiffing anyone who had legitimate FOIA requests? If the data it really says what they believe and hope, why was there a scandal as revealed by the stolen e-mails and other shady activities of so-called scientists?
....they don't ever bother to probe the question of how such biases affect things like "scientific consensus,"....
Is there any human being alive whose worldview does not affect how such a person interprets incoming information? Here in our so-called technological, materialistic West, especially here on Slashdot, the "There is no God" and nothing beyond the physical natural dimension exists -- worldview colors everything. This has not always been so, and even today, the majority of the world population believes there are other dimensions beyond what science can deal with. Mankind needs a standard outside of himself. If man is the measure of all things, then anything by definition of the majority is right.
If the majority or those in power decide that the murder of certain classes of human beings is acceptable, then by that definition it IS acceptable. The first step in classifying certain groups as non-human is the beginning of the slippery slope. The Nazis decided that the Jews and others were Untermenschen, subhuman, and therefore it was OK, in fact necessary, to exterminate them. In the USA and in Europe, the unborn are declared to be non-human, mere fetuses, biological tissue. Therefore it is no crime to murder unborn children. That same materialistic reasoning can be applied to other classes of human beings, such as for example the aged and infirm.
If on the other hand, the underlying worldview is that worldview upon which this country was founded, namely that there is a God, who gives inalienable rights but also responsibility, then ALL humans have great value, especially the helpless ones.
So it is no surprise then, that the underlying worldview, their belief system, is foundational to the outcome of this or any other study like this. Is it really necessary to spend a big pile of money on something that everybody knows or at least ought to know?
....God is unknowable....
Either you are right, or Jesus Christ is right.
John 17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
Jesus Christ claimed to be God, living a perfect life among us in a human body. He came out of eternity and entered into time and space. He proved by his resurrection that he has power over death. He called God his father and invites those who believe him, Christians, to also call God "Our Father...."
Can anybody call himself a Christian and not believe the Christ of the Bible?
....It's also very possible for to set something like this up without no IT help at all....
You are forgetting that these were Macs. Unlike Windows, Macs do not require sophisticated I.T. assistance to do rather complicated things. In this case however it looks like someone at the very top must have authorized the I.T. to install this specialized software on these laptops. It seems reasonable to believe school administrators, that this was done for theft reasons. I think, at the very least, that whoever authorized wrongful use of this otherwise legitimate software, should lose their job.
...What we have is common ancestors...
Which is totally false! The Darwin theory's famous evolutionary tree is pure fiction. All creatures come in distinct groups. These groupings are not necessarily the same as what scientists have termed species. Evolution in the sense of all creatures having a common primeval ancestor is NOT according to observations and experiments. Many, if not all creatures, adapt to some extent to their environment, but at all times they remain distinct in their groupings. Dogs are always dogs, even though there are many breeds of dogs and cats always remain cats even though there are many kinds of cats. Humans always have been humans, will never be anything else. Apes have always been apes and never were human and will they ever be.
....We need warp drive, subspace, wormholes, or something else ....
All of the posts on this subject make the assumptions of a Western scientific/materialistic worldview. There are other views, such as the Bible for example, which open other possibilities for exploring the universe.
The first and foremost problem to overcome is physical mortality. Jesus Christ claimed to be God and proved this claim by overcoming death. As far as I'm concerned, that would be a prerequisite to being able to explore the vast universe.
The second problem is to get rid of the limitation of mass. This means that a complex material spaceship would not be needed, in order to leave the earth for other worlds. Read the account of the ascension of Jesus Christ. He did not need a fiery rocket or other kind of vehicle to simply depart the surface of the earth to travel to another world.
Science has conditioned us to only think in terms of the physical, material part of reality. Einstein taught us that the speed of light is a physical limitation because of energy and mass. He also taught us that matter and energy are directly interchangeable. He had nothing to say on the speed of thought. Does gravity have a speed limit and could it be reversible given the right conditions? We read in the Bible about God and the spirit world and its inhabitants of demons and angels. These cannot be perceived by science. Does that mean they don't exist?
...The other big question is can we reverse the trend....
There are two worldviews. Western materialistic worldview or belief system which contends that we can do something about it and the Eastern worldview which doubts that mankind, not some higher power is in charge of this planet. I believe, that ultimately mankind is not in charge of their destiny. This is contrary to Western beliefs, but there are millions of people on this earth, that would agree with that. Human destiny as a whole is fixed and there is nothing we can do about it.
...For the last time, climate is not weather...
That this absolute and total BS. Climate is LONG TERM weather.
...The pc also has free and open apps...
as well as zillions of viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware and mountains of spam. When a PC gets infected with these, it is not usually a life and death situation, as it can be with a phone. A phone has to be at least 1000 times more reliable and dependable. Can you imagine loading a unknown app with a virus which breaks the phone? Can you imagine someone trying to dial 911 and nothing happens because the phone got some malware?
No, Apple has done the right thing with their store in preventing just any Tom, Dick and Harry Hacker from infesting the the iPhone, at least not the ones that have not been in jail broken. Cyber criminals would love to be able to do to the millions of phones out there, what they have done to the PC and its users. Apple has built security into the device, not added it on as an afterthought.
.... Over a few generations, all bacteria will be resistant. That's evolution.....
I would call that adaptation. That is vastly different from a theory that says birds came from reptiles or people from apes. Just because an organism, such as bacteria, adapt to a toxic environment doesn't make a new organism. It's still the same old bacteria with a new capability.
....The evidence for evolution is vast....
Can you give some examples of that? What I mean by that is actual observed FACTS, not interpretations or conjectures. By its very nature, evolution is historical. No one is making evolution happen today. Besides that, there is no consistent definition of the word "evolution". If that word is applied in the sense of bacteria gaining new capabilities or an organism becoming resistant to some environmental factor, then that can be indeed shown scientifically today. On the other hand if it is applied to one kind of organism changing gradually over time into another kind of organism, then that is not a scientific fact.
Scientists have tried to make revolution happened in the laboratory, by raising thousands or millions of generations of E. coli or fruit flies. So far at least, E. coli are still that and fruit flies still remained fruit flies. Scientists have bred E. coli with new capabilities and grotesque fruit flies with extra heads and other anomalies. In the end however, they were still recognizable as fruit flies.
One of the many things that evolutionists postulate, is that birds evolved from reptiles. That is an assertion that cannot be proven by any modern scientific procedure. To get around that problem, evolutionists resort to immense periods of time. The problem is, that even in tens of millions of years, there is not enough time to turn a heavy earthbound creature into an efficient flying machine.
Of course creation cannot be proven scientifically. In the end, there are many aspects of evolution that have to be believed by faith, because they cannot be demonstrated in the laboratory neither have they been observed as occurring today in nature.
...You have provided no evidence that an AI agent "cannot have personality"...
I guess you missed the part about a computer being a deterministic machine, but as humans are not. The question is: are the mind and the brain one and the same? Western materialistic thinking answers in the affirmative, but others believe that there is an immaterial aspect to humans. It is called various names, such as mind, soul or spirit.
In order for us to perceive information, it has to become physical, but information itself is not physical. Software has no mass. If you would weigh a blank hard drive on the most accurate scale that can be devised and then again after you have recorded a terabyte or so of information on it, you would not measure any difference. Information has no speed limit. What is the speed of thought? Because we lives in a physical body with a physical brain in a material world, normally information has to be manifested to us play a physical mechanism.
....But what does your suggestion have to do with consciousness?...
Nothing! It all depends on how we define "intelligence". If we define intelligence as requiring consciousness, that would be very limiting. A computer can have intelligence, at least in my mind, but it cannot have personality.
Another problem is that at least today's computers are all deterministic. It is possible to know all inputs and the program and from that predict the output. With humans it is not possible to know all the inputs, neither is it possible to know the program and therefore it is impossible to correctly predict the output. However for a computer to be useful, it does not have to mimic a human being in all respects, but only be able to perform simple human tasks.
One such human task might be to take a bin full of various electronic parts and chips and stuff them in the correct places on a printed circuit board. We already can do little to, but anything at all complicated, still needs to be done by cheap human labor.