Electrons, electromagnetic radiation and gravity have never been 'unobservable' nor supernatural. They are directly observable by everyone, anywhere at any time - you are looking at electrons and electromagnetic radition right now as you read from your computer screen while feeling the force of gravity push you into your chair. God on the other hand (as defined as all-powerful and supernatural) is not observable, no matter how advanced out technology gets.
I think we have a bit of a chicken and egg situation between our points of view on this.
Yeah I think so. Put it this way - I think the best way to teach students critical thinking is to teach them the scientific method and to teach them that science is always about questioning and testing things. I don't see how this can be done if you're also teaching ID in the science class, something which directly contradicts the scientific method.
At the moment relativity doesn't fit with quantum mechanics, however that doesn't mean that either is wrong. There is undeniably a lot we don't know about the universe and that's why scientists are going after things like string theory and trying to work out a unified theory of physics.
Einstein's theories are supported by more than just good maths, there have been numerous practical experiments and observations, eg. putting atomic clocks in supersonic planes and caculating how much the time dilation effect should have slowed them compared to clocks on the ground, the time difference matched the equations exactly. Its certainly possible that he was wrong with relativity its more likely that there are several missing pieces to the puzzle that will bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and relativity.
I didn't say that being religious means you aren't any good at critical thinking. I'm saying that teaching ID in science classes undermines the scientific method and the scientific method is all about thinking critically, being objective and testing things, not just believing.
Actually there is plenty of evidence for Einstein's theories, both mathematical and physical. You can choose to ignore relativistic physics all you want, but that doesn't stop it happening around you.
This critical thinking your arguing for is the basis of science and the scientific method. By putting religious dogma on a par with science in the science classroom they are teaching children that the scientific method, and by extension critical thinking, doesn't really mean much - that its just another theology.
Just because a test would be difficult in practice does not make a theory unfalsifiable. The parent posters suggestion may be a bit beyond our current capabilities but it is certainly physically possible. Testing the existence or not of an all powerful god is not.
Anyway we don't need another planet to test Evolution - the one we have here is quite sufficient. I think you need to read the talkorigins FAQ - http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html - it does a good job explaining all the misconceptions you seem to have about the scientific method and testability.
akgoatley you've been corrected on these points mutliple times in this thread. Evolution is falsifiable - it would be as simple as finding human remains that can be dated back to the dinosaur era. No one has yet managed to do this, but that doesn't make it unfalsifiable.
ID is not falsifiable because it says that a supernatural being - a god or whatever you want to call it, created life. If this being is supernatural there is no way it can ever be detected by any scientifc observation, because science is only what can be known or observed.
No one's denying that DNS was invented in the US. However that doesn't mean that the US somehow owns or should control all implementations of DNS. What I was trying to point out was that the Europeans and the Japanese and others already have their own DNS system - most of the actual root servers are outside the US. Its not a case of the US controlling all the DNS infrastructure and being able to tell everyone to 'get their own' if they don't like it. The US is just a party to an agreement of co-operation surrounding ICANN at the moment. If the other nations involved broke off they already essentially have their own internet with all the required infrastructure. The fact that the US originally invented DNS is irrelevant.
Not that I'm saying that should happen - I'd much rather keep the status quo than have any split and there are many countries that just have no right to have any say in how the internet works (beyond their own country TLDs), like China, Cuba, North Korea etc.
urpmi (mandriva), yum (fedora), Yast (Suse) and apt (RPM version not tied to a particular distro) all resolve RPM dependencies. They also all have GUI frontends.
The parent (renehollan) was not saying that everything is fine how it is, he was claiming that the US owns the global DNS system, I'm pointing out that a large portion of the global DNS system is in European and Japanese hands. You seem to either have not read our two posts.
I hate to burst your bubble but the US does not own DNS either. Many of the root DNS servers are located in Europe and Japan as well as the USA. So far from owning the internet or owning DNS the US is nothing more than a major party in an international agreement among the operators of the root DNS servers to obey ICANN.
Science has not made us rich. Business has made us rich. Money drives science.
Business has only been able to make us rich because of the discoveries of science. The advance of science is what has enabled our economies to expand - its allowed us to access new resources and develop more efficient ways of doing things.
As for history, most sociologists today (secular and otherwise) believe that the Protestant Reformation was directly responsible for the Industrial Revolution.
Nonsense. The industrial revolution began because the increasing levels of wealth in Britain and other colonial-powers in Europe lead to a sharply increased demand in goods. This couldn't be met by the old cottage-industry type of manual labour and animal power that was the main form of manufacturing in pre-industrial times. This increased demand lead scientists to research and develop more efficient mechanical means of production - industrialisation. The protestant reformation happened in the 16th century, around 250 years before the industrial revolution.
But, so far, science still isn't helping us be nicer people, eradicating poverty around the world, stopping violence, or any of the other things which we should expect from people of faith.
I don't see how eradicating poverty is primarily the job of religion. If it wasn't for science there would be no developed world to compare with the developing world and say "we're rich, they're poor". We'd all be living either as medieval peasants under feudal warlords or in hunter-gatherer tribes.
Again, how does this oppose religion/existance of God? Evolution is a religion in itself used to try and justify a Godless existance, in some vain hope that you will not be personably answerable to your creator.
Science does not say that god exists, nor does it say go ddoesn't exist, it simply says 'there's no way to prove or disprove it so its out of scope'. Its the religious world that is trying to distort science in the public's mind to include stuff about god (even though this is incompatible with the very definition of science). In short science is the innocent victim here, being attacked by a desperate fundamentalist movement in organised religion.
You are to hung up on fossilised carbon, which we don't need. Carbon that is exchanged between the biosphere and the atmosphere completes a full cycle in decades. You may want to take a quick glance at the carbon cycle.
I agree that theoretically we won't need it future,although we're still heavily reliant on it and that shows no sign of change in the near future. But I was using it as an example - the carbon cycle may be only a few decades but that doesn't change the fact that it takes millions of years for coal and the other fossil fuels to form. This is why just saying 'the earth is a closed system and will renew whatever we use' isn't a valid argument - it may well be true but it happens on such large timescales that its irrelevant to human beings.
I challange you to name at least a few resources that:
are absolutely vital to us.
are not renewable, even using more advance technology than we have today.
are not replacable by renewable resources.
are readily available in relatively close proximity in space.
Look the whole point of mining in space is not because we will totally run out of resources on earth, its not some desperate last-resort. The point of it is that there's vastly more (mostly) mineral wealth out there than we have on earth, enough to completely revolutionise the economics of pretty much everything. For example one of the roadblocks to large-scale production of fuel-cell cars at the moment is the shortage of platinum. The other reason is that no matter how efficient we recycle, we don't have enough resources on earth to get all 6 billion people alive today up to the current standard of living of the developed world, let alone the future.
Plus the whole thing has the added benefit that we could shift mining off earth eventually and not have to suffer all the environmental damage it brings. Even though none of this will happen for decades the space programs today are undeniably laying the groundwork for it all.
Your whole argument is based on thinking on geological timescales, resources like coal form over millions of years on earth. This is of no practical use to us because we 'use-up' all the important resources much, much faster than they are 'replaced' by the earth's natural processes. The idea that the earth is a closed system is irrelevant - our use of resources still converts them into forms that either have no further use to us or will take millions of years to process back to what they originally were. Coal being a perfect example of this. We need to get resources from space to make up that shortfall of usable resources.
Riight, which is why when I install the latest WinXP with SP2 I can do all this out of the box? Why can't I play real, quicktime, divx videos out of the box? Why can't Windows access my Linux ext3 drive out of the box?
And that is what I responded to; I was disputing the claim that we will not survive two millenia without resources from space. I believe you read more into my post that was meant to.
The OP didn't say wether he meant just survival of the species or survival of human civilization. I read that as talking about the survival of human civilization since, as I pointed out in my last post, the human species can probably survive almost any disaster but its civilization that could collapse if we run out of essential resources.
But all materials we use will sooner or later return to nature in some form. The Earth is a closed system, as long as we don't send anything out to space.
Just because all the materials we use return to nature doesn't mean they are usable by us again in any practical way. When coal smoke spews out of a coal plant it doesn't fall back to the ground in a form that's usable by us again. And of course with sufficiently advanced technology (nanobots perhaps?) we could scour the landscape and fetch all those particles that came out of the coal and remake it, but it would require far, far more energy and resources to do this than you'd be able to get out of the coal. Even though in a sustainable world we probably wouldn't be using coal its the same with any resources - no manufacturing processes are 100% efficient.
(In fact, the amount of available matter actually increases by 3000 tonnes per year as meteorite debris falls down from space.)
3000 tonnes!? That's about 2000 cars, assuming that all that asteroid matrial could be collected and was all usable. Its an insignificant amount unless the world's population was about 10,000 or so.
As I said before, all we need to do is to learn how to gather whatever substances we need.
Yes and if we had perfect technology like this then we could just as easily mine asteriods for whatever we need. Recycling is not 100% efficient and it never will be. And even if it was why would we want to restrict ourselves to a set standard of living, an economy where any wealth I make is wealth taken away from you and vice-versa. At least as far as the solar system is concerned we know that there's resources up there, in areas where there definately is no life that we'd be destroying so we may as well use it.
1) If the population keeps growing, that surely means we are succeeding in surviving.
The world population is the highest its ever been and is at least an order of magnitude higher than before industrilisation. Our ability to keep growing up to now doesn't prove that the earth has enough resources to sustain this over time.
2) This is a matter of wealth, not survival.
Who said all we care about is survival? The human species would probably survive a global nuclear war, major asteroid impact or major climate change event in some (probably stone-age) form or other. The point is that to preserve human civilization we need wealth and for that we need natural resources.
3) Can you give any examples of vital resources that are permanently lost when used? Granted, if we plan to use fusion power we can run out of deuterium and tritium, but that would take billions of years if I'm not mistaken.
Even if we recycled to the max of our ability there would still be a significant shortfall - no recycling is 100% efficient so we need to get the extra from somewhere after earth's resources are run-down.
If you want to compare Chinese poverty to my country (Australia) then the answer is that we lifted zero out of poverty out of a total of zero. Poverty as its defined in China (US$1 per day is the UN's global poverty line) simply doesn't exist in Australia - you could get more money than that begging on the streets of Sydney. China still has a long way to go before the majority of its people 'enjoy' the standard-of-living of even our poorer public housing tenants.
I agree. There were far too many "god in the machine"-type endings and on the whole the 'science-fiction' would only really fit in a kid's TV show. Its definately not like the 'hard' sci-fi you get from a show like star-trek, where although its far-fetched its at least consistent and remotely realistic. Having said that though the books involving the 7th and 8th Doctors written after the show was cancelled were really quite good.
I guess the the point I'm trying to make is read the 'novelisations' of the TV episodes of the 1st-7th Doctors. Now read the non-TV novels written for the 7th and 8th Doctors, the former read more like childrens books while the latter are proper sci-fi novels. I think the current TV series definately fits into the former, just like the previous TV series. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing - it may just be part of the limitations of trying to make Sci-fi fit in a 1 hour TV series rather than a 200-300 page novel.
1) The earth's population is growing 2) The majority of people on earth are still extremely poor. Even with a lot more recycling efficiency these people will consume a lot more resources than they do today if/as they climb out of poverty. 3) Recycling can only do so much, some resources can't be recycled, some can't be recycled very much at all and for some it would actually take more net resources to recycle and reuse them.
But I can presume that I can explore the world in a rational way because an intelligent logical creator made it all and bestowed logical reasoning to us. All of it works in a logical way (with the rare exception of things called miracles. This does not change the methods of discovery, it just gives one basis or motivation for discovery.
This is your subjective, personal religious belief. Science only deals what can be known or observed in an objective way. Intelligent creators, no matter how logical you think they are, are out of the scope of science - they fall into religion.
I was simply pointing out that there is plenty of speculation on how life came into being. Simply replacing God (not fully knowable) with a comet (not fully knowable) does not automatically make better science.
The 'comet brought life to earth' hypothesis can be tested and disproven so it is a valid scientific hyptothesis, however remote a possibility it is. The hypothesis that god (ie. supernatural and all-powerful) created life is not testable nor disprovable, therefore it is not science, its purely religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Electrons, electromagnetic radiation and gravity have never been 'unobservable' nor supernatural. They are directly observable by everyone, anywhere at any time - you are looking at electrons and electromagnetic radition right now as you read from your computer screen while feeling the force of gravity push you into your chair. God on the other hand (as defined as all-powerful and supernatural) is not observable, no matter how advanced out technology gets.
I think we have a bit of a chicken and egg situation between our points of view on this.
Yeah I think so. Put it this way - I think the best way to teach students critical thinking is to teach them the scientific method and to teach them that science is always about questioning and testing things. I don't see how this can be done if you're also teaching ID in the science class, something which directly contradicts the scientific method.
At the moment relativity doesn't fit with quantum mechanics, however that doesn't mean that either is wrong. There is undeniably a lot we don't know about the universe and that's why scientists are going after things like string theory and trying to work out a unified theory of physics.
Einstein's theories are supported by more than just good maths, there have been numerous practical experiments and observations, eg. putting atomic clocks in supersonic planes and caculating how much the time dilation effect should have slowed them compared to clocks on the ground, the time difference matched the equations exactly. Its certainly possible that he was wrong with relativity its more likely that there are several missing pieces to the puzzle that will bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and relativity.
I didn't say that being religious means you aren't any good at critical thinking. I'm saying that teaching ID in science classes undermines the scientific method and the scientific method is all about thinking critically, being objective and testing things, not just believing.
Actually there is plenty of evidence for Einstein's theories, both mathematical and physical. You can choose to ignore relativistic physics all you want, but that doesn't stop it happening around you.
This critical thinking your arguing for is the basis of science and the scientific method. By putting religious dogma on a par with science in the science classroom they are teaching children that the scientific method, and by extension critical thinking, doesn't really mean much - that its just another theology.
Just because a test would be difficult in practice does not make a theory unfalsifiable. The parent posters suggestion may be a bit beyond our current capabilities but it is certainly physically possible. Testing the existence or not of an all powerful god is not.
Anyway we don't need another planet to test Evolution - the one we have here is quite sufficient. I think you need to read the talkorigins FAQ - http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html - it does a good job explaining all the misconceptions you seem to have about the scientific method and testability.
akgoatley you've been corrected on these points mutliple times in this thread. Evolution is falsifiable - it would be as simple as finding human remains that can be dated back to the dinosaur era. No one has yet managed to do this, but that doesn't make it unfalsifiable.
ID is not falsifiable because it says that a supernatural being - a god or whatever you want to call it, created life. If this being is supernatural there is no way it can ever be detected by any scientifc observation, because science is only what can be known or observed.
No one's denying that DNS was invented in the US. However that doesn't mean that the US somehow owns or should control all implementations of DNS. What I was trying to point out was that the Europeans and the Japanese and others already have their own DNS system - most of the actual root servers are outside the US. Its not a case of the US controlling all the DNS infrastructure and being able to tell everyone to 'get their own' if they don't like it. The US is just a party to an agreement of co-operation surrounding ICANN at the moment. If the other nations involved broke off they already essentially have their own internet with all the required infrastructure. The fact that the US originally invented DNS is irrelevant.
Not that I'm saying that should happen - I'd much rather keep the status quo than have any split and there are many countries that just have no right to have any say in how the internet works (beyond their own country TLDs), like China, Cuba, North Korea etc.
urpmi (mandriva), yum (fedora), Yast (Suse) and apt (RPM version not tied to a particular distro) all resolve RPM dependencies. They also all have GUI frontends.
The parent (renehollan) was not saying that everything is fine how it is, he was claiming that the US owns the global DNS system, I'm pointing out that a large portion of the global DNS system is in European and Japanese hands. You seem to either have not read our two posts.
I hate to burst your bubble but the US does not own DNS either. Many of the root DNS servers are located in Europe and Japan as well as the USA. So far from owning the internet or owning DNS the US is nothing more than a major party in an international agreement among the operators of the root DNS servers to obey ICANN.
Science has not made us rich. Business has made us rich. Money drives science.
Business has only been able to make us rich because of the discoveries of science. The advance of science is what has enabled our economies to expand - its allowed us to access new resources and develop more efficient ways of doing things.
As for history, most sociologists today (secular and otherwise) believe that the Protestant Reformation was directly responsible for the Industrial Revolution.
Nonsense. The industrial revolution began because the increasing levels of wealth in Britain and other colonial-powers in Europe lead to a sharply increased demand in goods. This couldn't be met by the old cottage-industry type of manual labour and animal power that was the main form of manufacturing in pre-industrial times. This increased demand lead scientists to research and develop more efficient mechanical means of production - industrialisation. The protestant reformation happened in the 16th century, around 250 years before the industrial revolution.
But, so far, science still isn't helping us be nicer people, eradicating poverty around the world, stopping violence, or any of the other things which we should expect from people of faith.
I don't see how eradicating poverty is primarily the job of religion. If it wasn't for science there would be no developed world to compare with the developing world and say "we're rich, they're poor". We'd all be living either as medieval peasants under feudal warlords or in hunter-gatherer tribes.
Again, how does this oppose religion/existance of God?
Evolution is a religion in itself used to try and justify a Godless existance, in some vain hope that you will not be personably answerable to your creator.
Science does not say that god exists, nor does it say go ddoesn't exist, it simply says 'there's no way to prove or disprove it so its out of scope'. Its the religious world that is trying to distort science in the public's mind to include stuff about god (even though this is incompatible with the very definition of science). In short science is the innocent victim here, being attacked by a desperate fundamentalist movement in organised religion.
You are to hung up on fossilised carbon, which we don't need. Carbon that is exchanged between the biosphere and the atmosphere completes a full cycle in decades. You may want to take a quick glance at the carbon cycle.
. htm
I agree that theoretically we won't need it future,although we're still heavily reliant on it and that shows no sign of change in the near future. But I was using it as an example - the carbon cycle may be only a few decades but that doesn't change the fact that it takes millions of years for coal and the other fossil fuels to form. This is why just saying 'the earth is a closed system and will renew whatever we use' isn't a valid argument - it may well be true but it happens on such large timescales that its irrelevant to human beings.
I challange you to name at least a few resources that:
are absolutely vital to us.
are not renewable, even using more advance technology than we have today.
are not replacable by renewable resources.
are readily available in relatively close proximity in space.
Platinum for example. http://science.howstuffworks.com/asteroid-mining1
Its well known to be fairly rare and expensive due to a limited supply on earth.
Look the whole point of mining in space is not because we will totally run out of resources on earth, its not some desperate last-resort. The point of it is that there's vastly more (mostly) mineral wealth out there than we have on earth, enough to completely revolutionise the economics of pretty much everything. For example one of the roadblocks to large-scale production of fuel-cell cars at the moment is the shortage of platinum. The other reason is that no matter how efficient we recycle, we don't have enough resources on earth to get all 6 billion people alive today up to the current standard of living of the developed world, let alone the future.
Plus the whole thing has the added benefit that we could shift mining off earth eventually and not have to suffer all the environmental damage it brings. Even though none of this will happen for decades the space programs today are undeniably laying the groundwork for it all.
Your whole argument is based on thinking on geological timescales, resources like coal form over millions of years on earth. This is of no practical use to us because we 'use-up' all the important resources much, much faster than they are 'replaced' by the earth's natural processes. The idea that the earth is a closed system is irrelevant - our use of resources still converts them into forms that either have no further use to us or will take millions of years to process back to what they originally were. Coal being a perfect example of this. We need to get resources from space to make up that shortfall of usable resources.
Riight, which is why when I install the latest WinXP with SP2 I can do all this out of the box? Why can't I play real, quicktime, divx videos out of the box? Why can't Windows access my Linux ext3 drive out of the box?
And that is what I responded to; I was disputing the claim that we will not survive two millenia without resources from space. I believe you read more into my post that was meant to.
The OP didn't say wether he meant just survival of the species or survival of human civilization. I read that as talking about the survival of human civilization since, as I pointed out in my last post, the human species can probably survive almost any disaster but its civilization that could collapse if we run out of essential resources.
But all materials we use will sooner or later return to nature in some form. The Earth is a closed system, as long as we don't send anything out to space.
Just because all the materials we use return to nature doesn't mean they are usable by us again in any practical way. When coal smoke spews out of a coal plant it doesn't fall back to the ground in a form that's usable by us again. And of course with sufficiently advanced technology (nanobots perhaps?) we could scour the landscape and fetch all those particles that came out of the coal and remake it, but it would require far, far more energy and resources to do this than you'd be able to get out of the coal. Even though in a sustainable world we probably wouldn't be using coal its the same with any resources - no manufacturing processes are 100% efficient.
(In fact, the amount of available matter actually increases by 3000 tonnes per year as meteorite debris falls down from space.)
3000 tonnes!? That's about 2000 cars, assuming that all that asteroid matrial could be collected and was all usable. Its an insignificant amount unless the world's population was about 10,000 or so.
As I said before, all we need to do is to learn how to gather whatever substances we need.
Yes and if we had perfect technology like this then we could just as easily mine asteriods for whatever we need. Recycling is not 100% efficient and it never will be. And even if it was why would we want to restrict ourselves to a set standard of living, an economy where any wealth I make is wealth taken away from you and vice-versa. At least as far as the solar system is concerned we know that there's resources up there, in areas where there definately is no life that we'd be destroying so we may as well use it.
1) If the population keeps growing, that surely means we are succeeding in surviving.
The world population is the highest its ever been and is at least an order of magnitude higher than before industrilisation. Our ability to keep growing up to now doesn't prove that the earth has enough resources to sustain this over time.
2) This is a matter of wealth, not survival.
Who said all we care about is survival? The human species would probably survive a global nuclear war, major asteroid impact or major climate change event in some (probably stone-age) form or other. The point is that to preserve human civilization we need wealth and for that we need natural resources.
3) Can you give any examples of vital resources that are permanently lost when used? Granted, if we plan to use fusion power we can run out of deuterium and tritium, but that would take billions of years if I'm not mistaken.
Even if we recycled to the max of our ability there would still be a significant shortfall - no recycling is 100% efficient so we need to get the extra from somewhere after earth's resources are run-down.
If you want to compare Chinese poverty to my country (Australia) then the answer is that we lifted zero out of poverty out of a total of zero. Poverty as its defined in China (US$1 per day is the UN's global poverty line) simply doesn't exist in Australia - you could get more money than that begging on the streets of Sydney. China still has a long way to go before the majority of its people 'enjoy' the standard-of-living of even our poorer public housing tenants.
I agree. There were far too many "god in the machine"-type endings and on the whole the 'science-fiction' would only really fit in a kid's TV show. Its definately not like the 'hard' sci-fi you get from a show like star-trek, where although its far-fetched its at least consistent and remotely realistic. Having said that though the books involving the 7th and 8th Doctors written after the show was cancelled were really quite good.
I guess the the point I'm trying to make is read the 'novelisations' of the TV episodes of the 1st-7th Doctors. Now read the non-TV novels written for the 7th and 8th Doctors, the former read more like childrens books while the latter are proper sci-fi novels. I think the current TV series definately fits into the former, just like the previous TV series. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing - it may just be part of the limitations of trying to make Sci-fi fit in a 1 hour TV series rather than a 200-300 page novel.
1) The earth's population is growing
2) The majority of people on earth are still extremely poor. Even with a lot more recycling efficiency these people will consume a lot more resources than they do today if/as they climb out of poverty.
3) Recycling can only do so much, some resources can't be recycled, some can't be recycled very much at all and for some it would actually take more net resources to recycle and reuse them.
..or perhaps just further evidence that ID/creationists couldn't argue their way out of a paper bag
But I can presume that I can explore the world in a rational way because an intelligent logical creator made it all and bestowed logical reasoning to us. All of it works in a logical way (with the rare exception of things called miracles. This does not change the methods of discovery, it just gives one basis or motivation for discovery.
This is your subjective, personal religious belief. Science only deals what can be known or observed in an objective way. Intelligent creators, no matter how logical you think they are, are out of the scope of science - they fall into religion.
I was simply pointing out that there is plenty of speculation on how life came into being. Simply replacing God (not fully knowable) with a comet (not fully knowable) does not automatically make better science.
The 'comet brought life to earth' hypothesis can be tested and disproven so it is a valid scientific hyptothesis, however remote a possibility it is. The hypothesis that god (ie. supernatural and all-powerful) created life is not testable nor disprovable, therefore it is not science, its purely religion.