Here's how far our radio waves have traveled so far...
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
Ben Carson: Archaeologists Are Wrong, The Pyramids Were Built To Store Grain
- Thread starter cigaretteman
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Here's how far our radio waves have traveled so far...
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
For anyone wanting more context on Carson's remarks, there's a much longer and more detailed and analytical article on this at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...may-get-him-some-votes/?tid=pm_national_pop_b
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...may-get-him-some-votes/?tid=pm_national_pop_b
Here's how far our radio waves have traveled so far...
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
And - for those who don't click on the link - we must point out that the extent isn't the square but the tiny blue dot in the middle of the square.
Now, this is all just spit-balling because I haven't seen any evidence of aliens visiting either, but we could be closer in proximity than other places, which would have led them here earlier in their search.
There are sure a lot of posters in here spending their time trashing a guy who has no chance at getting the republican nomination. What a waste of effort.
1. DaFaq you talking about???
2. Carson now has my vote.
3. Carson now has lost my vote.
I believe the theory is "the less evidence the lower the odds". So zero evidence suggest very long odds based on today's information.
It doesn't do that now in Civ 5, but I could totally believe Carson gets his facts from video games.
None of this alien odds stuff is on point. The pyramids don't require advanced technology. And they aren't hollow for grain storage. Nor was grain storage some new concept at the time they were built. Ben is just a loon who desperately wants to fit everything into a narrow biblical worldview and he will ignore any facts that don't fit. Given what the Bible says must happen to Israel, only an anti semitic psychopath could ever vote for the guy. Which given the state of the Rs means he will probably get the nomination.
Random estimate of the size of the universe: Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has 200 billion stars. It is estimated that there are 8.8 billion habitable earth size planets rotaing around stars in our galaxy alone. Scientist estimate there are 100 billion galaxies in the "observable" universe.
Our minds can't even comprehend the vastness of the universe and how small our galaxy is. I was simply pointing out that the odds are high that there is intelligent life out there. The lack of hard evidence of aliens visiting infinitesimally small earth, one of trillions of planets that could support life, would hardly have a significant impact on the "odds."
Carson did not say aliens built the pyramids. He said in the linked artical that he doesn't believe that theory. However, some of the usual suspects are claiming he's a loon, nevertheless, for even talking about aliens. Your distorting what Carson said.
How am I distorting? Is he not rejecting established, evidenced based science once again to fit the world into a biblical view? How can you argue otherwise?
Oh, I absolutely believe in intelligent aliens out there. And not just a few. Probably millions. But the chances that any of them have visited Earth is slim to none. Distances are just too vast for them to have probably made the trip. We're talking about distances of hundreds if not thousands of light years.
True, but there's nothing saying advanced aliens could do this either. Even if a civilization was a hundred times more advanced than us they would still probably have no control of theoretical things like wormholes, if wormholes would even allow such travel, which is debatable.
You're really missing the point. It's not that Carson believes in aliens, it's that he spent a sizable part of a university speech talking about them in connection with the pyramids. It's just a really strange thing to do.
Well, to be fair, it was a Seventh Day Adventist university, so it's not necessarily quite as strange a thing to do.
But not nearly as strange as thinking he has the credentials to dismiss the field of Egyptology and pronounce them grain silos. We are being distracted from the real crazy he actually does believe.
The very fact that he talked about aliens building the pyramids at all is in itself weird, even if he happens to reject the idea. It would be kind of like him going out of his way to try discrediting the theory that Bigfoot is related to the Yeti. It's like something 5th graders would argue about, not world class surgeons.
Well, that may be true. But he didn't claim aliens built the pyramids. And, even if he did claim that, is that Bibically based? I'm no bible scholar, but didn't Jewish slaves build the pyramids? I'm asking because I don't know.
I said as much. The alien stuff is all off point. The crazy part is that he thinks he's Indiana Jones entitled to his own personal opinion on the matter. You know what that means right? It means when his budget, military or scientific advisors tell him the facts, he will filter them through his understanding of the Bible and come to his own conclusion no matter how much evidence points in another direction. He is psycho and Rs love that.
Edit: The best evidence points the the Pyramid builders being paid workers (or work done as a way of taxation) that were well taken care of with food, medical and entertainment. They even had a union that conducted strikes for mascara and beer rations. It was a way to keep the population busy when they were waiting for the fields to grow for harvest without war. Pyramids for peace if you will.
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The point is why he would feel the need to try discrediting such a ridiculous idea in the first place? It would be like Carson going out of his way to say that, "There's no way anybody could be as strong as Superman in real life." It's like, Well, duh, of course not.
Just started playing Civ 5 and it's effing awesome.
Edit: And FYI, the Pyramids give you two workers. It's a great early game wonder if you can build it first.
No...u don't get it. Its the pure entertainment value. Its kind of like watching Brother Theodore on the old Letterman show in the 80's.
Ok...spelling it out. Believing there is life on other planets is perfectly plausible given the vastness of the universe. Believing that those aliens have visited Earth is a whole 'nother thing....completely.
There's absolutely no evidence outside of the Bible that the Egyptians had Jewish slaves at any time. There is evidence that the Jews living in Persia had Egyptian slaves.
If you assume there is no way to exceed the speed of light, and you assume it takes a resource rich world (like ours, circling a 3rd generation star) to achieve a high-tech culture that might go into space, then it makes sense that there wouldn't be that many space-faring cultures in our galaxy and that not many would be much further-developed than ours.
Even if you assume that there are multiple millions of planets in our galaxy suitable for life to develop and evolve, how many would produce intelligent life, and how many of those would develop to the point of space travel on the scale necessary. We haven't yet and the odds that we will are only so-so.
Add to those considerations the points already raised about why aliens would visit our remote planet, and there's very little reason to think we'd be scheduled for an early visit.
BTW, the idea that it won't be a big deal to figure out FTL travel is almost certainly wrong. It is unquestionably a characteristic of normal space-time. And while we can conjecture and calculate about leaving or altering normal space-time, as far as I know the only plausible non-wormhole approach anyone has ever thought of to go faster than light involves artificially inducing or altering the inflation factor in a non-trivial region of space and then "surfing" that wave of altered space-time to a destination. Something that could take the energy of multiple stars to accomplish for a small trip and could destroy boh the departure location and the destination.
Traveling through wormholes is a wonderful sci-fi device. But we don't know if there really are any such things, or whether there really could be any. And if there are or could be, we don't have a clue how they operate, how we could control them, whether we could survive passage through them, or even if they exit back into normal space.
One of the more plausible views of wormholes is that they are holes or rips in the "field" within which our universe propagates. Think of the universe as a big block of Swiss cheese. Even if you can figure out how to enter a "hole" and even though that theoretically frees you of the speed of light constraint, how do you remain intact inside the hole and how do you exit on the other side?
Even if you assume that there are multiple millions of planets in our galaxy suitable for life to develop and evolve, how many would produce intelligent life, and how many of those would develop to the point of space travel on the scale necessary. We haven't yet and the odds that we will are only so-so.
Add to those considerations the points already raised about why aliens would visit our remote planet, and there's very little reason to think we'd be scheduled for an early visit.
BTW, the idea that it won't be a big deal to figure out FTL travel is almost certainly wrong. It is unquestionably a characteristic of normal space-time. And while we can conjecture and calculate about leaving or altering normal space-time, as far as I know the only plausible non-wormhole approach anyone has ever thought of to go faster than light involves artificially inducing or altering the inflation factor in a non-trivial region of space and then "surfing" that wave of altered space-time to a destination. Something that could take the energy of multiple stars to accomplish for a small trip and could destroy boh the departure location and the destination.
Traveling through wormholes is a wonderful sci-fi device. But we don't know if there really are any such things, or whether there really could be any. And if there are or could be, we don't have a clue how they operate, how we could control them, whether we could survive passage through them, or even if they exit back into normal space.
One of the more plausible views of wormholes is that they are holes or rips in the "field" within which our universe propagates. Think of the universe as a big block of Swiss cheese. Even if you can figure out how to enter a "hole" and even though that theoretically frees you of the speed of light constraint, how do you remain intact inside the hole and how do you exit on the other side?
I very much worry about the amount of effort being spent on derailing 2 guys (Carson and Trump) who have almost no chance of being nominated.
Sure, it's fun, as JRHawk2003 suggested, but it means the worst of the rest are getting a free pass. And it risks not only allowing them to gain strength but also introducing a certain fatigue such that when it's time to take down the dangerous candidates who do have a chance, the voters won't have the attention span or the energy.
We should be focusing on the "real" candidates. One of them might be the next president. It's rather important to make sure it isn't one of the dangerous ones.
Well, currently, the nearest star is 4.24 light years away. Orion's stars range between 243 and 1360 light years away.
So, I'm going to say the odds that another species figured out how to travel at the speed of light, while living 2.5 to 13.5 times longer than humans, visited us 2000 years ago, and then left no shred of credible evidence that they visited are..... remote. Lol.
Some years back an argument circulated that basically concluded that the number of planets that could support life are so numerous that the lack of evidence of intelligent aliens is proof that there aren't any.
Almost certainly bull hockey. We've found a few thousand exoplanets and the vast majority of them couldn't support life as we know it. If it's life as we DON'T know it, we may not even know what to look for.
Even on Earth, the only way to detect intelligent life from a distance of hundreds of light-years would be...well...there is no way. They would be looking at the planet as it existed hundreds of years ago. No radio waves, no atmospheric signature that I can think of that would indicate that life on Earth had developed intelligence, nothing.
I tend to agree.
Another argument I've heard is that the reason we don't "hear" other civilizations is not merely a technology problem that we are gradually overcoming but because such civilizations go dark shortly after passing through the developmental stage involving promiscuous use of radio waves. That can be for good or bad reasons.
A good reason is they simply move on to better communications methods which are either undetectable or we won't be able to detect until we get to that level.
A bad reason is that they bomb themselves back to the stone age when they discover nuclear power.
A worse reason is that there are very dangerous predatory species out there - so they are stealthy while their prey are hiding. Some folks here (Hawking and Gates among them, I think) have suggested we should be more careful and stop inviting possible predators to come visit,.
You keep arguing for the possibility of other life forms existing; but nobody is saying otherwise. We're saying there is zero evidence that aliens visited this planet, Let alone assisted with building the pyramids.
That's the argument.
Why would you assume that intelligent life is rare? Our own solar system has intelligent life. Granted, it's a super small sample size, but so far it has succeeded in creating intelligent life. It might be more common that we think.
It is impossible that any intelligent species would NOT live on a planet hospitable to intelligent species, so our own observation is no evidence whatsoever for how rare intelligent life might be.
On the other hand, it also depends on what you mean by "rare". I'd say if one star out of a billion contains a planet intelligent life, that is rare. On the other hand, that would still amount to about 300 planets with intelligent life in our galaxy alone; billions throughout the universe. So the planets with intelligent could be quite numerous, but still rare.
My hunch says that intelligent life is quite common, if for no other reason that that life is probably quite common. If you look at the elements that life is made up of, they also happen to be the most common elements in the universe. The universe is loaded with Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen. Ready made water is also incredibly common in the universe. All you need is an energy source and you have conditions that can theoretically support life. So take all this together, and it would seem like life would creep up whenever the conditions allow it to.
As for the intelligence part of the equation, we already know that the one place in our solar system is full of life is also full of a bunch of fairly intelligent species. It's not unreasonable to think that with some slightly altered conditions, any number of species could eventually develop into humans 2.0. Chimps and gorillas are exceedingly intelligent. Same with sea dwelling mammals like orcas and dolphins. Hell, the entire mammal class is pretty intelligent. Give any of these species several hundred million years to evolve and who knows which of them would become intelligent to succeed in space travel.
And when you consider that life follows the same basic pattern everywhere, namely that simple organisms will evolve into more complex ones, it only makes sense that if you give enough time, even the simplest of creatures will eventually evolve into something that could rival humans.
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