right, i'm firmly in the atheist camp but.........
Discussion
SpeckledJim said:
You're back to "Gosh, aren't we special!"
As Derek rightly says, this is a conceit.
well,........ nothing--big bang--stuff--stuff amalgamates into balls--life-intelligent life--man on the moon/voyager/space stations/space shuttles etc.......As Derek rightly says, this is a conceit.
we are a little bit special!
Eric Mc said:
My granny was born in 1890 and was already 13 when the Wright brothers flew. She was sitting in her usual armchair in our house with the rest of us as we watched the moon landing live on TV.
In fact, one of the guests who attended the launch of the last Apollo lunar mission, Apollo 17, was allegedly a slave who had been freed after the end of the American Civil War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Smith_(centen...
interesting article that!In fact, one of the guests who attended the launch of the last Apollo lunar mission, Apollo 17, was allegedly a slave who had been freed after the end of the American Civil War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Smith_(centen...
tuscaneer said:
SpeckledJim said:
You're back to "Gosh, aren't we special!"
As Derek rightly says, this is a conceit.
well,........ nothing--big bang--stuff--stuff amalgamates into balls--life-intelligent life--man on the moon/voyager/space stations/space shuttles etc.......As Derek rightly says, this is a conceit.
we are a little bit special!
Apart from sitting up and begging - and chasing a few sheep around a field (and maybe helping blind people across the roads) I would think that the total achievements of the doggy world somewhat lag behind what humans have managed.
I do like dogs by the way - and a dog was the first living thing to orbit the earth.
I do like dogs by the way - and a dog was the first living thing to orbit the earth.
Eric Mc said:
In fact, one of the guests who attended the launch of the last Apollo lunar mission, Apollo 17, was allegedly a slave who had been freed after the end of the American Civil War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Smith_(centen...
137? Come on Eric you're not usually fooled by numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Smith_(centen...
I first found about this chap about 30 years ago. There's a photo of him attending the Apollo 17 launch in David Baker's exhaustive history of the US maned space programme "Manned Spaceflight".
The book was originally published in 1982 and there was not a huge amount of detail about him mentioned apart from the fact that he was "a freed slave from the Civil War period". The Civil War ended in 1866. The picture was taken in 1972. I assumed he COULD have been an infant child of a slave as that would have made him 106 at the youngest - which was just about plausible.
I knew nothing else about him at that time. Obviously, the Wiki article casts a huge amount of doubt on his allegations - rightly, it seems.
Here's the book - which weighs a ton but is excellent -
The book was originally published in 1982 and there was not a huge amount of detail about him mentioned apart from the fact that he was "a freed slave from the Civil War period". The Civil War ended in 1866. The picture was taken in 1972. I assumed he COULD have been an infant child of a slave as that would have made him 106 at the youngest - which was just about plausible.
I knew nothing else about him at that time. Obviously, the Wiki article casts a huge amount of doubt on his allegations - rightly, it seems.
Here's the book - which weighs a ton but is excellent -
ash73 said:
I used to love dogs until I realised they are parasites, but a monkey making fire would impress me.
Erm... Isn't our relationship with dogs more symbiotic? Ok, we've turned them into fat lazy buggers, but in the past they would have worked with/for us. Many still do. Huskies, guide dogs, sniffer dogs finding drugs, explosives, buried disaster victims. tuscaneer said:
turned into an interesting read this thread has!! thanks for all the responses!
I'm watching the human universe shows with much interest. one big surprise for me was the assertion that somehow a chance encounter of one single cell being encapsulated by another and surviving in some sort of weird symbiosis was what caused complex life to happen at all. I find it amazing that in a literally countless sea of single cells that this only happened once.
who says it only started the once?I'm watching the human universe shows with much interest. one big surprise for me was the assertion that somehow a chance encounter of one single cell being encapsulated by another and surviving in some sort of weird symbiosis was what caused complex life to happen at all. I find it amazing that in a literally countless sea of single cells that this only happened once.
Life probably started & evolved separately multiple times, however only one of these were successful in surviving and continuing its lineage. The reason why life doesn't continue to start on the Earth is that it'll end up as being food before it gets a chance (conditions are possibly less ideal now too).
It's rare to find places on Earth that aren't ideal for life where it doesn't already exist in abundance, your organic compounds will always be tasty to something.
The reason single cell organisms don't become multi-celled is because they're every bit as evolved as we are. An amoeba or human (or anything else) have both had 3.5billion+ years worth of evolution to make it the most ideal version for its current environment.
I heard a wonderful Douglas Adams quote the other day and it went something along the lines of a puddle asking why it was perfectly shaped to fit in the hole it occupied. I think that's quite relevant here Maybe I could expand on that quote and imagine the puddle asking why it existed when all around it was just dry land and had been for hours? What I'm saying with that is that even if intelligent life is rare in our galaxy, I'm sure life is pretty common in the Universe as a whole, but obviously in order for us to ask these sorts of questions we need to be here, so it's a bit of an odd argument.
Something else I'd like to point out is that similar reasoning to the OP's in his first post can be used to imagine how unlikely a God is, after all why would he/she/it pick the Milky Way out of all the millions of galaxies out there, and then pick one of 300 billion stars, and then pick one of 8 planets orbiting that star? Not only that, but why wait 13.8 billion years to create the earth, and then why wait so long to populate that earth with life in the first place, and then go even further and give it hundreds of millions of years of life existing (dinosaurs etc) before we appear in the blink of an eye at the end? To be in that utterly insignifcant position and imagine that we were created in the image of a god/gods/godesses is somewhat bizarre. That said, belief in a supernatural creator is a philosphical and personal issue, so that's purely my point of view and I'm not going to tell anyone else how to think.
Maybe I could expand on that quote and imagine the puddle asking why it existed when all around it was just dry land and had been for hours? What I'm saying with that is that even if intelligent life is rare in our galaxy, I'm sure life is pretty common in the Universe as a whole, but obviously in order for us to ask these sorts of questions we need to be here, so it's a bit of an odd argument.Something else I'd like to point out is that similar reasoning to the OP's in his first post can be used to imagine how unlikely a God is, after all why would he/she/it pick the Milky Way out of all the millions of galaxies out there, and then pick one of 300 billion stars, and then pick one of 8 planets orbiting that star? Not only that, but why wait 13.8 billion years to create the earth, and then why wait so long to populate that earth with life in the first place, and then go even further and give it hundreds of millions of years of life existing (dinosaurs etc) before we appear in the blink of an eye at the end? To be in that utterly insignifcant position and imagine that we were created in the image of a god/gods/godesses is somewhat bizarre. That said, belief in a supernatural creator is a philosphical and personal issue, so that's purely my point of view and I'm not going to tell anyone else how to think.
I posted a link to the puddle bit earlier in this thread I think? Or was it another on another plane.....
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
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