estebanana -> RE: Black Hole eats sun (May 3 2012 19:35:33)
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I don't know what you mean with "dangerous" pronouncements. Hundreds of years ago, people thought we are the center of the world. Today we know with proof that there are billions of (visible) galaxies, each containing billions of stars, each of this stars could have planets (and in fact we found many planets). In such a world there is everything possible. We have proof for Quasars, Magnetars, Pulsars, etc. So a black hole is nothing impossible and i am pretty sure we will have (visible) proof in some years Arash, I agree with you here. What I'm saying is that despite all this information and scientific inquiry we are still living in a world of people who will use this information in ignorance or to keep other ignorant. Case in point is the way American politicians and or conspiracy theorists twist scientific fact and inquiry to suit their own agendas. An example would be Sarah Palin running for vice president in 2008 going around saying that global warming science is "junk science". Many people in America will accept that at face value and believe it. I think we are on that same side of the issue of science. I'm explaining that here there is a popular current of people in power, whether it be media or political, who manipulate the image of science to make science appear to be elitist. They exploit an idea planted by some political factions that intellectual inquiry is not to be trusted. Or worse, conspiracy theorist who use science in a non objective way to put forth a paranoid agenda about the government. I see you live in Germany and perhaps these types of anti science rhetorical shenanigans have not been a problem there in recent years. Here in the U.S. it has been a problem because it has become a political issue whether or not to actually believe in scientific method or to respect scientific inquiry. We have lots of media bloviators ( Rush Limbaugh for example, one of the prime idiots and cultural underminers in our entire history as a nation.) who would like to take those NOVA science programs off the air if they are publicly funded. There are those in people in this country who would like to see defunding of general public access to good credible science programming on television. To me as an American that is undermining the reasons and culture that allowed us to thrive so much in the 20th century. It concerns me as an American who grew up watching both science programming, the American space science programs and Sci-Fi on TV to see science being taken out of context or misunderstood for political reasons. It scares me, it concerns me and as a remedy to my fears, I get sarcastic about it from time to time. The photo is for an episode of Star Trek from around 1968, I remember watching this on TV as a child. it was a time when on one channel you could have watched Star Trek and on another channel an Apollo moon orbit or landing. We understood the importance of science as a country then and we looked forward to science in our future. We could discern between science fiction and scientific research, and we often used the science fiction programs like thought experiments. Then the thought was: What if we really could use satellites to transmit communications? And now we have it. The photo of the horn shaped object is a still from an episode of Star Trek called The Doomsday Machine. It's a pretty famous episode because it was so outlandish, yet it had us pinned to edges of our seats. This horn shaped thing went around swallowing galaxies and destroying worlds, it was terrifying, and funny. It was classic science fiction. the Doomsday thing was a paper maiche' cone about three feet long, a model that was filmed to look like a planet killer. At about the same time that was being filmed for a Star Trek episode in 1968 there was a small minority of people who were saying the actual U.S. space program was also being filmed on a sound stage as government propaganda. Seriously. At the time we laughed it off, but it represented a form of anti science paranoia that still has a small foot hold in the popular consciousness. I don't know all the reasons why there is a strain of science denouncing culture here. Some left leaning people will tell you it was fabricated and foisted on the country by the right. But it is more complex than that. We have long history, or short history, of science having to fight its way into public acceptance. We had a national spectacle of a criminal trial in the 1920's when a science teacher was harassed and brought up on charges for teaching evolution in public schools. By the time I was in grade school in the early 1970's this was a passe' issue. Oh yes we thought back then, we did have those backward thinkers who were afraid of scientific inquiry, but today in 1972 we are on the moon, Mark Spitz has won seven gold medals in swimming in Munich and Dr. Louis Leakey has shown us our ancestral fossils in Olduvai Gorge. The Scopes Monkey trial of the 1920's was water under the bridge, we were on the verge of launching the 21st century. Enter Sarah Palin and other factions in Congress who want to defund public science education on public television....because some home schooling paranoids who vote for them want to make sure their children learn about their God first, and that their God is more important than the intellectual health of the nation. I guess I'm not really scared, but vigilant, and occasionally sarcastic that science is not taken seriously enough in America today. If the country backslid into having to go through more versions of the Scopes Monkey trial, and this has happened in California in the 1990's, it makes one wonder just how many steps back we could be pushed until we became even mild type of political theocracy. Can you think of any countries that backslid into theocracy in the last 35 years? Countries that formerly were well rooted in modern scientific principle? I'm not saying be paranoid, just watchful. if that is not too mystical that is the longest stretch of words I've ever used to explain a joke. Did you finally get the punch line? [:D][:D]
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