Okay, let's have another non-political post while we prep for the World Science Fiction Convention (LACon) in Anaheim, next weekend... and the premier of my play, The Escape! Hope to see some of you there... where there will also be panels and revelations about... SPACE N' SCIENCE!
== Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse… ==
Okay I won’t say it a third time. Our nearest fast-decaying red supergiant star has been much discussed lately as likely to go supernova in the next few millennia, possibly centuries… or less. Now a discovery that Bet… um that giant has a companion star, barely detectable.
The smaller member of the binary actually orbits within Betelgeuse's atmosphere and won't survive for much longer (10K years or less before it crashes into the primary). Betelgeuse's six year dimming cycle is probably the result of this companion.
== The latest fad space structure – Analemma! ==
Every decade seems to have its hallmark transcendent visions that counterpoint repeated jeremiads of doom. In the eighties, Reagan-Era brinksmanship vs. the Kremlin’s "Evil Empire* was the backdrop for lavish dreams of space colonies – not on Mars or any planet, but human-built in orbit from melted or repurposed asteroids, leading to wondrous, rotating “O’Neil Habitats” that might offer new homes for millions. The nineties saw a lot of talk of Space Elevators. And soon after the millennial** Y2K panic and the accompanying braying about the 2000th Christmas, we got a fresh wave of renewed interest in the Red Planet… or turning it Green.
Along the way, in Earth I brought the entire planet to life and in Heaven's Reach I took you all to dizzying-huge 'fractal' habitats for 'retirement' civilizations orbiting in the tides of a black hole... then in Existence I added to a sub-genre about ‘alien lurker probes’ and how they might embody a wide range of both powers and motivations, for what we’d deem well or ill. (And I stand by my belief that asteroid belt Lurkers are 10,000x as likely as silly-ass UFO 'Disclosure' aliens.)
For another thing, it cannot just be suspended from an asteroid at geosynch. It will need a counterweight strung HIGHER, countering the effects of that suspended tower. And the swinging analemboid will incur appreciable drag, so everything is going to have to be maintained.
And... you plan to haul a huge asteroid that close to Earth and then tug/push it into geosynchronous orbit without billions below getting a little.. well... concerned?
**(You ain’t seen nothing yet. Read here about how millennial fever will reach its horrific peak in the 2030s!)
== More stuff about spaaaaace! ==
Proba-3 is ESA’s precision formation flying mission. A pair of spacecraft form an artificial solar eclipse, casting a precisely-controlled shadow from one platform for sustained views of the Sun's faint surrounding corona.
At NIAC we funded the first work on what became the Starshade that will vastly improve the ability of space or earth telescopes to see clearly the planets orbiting close to stars. And from this year's NIACS? Realization that red dwarf stars - the most abundant in the cosmos - are mostly FLARE stars that will challenge the atmospheres of any nearby planets.
But those flares do put out a lot of ultraviolet... and when that wave of UV later hits a nearby planet it should brighten as if by a strobe or flash bulb, in exactly a part of the spectrum where the star itself is dim! Possibly (in the UV) briefly outshining the star! I'd love to see a project around this.
Shocking details about a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C—a turbulent area located near the Milky Way’s center. Long, glowing filaments, energetic protostars, and powerful magnetic fields that are reshaping the way stars are born and die. So much of this was predicted in Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Series!
You might enjoy this list of 15 places on Earth that look like alien planets.
According to Miles Palmer, for $460 you can include a personal item on the Astrobotic Lunar Lander. If this works, your personal item would presumably stay on the Moon until:
-The Sun expands to vaporize the Earth and the Moon (Billions of years)
-A meteor hits the Astrobotic lander and destroys it (Maybe 100 million years?)
-A Lunar tourist or tourist’s child vandalizes it (100 years?)
JPL techies keep finding ingenious ways to keep alive the two Voyager probes, after 48 years, One of the most impressive examples of multi-generational human competence and a reminder that the scions of chippers-of-flint-arrowheads remain admirable and much-needed.
== Aaaaaand… getting really, really deep in the weeds ==
See this fascinating conversation between two physics podcast stars. Sabine Hossenfelder & Matt O’Dowd.
In the simple example that they argue over – the measurement correlations of far-separated entangled particles – ‘super-determinism’ depends upon the fact that most parts of the universe at some point touched each other and thus can trace back some degree of causal contact, going back almost to the Big Bang.
That is the 'causal chain' Matt talks about - and that Sabine appears to believe-in. The notion is not necessarily untestable! Here is an experiment by some fellows I know, using quasars at opposite ends of the universe which (we think) never ever had any mutual influence. Unless influence extends either FTL or else back even further. Say into a previous Penrose Era...
Longtime rocker and astrophysicist Brian May collaborated in this musical tribute to the New Horizons Mission to Pluto and beyond!
== And Revisionist cosmology ==
Highly skeptical of this one. Still, some astronomers suggest that new concepts of a dynamically variable version of Dark Energy might cancel out the last 30 years of assumptions about the universe heading toward ‘accelerating dissipation.’ Indeed they go the other way and propose that gravity will end Big Bang expansion in just 7 billion years. Using data from a number of astronomical surveys including the Dark Energy Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, the researchers have developed a model that predicts our Universe will end in a "Big Crunch" in approximately 33.3 billion years.
Jeeper, let’s dust off my old copy Of Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality!
== And finally back to the "Disclosure" nonsense ==
As it has been since I was ten - 65 years ago - every one of these spasms turns out to be a nothing burger driven by the dumbest versions of sci fi mystical wishing, plus fools shouting "I'm one of the few-ones they won't fool!"
The 'images' get fuzzier every time even though we now have ten million times as many active cameras. Not even a whiff of logic and every single 'sighting' could have a much easier explanation, like little plasma balls zipping around at the whim of DARPA operators of a ship-born cat laser. And you are the pussycats.
What this does is harness reflexive American Suspicion of Authority to aim it away from the "Files." Not X... but Eps.
Want some physics? Because I could make these zipping little balls ('ships') without breaking a single physical law.
Oh, but sure...
EIGHTY YEARS this has supposedly been going on, with thousands of humanity's smartest Best People hurled at a project that would be far more urgent than the atom bomb, tasked to reverse engineer alien technologies... only, oops... um do YOU see any reverse-engineered alien tech? After 80 years?
Have any of these cultists found one... even just one... top techie or scientist who spent a career on this? I know scores of the Best and not one was ever asked. IF the disclosure cultists were sincere they'd track down such folks and shine light on them, because there'd be thousands of them, by now. Instead they shrug that off, dismissing them all as obedient henchmen.
Eighty years. The original teams would be in their 100s by now. And no deathbed revelations? Hundreds of retired guys with shotguns racked behind the seats of their pickups in Arizona... and they're afraid of f$#$!g NDAs? N..D...As?
And meanwhile, advanced beings a million years ahead of us can't figure out how to phone JPL? OR the SETI Institute? Or the Dod? Meddle with out genes and brains, yep. Mind control and wheat twirling and anal probes, sure. Break every law of physics? Why not. But looking up a phone number and navigating call options to suggest a friendly meeting? Beyond them.
It's not just that these UFO folks are shills using "X-Files" to distract from Eps Files. Only some of them have that purpose in mind. Others are sincere ninnies.
It's that their sci fi cult meme is BAD science fiction. Illogical and utterly evidence-free. Drawing attention away from high crimes... and also away from a real future and real universe of wonders.
See my posting: What's really up with UAPs?
33 comments:
I think the power of the X Files is that it was a sort of political commentary, picking up conspiracy theories and local folclore and running with it.
I Reread your linked article on Revelations and saw this:
"Unfortunately, that postulate presents problems. Regarding the actual date of nativity, biblical scholars disagree over a range of five years or more. Nor is there good evidence that the month and day assigned to Christmas under the Gregorian Calendar have anything to do with the celebrated event."
Yes, the Western church adopted the Roman feast of Sol Invictus in December as a way of easing the transition from paganism to Christianity. Such religious syncretism was done al the time with other pagan feasts, minor gods and heroes became saints, institutions like the Roman senate became the College of Cardinals, etc.
Despite all of that, there are historical markers in the Gospels that point to basic historic veracity. For example, shepherds really do "keep watch of their flocks by night", but only in calving season - March/April, which would be the most likely birth date for Yeshua (a fairly common name at the time).
The Slaughter of the innocents by Herod was well within the ability and in keeping with the character of a paranoid ruler who killed members of his own family. At the time, Bethlehem was a small village of 300 to 1,000 people. In an agricultural village of that size there would have been only about a half dozen children under the age of 1, so maybe three boys total. Bethlehem was only 28 miles from Jerusalem, so a squadron of Herod's cavalry could have committed the murders in a single night.
If Bethlehem was Joseph's home town, he would probably have owned property there and roman taxation records required registration where you had property (there are Egyptian papyrus records that show something similar, a famous 104 CE papyrus edict issued by the Roman Prefect of Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus ordered people living away from home to return to their home districts for a household census so they could be registered and tend to local farming duties). Thought there was never any single world wide census ordered by Augustus as implied by Luke, he did order periodic provincial censuses for taxation and record-keeping.
Yeshua's brothers and sisters would make sense if they were Joseph's from an earlier marriage. As a widower, Joseph would have probably married a younger woman, which explains why the much older Joseph was dead by the time Yeshua started his ministry while the younger Mary was still alive. The probable poverty experienced by an unmarried widow and her child may have formed Yeshua's sympathy for the poor.
He also probably came from a rough neighborhood as shown in his parables and teaching examples ("no one can enter a strong man's house and steal his goods unless they first tie up or overpower the strong man", the highway robbers that assaulted the victim helped by the Good Samaritan, etc.). Yeshua was from the 'hood.
Caiphas, Herod, Pontius Pilate etc. were all real historical people. Pilate was an especially brutal and corrupt man always extorting bribes from helpless subjects. He would be called back to Rome for trial on charges of brutality and corruption, which must have been extreme since the whole point in being a Roman governor was to exploit and extort. So his interaction with Yeshua at his kangaroo court trial only make sense if he was fishing for a bribe in exchange for letting him go. To prevent this, the pharisees reminded him that they would complain to the paranoid emperor Tiberius - who had just finished purging his traitorous commander of the praetorian guard Sejanus who was Pilate's mentor. But Pilate's courtyard could only hold a few dozen people so there was no Hollywood sized crowd calling for Yeshua's death. Pilate took the hint, not wanting to draw the emperor's attention.
The gory details of the scourging and crucifixion are medically and legally accurate.
And so on.
A lot of historical fact in the gospels, along with much that has to be taken on faith.
When it comes to potential space structures and technology, I highly recommend Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel. Especially his compendiums.
The most recent of which is a compilation of his videos on space megastructures from orbiting spin habitats (Bernal spheres, O'Neal cylinders, Bishop rings, Banks orbitals, etc.) and domed world houses for planetary colonization (lava tubes on Mercury, Luna and Mars, hollowed out asteroids, floating cities on Venus and Titan, covered valleys and craters, under the ice cities on the Jovian moons, etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-30ARDqsF7U&t=13064s
Space Habitats: The Strangest Worlds We Could Build
Bottom line is that it is much easier and cost effective to build artificial worlds (some the size of subcontinents) instead of travelling to the stars. You could build spin worlds that provide the living space of a thousand earths for a fraction of the cost of a single probe to Alpha Centauri.
As for colonizing other planets, para-terraforming with world houses is far more cost effecting than pure terraforming which would require prolonged bombardment of comets for centuries during which time the planet is unusable.
OTOH individual world houses can be built incrementally allowing for immediate use and colonization instead of waiting millennia for terraforming to be completed, and grow organically as needed until they cover the entire planet.
The optimum configuration appears to resemble an iceberg with most of the living space underground in lava tubes and tunnels, capped on the surface by a dome that provides open air atmosphere, greenery, weather and shielding.
I am not sure that Pilates wasn't the norm for his time. Roman politicians at the end of their carreers often reimbursed themselves in the provinces for the political and electoral campaigns in Rome proper.
Known now as an 'Analemma City', this 'new take on an old idea' is one that Jonathon Swift first named 'Laputa' (circa 1726) which he populated with vicious scientists who exerted their will by blocking out the sun from above while raining down rocks & garbage upon the dirt dwellers below.
I'm likewise disappointed by our fine host's ongoing obsession with Dark Matter & Dark Energy, as this irrational cosmology involves a baseless belief in an invisible & magical form of unobservable pseudo-matter made completely irrelevant by the more rational Timescape Model.
https://www.ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/dark-energy-doesnt-exist-so-cant-be-pushing-lumpy-universe-apart
I'll be the first to admit that such 'magical thinking' makes an entertaining narrative, as in the case of an AI & Gaia-mediated 'Deus Ex Machina' story resolution, but it makes a piss-poor excuse for the Scientific Method.
Colour me Skeptic, but only that which is observable & reproducible qualifies as 'Science', and every other unobservable something is either speculation, hearsay or yak vomit.
Best
_______
From 'Pure Communism' to the assumed 'Perfectibility of Man', I'll leave the further debunkment of such over-idealized absurdities for another day, as 'corruption' & 'imperfection' are the universal rules rather than the exceptions.
Celt, the only somewhat reliable (if biased) gospel is Mark’s. The others show linguistic cues from over a century later. But even more pertinent, Mark speaks AS a Jew who believed Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah. They others, especially Matthew, drip with hatred of Jews, from over a century later, when they were diverged competing faiths..
Especially discrediting is the scene you mention, where “The Jews” (not the Mob) taunt Jesus and declare “May this guilt be upon us and all of our heirs for all time!” Um… who says such things? ?? And would such a mob have such authority?
In any event, while Herod and Pilate were unambiguously evil, it is only one side’s testimony that all of the priests were. And even if they were, will anyone EVER consider the logic of the situation? Questioning would be messiahs and demanding proof WAS THEIR JOB. And magic tricks for country bumpkins would not suffice.
Moreover consider, corrupt or not, they would kneel before him if he provided proof. Because that would be choosing the winning (God’s) side! The whole scenario makes no sense. Of course the biggest reason for Jews enduring 2000 years of torture & martyrdom “out of stiff-necked pride” was the Paulian dogma of Original Sin… a Grek notion that Paul adopted because it turned Jesus’s mission from a failure to a human sacrifice of profound nobility and success. Thought it also portrays the Father as a sadistic madman who would torture babies for a mistake made by a pair of ignorant teenagers 4000 years before.
The entire Bethlehem thing might be true, census and all, but unlikely. By making Joseph from there they can imply he is of the tribe of Judah and an heir to King David, according to prophecy and not a Galilean from Nazareth.
Summary: Mark is somewhat credible and the beauty of the beatitudes and the Seromon on The Mount pass through many hands to the other Gospels and directly contradict the evil Book of Revelation, so…. We are still left with a Big Problem…
…that the 2030s will swarm with Jesus pretenders and would be John the Baptists and far worse, as the 2000th anniversary of the crucifixion approaches. That is an absolutely reliable forecast. And we must have a sane society before then, in order to endure.
"Bottom line is that it is much easier and cost effective to build artificial worlds (some the size of subcontinents) instead of travelling to the stars."
That may indeed by HOW organic humans go to the stars.
Locum is back to jibbering. Actually kinda comforting, in a way.
" as the 2000th anniversary of the crucifixion approaches."
Serious question. Is there a known timeframe for the real-life crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth? Do we know if it was really in AD 33, or if it was when Jesus was 33 years old (which are likely not the same thing), or some other time entirely?
Inquiring minds and all.
Link mission update: after further tests, it has been concluded that they lack the attitude control needed to grab the Swift observatory and boost it to a higher altitude. The mission will continue with some procedures to hone expertise in maneuvering
Ah well, it's chances of success were never high...
In APOLLO 13 (1995), much of the movie concerned the nail-biting attempts at attitude control (and thus navigation) of a faulty spacecraft. Perhaps need is indeed the mother of invention.
And we must have a sane society before then, in order to endure.
I would not bet on it. Time needed is too short, and the structures needed for that need to be build from the ground up.
Plus, I remembered a little saying:
"Misery teaches praying", i.e. people turning to cults in times of hardship.
Which are about to come.
The only thing that could help is building dykes against the floods and channel the dark waters before they wash you away.
The difference between Mark and Matthew was the destruction of the temple in 70 ad. Mark was finalized before when Christians were just a Jewish sect. After the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt the religions were enemies in large part because Christians refused to join the revolt.
This is because yeshua saw that
A. The Jews would revolt.
B. The romans would crush that revolt.
And you didn't need to be a mystical prophet to see this coming. During his childhood there were two revolts against Roman rule in Galilee. So as a child yeshua may have witnessed two mass crucifixions of the defeated rebels.
Knowing the futility of open revolt he chose a third way, the subversive path of the mustard seed. Mustard is a weed that is almost impossible to eradicate when it infects your fields and keeps spreading
Rome would be defeated by quiet conversions , ideas and beliefs. Which makes yeshua the most profound revolutionary in history.
I was a tweener during the real-life events of Apollo 13. At the time, I was sure the astronauts were doomed, and was amazed that reality mimicked a tacked-on Hollywood happy ending. Had I seen the Tom Hanks movie without having lived through the reality, I would have thought the ending was wishful thinking.
"And you didn't need to be a mystical prophet to see this coming."
As a young Jewish boy, my first introduction to the details of the Jesus story was Jesus Christ, Superstar. That particular version does not ascribe any overt supernatural powers or abilities to the title character. What it does imply if one reads enough between the lines is that Jesus had an extraordinary ability to foresee consequences many chess-moves in advance. "If you knew the path we're riding, you'd understand it less than I," indeed.
To this day, I find that interpretation more plausible than most.
Larry, The Gospels report a three-hour darkness during the crucifixion of Jesus, traditionally linked by some researchers to Friday, April 3, 33 AD, when a partial lunar eclipse occurred at moonrise.
Reading some of the above, I’m reminded that one of the weirdest things about humans is their ability to compartmentalize their rationality and subsume it to magical thinking. Millions of otherwise intelligent people orient their entire worldviews and ways of life around supposed miracles and metaphysical revelations that occurred to some wacked-out Jews, Arabs, Indians or whoever thousands of years ago, despite having no experience of such things themselves, and they don’t seem bothered by it. Giant cults based on these absurd mythologies take over whole countries and civilizations, and even in an age of “enlightenment” and science they’re still going strong.
All I can say is, I kinda get it; I spent some time in cultish and magical head spaces and saw how naturally people gravitated toward that mode of being. You can get a lot of energy and motivation from being in a cult, no matter what it’s beliefs. It’s like Nietzsche said: “people would rather believe in nothing than have nothing to believe in.” Even atheists usually find an irrational quasi-religion to give their lives purpose and motivation, in forms like Progressivism, Singularitianism, Cosmism, Gaianism, I-theism, or what have you. Almost no one can deal with the nihilistic nature of the world, it seems -- just a chosen few, we acolytes of the Church of Nihil. ;)
"one of the weirdest things about humans is their ability to compartmentalize their rationality and subsume it to magical thinking. ...despite having no experience of such things themselves"
Hey, you're usually the anti-me, and yet that was exactly what turned me to agnosticism around fifth grade. The recognition that I never see any supernatural occurrences, that no one I know has actually personally witnessed any such occurrences, and that despite lip service to God, no one lives their lives as if they expect to see any such thing happen.
The only thing I'll quibble with you about is...just what in the above conversation are you directing this toward? I mean, I see questions about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, plus some theories that that human being was good at envisioning consequences, and a mention of an astronomical occurrence that might give a clue to the time of his death sentence. Nothing about miracles or metaphysical revelations. So, where's the beef?
Treebeard's self-appraisal and generalities all seem fairly cogent... though lacking in what's needed for sapience... acceptance that his PRESENT rationalizations may be delusional, as well..
I was talking more to Celt, who seems to take his religion seriously, although he could be one of those people who wants the moralism without the miracles. But that's one of the main attractions of cults, even secular ones: they get you high on their grand narratives about the fate of the world and your role in it, and give you a moral club to beat everyone else with. It can be a lot of fun.
It's comment worthy that this recent exchange between Treebeard & Larry provides such a succinct summary of the Scientific Method, and it's fairly amusing that they seem to have have switched philosophical places, as an exceptionally empathetic Treebeard notes that magical thinkers engage in a priori 'believing is seeing' approach for understandable reasons, while our often delusional Larry notes that rationality presupposes an a posteriori 'seeing is believing' approach.
This reverses the usual dynamic here, as our resident scientists tend to BELIEVE in a magnificent but as-yet-unseen future consisting of magical Marxism, Equality, Diversity & Perfectibility, but our rational naysayers are bizarrely labelled 'science deniers' because they have actually SEEN the dysfunction inherent in Marxism, Equality, Diversity & Perfectibility which makes these imagined futures damn near impossible.
I admit that I also desire the Golden Star_Trek future to which our fine host aspires, but I desire a REAL FUTURE predicated on our basest proven human qualities & mores, derived from greed (ie wealth & quatloos), sexism (ie. sluts in miniskirts), lust (ie. green animal women for the victor), violence (ie gladiatorial games & conquest) and hate, vengeance & genocide (ie Warfare against Commies & Romulans), as these our lowest instincts have always served humanity in predictable fashion.
Humanity must lead with our darkest & strongest qualities, not some with nonsensical better angels folderol, assuming that we wish to conquer the Universe.
Best
Okay. So Treebeard is a former cultist. That explains a lot. Some of the strongest opposition to a cult comes from those who lost faith in it.
Thing is, one doesn't really leave a cult. They leave it for a different belief system. I've never met any former believers who didn't get that way because something else displaced their beliefs. It's ALWAYS a set of beliefs as the foundation even if it is a giant stack of turtles.
No one escapes a priori assumptions about what is and isn't.
We might change them, but not with nothing.
Even Nihilists have postulates they don't question.
James Burke's series "The Day The Universe Changed"* covers through 10 episodes exactly how we've changed over the generations and perceived it as the universe changing. The last episode deals with the entire western system of thought as context that isn't really context. ALL of it feels immutable where we believe it to be immutable... but it isn't.
* I'd love to see someone revisit the series. It was created in the mid-80's. A LOT has happened since then including more changes to what we believe the universe to be. He did follow-ups to Connections, but the knowledge web isn't what I find most interesting. We keep changing ourselves and like to pretend we aren't even though it is incredibly obvious we are.
Ship Forty is being shipped home by Forte.
The universe is messing with us.
We best pretend this is funny. 8)
Our direct inputs are rich but localized. Too small to interpolate, we extrapolate fancifully. Realizing the results are poor we have a desire to explore and see for ourselves. Frustrated by the math we invent wormholes and hyperspace and pray to whatever deity we extrapolated that some future engineer will make them practical.
A miracle is a perfectly natural phenomenon easily explained by science that just happens to occur at just the right moment.
Like that lunar eclipse the day Yeshua was crucified.
Yeshua himself condemned the desire for miracles: "An evil and adulterous generation demands a sign" (Matthew 16:4).
Another series of purely natural occurrences was the 10 plagues that Moses afflicted on Egypt. The plagues of Egypt were an ecological chain reaction. A severe climate shift or drought caused toxic red algae to bloom in the Nile. This poisoned the water, killed the fish, drove frogs onto land, and triggered massive swarms of insects, disease, and weather disruptions.
Water to Blood (Plague 1): A warm drought caused toxic red algae (Planktothrix rubescens) to multiply, turning the Nile red and killing fish.
Frogs (Plague 2): Fleeing the toxic, oxygen-depleted water, frogs left the river and died on land.
Lice and Flies (Plagues 3 & 4): Rotting fish and dead frogs created ideal breeding grounds for biting gnats, stable flies, and other pests.
Livestock Pestilence (Plague 5): Biting insects transmitted deadly blood-borne viral diseases (like bluetongue or African horse sickness) to cattle, sheep, and horses.
Boils (Plague 6): Swarming stable flies or infected animal carcasses caused painful ulcerated boils and skin infections on humans.
Hail and Fire (Plague 7): Volcanic ash from the massive eruption of the Thera volcano on Santorini mixed with atmospheric moisture, potentially causing severe volcanic hailstorms.
Locusts (Plague 8): Unsettled weather and sudden climate shifts drove massive swarms of desert locusts into the Nile Valley.
Darkness (Plague 9): Dense volcanic ash clouds or severe Khamsin dust storms blotted out the sun for days.
Death of the Firstborn (Plague 10): Grain contaminated by mold, animal waste, or toxic locust droppings may have first poisoned the oldest children who had ceremonial rights to larger or primary food portions.
Your response reminds me of Carl Sagan's description of potential starships of having engines the size of planets (he also compared current designs to future starships as being similar to Leonardo's flying machines with modern jets).
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ukbem7LRTPI
Carl Sagan And The Ideas Of Leonardo da Vinci
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5h37sNXVv94
Carl Sagan On Interstellar Space Travel (Part 1 of 2)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cVYvQieK-4c
Carl Sagan On Interstellar Space Travel (Part 2 of 2)
He's describing the Bussard ramjet, which accumulates hydrogen between the stars and turns it into fusion thrust - thus avoiding the tyranny of the rocket equation. which (alas) has been shown not to work since the impact of the accumulating hydrogen in the magnetic scope would be greater than any thrust and actually cause the ship to slow down. Which makes the Bussard ramjet ironically a great way to slow down a spacecraft without expending fuel.
So the Bussard ramjet doesn't' work.... or does it?
Recent studies show that it can work provided it is big enough. Really, really big. So big its magnetic funnel is the length of 1 astronomical unit (the distance from Earth to the sun) with a mouth having the diameter of the moon.
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/new-calculations-show-that-an-interstellar-bussard-ramjet-drive-would-need-a-magnetic-field-stretching-150-million-kilometres
New Calculations Show That an Interstellar Bussard Ramjet Drive Would Need a Magnetic Field Stretching 150 Million Kilometres
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521005804#!
The Fishback Ramjet Revisited
Even a truly advanced K3 civilization would have trouble engineering a magnetic scoop that large, but it is not impossible in principle. Attach such a powerful scoop to an O'Neal cylinder (with an interior cylinder area of 800 km2, the size of a city) or a Bishop's ring (with an interior surface over 3 million km2, the size of the Indian subcontinent) and with an aft fusion engine and you have planetoid size starship capable of traveling near the speed of light.
It's not cultish, we humans have a basic need for purpose and meaning, because we as a species cannot survive the inevitable nihilism.
Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died":
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php
They start with the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am," which they regard as the essence of "dualism," the old–fashioned notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the brain and the body. (I will get to the second most famous statement in a moment.) This is also known as the "ghost in the machine" fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly "self" somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations. Neuroscientists involved in three–dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self–consciousness (Cogito ergo sum) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What "ghost," what "mind," what "self," what "soul," what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth....
A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? And what if, ten years from now, brain imaging has proved, beyond any doubt, that not only Edward O. Wilson but also the young generation are, in fact, correct?
You mention Nietzsche, who feared the consequences of his own atheism.
Q: So what are the consequences of your nihilism?
A: "The total eclipse of all values"
https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/WolfeSoulDied.php.htm
Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book was Die Fr�hliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science ].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."...
Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."
Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?
A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way.
(TLDR With the death of the Soul mankind has nothing to cling to)
IOW nether the Millennial Falcon of the USS Enterprise are nearly big enough to be starships. You'd need something bigger than the Borg Cube or the Death Star.
And if we talk about Jesus, we have to talk about Paul. Possibly a severely repressed gay (his "thorn in his flesh" and Romans 7:19: "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing" and remainign a bachelor - highly unusual for a rabbi) and was almost certainly an epileptic.
His sudden conversion on the road to Damascus and his intense visions stemmed from temporal lobe epilepsy. Certain studies suggest his intense writing style, profound religious focus, and emotional depth mirror traits associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. His mystical experience where he was "caught up" to the third heaven are similar to ecstatic states experienced by epileptics. Shares striking similarities with the intense feelings of bliss, altered self-awareness, and unearthly clarity felt during ecstatic seizures linked to temporal lobe epilepsy.
He never knew or met Jesus, except in his visions, and while not really contradicting Jesus teachings he creates a whole new emphasis, purpose and backstory for Jesus ministry.
And without him Christianity would have remained an obscure Jewish sect, because he understood one thing the Apostles never comprehended - the potential of God Fearers in the Roman Empire.
About 10% to 20% of the population of the empire could be described as God Fearers - people who had abandoned their old Olympian Gods with their childish immortality and come to admire the intellectual superiority of one God, the moral superiority of the Jewish faith and the healthier environment of Jewish family life (Herod's family being the exception). But Jewish religious requirements such as kosher diet restrictions and especially the requirement for circumcision (especially for adult males) were show stoppers.
For example, the Gospels describe a Roman centurion whose servant was miraculously cured by Jesus from a distance (and whom Jesus described as having more faith than anyone in Israel) as God Fearer who actually financed the construction of the local synagogue (as the elite backbone of the legions, Roman centurions were paid very well) and who had married a Jewish woman. Like a lot of soldiers stationed overseas he married a local girl, and like a lot of wives she influenced her husband.
It was Paul's marketing genius that allowed him to revise the mission of Jesus so it would spread throughout the empire.
ALfred shows us the new ere. I highlighted the mysterious sentence, plopped it into google, and Gemini explained in detail. No need to click a news article. Oy.
@Alfred I wasn’t a cultist as in I joined an existing cult like the Moonies. I explored “cultish and magical head spaces”, meaning I experimented with the power of cult-like belief and actions, and basically co-founded my own little cult. I learned a lot about how that works, including that people naturally gravitate towards cults because the world is confusing and scary and we’re tribal animals who get power from having a shared story and a group of like-minded people to bond with. The root of culture is cult, and religions are just particularly large and successful cults. I agree that we probably can’t escape having some kind of foundational beliefs, which means we can’t escape being in cults.
@Celt Yeah I’ve often thought that Nietzsche was the closest thing to a prophet the modern West has produced. But nobody claims he worked miracles. Do you believe this Jesus character died and came back to life, that the biblical prophets communicated with the creator of the universe, parted seas, walked on water etc.? Or are you a scientific, naturalistic Christian who sees Jesus not as a miracle worker, but just a moral teacher and progressive revolutionary? That would be interesting, but still absurd, imo.
"Or are you a scientific, naturalistic Christian who sees Jesus not as a miracle worker, but just a moral teacher and progressive revolutionary? That would be interesting, but still absurd, imo."
I can't speak for Celt, but he didn't seem to me to advocate for the supernatural version of the story.
My own musing on the subject is close to the one you dismiss as absurd--that Jesus taught a "kinder, gentler" form of monotheism which appealed to a certain subset of the population. But that his true "powers", as it were, were his ability to see many steps ahead what consequences would result from which actions, and his skill at communicating his ideas through storytelling.
CS Lewis famously proposed that by actually claiming to be the Son of God, Jesus left us with three and only three possibilities as to what he was: "Lord, liar, or lunatic". That for example, "good moral teacher" was not an option, since a good moral teacher who was merely human would not claim otherwise.
I think that, willfully or otherwise, Lewis left out "storyteller"
onward
onward
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