Four years before we landed men on the moon, scientists still believed there were canals on Mars.
6 Jun 1965, Page 82 – at Newspapers.com
The started this nonsense more than 60 years earlier.
4 Oct 1919, Page 47 – at Newspapers.com
13 Jan 1912, Page 1 – at Newspapers.com
There was never any legitimate basis for this insanity. Just scientists seeing what they wanted to see. Identical story as global warming.
But the Martian canals made a great news story and worked well when it came to frightening the public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0K4ApWl4g
This is a small subset but is instructive of the wild, baseless speculation about extraterrestrial life in the universe. Because the speculators have a ‘Dr.’ in front of their names their vain ramblings become settled science and nonbelievers are castigated but they are fiction nonetheless. If these PhDs applied the same stretches in credulity to any endeavor other than space aliens (and sister fables of spontaneous generation of life, and evolution), they would be run out of their professions!! They totally discard laws of probability and laws of thermodynamics to arrive at conclusions like alien life is prevalent just in the Milky Galaxy let alone swarming all over the universe.
Forgive me for being a bit confused by your comment.
If your comment was ment to be humor/sarcasm then disregard.
To get a better understanding I have some questions.
1-How did life come into being according to you?
2-How did modern man (or other lifeforms seen today)appear?
3-If I understand you correctly ,you think life only exist on Earth ,if so ,why?
4-Why would the ‘laws’ of probability be against the possibility of life being prevalent in our galaxy/ Universe?
5-What have the laws of thermodynamics got to do with this?
1) I believe in a Creator God. that is the only logical explanation I can come up with.
2) Modern man was created 6000 years ago. The universe is as old as you want it to be. I think it is a bit humorous that the Big Bang points toward a God creating the universe from nothing but scientists won’t acknowledge that evidence.
3) Several reasons the main scientific one being if life spontaneously appeared it was with odds in the -1000 exponent range conservatively. The universe is trillions of trillions too small for life to have erupted anywhere else by chance.
4) for life to form as we know it there would have to have been hundreds of complex proteins form by chance then combine by chance into a mind boggling ‘simple ‘ cell. do the math of a ‘simple’ protein stack of just 100 amino acids with 20 acid options forming by chance. Add in the complexity of them all having to stack left handed. Now expand that to a couple hundred proteins, then tell me how they all got together to instantly perform the myriad tasks that they all need to do in a cell. They all function instantly perfectly or the cell isn’t alive. I have played with the math and there aren’t enough numbers to calculate the necessary chance occurrences!
5) the principle stated in the Second Law is that noting can go from a lower state to a higher state without external input. If that doesn’t apply here, why haven’t we found a Rolex watch in a volcanic deposit. I think we would both agree a Rolex watch is infinitely less sophisticated than a single living cell.
The definition of intelligence that most agree to is the organization of information. The most compact and comprehensive compilation of precise information in the universe is found in a strand of DNA. Doesn’t that, by science’s own definition, require a superior intelligence creating life?
I realize those beliefs make me a kook to most but I must be intellectually honest and they are the only explanations that make sense to me.
So… willys36 : I believe everyone has a right to their opinion & religious beliefs “but” it all can be problematic when Society is foisted with unsubstantiated claims as “fact” as has been the case with Global Warming & other wild Scientific assertions of the past.
……………
Your statement is made with honest intent,,, although I do not agree with your analysis like: 2 + 2 = 22 … no, but I agree with your personal right, to hold such beliefs.
Marsh. Agree 100%. Organized science has always joined in an unhealthy alliance with politics to try to legislate beliefs. Have you read the book “The 5 Equations that Changed the World”? Great read about the lives of Newton, Bernoulli, Faraday, Clausius, and Einstein. The common thread that jumped out at me is every one of these geniuses had a mentor whom they quickly passed and that mentor dedicated his life to destroying his mentee! Gotta love politics.
Hello Willys36 thanks for the answers (sorry about the late reply)
I agree with Marsh that everyone is entitled to their own opinion , (as long as one doesn’t try to impose it on others.. Which you don’t do , to be clear)
About 1 ,3 and 4 ; I’m not going into ‘who’ or better ‘what’ God is , such a discussion would be too long (and fruitless I think) , and maybe not fit for this site.
I agree that the origin of life etc is still a mystery also for today’s science ( which in my opinion is also a kind of religion(s) , complete with dogma’s , sects ,’heretics’
luckily not with burning people anymore ,because of the CO2 it creates 😉 , scientists thinking they hold the ultimate truth and others are wrong ,etc.see AGW and
astronomy as a few examples.) ,
But if you think that a God (which one by the way , different people(cultures, religions)
have their own god(s) and all claim they are right) created life on Earth, then why not also elsewhere in the Universe ? Sounds like a reasonable theory to me,
Isn’t it a bit of a contradiction to say that God created life and then talk about the chance of life spontaneous appearing after having established that it has not spontaneously appeared ?
About 2 ; I think the Big Bang theory is a religion , it starts with a miracle and a purely
mathematical point and then science takes it from there. Not surprisingly because it was first proposed by a priest who also did science.
About 5 ; I don’t think the comparison between a Rolex , which is artificially made by man and a living cel ( which is (‘artificially’) made by God according to your 1)is a good one.
For the rest , don’t be afraid to be regarded as a “kook” , as long as you stay
openminded if irrefutable evidence proves ones believes wrong.
Michael Crichton called it a “State of Fear.” Roger Helmer (EU MP) called it a “Climate of Fear”:
https://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/climate-of-fear/
CERN deserves credit for using nuclear physics to promote fear and for developing the worldwide web as an avenue for distributing fear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN
Well sometimes I think we need to burn down the radio station like the Ecuadorans did in 1949 when that station broadcast it’s own version of War of the Worlds and caused a real panic.
http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_quito.htm
It is thought that Percival Lowell was actually seeing the refection of the blood vessels in his eyes in the eye piece of the telescope. This some something that can happen when you stare hard and long into the optics of such an instrument.
The belief that there were canals on Mars was mainly due to an optical illusion and the relatively poor “seeing” from earth base telescopes at the time.
Given scientific knowledge then, it was probably perfectly reasonable to believe in them at the time. Scientists are continually updating theories as knowledge changes.
Unfortunately I don’t see any relevance to the veracity or otherwise of “global warming” theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal
Based on my own experience with my Mead 10″ Starfinder telescope, I believe the theory that he was seeing the reflection of his blood vessels from the eye piece has some validity. I know that eye strain does cause this to happen because it has happened to me. Fact is though that to see the maximum detail one has to look continuously a long time. It is surprising the details that do emerge when observing the surface of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter or our moon when one sticks with it. The same is true of Nebulas. Of course my 10″ Newtonian reflector telescope is miniscule compared to the 24″ refractor that Lowell was using but the optics are modern and I use 1.25″ Super Plossl eye pieces which are top of the line from Meade.
I do not know if your scope is the equatorial mount or Dobsonian, but just to brag a bit, I once had the pleasure of sitting down with John Dobson and just conversing for a couple of hours, What an extraordinary person! It is a shame that he has left the building…
Dobson mount. I bought the scope 13 years ago with the intent of learning the skies and learning to star hop. I did learn the skies and did do some star hopping to find faint fuzzies. But my next scope will be a 10″ computer guided Schmidt-Cassigrains. Astrophotography and being able to automatically track fast movers has an appeal for me once I semi-retire and have the time to justify the investment. I have gotten more than my monies worth out of the $1,700 investment I have in the equipment I am using now. Gotta take my current scope apart and wash the mirrors, put it back together and collimate it and realign the spotter scope so it’s ready to go when the weather gets warm enough.
Nice thing about a computer controlled scope is that you can set it up and leave it out in the cold and view and take images with your butt staying warm and sitting at your computer.
Hey RAH! Cool! Sounds like a good plan. I have never done any astrophotography — well, the obligatory few moon photos and some long exposures of Sagittarius back in the old days of film. Remember film? 🙂 The new equipment is so sophisticated that now amateurs can create photos considered impossible even a few years ago. Sounds like you have a great plan!
I have hopes of getting active again in astronomy when I semi-retire as well, probably in another year or two. My planned location is in the deep woods, mountain top, nearest neighbor three miles. At night I can see a total of three small farm lights off on a ridge top about ten miles distance.
How much of the War of the Worlds “mass panic” was press hype?
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_welles_war_of_the_worlds_panic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.html