So it's turtles all the way down, until you get to the penguin.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Yep!, he's the initial singularity from the "big beak theory"

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But you're sure the astronauts are lying; you just don't seem to know what they're lying about. jayutah

More accurately, they're actively in denial of science. They reject any conclusion, statement or observation that contradicts their beliefs.


I'm sure they had their nutters too. Every culture does. The Greeks just didn't let them write anything.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Good one.

This makes the point exactly.

I guess these people would argue that people have 6 fingers on their hands too because we can't be sure of the difference between 5 and 6 because mathematics has some strange discontinuity between those 2 numbers.

The difference between these type of people and the ancient Greeks is that the ancient Greeks were actually educated and made sophisticated models consistent with what was then known in physics. These people today just are ignorant of physics and have no excuse for their incorrect notions.

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"fifty is nifty" , unknown poet

These people today just are ignorant of physics and have no excuse for their incorrect notions.


See my post in the thread below.

Hi, I like to bring science to the ignorant.

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But you're sure the astronauts are lying; you just don't seem to know what they're lying about. jayutah

Their "excuse" is that they're irrational. They live in a fantasy world that conforms to their own expectations, and physics, or any other means of examining the real world, means nothing to them. It's not ignorance, it's mental disfunction.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

It's not ignorance, it's mental disfunction



Bullseye!!(thats ditto for any none darts players)

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But you're sure the astronauts are lying; you just don't seem to know what they're lying about. jayutah

I'm currently reading a book with a pretty good history on the subject. It's called The Discoverers, by Daniel J. Boorstin--former Librarian of Congress.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Sounds interesting. I'll have to give that one a look.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Well Galileo's problem wasn't that scripture was accepted as evidence, it was that he didn't have an ounce of tact in him. He wrote a book that make the Pope of the time look like a total idiot after having been told not to do that exact thing. Not the way to win friends and influence people...

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

He may have just been a poor dialog writer, or in need of an editor. Apparently he didn't mean the characters to come across quite as insulting as they did.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Another way that my ancestors were intelligent.

-Kai, the Greek Geek

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

Yes, your arguments are indeed air tight it seems, I apologize that I didn't see those before.

Good point, so I would be no more than a magician to him, even if his own eyes were "deceiving" him. I still hope the look on his face would be rewarding at first, but I have a feeling now that you're right and his belief that he was about to be "tricked" even before seeing my telescope would prevent him from being at all surprised at the sight of a space station or shuttle that he insists does not exist.

It seems to me that the following arguments were settled by great scientists a long time ago

1. geocentrism v. heliocentrism: probably settled by first detection of parallax. BALL GAME OVER (long ago)
2. creationism v. evolution: probably settled in early 20th century.
3. static continents v. continental drift: settled by Tuzo Wilson in 1960s
4. round v. flat-earth (are you kidding me?): settled by ARISTOTLE with observation of curved shadow of earth in lunar eclipse

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"fifty is nifty" , unknown poet

The problem with already-settled arguments is that not everyone gets the memo. Every day new people discover fringe theories they themselves didn't know about before. They get excited; they embrace it; they express it; and their learning process plays out in public. Tomorrow someone new comes along and it starts all over again. That's the nature of a constantly renewing society.

The corollary also applies. The amount of information regarding, say, the Moon hoax theory monotonically increases. There's more out there today than there was yesterday. So someone newly introduced to it today has farther to go than someone who was newly introduced to it last year. As the informational burden increases, fewer people are willing to shoulder it. When it becomes to onerous to keep up with, people become again more inclined to shoot their mouths off before becoming "fully" informed.

That's why I decided to stop talking about 9/11. I just can't keep up with every single fringe theory out there. So rather than try and fail, I just decline.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Good point,

but then I would contend that instead of a "renewing" society, we're in a "devolving" society ; and how long will it be until the mobs burn down the Library of Congress (like the mobs burned down the libraries of Alexandria in antiquity and the dark ages set in).

Which is part of the reason I made a pretty interesting thread "Collapse of Industrial Society?".

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"fifty is nifty" , unknown poet

I find it enormously unlikely. It's true that quite a lot of people don't care about libraries, but my local one, at least, is always busy. The majority of people, I think, have no interest in burning libraries and never will, and those that do think they get all the necessary knowledge from one book.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"