Kevin McKenna #fundie

Kevin McKenna #fundie heraldscotland.com

I always have a wee chuckle with my atheist chums when they deride the mere concept of spirituality yet have no problems with the cost of an international space programme looking for life beyond the stars. Or when they stress the random nature of creation and everything in it but can’t explain why the seasons fall in the same order year after year (but that’s another debate for another time).

19 comments

old comment by Happy Atheist

The seasons fall in the same order year after year for the same reason that when I let go of a rock it falls to the grounds rather than flies into the air: physics.

A space program looking for life beyond the stars would be a waste of money, as interstellar travel is unfeasible. An international space program, such as the ISS, would be worth the money on the other hand, as the thing we learn from microgravity and space research will advance our technology and lay the foundation for any future, interplanetary space travel we might look to accomplish.

Spirituality, however, has no basis in physics, and I have been given no evidence that warrants belief in it.

old comment by Shepard Solus

And they heave a huge sigh as they steel themselves and begin explaining to you for the 400th time concepts that a four year old could understand & remember in one go, like "one comes before two". The fact that you're an idiot really isn't something you should be laughing about. Not when you insist upon inflicting yourself upon others. Do you also demand to know how the sun rises & falls without god? Or perhaps how the days of the week repeat in the same order? Why circles loop back upon themselves if there's no omnipotent being bending them?

And no. That is NOT a debate for another time because it is NOT a debate AT ALL. Just because you have the ability to ask a thoroughly retarded question does not mean that your thoroughly retarded question is valid.

old comment by Lauge

Kevin, m'boy, if your friends (atheist or otherwise) can't explain why the seasons fall in the same order every year, they should have paid better attention in school. I mean, seriously, dude....

And @ #2088122
Happy Atheist

"A space program looking for life beyond the stars would be a waste of money, as interstellar travel is unfeasible."

That assuming that "space program" means "spaceship" or "probe". A synthetic aperture telescope array in orbit would be just the ticket for looking for signs of life in nearby solar systems.

And interstellar travel is unfeasible now only because it would take too long with today's technology (the old Voyager probes are in principle interstellar probes these days...). But it is unlikely to remain unfeasible, especially given a concerted development effort. And for that, a new "ISS II" project would indeed be a great place to start.

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

old comment by Lauge

@ KingOfRhye

"Maybe so, but that would be in the far far future, IMO. We'd have to either come up with a radical new method of propulsion or a new understanding of physics, or both, from what I understand about it."

I'm going to go a bit off-topic, since this is one of my favorite "relativistic hobby-horses".

Your statement would depend on:

a) your definition of "far, far future".
and
b) the effort that society as a whole is prepared to put into it.

For something like a star-wisp (microwave or laser powered sail), we almost have the required technology now. Same for an Orion-type (nuclear pulse propulsion) generation ship.

That probably wouldn't be worth the effort, though, since such vessels would almost surely be overtaken (in every sense of the word) by advances in technology.

A better bet, IMNSHO, would be a Valkyrie style vessel, much like the Venture Star from the movie Avatar. The main science/technology issue here is the production and storage of enough anti-matter to fill the tank. We're not at the point of being able to do that yet, but there's no immediate reasons why it would be impossible.

Another candidate is the ram-augmented interstellar rocket (RAIR), which makes use of interstellar hydrogen as fuel and reaction mass, thus neatly bypassing the pesky mass ratio limitations on conventional designs. For the RAIR as well, we're not quite there, technologically, but there's no immediate reason why we couldn't get there.

And the Venture Star of course brings us to the issue of time dilation. Interestingly, the Venture Star is (in the movie universe) cruising at 70% of light speed. This is an interesting "threshold" speed, because at 70% lightspeed, the time dilation factor is about 1,4, and it takes the ship about 1,4 years to travel a light year. So from the point of view of the crew, they are travelling almost exactly at lightspeed. Neat, huh? And manageable, from the point of view of timekeeping and communications. And, for a trip to Alpha Centauri C, that would keep the travel time (ship time) down to just under 6 years which would, again in my opinion, be within the limits of the practicable, even for a manned vessel.

And we haven't even started on things like wormholes or Alcubierre warp drives, mostly because these would require massive scientific and technological advances, some of which may for all practical purposes be impossible (e.g. creating negative mass and energy).

And last, but most certainly not least, the reason. Why would we (homo sapiens) make the effort? Sure, Terra can suck sometimes, but is it really bad enough that we need to leave? Well, yes, it is. For we are living on borrowed time, and the human race is doomed. We could be wiped out tomorrow, by the next extinction level event. Or in 20 years, in a thermonuclear WW III. Or in 5 billion years, when the Sun evolves into a red giant (at which point even Lunar or Martian colonies won't save us). So do we really have a choice?

Ahem. Thus endeth the rant. And now, back to our scheduled broadcast.