So, I know that I'm late on keeping up with the plan to post a chapter from the bible each week. Work and other parts of my life became hectic since the last post and this is the first time I've gotten the oppertunity and energy to make another post.
I have since joined a group for atheists and other sceptics in the Ashland region, and though it's a small group at the moment it's nice to know that there are at least some in this region that have decided that religion and the god idea is not for them. And with that in mind, I wanted to post how I went from believer to non-believer.
I was raised in a strong Baptist family. Not necessarily a fundamentalist home but one with a strong emphasis placed on religion. The bible was discussed fairly frequently, though in no great detail beyond the generalities of "god is love" and "god is great" and etc, etc.
As I grew up, I remember going to church with my family and taking part in the usual activities of summer vacation camps and food drives and the like. The preacher's wife at the time was more fundamental than my family and so always seemed a bit more intense than I was used to. Around the time I was 8 or 9, I was very interested in dinosaurs and archeaology and thus was beginning to take an interest in things scientific. One day in Sunday school the preacher's wife made the comment that there was no such as dinosaurs because there was no mention of them in the bible. When I asked about the dinosaurs bones that were in museums, she said they were the bones of giants mentioned in genesis and not of prehistoric animals. That was about the time that I started to have doubts about the whole church thing.
But I stayed with it, even made a profession of faith and was baptized at the age of 12. I thought it was a genuine feeling of god in my heart at the time, and I read through parts of the bible that I was able to understand. Which wasn't much since I was taught at church that the only version that I should read was the King James version, which is not exactly easy reading for a 12 year old. But I pushed through and tried to understand the book from cover to cover.
When I hit high school, I started to really develop my interest in science. Particularly the areas of physics and cosmology, but chemistry and biology was up there on the list as well. Needless to say, as I learned more about science, the bible began to make less sense in a literalist sense. The stories of creation, the story of the global flood and everything else in just the first book alone was enough to make my head hurt in trying to reconcile what was supposedly divinely inspired.
By the time I graduated high school, I was more of a deist than baptist, though I didn't know that term at the time. I accepted the idea of a god existing and putting the world in motion but then having no active role in the day to day affairs of people. There was just too many disasters in the world, too much famine in the world and health crisis for me to believe that a loving, all-powerful and all-knowing deity existed. In addition, why would a loving god allow so many children to starve in Africa and Asia while so many evangelicals on TV were preaching the "prosperity doctrine" that if you just sent them $20 then god would bless you and make you a millionare that could also defraud the government tax agencies.
I went to college at Morehead State University and got my first real exposure to alternative religions. Around home, it was primarily baptists of some denomination with a few methodist churches in town. The most "radical" group that we had in the area at that time was a group of jehovah's witnesses. These days, we've branched out a bit and have church of christ, church of god (which I know nothing about to be honest), and even have a catholic church. Go us, I suppose. Anyway, I spent time at the student methodist group, the student baptists and student bible group, all trying to reconnect to what I thought was missing in my life.
I spent a semester at that, and as part of that goal I started to read the bible from cover to cover for the first time that I could actually understand the words. I made it through Exodus and had to stop because I couldn't handle anymore. Finding passages that endorsed slavery, human sacrifices, genocide and other crimes that would get a person today thrown into prison for the rest of their lives, and were encouraged as being good and godly behavior. It was also at this time that I came to believe that the god in the old testament was an old bronze age war god, similiar to the god Ares/Mars in the Greco-Roman pantheon, but that's a subject for another post. Regardless, by the time I left college I was considering myself an agnostic.
I was fairly certain that there was no god at that point, but I wasn't convinced enough that I was ready to say for certain "There is no god." So I morphed again and began to call myself an agnostic. I believe that the universe was created through an inpersonal agent and followed the laws of physics, but I was willing to entertain the idea that a god may have been involved and that I was wrong on the inpersonal aspect. But as I read further in science journals and researched the matter on my own, I began to realize that there was really no need for a god in any of the aspects that were out in the world.
There are thousands of gods in the world, and in christianity alone there are 13,000+ denominations. Yet they all supposedly have the sole version of the Truth and the other 12,999 are false and decieved. And that's not counting Islam or the various Asiatic philosophy/religions such as buddism, hinduism, confusionism and the like. Which god you follow is primarily a matter of geography and family tradition. If I had been born in say India, then I would likely have been brought up as a hindu, possibly a muslim depending on which part of the country I was born in. If I was born in Iraq, I would have been a muslim of some variety. And all of them share commonalities. They all make appeals to supernatural agents that are said to impact the world and yet are seperate from the world. That doesn't work though, as any science experiment will tell you. If you impact something, you leave evidence behind that you were there. The same would apply to a god interacting with our world.
And that is why I now consider myself an atheist. I will say that I believe there is no gods, though I am not to the point of saying that I know there is no gods. But based on the claims and evidence presented thus far, I cannot take seriously any religion's claim of a divine agent being involved in our world in any shape or fashion.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
A new project
Recently in discussions with friends, the topic of religion came up and my own rejection of the same. I was asked about why I went from being a christian to an atheist and I figured instead of repeating myself to cover all the bases, I have decided to try something here on the blog. Once a week, possibly more often if I have the time for it, I will take a chapter from the bible and discuss why I believe the scripture fails when examined in a logical, rational and scientific approach. And I will use the King James Version (KJV) for the most part, though may include translations from the New International Version (NIV) if something is particularly confusing or the grammar hard to follow in the older language. So, let's get started with the first chapter.
1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
So at the first moment of creation, there was already a planet Earth, but nothing else existed around it. This runs counter to the scientific evidence that says that our planet is about 4.6 billion years old, and we spin around in an universe that is about 14.5 billion years old. So right off the bat, the creation story makes assumptions of an eternal earth in a finite universe.
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
This part could be considered at least feasable. Most likely at the moment of the Big Bang, there would have been intense heat released, which would have translated into an intense light. But following the Big Bang, there was a span of time called the universal dark ages, where the clouds of hydrogen gas blocked any view back beyond a certain point. Once the first stars flared to life, around 500 million years after the Big Bang, the radition and solar winds push the hydrogen clouds far enough apart that light can now travel freely and reach our telescopes. But they still have it wrong because this all came after the earth itself was created according to the book.
6And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
So apparently, according to the bible, the sky is made of water since that is the "waters which where above the firmament". This is where you get the nutty idea from people like Kent Hovid and Ken Hamm that there was once a canopy of water surrounding the earth and that's where the waters came from for the flood. But I digress. Suffice to say, this line of reasoning is complete and utter bullshit. If there were water above the atmosphere, it would quickly disappear due to the vaporization from the lack of pressure and low temperatures.
9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Notice first that there are grasses and flowers and other vegetation present, before the sun was created. There's no stars in the sky yet, and no sunlight to fuel the photosynthesis and yet you have flowers and trees that are producing fruits. Secondly, paeleological evidence shows that the first form of life on the primative earth was forms of bacteria. The earliest form of bacterial life shows up in a period ranging from 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago. The first evidence for cells capable of photosynthesis is around 3.0 to 2.7 billion years. So there is a gap there of at least 500 million years where cells were dependant on chemosynthesis for their energy rather than sunlight. Where the most advanced form of life on the planet at that time, was a form of cyanobacteria (which is the technical name for the more commonly named blue-green algae). The first evidence for what we would recognize as actual land vegetation didn't arrive until 450 million years ago in the form of ferns and other simple plants. Fruit trees began to appear around 300 to 250 million years ago, while grasses came into their present form only about 40 million years ago.
14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
So now the sun and the moon and all the trillions upon trillions of stars that are currently visible in our universe come into existence. Notice that the stars only get a passing mention. "...he made the stars also." Now, if the sun and the moon are just now being formed, then where was the division for day and night before this? How could there have been three previous days without the celestial bodies used to designate our perception of time? And where was the light created on the first day if we had to wait until now on the fourth day for the sun to arrive to "give light upon the earth". I plan to do a posting on stellar evolution soon, so I won't get into too much detail on that, other than to say that star formation takes anywhere from a few hundred thousand years to millions of years, depending on the mass of the star to-be. Larger stars form quicker. So there would have been a long period of star formation going on before our Sun came onto the scene.
20And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
At least they got the fact right that life began in the sea, but that's about the only thing going for them. Fish evolved about 500 million years ago, insects came around 400 million years ago, amphibians about 360 million, reptiles about 300 million (including dinosaurs eventually), mammals around 200 million years and birds about 150 million years ago. So there's a relatively steady progression, though looking at the fossil record you see that it was anything but orderly as new species diverged and formed new branches on the tree of life. But they are compressing a process that took approximately 350 million years to a single "day".
24And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 26And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
I brought it up already about the process of how the various species came into being. The main thing I wanted to point out here in this passage is evidence of the biblical scripture being influenced (if not outright plagerized) by older sources. Notice what god said about creating man. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness". Implying a polytheistic pantheon rather than a supposed monotheistic belief. There are other examples in Genesis where there are the plural pronouns used. I also find the idea of man having dominion over all other species to be something that has lead us to the state we are in now of using resources without concern of whether they can be sustained or not, or what the consequences might be.
27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Now the question here is, what image does god have? The first appearance of the species Homo, to which we belong, came with Homo habilis, which existed from about 2.3 to 1.4 million years ago (although there has been a recent find of a species tenatively named Homo gautengensis which may be older and thus would be the progenitor of the Homo genus). Habilis looks nothing like modern humans, which raises the question of what god would have looked like then. Of course, a common creationist tactic is to look at fossils and reconstructions of those fossils and point to everything except possiby Neanderthals as being monkies, and start saying man with Neanderthals. But put three creationists in the room together and you'd get three different results so they can't even agree where they disagree with each other, let alone disagreeing with the physical evidence.
And this ignores the other species that came before Homo. You have Australopithecus (the famous skeleton of Lucy), Ardipithecus (Ardi in the recent fervor of media coverage), and other earlier species before our particular branch of the family tree. You also notice that there is no mention of Adam or Eve or god pulling a rib out of Adam because he ran out of play-doh to make Eve the same way. Interesting bit of omission there don't you think?
So this is my brief analysis of the first chapter of the supposedly holy book. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and feel free to leave comments of whether you loved it or hate it.
1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
So at the first moment of creation, there was already a planet Earth, but nothing else existed around it. This runs counter to the scientific evidence that says that our planet is about 4.6 billion years old, and we spin around in an universe that is about 14.5 billion years old. So right off the bat, the creation story makes assumptions of an eternal earth in a finite universe.
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
This part could be considered at least feasable. Most likely at the moment of the Big Bang, there would have been intense heat released, which would have translated into an intense light. But following the Big Bang, there was a span of time called the universal dark ages, where the clouds of hydrogen gas blocked any view back beyond a certain point. Once the first stars flared to life, around 500 million years after the Big Bang, the radition and solar winds push the hydrogen clouds far enough apart that light can now travel freely and reach our telescopes. But they still have it wrong because this all came after the earth itself was created according to the book.
6And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
So apparently, according to the bible, the sky is made of water since that is the "waters which where above the firmament". This is where you get the nutty idea from people like Kent Hovid and Ken Hamm that there was once a canopy of water surrounding the earth and that's where the waters came from for the flood. But I digress. Suffice to say, this line of reasoning is complete and utter bullshit. If there were water above the atmosphere, it would quickly disappear due to the vaporization from the lack of pressure and low temperatures.
9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Notice first that there are grasses and flowers and other vegetation present, before the sun was created. There's no stars in the sky yet, and no sunlight to fuel the photosynthesis and yet you have flowers and trees that are producing fruits. Secondly, paeleological evidence shows that the first form of life on the primative earth was forms of bacteria. The earliest form of bacterial life shows up in a period ranging from 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago. The first evidence for cells capable of photosynthesis is around 3.0 to 2.7 billion years. So there is a gap there of at least 500 million years where cells were dependant on chemosynthesis for their energy rather than sunlight. Where the most advanced form of life on the planet at that time, was a form of cyanobacteria (which is the technical name for the more commonly named blue-green algae). The first evidence for what we would recognize as actual land vegetation didn't arrive until 450 million years ago in the form of ferns and other simple plants. Fruit trees began to appear around 300 to 250 million years ago, while grasses came into their present form only about 40 million years ago.
14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
So now the sun and the moon and all the trillions upon trillions of stars that are currently visible in our universe come into existence. Notice that the stars only get a passing mention. "...he made the stars also." Now, if the sun and the moon are just now being formed, then where was the division for day and night before this? How could there have been three previous days without the celestial bodies used to designate our perception of time? And where was the light created on the first day if we had to wait until now on the fourth day for the sun to arrive to "give light upon the earth". I plan to do a posting on stellar evolution soon, so I won't get into too much detail on that, other than to say that star formation takes anywhere from a few hundred thousand years to millions of years, depending on the mass of the star to-be. Larger stars form quicker. So there would have been a long period of star formation going on before our Sun came onto the scene.
20And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
At least they got the fact right that life began in the sea, but that's about the only thing going for them. Fish evolved about 500 million years ago, insects came around 400 million years ago, amphibians about 360 million, reptiles about 300 million (including dinosaurs eventually), mammals around 200 million years and birds about 150 million years ago. So there's a relatively steady progression, though looking at the fossil record you see that it was anything but orderly as new species diverged and formed new branches on the tree of life. But they are compressing a process that took approximately 350 million years to a single "day".
24And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 26And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
I brought it up already about the process of how the various species came into being. The main thing I wanted to point out here in this passage is evidence of the biblical scripture being influenced (if not outright plagerized) by older sources. Notice what god said about creating man. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness". Implying a polytheistic pantheon rather than a supposed monotheistic belief. There are other examples in Genesis where there are the plural pronouns used. I also find the idea of man having dominion over all other species to be something that has lead us to the state we are in now of using resources without concern of whether they can be sustained or not, or what the consequences might be.
27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Now the question here is, what image does god have? The first appearance of the species Homo, to which we belong, came with Homo habilis, which existed from about 2.3 to 1.4 million years ago (although there has been a recent find of a species tenatively named Homo gautengensis which may be older and thus would be the progenitor of the Homo genus). Habilis looks nothing like modern humans, which raises the question of what god would have looked like then. Of course, a common creationist tactic is to look at fossils and reconstructions of those fossils and point to everything except possiby Neanderthals as being monkies, and start saying man with Neanderthals. But put three creationists in the room together and you'd get three different results so they can't even agree where they disagree with each other, let alone disagreeing with the physical evidence.
And this ignores the other species that came before Homo. You have Australopithecus (the famous skeleton of Lucy), Ardipithecus (Ardi in the recent fervor of media coverage), and other earlier species before our particular branch of the family tree. You also notice that there is no mention of Adam or Eve or god pulling a rib out of Adam because he ran out of play-doh to make Eve the same way. Interesting bit of omission there don't you think?
So this is my brief analysis of the first chapter of the supposedly holy book. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and feel free to leave comments of whether you loved it or hate it.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Science, Religion and Politics...oh my!
Science
For those that already know me, they are aware that astronomy is probably my favorite field of science. If there had been more employment oppertunities around here I would have gone with that as a career choice. But thebest observational conditions are dry weather away from large population centers, hence why you see most observational centers in places like Arizona, New Mexico or the Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea.
The problem arises from the atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere, great for allowing life to have formed and evolved over billions of years, is terrible for most observational forms of astronomy. The higher wave-lengths of light, such as x-rays and gamma rays have difficulty penetrating the atmosphere, while the visible and infrared or lower portion of the spectrum gets scattered between the top and bottom of the atmosphere. Modern computers have programs that can compensate to a large part for the scattering, but it's still always there in some form. So there's two solutions. Either build larger so that more light is collected to compensate for the scattering effect, or lauch the telescope into orbit.
Putting a telescope in orbit is more expensive, given the cost of launch. When I wrote a term paper my freshman year of college back in 1999, it cost approximately $1million per pound to put something in orbit, with nearly 80% of that cost being the expense of the fuel necessary to generate the needed thrust to reach the escape velocity of 11.2 kilometers/second (or about 7 miles/second). To put that velocity into perspective, at that speed you could go from New York City to Los Angeles in just under 6 minutes. So to push through the relatively thick atmosphere and escape Earth's gravity takes alot of force, and to get that force at the moment we have to rely on chemical propulsion that is not very efficient and so needs huge fuel tanks.
But once you get out of the atmosphere, the pay off is worth it. Consider the images the public regularly gets from Hubble and how spectacular those snapshots are. That is a level of clarity that I doubt can ever be matched with terrestial-based observations, and so space-based observations I believe will become the dominate form of research in the coming decades.
One of those new telescopes already in operation is the Herschel Space Observatory, launched in 2009 in a joint operation by NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency). Rather than orbit around Earth like Hubble does, Herschel orbits around the sun instead, giving it a much wider range of views as well as more flexibility of where it can be directed to look. As a side, the new telescope is named for Sir William Herschel, the British astronomy who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.
This is in addition to the fact that the President today signed a bill extending the tax cuts for another two years. You know, those things he campaigned against so hard. Like the rest of his campaign, what he said he'd do and what he has done since being in office have been vastly different. Nevermind that the trade off was 2 years of deficet-inducing tax cuts (which every economist with any sort of credibility says will not help the economy) for a few months worth of unemployment benefit extensions. Or that keeping the tax cuts in place adds hundreds of billions of dollars to our deficet, at a time everyone in Washington is making a big deal out of keeping spending in check. Goddamn hypocrites, every single one of them. We have no democracy any more, or even a republic. We are in a country where our politicians are bought and owned solidly by the corprations and special interest groups.
For those that already know me, they are aware that astronomy is probably my favorite field of science. If there had been more employment oppertunities around here I would have gone with that as a career choice. But thebest observational conditions are dry weather away from large population centers, hence why you see most observational centers in places like Arizona, New Mexico or the Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea.
The problem arises from the atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere, great for allowing life to have formed and evolved over billions of years, is terrible for most observational forms of astronomy. The higher wave-lengths of light, such as x-rays and gamma rays have difficulty penetrating the atmosphere, while the visible and infrared or lower portion of the spectrum gets scattered between the top and bottom of the atmosphere. Modern computers have programs that can compensate to a large part for the scattering, but it's still always there in some form. So there's two solutions. Either build larger so that more light is collected to compensate for the scattering effect, or lauch the telescope into orbit.
Putting a telescope in orbit is more expensive, given the cost of launch. When I wrote a term paper my freshman year of college back in 1999, it cost approximately $1million per pound to put something in orbit, with nearly 80% of that cost being the expense of the fuel necessary to generate the needed thrust to reach the escape velocity of 11.2 kilometers/second (or about 7 miles/second). To put that velocity into perspective, at that speed you could go from New York City to Los Angeles in just under 6 minutes. So to push through the relatively thick atmosphere and escape Earth's gravity takes alot of force, and to get that force at the moment we have to rely on chemical propulsion that is not very efficient and so needs huge fuel tanks.
But once you get out of the atmosphere, the pay off is worth it. Consider the images the public regularly gets from Hubble and how spectacular those snapshots are. That is a level of clarity that I doubt can ever be matched with terrestial-based observations, and so space-based observations I believe will become the dominate form of research in the coming decades.
One of those new telescopes already in operation is the Herschel Space Observatory, launched in 2009 in a joint operation by NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency). Rather than orbit around Earth like Hubble does, Herschel orbits around the sun instead, giving it a much wider range of views as well as more flexibility of where it can be directed to look. As a side, the new telescope is named for Sir William Herschel, the British astronomy who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.
The Herschel telescope contains an infrared system, which lets it see through the thick dust and gas clouds in galaxies and nebulae that obscures the visible spectrum. One of the recent photographs sent back was this one.
The circle blobs of light? Those are whole galaxies, located 11 billion light years away. The universe itself is about 13.5 billion years old, so these galaxies are from when the universe was still in it's infancy. But the remarkable thing about them is that despite their young age (which means they would not yet be the size of galaxies we see today, such as our own Milky Way or the Andromada), each of them is producing a huge amount of energy. In the infrared spectrum alone, they are generating one trillion (that's 1,000,000,000,000 ) times the total amount of energy the sun will produce in its lifetime, in every spectrum. These young galaxies are also producing stars at a frantic pace, almost 700 times faster than new stars are born in our Milky Way.
That we are able to see something like this, even so far away and with so much time seperating us and the event, speaks volumes of the value and strength of science, and why I prefer it to the supersitions and fallicies presented in the name of religion.
Religion
On the topic of religion, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement Thursday saying "At present, Christians are the religious group which suffers most from persecution on account of its faith." He went on to say "This situation is intolerable, since it represents an insult to God and to human dignity."
Excuse me a moment while I stare in awe at the sheer hypocracy and gall that it takes to issue statements like that. To imagine that the Christians are the most persecuted cult in the world (and yes, I consider any sort of religion to be a cult, interested only in gaining power and authority over its members and most especially over their finances through fear and mental manipulation) is to completely and utterly divorce oneself from reality. Which considering it is relgion that we are talking about, isn't all that uncommon really but there should be limits that are even too emberassing for someone like the pope to cross.
Now if he had said that Christianity was the most oppressive group, then I could see some validity in that statement, though I think they'd have stiff competition from Islam in that department. But to argue that attacks against christians is somehow an assault on human dignity is laughable. What about the church's attack on same-sex relationships, their behaviour during the child abuse scandals that have been going on for decades apparently, the way they treat women as inferior by virtue of having breasts, the refusal to admit that condoms would help prevent the AIDS epidemic from spreading in Africa, their rabid denial of the benefits of stem-cell research, and a host of other areas where their own positions are a goddamn insult to humanity in general.
Okay, deep breath, count to 10 and all that. Sorry, but organized religion sets off my bullshit-o-meter quicker than anything else I've discovered. And it's not just one denomination, but all of them. Every religion or cult (which the only difference between the two in my opinion is that a religion is simply a socially accepted cult with a larger membership list) follows the same pattern. They present an answer, and forbid their members from searching for themselves if that's the right answer or even if the question is valid. As Christopher Hitchens said once "Arguments that explain everything, frequently explain nothing".
Politics
Which is why it's so sad and depressing in this country that religion and politics have become so intermingled. In Iowa, the newly elected Republican-majority in the House of Representatives is looking to gain enough support to begin impeachment procedures against four of the state Supreme Court justices that joined in the unanimous decision to allow same-sex marriage in the state, on the grounds that the bill passed by the legistature violated the equal rights clause of the US Constitution. And so for that one singular instance, some newly elected conservatives, who aren't even sworn in yet, are trying to have them thrown out of office.
Or the new US House Republicans that are going to be chairing committees dealing with matters that they have gone on record of saying are hoaxes. Global warming comes to mind first, but there's also science education (there have been talks of allowing creationism back into the schools for fuck's sake), the need for renewable energy sources, and a host of other issues that if they had their ways we'd be stuck in the Dark Ages over again. Europe has already surpassed us in many avenues of research and studies, and China is gaining grounds quickly. Yet the only thing these politicians are on TV talking about is tax cuts for the top 2% of the population and giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the military and defense industries. It terrifies me to know that people that have publicly stated they believe the biblical account that the Earth is only 6000 years old and that we'd all be living in paradise right now if the first woman hadn't fallen victim to a talking snake with legs and just been a good, submissive helper like she was suppose to be, is also in charge of the world's largest military budget. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined.
Is it any wonder the rest of the world hates us or pities us? We are slowly devolving from the shining city on a hill that Regan described us as, and turning into a theocracy similiar to Iran. Only with crosses instead of crescent moons.
This is in addition to the fact that the President today signed a bill extending the tax cuts for another two years. You know, those things he campaigned against so hard. Like the rest of his campaign, what he said he'd do and what he has done since being in office have been vastly different. Nevermind that the trade off was 2 years of deficet-inducing tax cuts (which every economist with any sort of credibility says will not help the economy) for a few months worth of unemployment benefit extensions. Or that keeping the tax cuts in place adds hundreds of billions of dollars to our deficet, at a time everyone in Washington is making a big deal out of keeping spending in check. Goddamn hypocrites, every single one of them. We have no democracy any more, or even a republic. We are in a country where our politicians are bought and owned solidly by the corprations and special interest groups.
If the religious nutjobs don't get us first, the corporate taskmasters will.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
First Post
So, I finally got around to creating a blog of some sort. Cutting edge, I'm not apparently. The posts here will likely be sporadic and not on some sort of regular pattern, but rather when I get the energy to post and the time to do so.
To start things off, just a quick run down of myself. I live in Kentucky, I'm single, and I'm 30 years old (at least for a few more days). Unlike the majority of people around me, I'm registered Democrat, and am an atheist. Some may say more of an anti-theist, but I try to keep things civil as much as I can when discussing the topic.
Most likely, this blog is going to be for me to vent on matters political and social. I don't expect anyone reading it to agree with me constantly, and in fact I prefer to hear different opinions since they make me consider my own position more thoroughly, and that is never a bad outcome to a discussion. I will also be discussing topics of interest across various scientific fields, ranging from astronomy to biology to physics and a host of other topics.
So, that's my opening salvo. Let the games begin.
To start things off, just a quick run down of myself. I live in Kentucky, I'm single, and I'm 30 years old (at least for a few more days). Unlike the majority of people around me, I'm registered Democrat, and am an atheist. Some may say more of an anti-theist, but I try to keep things civil as much as I can when discussing the topic.
Most likely, this blog is going to be for me to vent on matters political and social. I don't expect anyone reading it to agree with me constantly, and in fact I prefer to hear different opinions since they make me consider my own position more thoroughly, and that is never a bad outcome to a discussion. I will also be discussing topics of interest across various scientific fields, ranging from astronomy to biology to physics and a host of other topics.
So, that's my opening salvo. Let the games begin.
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