Howdy LQ friends.

Last night, I saw a large billboard along side the road that said: "In the beginning, God created", and then it had a red circle with a slash through it, centered over a sequences of images that went from monkey to gorilla to man, and provided a toll free phone number to call for TRUTH.

I want a recording of the conversation that would happen if @enorbet called, but I forgot the number already.

I don't think that creationism conflicts with evolution the way suggested by that billboard.

An Earthling's day is one revolution of Earth. However, God's day is one revolution of a universe, and thus wouldn't be the same as a person's day. A day for God could be as many as a trillion earth days.

So, given that, we no longer have to quibble about whether this occurred 4000BCish, or 4,000,000,000 BCish. So lets look for scientific evidence that the entire earth was flooded.

There is hard objective scientific evidence that @enorbet would, imho, probably not refute, that suggest the earth was once completely and totally covered by water. Here is a recent study sharing some of that evidence found in the memories of rocks in Australia.

Oh, here's an online version of this billboard, and it has the number: 1-855-FOR-TRUTH.

If you want, @enorbet, I will donate a vanity toll-free number, like 1-855-ITS-A-MYTH, and we can print some billboards with Noah's Ark on it, and seek funding from the Geological Society of America, or other such scientific organizations. I host an asterisk pbx, and can give you a code when you call that will let you make voice recordings over the phone that would be played back to callers. Of course, I reckon you could host your own pbx too.

For some comic relief, but having nothing to do with myths, I will share that, until the decline of their use, I thought about hosting a pay-per-call service (1-900 calls in USA) that insults people for being so stupid as to waste money on 1-900 calls: basically a therapy to help them kick the habit. Then whenever I encounter mean people who insult me, I could offer them jobs.

I know that's off topic. I just got distracted thinking about all that can be done with PBX--what a fun toy for my inner prankster.

So do you think that was applied for the moon landing then? I suppose it might be possible, but as I mentioned in post #286, I don't think the lack of delay sundialsvcs is pointing at is due to editing. It's just due to not understanding how transmission delay works (specifically, that if you record from one side of the conversation, only the other side will sound delayed).

To employ a US Centric cliche, "In a pig's eye!" Firstly I seriously doubt that would ever happen but even if as a hypothetical event, one could hardly call that a conversation. Secondly, any organization, and I'm fairly confident the cost of a billboard is most likely funded by a group, motivated to denounce Evolution publicly on religious grounds is likely quite set in their ways. I doubt their views have changed on anything of importance in well over a month, likely years, maybe decades.

Obviously, then, you do manage to think for yourself and would be unlikely to belong to such an evangelical organization

While I applaud your sense of "the grand view", your calculations are off... WAY off! Our Sun, and we along with it, makes one complete circuit of the Milky Way Galaxy, a "Galactic Year", every 250,000,000 Earth Years. Multiply that by 365 Earth Days per year and we are already at roughly a trillion days. Although we can spout the numbers, even just the bit of our Universe we can see is incomprehensibly larger than our Galaxy so instead of 10^9 days we can't even scratch the surface with 10^90. If the Universe is actually Infinite, there is no exponent to even scratch the surface. The number of days in 1 Universal Year would be Infinite.


Agreed! I don't care whether the asteroid or comet at The Chicxulub Event that was instrumental in the extinction of dinosaurs (among others) took place on June 9th, 64,979,631 years ago or October 3, 66,173,752 years ago. It's far more important that it happened at all approximately 65,000,000 years ago.

I would have to spend a few days to actually refute that the entire surface of our Earth was ever, could be ever, completely covered in water even just an inch deep, but I seem to recall there just has never been enough for even that modest depth. Most people have an extremely diminutive concept of the size of the Earth. If we actually scale the Earth down to the size of a schoolhouse globe, despite the ,compared to what at human scales is the vast depth of the Marianas Trench and the height of the Himalayas, and if we add those together to calculate the difference between the lowest and highest points on Earth, a sum of roughly 20km, compared to the surface area involved in a sphere of diameter 13,000 km, that globe would literally be smoother than a cue ball. The height of the ISS orbit would be less than the thickness of a US dime.

My memory of the exact numbers may need some refreshing, but I'm pretty sure there has never been enough water on Earth to cover it even 1 inch deep. BTW I didn't see anything in that Nature article speaking to depth, and certainly not to cover mountains during the brief few million years Homo Sapiens have been resident. Global Flood never happened in any context, and certainly not as laid out in any Scripture, assuming "world" actually was used to mean "our world" locally.

I was glad to read this. If the universe is actually infinite, not only would there be an infinity of days in a universal year, but statistics would be rendered meaningless, since they are only valid over finite populations. Statistics might have some meaning locally, but, universally they don't hold up, because deviations could occur way beyond the local scope. Thus, epistemologically, neither statistics nor the scientific method render any valid knowledge about the universe--which you have admitted, in that science is always changing, so science isn't rendering any kind of knowledge one can be certain of.

So what kind of knowledge is it? Perhaps it is the best we can figure out with the tools availble to us, and so we should make choices based on whichever paradigm is in vouge, even though we know its proably all going to change again one day?

To believe in a current paradigm enough to make a choice requires the same thing required by all religions: faith.

Not having actually been there manning the broadcast I can't know with high probability IF it was done for the original Apollo 11 landing as it happened in real time. I don't think that matters in this particular discussion. The salient point is that there is NOT only one possible conclusion - that it was faked. If you actually research what it would take to succeed in such a fake, given the extreme probabilities of what preceded Apollo 11, fake is quite ungainly, very expensive, and highly unlikely. That there is even one alternative that that explains how manned Moon Landing was actually possible, begins to shift the conclusion, That there is a plethora of reasonable, un-falsifiable progressive steps powerfully shifts the end result to the "confirmed" conclusion.

Besides the 50 year old laser reflectors (there are 4 of them) still accessible by laser from Earth, the recent Artemis photos, particularly of the paths of footsteps at the landing sites is absolutely compelling. It is utterly obvious no "natural" phenomenon looks like the paths that animals make. I defy anyone to explain an alternative explanation that indicates fakery. The only one I can think of is that the photos themselves are faked. Does anyone actually imagine NASA is so stupid to double down on what will absolutely be revealed as fake in just a few years?

Ahhh... attempting to equate Logic and Science with Blind Faith, are we? Here on Earth we can 100% conclude it is possible to walk on flat, solid ground. We can't (unaided) walk on water or most liquefied ground (lava) at a high enough temperature. We can by Science determine what density is required to walk on any surface regardless of what the material is. Get Air cold enough while protecting one's feet, and one can literally walk on air.

That's not statistics. That's Physics. Once we add in the fact that Infinity is and will always remain an abstract construct. It's possible that Infinity can exist but it is unlikely. It is silly to base a meaningful conclusion on something that can never be observed. Infinity is only useful as an upward lack of limits, like the ancient thought experiment resulting in Zeno's Paradox as wellk as the one whose author I forget that asked something like "An archer fires an arrow and walks to where it landed, pulls the arrow from the ground, and fires it again along the same line. Is it possible the archer will ever run out of a new location to stand and fire again?"

It cannot ever be answered so it only matters as a concept like Zero, a mathematical concept of upper and lower limits. With current Quantum observation we know that nobody has ever witnessed actual Zero. Wrap your head around this one, "Nothing is Empty"

And there is no point in me asking for objective evidence for any event in the 3rd century BCE from you anymore, so I won't.

@ntubski, my six-year old self was there to listen to that supposedly-"live" black-and-white broadcast on my parent's black-and-white TV. And what I heard was disturbed my six-year old self's understanding of physics. It takes more than a second and a half for a radio signal, traveling at the speed of light, to get from the earth to the moon. But there was no delay. The astronauts and Mission Control were simply having a two-way conversation as though they were in the next room. "Tranquility Base here" is only the first of countless examples.

My six-year old self noticed that immediately.

Much later, NASA realized their error and re-made those audio tracks. But now the problem is that they don't sync-up with the video, and also that the inserted gaps are "perfectly silent." The bottom line is that NASA simply cannot "patch over" the fact that they screwed up. They also can't compensate for the many other producers of films and television shows who included their "official" footage verbatim. The cat is out of the bag.

The very-political bottom line is that NASA decided to tell a nation what it badly wanted to hear: that the extravagant promise made by a much-beloved and martyred President actually did come true, and even "right on schedule." Maybe they thought that it was the right thing to do at the time. But it has become an impediment to future, actual, space exploration. One that could actually put future explorers' lives in danger. We do not yet(!) know how to survive "out there," let alone play golf.

Faith is not inherently blind: call it soul vision Blind faith is closer to dogma, imho, and has the inflexible characteristics you describe.

There is another faith, based on tracking signs along the soul highway, from serendipidous epiphenes, to mysterious phenomena inexplicable to science and logic, all the way unto the experience of the miraculous, which becomes not just possible, but even probable, within this abstract concept of infinity, which is not quite abstract, in that we are connected to this whole, since, as you say, "Nothing is Empty", so, if that is the case, there cannot be separation between us and the infite whole. (was that a run on sentance or what)...

Spinoza was on to this with his metaphysics of infinite substance, in which we are but modes, and every mode is a cross section of this substance with an infinity of attributes, of which we are but consciously aware of a few.

But as cross sections of the infinite whole, each with an infinity of attributes, self-awareness can become infinity-awareness in a way that is not abstract, as it is not as conscious but more in-between.

This is one of the values of creating music, meditation, etc., which I feel, and I suspect the same may become possible to a painter, though I am not a painter, and probably in many other of our art forms, sculpting, etc: one loses one's conscious self... some time passes and something is created in this inbetween state, in which more of the subconscious attributes of infinity present themselves via the pineal gland.

Thus, sniffing out these subliminal attributes of infinity is a less blind of faith, and keeps the phenomenological patterns observed by science in check.

The chemistry that fills everything, since nothing is empty, is interesting to try an predict with science and logic: but at any moment a pineal gland can activate, and the infinite chemistry responds according.

What about olfactory intelligence? How does science consciously measure the chemical changes of subcounscious phenomena? It seems to me, that is beyond the scope of science. Can artifician intelligence smell? Yet we quantify everybody: our bodies, their health conditions, every traumatic experience that gets reported, all the academic assessments in the schools, and we (well, not me, but google, etc) feed all these quantified stats to artificial intelligence for machine/statistical learning. Since AIs can defeat our champion chess players, we figure it is better at analysis, so we should feed it stats, and make policies based on its output.

Yet, AI, has no olfactory intelligence. It is useful figuring out speech recognition and much more. But should we follow all advice from AI? There is something we have via the visionary faith, and not the blind kind, that AI lacks, such that we know when something smells fishy and off.

Anyways, such chemistry filling the universe enables possibility to interact with the Infinite Chemist.

I strongly(!) believe that we should always avail ourselves of all of the "senses" that are available to us: scientific reason, intuition, "gut feelings," and faith. Do not dismiss any of them, and do not place any one of them above nor below any of the others.

"Literally since humankind began," we have been relying on all of these things, and all of them have worked. Just because you cannot find "a rational explanation" for something does not mean that it is not somehow "true." Always keep an open mind. Always be prepared to ... wonder.

"The human intellect" is an amazing tool, yes, but it cannot always carry you to the places where you need to go. Always "think outside the box." We really do live in: "what a wonderful world."

Whether or not the moon-landing happened doesn't seem especially important to me, but remaining with a six-year old's understanding of physics is a terrible tragedy. Here's a diagram, imagining g (ground control) and m (moon) simply counting up to four together. I assume 1.5 seconds transmission delay and ~0 seconds figuring out what to say for this example to keep it simple:

If you record on the ground, you get the left column, if you record on the moon you get the right column. Notice that on the ground, ground control says "two" immediately after the moon's "one" message arrives, there is no delay (this explains your "Tranquility Base..." example). Whereas the delay before the moon's "three" message comes back is 3 seconds, as expected (that corresponds to the delay before Buzz Aldrin's final "thank you" in the more extended version that enorbet linked).

I believe any example you can find in the "raw" footage will be consistent with this. If you say that the original live broadcast wasn't consistent in that way, well, I don't know, I wasn't there (I asked my Dad about it, and he didn't remember that kind of detail). Perhaps even the supposedly "raw" footage was sneakily edited to match. But I can't let statements like "it doesn't matter where the recording was made" stand. That's just silly.

There are simply too many examples of "astronauts and mission control speaking 'conversationally' with each other" for that novel theory of yours to hold water. In the "Tranquility Base" example, Houston would have had to reply in their entirety when they had only had had time to hear: "Tra..." and could not possibly have known what the Moon was saying. (Notice also that the Moon replied just as quickly to "Copy you down," and in the entire remainder of the back-and-forth conversation. They then proceeded to do the same thing all day long.)

In short, no matter how you try to apologize for the issue and to explain it away, there are far too many examples in which one of the parties clearly understood the entirety of the other's message, and responded to it much too fast. In some cases, in slightly less than one second.

Like it or not, there is simply no way that the two parties could have spoken to one another in the manner that they repeatedly did, if they were actually separated by 225,000 miles distance.

I think we should be very careful about the loose mixing of word meaning, of semantics and connotation versus denotation not to mention colloquialism and euphemism when discsussing things we consider important. "Faith" is not the same as "Confidence". In fact it should be obvious that what is considered the purest Faith is utterly unquestioning and resistant to Reason. What was once literal but after Science became euphemistic, there are passages in the Christian bible that urge and extol unquestioning faith, to "believe in your heart". It used to be thought that the heart was the seat of passionate devotion when we now know it is "merely" an amazing pump.

Another word that suffers from euphemism and connotation is "soul". I see "soul" as a sort of instinctive sum total of perceived patterns catalogued in the brain for our chemical "wiring" and our life experiences, a sort of essence and it evolves but slowly. An example might be the sense of fear of darkness mostly experienced as a child but outgrown over time. A more difficult to define example might be why some people enjoy sad songs while others can't stand anything but light and frivolous. What "soul vision" can possibly mean can only be subjective and nebulous from my POV. What I understand as soul can no more see than the heart can feel, but then I didn't gain life experience 2000+ years ago.

If we create a line of progression, a sliding scale, 1 to 10 if you like, and at one end of the scale we have absolute certainty based on definition like "1 + 1 = 2" and one step down 90% probability based on hard, objective repeatable and falsifiable evidence, and proceed along through current culturally accepted and working rules through conjecture all the way to the opposite end of the scale at rigid, unquestioning, any evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, acceptance, where do you place "Faith"?

As it applies to Myth, that too is obviously a somewhat nebulous term rather subjective in nature, since much of what is mythology to us now was once considered "gospel" and vice versa.

Could you explain how you would expect my simplified counting to four example to go according to how you think the transmission should work? Because I can't understand what sort of timeline you would expect.

That's fair in terms of delay, but I don't see that as a case of the Moon actually replying, they just continued talking after finishing their "engine off" type declarations. In the next transmission, ground says again "roger tranquility we copy you on the ground..." because they are not assuming that the moon heard the previous "copy you down". Your video ends before any replies from the Moon come in, so I'm not sure what back-and-forth you're referring to.