Long story behind this one, I don't think I have the energy to go into it all tonight, maybe another post later on...

I think there are better examples out there of depictions of the known universe, but this one has its charm.

I doubt there are very many religious people here on XPT (maybe the subject of another thread some time?), but I wonder how can religious nuts watch something like this and still believe anything in the Bible or Koran or whatever?

Watch this and comment on how it affects your feelings of religion, please?

Cool vid but needs more Pew Pew.

Not a whole lot more "pew pew" here, but it does lead you somewhat more awkwardly and clumsily to the same point I think.

CLICK ME !!!!

Thanks. I've geeked out to similar short films at times, but this was new to me.

Quote:

---

Watch this and comment on how it affects your feelings of religion, please?

---

Honestly it casts doubts on me that there isn't a God [which is my normal position].

The sizes and distances are so vast ... I can't get my mind around the numbers/time/physics involved.
The illustration of how much remains unknown to us ... and the fact that we are limited to our cosmic horizon makes me feel so feeble and ignorant ... it piques a need for some entity who CAN deal with these unknowns.





The tiny "sphere" showing the tiny extent of our 1st radio signals profoundly affected me.

It brought to mind a Yiddish saying, "Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht!" ... which is basically, "Man plans, God laughs!"

Here was the pimple of our greatest extend on the universe, and I SWEAR I heard supernatural giggling behind me.

Quote:

---

The opening scene of "Contact".

---

Interesting. [Never saw the movie, likely since I hate Jodie Foster and never cared for the scientist Sagan allegedly based her character on].


Honestly this got me thinking about my Dad during the moon landings.

It was one of the later landing, so I was like 11. We were watching in his sister's house during some family get-together like a birthday. My uncle [looked like Christopher Lloyd, dressed similar to the Honeymooner's Norton and talked like Archie Bunker] complained about the delay in each response from the guys on the moon.

I said maybe they had to think about their answers with so many people listening.

My dad said that they were responding as fast as possible because it took a second or two for the radio wave to get there and the same time for their answer to come back. His brother-in-law the oil burner repairman discounted it, but it intrigued me.

I asked him about it when we were leaving. I couldn't believe it took so long [a second being long to me] to get to the moon which looked so close.

He looked at the sky, found the north star and said that when the radio waves got to that star it would be about 2400 and there would likely be nothing much left our bodies on Earth.

Probably no one would even know we existed.



And, like God, he laughed.

While some kids were raised by Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street , I was raised by Carl Sagan in the cosmos. I remember playing on the floor as a little kid after school, waiting for dinner while his series "Cosmos" on PBS was playing in the background.

His voice and the music of "Cosmos" is as much a part of my childhood as my mother's voice. Click here for more.











P.S.
The full speech for the true Geek!

I loved that show. My dad used to tape the episodes. They play edited versions sometimes on the Science channel.

Oddly I remember some of the "cut" scenes. :rolling:


I was also impacted by his stuff. When I wrote my first "novel" as a teen, called "V.I.M." , I used the Hindu belief he introduced me to that the Universe was merely the dream of a god.

Though, I changed it to Buddha. The first line was ...

"The Buddha sleeps, and in his sleep he dreams."

My internet connection appears to be slower today than normal. I don't understand why my internet connection is spotty tonight. Does anybody know the proper prayer and offering to the God of internet speed to make my connection better?

That would be "Work, Goddamnit!!!" whilst smacking your modem.

1. Aren't most religious people against drug use?

2. I can't think of a single primal urge that doesn't require domination by a civilized mind.

3. If it were not for those human minds that rejected the urge to seek solace in the intoxicating lie of divine intelligence we would all still be living in caves and afraid of the dark.



But to continue the drug analogy, which life would you think is more productive and fulfilling:

laying around on dirty mattresses in the basement of your stained glass, steeple-roofed, crack house chasing your last bit of solace by mainlining a tainted fix of divine intelligence with dirty needles provided by the Reverend Ima Pusher

...or leaving all that behind to live your life in the bright, warm sunshine of a civilized society as a man who is more excited by the potential opportunity of saying "I don't know" because of the immaculate bounty that we are all blessed by out of that revelation.


Don't be a frightened junkie so scared of harmless phrases like "I don't know" to run back to the needle and the easy fix?

Just say "NO".

It's a little dated but still one of my favorites in this genre; "The Power of 10":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

^^^^ I used to subscribe to the Scientific American Library. They made a book from that film that was one of my favorites.

Fucking Rommel.