Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites
http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html
Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites
Dr. Hoover has discovered evidence of microfossils similar to Cyanobacteria, in freshly fractured slices of the interior surfaces of the Alais, Ivuna, and Orgueil CI1 carbonaceous meteorites. Based on Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) and other measures, Dr. Hoover has concluded they are indigenous to these meteors and are similar to trichomic cyanobacteria and other trichomic prokaryotes such as filamentous sulfur bacteria. He concludes these fossilized bacteria are not Earthly contaminants but are the fossilized remains of living organisms which lived in the parent bodies of these meteors, e.g. comets, moons, and other astral bodies. The implications are that life is everywhere, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets.Members of the Scientific community were invited to analyze the results and to write critical commentaries or to speculate about the implications. These commentaries will be published on March 7 through March 10, 2011.
Dr. Richard Hoover is a highly respected scientist and astrobiologist with a prestigious record of accomplishment at NASA. Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis. Our intention is to publish the commentaries, both pro and con, alongside Dr. Hoover’s paper. In this way, the paper will have received a thorough vetting, and all points of view can be presented. No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough analysis, and no other scientific journal in the history of science has made such a profoundly important paper available to the scientific community, for comment, before it is published. We believe the best way to advance science, is to promote debate and discussion.
But wait everyone! It says here in this copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an ancient manuscript authored by people who were expert goat herders thousands of years ago that a superstitious entity called a god specially started life on Earth. False alarm!
50 billion planets in our galaxy?
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/19/6087627-planet-probe-spots-hot-prospects
50 billion planets in our galaxy?
Kepler detects extrasolar planets by staring at 150,000 stars in a single patch of sky, centered on the constellation Cygnus, and detecting the faint dips in light as planets pass over the stars’ disks.Based on a statistical analysis of the data available so far, 44 percent of the 150,000 stars in the Kepler sample should have planets going around them, Borucki said. You could take that statistic and do some mathematical gymnastics to extend it to the entire Milky Way galaxy, which by conservative estimates has 100 billion stars. That would give you 44 billion stars in our galaxy with planetary systems — or the nice round number of 50 billion planets that was cited today by The Associated Press. That number has a high uncertainty factor, to be sure. But the bottom line is that there are almost certainly tens of billions of planets out there, including hundreds of millions of planets in habitable zones of outer space.
Borucki provided a more detailed breakdown:
- 10.5 percent of the stars in the sample are predicted to have Earth-size planets (that is, 50 percent to 125 percent as wide as Earth).
- 7.3 percent should have super-Earths (125 to 200 percent as wide as Earth).
- 20.8 percent should have Neptune-sized planets (two to six times as wide as Earth).
- 5.2 percent should have Jupiter-scale planets (more than six times as wide as Earth). All these numbers will get some additional tweaking, because they don’t reflect the breakdown for multiple-planet systems.
The preliminary estimates suggest that roughly one out of every 200 stars should have a planet in the habitable zone, where life could theoretically exist. If you extend that statistic to 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, you come up with a figure of at least 500 million planets in habitable zones.
There’s a lot of uncertainty about how many of those planets you could actually live on, because some of those worlds might be too big or otherwise unsuitable. For instance, on Kepler’s current list of 1,235 candidates, 54 potential planets are in habitable zones, but only five of them are around Earth’s size. KOI 326.01 appears to be the smallest of the five candidates. (“KOI,” by the way, stands for Kepler Object of Interest. SolStation.com has the full rundown on Kepler’s potentially habitable planet candidates.)
Earth-size planets and super-Earths would be considered the best prospects for alien life, but Borucki pointed out that even Jupiter-scale planets could have moons where life as we know it would do pretty well (as seen in the sci-fi movie “Avatar”).
“There’s a very rich ocean of planets out there to explore,” he said.
In an era where we have access to all of this knowledge, many still stubbornly believe that this was all done for humans. Earth compared to the scale of the rest of the galaxy (let alone the universe) could only generously be characterized as an anthill. What would we think of a world in which ants all thought that Earth was created by a magical entity outside the universe solely for them? Is the idea not completely comical? Yet this is the exact world that we live in. And it gets worse: many of the different cliques of ants believe in different sorts of “magical entities” that created the Earth for them. They have been legislating death for those who wish to be free of the belief in the “magical entity”, discriminating against one another, burning one another at the stake, cutting each others’ heads off and flying planes into each others’ buildings over the other group’s marginally different ideas of the same “magical entity” throughout recorded history. Again; it seems completely and totally ludicrous, but this is exactly the world that we are living in. But the vast majority seem to truly unable to see the big picture. Humans tend to simply accept the way things are and the way things have always been, even if it is wholly nonsensical, contrary to fact and despicable. It is no wonder then, why many people continue to assert that religiosity and having faith are virtues, or that atheists cannot be good people, or to continue to assert a personal god despite massive amounts of evidence against humans being special in even the perspective of the universe, let alone a god’s eyes. Their ancestors and family did it before them; apparently that’s powerful enough to overcome actual facts to the contrary.
“Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief.”
“Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.”
Islam
http://pewglobal.org/2010/12/02/muslims-around-the-world-divided-on-hamas-and-hezbollah/
Send that link to people who try to claim that Muslim violence is limited to fundamentalist terrorist groups who most Muslims don’t support.
Among other damning statistics, 84% of muslims living in Egypt, and 86% of muslims living in Jordan believe that anyone who leaves Islam should be slaughtered and killed. 82% of muslims living in pakistan believe that adulterers should be shackeled in the middle of town so that everyone walking by can throw rocks at their face until they die. 49% of muslims in Nigeria support al Qaeda, while having full knowledge that they were behind the acts of 9/11.
To put these %’s in perspective, there are roughly 83,000,000 people living in Egypt. 90% of Egypt’s population is Muslim – around 74,700,000 people. 84% of that number believe that anyone who leaves Islam should be killed. This means, roughly 62,480,000 people in Egypt believe leaving Islam should be punishable by death.
This should just about put to bed the concept that Islamic violence is limited to “marginal” or “fundamentalist” groups who make everyone else look bad. We need to understand that violence and killing are built-in tenets of Islam that are advocated by the majority day after day before we can deal with it.
Carl Sagan: Science’s Great Demotions
Believe it or not, I made this one.
Is There Anything God Could Do…
…to make you not like him?
I think any act performed by god would attempt to be justified by theists as something beyond human comprehension and therefore by default, must be righteous in his infinite wisdom.
What if you were born with severely debilitating birth defects? What if your child(ren) was/were? What if an asteroid was coming at hyper speeds to destroy the vast majority of life on Earth?
I ask, because so far, nothing seems to have done the trick. Not having his only son brutally tortured. Not mass murder. Not infanticide. Not standing idly by while great suffering occurs.
Why would drinkable water be a scarcity on a planet designed for humans?
884 million people, lack access to safe water supplies, approximately one in eight people.
Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use.
Only 62% of the world’s population has access to improved sanitation – defined as a sanitation facility that ensures hygienic separation of human excreta from human contact.
The majority of the illness in the world is caused by fecal matter.
Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection.
Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease.
Children in poor environments often carry 1,000 parasitic worms in their bodies at any time which can come from drinking unclean water.
Earth is actually water-poor when compared to some other planets/moons in our solar system.
So, the christian god cares about everyone and has the power to give everyone clean water, but just doesn’t?
I’m sorry but I can’t see how anyone can bring themselves to believe that. It almost seems insulting to such a being’s intelligence to suggest that is what’s going on.
A deist god makes far more sense to explain things like this. No god makes even more sense.
Now, the last time I used this argument this came up in reply:
1) [maybe it's essentially humans fault in that some countries are hoarding their fair share, or some countries have a fair share but are not spreading the supply to it's inhabitants. the argument essentially seeks to put the blame on humans]
Let’s assume for a second that there is in fact enough naturally clean water on earth to sustain the population. Why did god feel the need to bless some areas with it greatly, and offer virtually none to other areas? That doesn’t seem fair at all. Also, since your god is omniscient, shouldn’t he have known in advance that it was possible that free will could have allowed humans to hoard a lot of it for themselves and keep it away from others? If he knew this, which by the christian definition of god he did, then why didn’t he plan in advance and put extra rations evenly spread out throughout the planet in order to undercut so much intense illness, suffering, and death of people who were utterly innocent?
http://environment.nationalgeographi…shwater-crisis
However I argue that it is almost certain the existence of humans has helped increase the clean water supply generally, not reduce it. Sophisticated cleaning and purifying systems have helped greatly. Of course, unfortunately only an extremely small percentage of humans who have ever existed have had access to them.
Let’s say that the supposition that the freewill of some greedy human beings hoarding all the water for themselves were the most important factor in people dying of thirst. This does not in any way preclude god for making an exception for the innocent people who are getting scammed out of nourishment. A loving god that can do anything would provide such people who were being scammed by others’ free will, and in turn dying from it, the clean water they need in order to survive. God hasn’t done this. I can only conclude that if a god exists, he either doesn’t know about such a situation, or he doesn’t care about the situation, or both. This means such a god couldn’t be both omniscient and omnibenevolent. If the christian god exists I would expect to have seen many interventions in my life time where he was helping the innocents from enduring massive suffering. We don’t see that though. The best your god can muster, apparently, is having scribe’s write in some ancient manuscripts thousands of years ago about some dude who maybe, possibly, walked on a sheet of water, and turned water into wine. If god wanted to show his infinite love, allowing jesus to turn water into wine and walk across a lake wasn’t exactly a great idea. Helping innocent people dying of thirst every day would have been much smarter and loving.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/08/t…d-s-water.html
| Everyone agrees that we are in the midst of a global freshwater crisis. Around the world, rivers, lakes, and aquifers are dwindling faster than Mother Nature can possibly replenish them industrial and household chemicals are rapidly polluting what’s left. Meanwhile, global population is ticking skyward. Goldman Sachs estimates that global water consumption is doubling every 20 years, and the United Nations expects demand to outstrip supply by more than 30 percent come 2040. |
Is this a flaw in the design of “mother nature”? Did god not foresee humans spreading and needing clean water? If god knows everything he most certainly did foresee this, but did not do anything to help. This is not impressive.
The article is pretty interesting I recommend reading it. Water is becoming more privatized and expensive and hard to come by. But why must this be so? Couldn’t god have simply designed the planet or some other apparatus that could sustain even enormous human populations instead of the planet having a very, very small amount of this essential resource, some of which being trapped in glaciers and/or hard to find?
Does it not seem totally irresponsible to design every human to ever be born to need large amounts of clean water and then put them on a planet with a remarkable lack of it, and without the tools or knowledge to purify the dirty water?
Hey, remember this post?
Where I said, among other things:
Kepler is going to change a lot of minds in the coming years. My guess: Kepler will find that rocky earths are more common in our galaxy than we previously thought. I think this will make the topic of extra terrestrial life at an extremely high probability…even though most scientists already know this. This mission will forever change our perceived place in the universe.
Well, look at this
Newly discovered planet may be first truly habitable exoplanet
A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.
The most interesting of the two new planets is Gliese 581g, with a mass three to four times that of the Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and that it has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Vogt.
The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet’s surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet’s surface would be the line between shadow and light (known as the “terminator”), with surface temperatures decreasing toward the dark side and increasing toward the light side.
“Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,” Vogt said.The researchers also explored the implications of this discovery with respect to the number of stars that are likely to have at least one potentially habitable planet. Given the relatively small number of stars that have been carefully monitored by planet hunters, this discovery has come surprisingly soon.
“If these are rare, we shouldn’t have found one so quickly and so nearby,” Vogt said. “The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 percent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that’s a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy.”
49% of U.S. adults don’t know how long it takes for the Earth to circle the sun.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11463#toc
In other news, ~92% of Americans are totally convinced that some supernatural being named “god” or “jesus” is responsible for the creation of the universe, how long it took, etc.
Vatican Justice
http://www.project-reason.org/vatican_justice/
by
Sam Harris
I confess that, as a critic of religion, I have paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it always felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel. This scandal was one of the most spectacular “own goals” in the history of religion, and there seem to be no need to deride faith at its most vulnerable and self-abased. Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one’s eyes: Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. And then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time—and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced, and so fully betrayed, is simply too depressing to think about.
But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception: preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy—or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution—one of the wealthiest on earth—that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway—leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.
In 2009, The Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) investigated such of these events as occurred on Irish soil. Their report runs to 2,600 pages. Having read only an oppressive fraction of this document, I can say that when thinking about the ecclesiastical abuse of children, it is best not to imagine shades of ancient Athens and the blandishments of a “love that dare not speak its name.” Yes, there have surely been polite pederasts in the priesthood, expressing anguished affection for boys who would turn 18 the next morning. But behind these indiscretions there is a continuum of abuse that terminates in utter evil. The scandal in the Catholic Church—one might now safely say the scandal that is the Catholic Church—includes the systematic rape and torture of orphaned and disabled children. Its victims attest to being whipped with belts and sodomized until bloody—sometimes by multiple attackers—and then whipped again and threatened with death and hell fire if they breathed a word about their abuse. And yes, many of the children who were desperate or courageous enough to report these crimes were accused of lying and returned to their tormentors to be raped and tortured again.
The evidence suggests that the misery of these children was facilitated and concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the prefrontal cortex of the current Pope. In his former capacity as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict personally oversaw the Vatican’s response to reports of sexual abuse in the Church. What did this wise and compassionate man do upon learning that his employees were raping children by the thousands? Did he immediately alert the police and ensure that the victims would be protected from further torments? One still dares to imagine such an effulgence of basic human sanity might have been possible, even within the Church. On the contrary, repeated and increasingly desperate complaints of abuse were set aside, witnesses were pressured into silence, bishops were praised for their defiance of secular authority, and offending priests were relocated only to destroy fresh lives in unsuspecting parishes. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organization devoted—not to gambling, prostitution, drugs, or any other venial sin—but to the sexual enslavement of children.
Consider the following passages from the CICA report:
7.129 In relation to one School, four witnesses gave detailed accounts of sexual abuse, including rape in all instances, by two or more Brothers and on one occasion along with an older resident. A witness from the second School, from which there were several reports, described being raped by three Brothers: ‘I was brought to the infirmary…they held me over the bed, they were animals….They penetrated me, I was bleeding’. Another witness reported he was abused twice weekly on particular days by two Brothers in the toilets off the dormitory:
One Brother kept watch while the other abused me …(sexually)… then they changed over. Every time it ended with a severe beating. When I told the priest in Confession, he called me a liar. I never spoke about it again.I would have to go into his …(Br X’s)… room every time he wanted. You’d get a hiding if you didn’t, and he’d make me do it …(masturbate)… to him. One night I didn’t …(masturbate him)… and there was another Brother there who held me down and they hit me with a hurley and they burst my fingers …displayed scar….
…
7.232 Witnesses reported being particularly fearful at night as they listened to residents screaming in cloakrooms, dormitories or in a staff member’s bedroom while they were being abused. Witnesses were conscious that co-residents whom they described as orphans had a particularly difficult time:
The orphan children, they had it bad. I knew …(who they were)… by the size of them, I’d ask them and they’d say they come from …named institution…. They were there from an early age. You’d hear the screams from the room where Br …X… would be abusing them.
There was one night, I wasn’t long there and I seen one of the Brothers on the bed with one of the young boys … and I heard the young lad screaming crying and Br …X… said to me “if you don’t mind your own business you’ll get the same”. … I heard kids screaming and you know they are getting abused and that’s a nightmare in anybody’s mind. You are going to try and break out. … So there was no way I was going to let that happen to me…. I remember one boy and he was bleeding from the back passage and I made up my mind, there was no way it …(anal rape)… was going to happen to me. … That used to play on my mind.
This is the kind of abuse that the Church has practiced and concealed since time out of memory. Even the CICA report declined to name the offending priests due to pressure from the Vatican. The cover-up of these atrocities continues.
