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Old October 5th 18, 07:14 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Paul Schlyter[_3_]
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Posts: 1,344
Default Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 09:39:27 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote:
Less, but not zero.* You have NO idea how much less prevents

lif=
e
and neither do I, so this is just yammering.


Neither do you have any idea about it.


Actually, I do. The fraction of heavy elements in the human body

are in
parts per million, so a star's metallicity of 20% present value is

QUITE
sufficient.


Note that "heavy elements" here means elements heavier than helium.
So here you just claimed that the human body consists of 99.9999%
hydrogen and helium only. This is blatantly false, and you should
know that! What about the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen? Elements
essential to life, but you just said our body has virtually nothing
of them...


The "law of big numbers" doesn't help you here since there are

too
many unknown and possibly extremely small numbers involved.


But WE ARE HERE. No Law og Large NUMBERS needed to project our

future,
provided one isn't an abject pessimist with zero hope of any future

at
all.


Nobody argues the fact that we are here. The question is if we are
common, or if we are very rare, perhaps unique.


Dream on, and get back if and when solid evidence for the

existence of=
these phenomena appears. And note that science fiction is not

science
fact.


Nobody but you is trying to bring the topic to actual fact. That

is a
straw-man argument, which you regularly try to do.


Why would the actual fact be so uninteresting to you? And if it is,
why don't you move your discussion to alt.fantasies instead?
Obviously, that is where it belongs.


Having vision is easy, you just fantasize. Making it actually

happen is=
much much harder.


Again you are trying to foist another straw-man argument on me :-)


Do you disagree with this?


Believing doesn't make it true. It just means that believers will

stick
to what they think they know in the face of all evidence to the

contrary

That's YOUR definition of believing. Mine is that which is not

refuted
by solid evidence.


Then your collection of beliefs must be a chaotic collection of
mutually contradiction of beliefs. You believe in ET because that has
not been refuted by solid evidence. But at the same time you also
believe in the non-existence of ET because that too has not been
refuted by solid evidence. In any area where we don't know how it is,
you have two or more mutually contradicting beliefs because all these
beliefs have not been refuted by solid evidence. How can you have
such a belief system without going insane?


And in what way could VISION alone give us knowledge?


It gives us possibilities, and statistics gives us probabilities.


Statistics require solid evidence, or else you'll have no data to do
your statistics on.


I'll be the first to recant if you present solid evidence that no
advanced civilization exists or that travel from one place to

another
faster than light can get there is impossible.


The latter has already been proved impossible with ordinary matter by
Einstein's theory of relativity. FTL travel would require exotic
matter with imaginary rest mass. Such matter has never been observed,
and in particular our bodies are not made of such matter. FTL travel
would at least require infinite amounts of energy, and there isn't
that much energy in the universe.


Dreamers and creative people can think of things but it takes

engineers
and scientists to make something that will actually work.


As YOU pointed out above, those who believed the dreamers made cell

phones

Yep, engineers did that, and scientists provided the engineers with
the information they needed to do that. But without scientists and
engineers and with only the visionaries, there would be no cell
phones.


Yes, but it is MUCH more desirable to be an optimist rather than a
pessimist.


This comment shows what is driving you. You want what is pleasant,
and you are not interested in reality. Becoming a drug addict would
probably be the ideal solution for you.


But, if you remember, I began this, um, treatise to demonstrate the
abject failure of atheism. I maintain that anyone who calls himself
an atheist is either ignorant of cosmology, incapable of critical
reasoning (i.e., stupid) or dishonest. One cannot rule out the
existence of a godlike race of beings.


I find it interesting how many fight against this very simple idea.


Perhaps you noticed that many who call themselves atheists merely
lack a belief in deities? They don't think that the non-existence of
deities has been rigorously proved beyond doubt. But, as opposed to
you, they don't naively believe in anything which hasn't been
rigorously disproved.