The newest "Are We Alone" radio/podcast from the SETI Institute is all about the end of the world. It’s a pretty cool show, and it’s only Part 1! The host, Seth Shostak, and I talked about cosmic doomsday cults on this show; that segment starts at 17:50 into the show. We cover Planet X, the Mayan calendar, and I even get a dig in at Sylvia Browne. You can download the show as MP3 or as WMV.
And hey– don’t forget to sign up for the free book giveaway, or send me astronomy questions for "Q & BA"!
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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February 1st, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Just listened. Great interview. One thing that keeps people believing the ideas or attributing more knowledge to the ancient societies is that they tend to place mystical qualities on them, when really, they were just people who lived at a different time.
The ancient Chinese didn’t have evidence of Qi, the ancient Egyptians weren’t magical, the Druids didn’t have mystical abilities and no one named Noah ever lived to be 900 years old. It’s all just silly.
February 1st, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Ok, everything else in that show aside, the people who put that together are bad word deleted by The Bad Astronomer for that little feedback bit at the end. I was listening to this on my headphones and was almost deafened. It would have been more amusing if they had simply cut off to static instead of attempting to cause permenant hearing damage. I wish people would think before they did things like that.
I was not pleased.
February 1st, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Sorry for swearing BA, I was a little miffed at them. I’ll try not to take up your time by making you edit my posts in the future;).
February 1st, 2007 at 7:24 pm
> One thing that keeps people believing the ideas or attributing more knowledge to the ancient societies is that they tend to place mystical qualities on them, when really, they were just people who lived at a different time.
It reminds me of something I once heard Richard Dawkins say once. He said it’s almost as if the older something is, the more reverence and respect they have for it. Of course, I’ve seen this happen in a number of instances. There’s a fair number of Christians who think that King James Version of the Bible is somehow superior to all the other versions. They believe this in spite of the fact that translation errors have been found and corrected in later versions. There’s even a small movement that claims the KJV of the Bible is a type of “advanced” revelation (superseding even the original Greek text). In other words, where the KJV and the original text differed because of inaccurate translation, the KJV is right. Most don’t go that far, but they do believe it’s somehow superior to all the later translations. I really just think that they see things this say because KJV is the oldest English translation – and that somehow makes it “better”. (Lookup Pensacola Christian College in wikipedia for an example of this. It says, “Pensacola Christian College supports the exclusive use of the King James Version of the Bible, a tenet of the King-James-Only Movement.”)
February 1st, 2007 at 11:49 pm
The KJV isn’t the oldest English bible – that was Tyndale’s Bible.
February 1st, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Sorry that was long after the Septuagint and the Codex Siniaticus
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:20 am
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February 2nd, 2007 at 2:28 pm
>The ancient Chinese didn’t have evidence of Qi, the ancient Egyptians weren’t magical, the Druids didn’t have mystical abilities and no one named Noah ever lived to be 900 years old. It’s all just silly.
J Rearden, I haven’t done any research on claims of Chinese Qi, or Egyptian and Druid “supernatural” powers, but since you said it’s just plain silly, I wanted to make sure you weren’t summarily dismissing claims.
I understand why claiming that someone lived for more than 10 times the current human life expectancy would sound preposterous, especially given current common-sense evidence that life spans, due to advances in science and medicine, should be getting longer, not shorter.
There are a couple of things that seem interesting about Noah’s case. According to the genealogies accounted in the book of Genesis, Noah wasn’t the only one to live so long, but all people before him, and after his time, the age spans gradually curve along a path that is mathematically expected. Also that the text, rather than making a big deal out of how unnaturally long a person’s age is, and attributing it to miraculous wonders, seems to actually instead handle it in a very “matter of fact†manner. Not typically what would be expected of writings from over 3000 years ago.
Since today, we know that conditions like Down Syndrome and Progeria exist that cause rapid aging, by inverse the notion of the possibility for long life spans in the past is not entirely absurd and could warrant additional investigation as opposed to being summarily dismissed.
What do scientists do when faced with these questions? Well, if following with the scientific method, they make models and hypotheses and predictions. And conduct tests that should see how accurate their models predictions predict the reality of the tests.
There have been many studies into Reactive Oxygen Species, Telomere Loss, Caloric Restriction, Genome Size, and studies based on what effects cosmic radiation has on life expectancy from the Vela Supernova , so far, what I’ve read in peer reviewed articles seems to indicate scientific plausibility, but I admit, I am not a scientist, I just try to keep up on it in my spare time.
What I’m trying to say is that a scientist who believes something works one way, and thus builds a testable model on established principles and then formulates hypotheses and experiments is just as much a scientist as another scientist who believes something works another way and goes through the same process to test his or her model and hypotheses. The best approach to finding truth is to not summarily dismiss things until they have been well investigated, thus withholding judgment until being finished with investigating through testing hypotheses and critical thinking. And of course keeping an open frame of reference where you will continue to weigh new data as it comes in against your existing models and discard models that no longer work and build new ones.
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Great interview overall, but I have a few quibble points.
First, the comment that if they couldn’t predict their own passing, what good are they. I don’t see how that is a point which disproves that their calendars can’t predict anything. You don’t know whether they predicted their own demise or not, or whether their own demise was even important to the continued “prediction” of events in the calendar after their passing. Seems really unimportant to whether or not there is any use in them as predictors of anything. What is important is that they don’t predict anything at all. They’re just calendars.
Secondly, that comment about them getting wiped out by disease. You said that very definitively, but there isn’t a known answer to why they disappeared. Disease is one hypothesis, so are drought, overthrow, other environmental disaster, and economic collapse.
As I said, quibble points.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Really disliked this whole thing as propaganda from UCS. Nuclear power reactors do not use highly enriched uranium (>95%) but rather low enrichment (
February 6th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Resubmitted:
Really disliked this whole thing as propaganda from UCS. Nuclear power reactors do not use highly enriched uranium (more than 95%) but rather low enrichment (less than 5%). This talk is full of subtle nuances such as that. If you want to learn something about the nuclear age read “Creating the New World” by Theodore Rockwell. It’s a blast. (Slamming two pieces of highly enriched uranium will not create a large explosion — double dumb) I’m very disappointed in Phil.