I can’t remember where I read this but they figured we should wait until we can reach at least .1c no point sending a probe that would more than likely be passed by something faster developed and built decades later.
Imagine the caravans of wagons that conquered the West being overtaken by a steam train and this in turn being overtaken by a Ford Trimotor and this in turn surpassed by the F8U Crusader of John Glenn and above, flying much higher in the sky an SR 71.
Dawkins is an evangelical atheist; arguing with him about God has all the pleasure of arguing with a YEC about the age of the Earth and an equal chance of influencing his feelings about the subject.
Not yet, but it has already debunked many myths that humanity in its ignorance attributed to “supernatural” causes: the fire god, the sun god, the moon goddess, rain, snow, hail, flat earth, lightning, thunder, eclipses, meteorites, comets, earthquakes, tidal waves, diseases (Yertsynia Pestis), unicorns (rhinos), mermaids (manatees), werewolves (porphyria), Kraken (Architeutis), dragons (dinosaurs fossils) ... Science advances methodically and is unstoppable... What will be the next myth deciphered and archived?
There was a time when no one argued about the age of the earth because believers knew for sure that Bishop James Usher had already been calculated: the early morning of October 23, 4004 B.C. Non-believers were simply burned alive.
Einstein worked at the Swiss Patent Office from 1902 to 1909.
Would be funny if the plot twist turns out to be that science deciphers science and finds that science itself is a plot twist.
Leo Szilard, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars, used this term. In an answer to the question of why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth despite the high probability of it existing, Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians." This account is featured in György Marx's book The Voice of the Martians.
Escher?
Thank you, Ed! What a very nice thing to state - I am a green (it's actually pink these days, but never mind) card carrying resident alien and truly appreciate your confidence in our wisdom and capabilities, although you might be a tad overconfident in our collective faculties - there *are* European idiots, too, you know. But now let's start by completely updating your... antiquated over two centuries old two party political system...
Nah, I look at the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. After WWII West Germany had shall we say the opportunity to learn from established democratic political systems around the world and combine the best features of different models in an optimized solution.
I think you miss the part of history that also before WWII there was a democratic system in Germany. So I would more say it was some kind of learning from the Weimar Republic under the control of the Western victorious powers. Besides, I think the established and still active system is far away from being optimized compared to other democratic systems.
Germany has not yet overcome its exclusion from the Roman Empire, its political thought functions with different frequencies from the rest of Europe.
I am not missing any part of history (believe you me, 20th century European history was drilled into my generation in a post war West German gymnasium with a righteous laser focus on the evils of the nazis), so there's really no need to try to lecture me on the Weimar Republic, and I deeply resent your obviously wholly uninformed and completely uneducated glib and slanderous assertion (you're american, I presume?). I'm awaiting with baited breath though which other current democratic systems you would consider superior to the German one though, and *precisely* why (cough *electoral college* cough).
Would you perhaps care to exactly elaborate on your apparent German inferiority complex insinuation theory? I assume you have access to Wikipedia in the southern european parts where presumably you reside, so I hope it will not blow your mind irreparably to become aware that the socalled Holy Roman Empire was also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1512, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire. But if you will, please discuss which current Roman Empire you're referring to - is that perhaps the one where Spain is supplying several luxury car and appliance company brands around the globe and is the economic powerhouse of the European Union? Oh wait, I think I got that mixed up - my bad... But you sure produce nice B/W line drawings of other countries' airplanes, my kind sir...
Boy howdy, I fer sure don't know what you're partakin' of this here pre 7/4 evening, son, but postulatin' an alien invasion of the EU only rather than of this here planet Earth as a whole with complete popular acceptance seems... farfetched/desperate, but dagnabbit I'm glad that even you admitted at the end that that's crazy, my dear boy. But you do you, bro! Also, please point me to *any* credible source that fantasizes about turning the EU into a single nation - believe you me, Europe is closely watching the US, and we certainly recognize a more than two century long failure in actual unified nation building when we see one... I am a proud German/European citizen working as an expat in the US for the last quarter century, so I have seen first hand how both political systems work (or not). But please tell me, dear Scott, kiddo, when was the last time that you have actually set foot outside of the continent you live on, let alone the country you reside in, rather than just mindlessly absorbing lies fed to you by feaux news or other even more disreputable misinformation sources that ignorantly disparage places that you have never actually physically been to in the first place. Based on my personal first hand experience, I do indeed consider the German/European parliamentary political system *vastly* superior to the severely outdated US one, which to me is more akin to a banana republic, but at least here in California, elections reliably go the way I would vote on a local, state, and federal level anyway (even though, as a US tax payer, I'm still equally amused and embittered by the contradiction between my status and the catchy slogan "no taxation without representation!" - I would vastly prefer to pay no taxes in order to maintain my status as a non voter, but I've long since learned that looking for consistency in the US political system is utterly futile). So, while over the decades I've learned not to take any US catchphrases seriously, I'm just copacetic and happy to see things politically consistently go my way in SoCal without even having to enter an election booth, and I just enjoy the sunny Mediterranean lifestyle of being around palms (they're not actually trees, you know
) and sandy pacific beaches , and I'm also happy to not ever become subject to being roped into any socalled "jury system" as a juror of socalled peers (for example, since I'm a German citizen, if I ever were charged with anything at all, I should be entitled to a jury of twelve male German resident aliens as my peers, right?). But who knows, if California ever grew the balls and decided to try to break away from the "union" and become its own nation with the world's fifth largest economy instead of having to subsidize mouth breather southeastern hick do nothing states with our tax dollars, I might even consider to change my citizenship to Californian .
I think he actually missed a whole lot more...
Right. Extraterrestrials. But I dare to speculate that for certain forum members from a certain (half) continent Europeans fit that bill?
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