From: animated silicon love doll (cheshire@velvet.net)
Date: Sun Jan 20 2002 - 01:15:50 MST
2002.01.19 19:29:51, Mike Lorrey <mlorrey@datamann.com> wrote:
>Of course not, but presuming that they are more like europeans than
>other humans is the absolute height of ethnocentricity. The fact that we
>have no evidence that they DO exist means that your presumption is based
>on absolutely no facts at all.
that's very true. by nature of it's alienness, it is impossible to know an alien culture.
but i'm saying there is precedent from our world explaining why, if they exist, they would
want to come visit us hicks.
>I highly recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" to anyone
>trying to make any prognostications about what alien life and culture
>will be like. What cultures develop at what pace is highly dependent
>upon the species they co-evolve with and the geography and climate they
>develop in.
hmmm. i've heard good things about that book, it's going into my reading list now..
thanks!
>Actually, there was evidence in spades of quarks, of a sol-centric
>planetary system, and that the earth was not the center of the universe,
>they only required that people observe that evidence and draw the proper
>logical conclusions from them using the scientific method and not
>superstition. Furthermore mechanical calculators for calculating time
>and astronomical movement have been found dating back to ancient greece,
>and accurate predictions of lunar eclipses, comets, and planetary
>movement for thousands of years have been performed.
>
>That the ignorant superstitious types choose to refuse to acknowledge
>existence of evidence is quite different from its actual absence.
point taken. though it would be very hard to extrapolate a pentium 4 overclocked to 3.5
gigahertz based on one of these mechanical calculators. (i'd even go so far as to say that
we may have passed a singularity, from the dark ages or the ancient world...)
while people in the dark ages probably could have figured out that the earth is not the
center of the solar system or the universe, the technology to detect quarks quite simply
wasn't there. even if someone (or many someones) was brilliant enough to deduce their
existence in theory, they would not have a way to prove it. but nevertheless, quarks
existed then, and exist now.
cheshire morgan. i can promise you're not losing me,
but i must be that which i am.
though i know where this could take me,
no tears, no sympathy.
-vnv nation, epicenter.
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