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The moon hoax is a great idea because it saves you lots of time at parties. You see someone, you talk to someone, ask them if they think we really went to the moon. If they say no, it's all a hoax, i saw this really interesting programme...etc then you know that they're an idiot and you don't have to waste anymore time talking to them ever again. This also works with aromatherapy.
There are always people who want to denegrate the achievements of our species. How we couldn't possibly be clever enough to have build stonehenge etc without help from gods or aliens. How microwave ovens are reverse engineered from that saucer that crashed at Roswell. Perhaps these people have brains with such low wattage that because they could never have worked out how to move big stones around without supernatural intervention they can't imagine how anyone else could have.
These people i think want the world to be far less wonderfull than it really is. They want everyone to be mired in cynicism, they can't believe that the United States really has achieved great things. They never believe that Gargarin didn't really achieve orbit for example. There have been great hoaxes, sure - the moon hoax is a great hoax. People will buy books about it so books are written about it. The shamefull acquiesence of the media in this should always be highlighted, but they also have horoscopes in newspapers, 'mediums' on TV, we shouldn't be surprised.
Most people in the world think in supernatural terms. Most people believe in some form of god for which there is absolutely no evidence at all. The so called evidence backing up a moon hoax has been comprehensively dismantled. Thinking about it for a minute renders it ludicrous. It would be a lot harder to pretend to go to the moon and carry off this gigantic con than it would be to actually just do it. I think the lack of real progress in manned space exploration since the moon landings provides a fertile breeding ground for this nonsense, if we had astronauts en route to Mars right now then everyone would be too interested in them to fill their minds with this garbage.
Once every rock and stream and tree needed its own ghost or god or spirit to animate it, then we decided that was silly but that a big sky god was needed to keep the sun going round the earth, then we found out that the earth went round the sun quite happily by itself so we needed a god to have created life, then we found out that life evolved quite happily by itself, so we were reduced to needing a god to light the blue touch paper of the big bang. We're risen apes, not fallen angels. Get over it.
Science gradually enables us to discover that we're not special in any way. There is no supernatural animation needed to create life or consciousness or anything like that and the soul simply doesn't exist. Christians are atheists about the 499 other major gods out there, just take that extra logical step boys. You believe that Zeus lives on top of Mount Olympus? Neither do I, although the greek myths were a whole lot more fun.
The question of life in the universe is the topic here and perhaps should be split into two.
It's almost certain that there's lots of life out there. There's a lot of stars in a lot of galaxies, there's planets and accretion disks everywhere we look, carbon and water are common as, well, dirt. Life on earth, our only current example, began around 3.5 billion years ago, that is just as soon as it possibly could. We've had multicelled life for around 500 million years, again just as soon as there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere to allow it. We find life everywhere on earth, places we'd never have dreamed of thirty years ago. The huge biomasses of primitive life in the rocks, teeming communities living around sea bed smokers utterly cut off from the sun. We'll find life anywhere there's a rocky planet, a relatively stable orbit and liquid water.
There's life on Europa because that's got all three.
Intelligent life is a different matter. There was complex multi cell life here for 500 million years without any sign of higher intelligence before we evolved. More than that we as homo sapiens only developed the ability to think intelligently e.g. scientifically a few hundred years ago for the most part. It's easy to imagine an earth with no mankind (a comet strike here, a basalt melt there). Easy to imagine us still living in caves. If we'd let religion rule our thinking we'd still be riding around in ox carts burning people. Evolution isn't a ladder of progress, we weren't inevitable.
Let's all download the seti@home programme and help though. We're not going to discover the answer to this question by sitting around discussing it. That's why the greeks didn't build any starships. Our signals are travelling out there, maybe someone's already picked them up and is on their way. We have the technology to start sending out interstellar probes. We have the ability to get to Europa, burrow under the ice and take a look. Let's do it while we still can.
The truth won't be found in the bible, it's a mistranslated story book about things which never happened. Everything it says about cosmology, biology etc is simply wrong. You can pretend it's all a metaphor (what's a day etc) but you won't learn anything.
No? Tell me this. God decides to kill everyone on earth for being naughty. Every man, woman and little baby except for Noah's family. Yes he does. He makes it rain for forty days and nights. Earth is covered in water. Even the top of Everest. That means, as Everest is 29,000 feet high that it rains about 725 feet every 24 hours during that period. That means 30 feet an hour. That means six inches of rain every minute. For forty days and nights. Meanwhile Noah is popping all over earth discovering Australia and picking up Koalas and Kangeroos and Jaguars from latin america and half a million kinds of beetle and whatabout all the fresh water fish..it's just nonsense isn't it?
If we're going to call ourselves intelligent life we have to think intelligently. That means rationally. That means according to the evidence. That means we stop talking about the bible, or the koran, or whatever, and get on with exploring the universe properly.
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