Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Wait, why is 2001 realistic?
WingCommander-Simulator ? ?
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Lelapinmechant
Spaceman
Because it's a path we're currently on. There's actually a documentary about how realistic 2001 is that's on public television(here in Mass. it's 'GBH 44) today at five. The development of such a technology is within the reach of man by about ten or fifteen years. Sentience in artificial life forms is actually plausible, meaning it is a realistic possibility. Homonid cats are quite a different matter. 2001 is written with an understanding of the vagueries of technology not yet explored— meaning it's not specific enough to be "unrealistic" in technological terms. The only unrealistic thing about 2001, in my opinion, is the year in which it takes place.
Frosty
a full fledged GF
There's probably also documentaries that explain why Star Trek is realistic.
Yeah, I suppose the same goes for flying cars and colonies on Venus. Oh wait, that was supposed to happen two years ago...
Yes, because a human being capable of writing software that becomes sentient is far more realistic than the vast and infinite wonders of nature creating an animal.
I guess that little acid trip during the last half hour slipped your mind.
AD
Finder of things, Doer of stuff
Actually... Yes
There's a book, written by a noted physisist called "the physics of star trek". It uses the latest theroies to explain why or how the star trek technology could work for real, and also some of the limitations they might encounter. Intresting read anyway...
Lelapinmechant
Spaceman
Be warned. I actually responded to each of your comments. You might want to skip to the end-- Unless you really want to hear what I have to say.
Star Trek is realistic in certain ways(see: Physics of Star Trek). But there are continuity problems that are not present with 2001. For example, why is it that every sentient life form in Star Trek is able to speak perfect english? How does the UT work? How did all of these species evolve/ i.e., what's there natural history?
No, it's not the same. Construction of artificial sentience is being attempted-- with some success-- by some of the greatest minds in the scientific community. Flying cars, however, have never actually been looked into. Nor has colonizing Venus. So, while your comment may succeed in making you appear... erm, clever, it is not actually a valid point, as it is not the same thing as expecting a currently rapidly developing technology to soon meet it's logical conclusion.
1) Their planet is almost identical in every way to Earth. That includes a very similar evolutionary process-- everything that set the stage for cats to exist here on earth would, in order for them to evolve, have to exist on this hypothetical planet as well. This includes this planet being the same distance from it's sun, having a sun the same size as ours, etc.
2) Cats on this hypthetical planet would have to find it essential to their survival to use tools. Animals only evolve or change when it is necessary to their survival. While many primates on this Earth(which, as I have stated, would need to be identical to this new planet in almost every way) have evolved the use of their thumbs and can spend prolonged periods of time walking upright. Cats, on the other hand, after over fifty thousand years of evolution(as long as the earliest cat has been around) have never once needed to stand up straight or to use an opposible thumb. In fact, the very design of cats suggest that this is not a direction that, evolutionarily speaking, they could take. The evolution of the primate began waaaay on the evolutionary family tree of mammals. Cats evolved from a branch so far removed from the one that created hominids on this planet that they'd be evolving backwards, i.e., losing certain traits that they'd evolved over thousands of years in order to attain the traits that qualify a creature as a homonid. And there is no precedent for an animal evolving and then devolving.
It's a basic fact of nature that things don't happen for purely aesthetic purposes. In other words, the only things that look like cats are cats. Whiskers serve a purpose, teeth arranged such as cats' teeth are arranged serve a purpose. No homonid creature needs such traits, and therefore no hominid creature would ever have them. Biologically speaking, this is the same trouble with star trek. Too many aliens created simply because they "look nice."
If that had made sense, it would have been mean, which is in no way constructive.
Perhaps we're simply having a symantic squabble. As such, I will leave the word "realistic," which I still believe to be perfectly applicable to 2001, and replace it with another, less ambiguous word: "Believable." Good "Believable" science fiction is all about looking at what current technology is and following it to it's logical conclusion. Simply put, 2001 is believable, while Wing Commander is not. Same distinction. Different word.
Star Trek is realistic in certain ways(see: Physics of Star Trek). But there are continuity problems that are not present with 2001. For example, why is it that every sentient life form in Star Trek is able to speak perfect english? How does the UT work? How did all of these species evolve/ i.e., what's there natural history?
No, it's not the same. Construction of artificial sentience is being attempted-- with some success-- by some of the greatest minds in the scientific community. Flying cars, however, have never actually been looked into. Nor has colonizing Venus. So, while your comment may succeed in making you appear... erm, clever, it is not actually a valid point, as it is not the same thing as expecting a currently rapidly developing technology to soon meet it's logical conclusion.
The wonders of nature are many, but not infinite. Creatures evolve based upon highly complicated questions of survival in their environment. Everything from atmosphere to other creatures to how many babies they can have. In order for the Kilrathi to exist, the following would have to be true:
1) Their planet is almost identical in every way to Earth. That includes a very similar evolutionary process-- everything that set the stage for cats to exist here on earth would, in order for them to evolve, have to exist on this hypothetical planet as well. This includes this planet being the same distance from it's sun, having a sun the same size as ours, etc.
2) Cats on this hypthetical planet would have to find it essential to their survival to use tools. Animals only evolve or change when it is necessary to their survival. While many primates on this Earth(which, as I have stated, would need to be identical to this new planet in almost every way) have evolved the use of their thumbs and can spend prolonged periods of time walking upright. Cats, on the other hand, after over fifty thousand years of evolution(as long as the earliest cat has been around) have never once needed to stand up straight or to use an opposible thumb. In fact, the very design of cats suggest that this is not a direction that, evolutionarily speaking, they could take. The evolution of the primate began waaaay on the evolutionary family tree of mammals. Cats evolved from a branch so far removed from the one that created hominids on this planet that they'd be evolving backwards, i.e., losing certain traits that they'd evolved over thousands of years in order to attain the traits that qualify a creature as a homonid. And there is no precedent for an animal evolving and then devolving.
It's a basic fact of nature that things don't happen for purely aesthetic purposes. In other words, the only things that look like cats are cats. Whiskers serve a purpose, teeth arranged such as cats' teeth are arranged serve a purpose. No homonid creature needs such traits, and therefore no hominid creature would ever have them. Biologically speaking, this is the same trouble with star trek. Too many aliens created simply because they "look nice."
If that had made sense, it would have been mean, which is in no way constructive.
Perhaps we're simply having a symantic squabble. As such, I will leave the word "realistic," which I still believe to be perfectly applicable to 2001, and replace it with another, less ambiguous word: "Believable." Good "Believable" science fiction is all about looking at what current technology is and following it to it's logical conclusion. Simply put, 2001 is believable, while Wing Commander is not. Same distinction. Different word.
Frosty
a full fledged GF
My point is that having a documentary made about a film which says "this film is realistic," doesn't really give it any extra credibility.
Flying cars have been looked into, and more.
Come now, I'm sure it's been looked into. But you're missing my point. It's a shame I have to spell it out for you, since that ruins the humor, but...
I was mocking your "in ten or fifteen years" comment. I mean really, how many times have we heard that robots will clean our rooms for us in fifteen years, or that we'll be able to travel to the moon on vacation "by 1999," and so on? A lot. That's a statement that lacks any weight altogether.
Yes, because spaceships that go insane and kill their crews are the logical conclusion to the persuit of artificial intelligence.
Let me get this straight. For Kilrah to produce an animal that doesn't exist on Earth, the conditions on Kilrah would have to be identical to those which failed to produce that animal on this planet? Beautiful.
The whole of item "2)" in your reply seems to be based on the assumption that Kilrathi actually are cats.
That you find one complete fiction more believable than another is a bit confusing to me.
AD
Finder of things, Doer of stuff
I'll agree there. Why would the starchild stuff be anymore realistic than aliens and transporters in star trek.
The whole point of the 2001 series is the oversight of the evolution of mankind by some god-like aliens. (un-huh? )
First they give monkeys tools and then wait for a signal that indicates humans have evolved enough to be digging up the moon... then they "evolve" Dave and he is "reborn" as the star child.
This is all on top of the fact that scientific proof requires experimentation and observation to come to a conclusion. We exist so we know life started, but we can neither create life in a lab nor have we observed the origin of it or of the universe. We can't deny it happened, nor can we explain how it happened. The theory of evolution is just that, a theory, and an improbable one at that.
Hmm. 2001 is sooo realistic.
By the way, I actualy enjoy watching 2001.
Creationist season!
Evolutionist season!
Creationist season!
Wabbit season!
... where the hell did that come from... anyway...
I recall once(now, don't laugh, this is true)... I actually drew up plans for a hybrid automobile in eighth grade(petrol/electric regeneration system)... and the bastards came out with it three months later in a press release. I always seem to reinvent the wheel... but my ideas are (almost)always good ones... despite that I'm not the first to come up with 'em
Evolutionist season!
Creationist season!
Wabbit season!
... where the hell did that come from... anyway...
I recall once(now, don't laugh, this is true)... I actually drew up plans for a hybrid automobile in eighth grade(petrol/electric regeneration system)... and the bastards came out with it three months later in a press release. I always seem to reinvent the wheel... but my ideas are (almost)always good ones... despite that I'm not the first to come up with 'em
Hold on, now. There were elements of 2001 that were very realistic, particularly for a science fiction film of the 1960's. Kubrick and Clarke did a fine job of capturing the essence of real space flight given currently available technology:
* It takes forever to get anywhere in space because there is so darned much of it.
* Space is a vacuum, so there is no sound, and you don't need to run the ship's engines to coast along in a transfer orbit.
* There is no gravity in space so stuff floats around unless it is stuck onto something.
* To simulate gravity for a long voyage, the Discovery used a centrifuge, and it was even shown spinning at a reasonable rate!
* They accounted for the light-speed delay in communications between Earth and the Discovery.
* Commander Bowman was able to survive in hard vacuum for several seconds without his eyes popping out of his skull (contrary to Arnold's Total Recall film, that wouldn't happen).
One of the very few things they got wrong was that the actors didn't hop/bounce on the moon. This might be excusable, since the film was shot before anybody had actually tried to walk on the moon. The lunar bunny hop was only worked out by the astronauts after landing as the easiest way to maneuver. They had originally tried simply walking around, but found that it was too hard to maintain a natural rhythm in the reduced gravity environment.
Compared to the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon adventures and the "It Came From Way Out Thataway" monster epics of the fifties, 2001 was practically a NASA training film.
* It takes forever to get anywhere in space because there is so darned much of it.
* Space is a vacuum, so there is no sound, and you don't need to run the ship's engines to coast along in a transfer orbit.
* There is no gravity in space so stuff floats around unless it is stuck onto something.
* To simulate gravity for a long voyage, the Discovery used a centrifuge, and it was even shown spinning at a reasonable rate!
* They accounted for the light-speed delay in communications between Earth and the Discovery.
* Commander Bowman was able to survive in hard vacuum for several seconds without his eyes popping out of his skull (contrary to Arnold's Total Recall film, that wouldn't happen).
One of the very few things they got wrong was that the actors didn't hop/bounce on the moon. This might be excusable, since the film was shot before anybody had actually tried to walk on the moon. The lunar bunny hop was only worked out by the astronauts after landing as the easiest way to maneuver. They had originally tried simply walking around, but found that it was too hard to maintain a natural rhythm in the reduced gravity environment.
Compared to the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon adventures and the "It Came From Way Out Thataway" monster epics of the fifties, 2001 was practically a NASA training film.
AD
Finder of things, Doer of stuff
Sure. No one is going to disagree there. But It is 2002 now...
While the space stuff seems fairly grounded in science, There are still alot of elements that are merely speculation...
Frosty: My point before wasn't entirely about creationism, but rather that we can never know for certain how life started, whether by some remote chance there were enough of the right amino acids in the same place at the same time or even whether there was intervention... Belief in Creation or evolution both require elements of faith.
While the space stuff seems fairly grounded in science, There are still alot of elements that are merely speculation...
Frosty: My point before wasn't entirely about creationism, but rather that we can never know for certain how life started, whether by some remote chance there were enough of the right amino acids in the same place at the same time or even whether there was intervention... Belief in Creation or evolution both require elements of faith.
Frosty
a full fledged GF
I never said it was. In fact, I never mentioned creationism at all. Kris did.
Which has, of course, absolutely no bearing on the matter at hand.
Believing in evolution doesn't require faith in anything but logic. The way evolution is taught these days in schools is disgraceful. It's made to sound as if there's some force in nature making rational decisions prior to 'evolving' a critter, which is absolute crap.
Mutations occur, some offer competitive advantages. Those that do move forward and reproduce more quickly than others, and eventually drive them out of existence. those that don't are driven out of existence. There's no logic to the mutations that occur, but there is logic present in determining which succeed.
Evolution is a result of a process, but a lot of people treat it as if it is the process. If more people were properly educated, they'd see that the fact that creatures evolve is essentially a certainty.
The only reason it's still a "theory" is because we haven't studied it long enough to prove it outright, and that will take more years than you or I have left to live. It is an inevitability, however that evolution will be recognized as law.
Actually Frosty Evolution has been proven impossible.
First on your theory of mutations. Mutations are almost always destrutive. In thousnads of oberved cases only a few mutations could be comcidered favorable and even those were not passed on to the offspring.
Second, Probability. From a practical standpoint scientist have determined that anything beyond i chance in 10 to the 50th power is beyond reason. Thats like someone picking the winning lottery numbers seven times in a row. If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the fastest rate possible, and left it for a billion years the odds of producing just one functional protien molecule is 1 in 10 to the 60th power. Thats just a protein molecule. Not DNA or a living cell.
Third time. There simply is not enough of it. In 1965 scientist discovered background radiation. That discovery dates the universe at 14 billion years old. More reaserch in this area dates the earth at 5 billion years young. If you take into account the time it took the earth to cool off to a point for life to be possible, you've narrowed the window down to 400 million years. Less than half the time to come up with just one viable potien.
At the 1999 international conferance on the origin of life, leading biochemist Klaus Dose (an athiest) stated "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth than to it's solution. At present all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance."
First on your theory of mutations. Mutations are almost always destrutive. In thousnads of oberved cases only a few mutations could be comcidered favorable and even those were not passed on to the offspring.
Second, Probability. From a practical standpoint scientist have determined that anything beyond i chance in 10 to the 50th power is beyond reason. Thats like someone picking the winning lottery numbers seven times in a row. If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the fastest rate possible, and left it for a billion years the odds of producing just one functional protien molecule is 1 in 10 to the 60th power. Thats just a protein molecule. Not DNA or a living cell.
Third time. There simply is not enough of it. In 1965 scientist discovered background radiation. That discovery dates the universe at 14 billion years old. More reaserch in this area dates the earth at 5 billion years young. If you take into account the time it took the earth to cool off to a point for life to be possible, you've narrowed the window down to 400 million years. Less than half the time to come up with just one viable potien.
At the 1999 international conferance on the origin of life, leading biochemist Klaus Dose (an athiest) stated "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth than to it's solution. At present all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance."
Also you must diferinciate between macro and micro evolution. Micro evolution, the changes within a species is a proven fact. Take the peppered moth examle in England. All the DNA for these changes are already present in the species.
Macro evolution, changes between species, is unproven. Not one fossile of a "missing link" has ever been found.
Piltdown man was a proven hoax. Someone put an ape jaw on a human skull and stained it to look old.
Java man. Even the discoverer later rejected it saying that an ape and human were just found in proximity.
Peking man. Humans were eating the apes. A practice that still goes on in China.
Lucy was reclassified as an extinct ape
Ramapithecus was dismissed when they found out it was a jaw from an orangutan
Nebraska man takes the cake though. An entire family was envisioned from a single tooth which proved to come from a pig.
Macro evolution, changes between species, is unproven. Not one fossile of a "missing link" has ever been found.
Piltdown man was a proven hoax. Someone put an ape jaw on a human skull and stained it to look old.
Java man. Even the discoverer later rejected it saying that an ape and human were just found in proximity.
Peking man. Humans were eating the apes. A practice that still goes on in China.
Lucy was reclassified as an extinct ape
Ramapithecus was dismissed when they found out it was a jaw from an orangutan
Nebraska man takes the cake though. An entire family was envisioned from a single tooth which proved to come from a pig.
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
You've outlined very well what the problem is with the way people look at the theory of evolution these days. I've seen two (and only two) anti-evolution arguments so far -
1. The argument that the theory about the beginning of life is considered improbable at best.
2. The argument that there is evidence which suggest that humans existed before their supposed ancestors (homo erectus & co.) did.
What it comes down to, however, is that even if either of the above arguments can be proved (I'm not suggesting either that they're false or true) as true - hell, even if both are true - they do not in any way suggest the theory of evolution is false. They merely suggest that we have misunderstood some aspects of how the theory is put into practice. The anti-evolution arguments are not anti-evolution at all.
As for the Kilrathi, we must be careful not to assume that they are in fact cats. They are a species that happens to look like cats. Biologically, we know almost nothing about them, so who are we to argue about the probability of their existence? It's also worth pointing out that, throughout Earth's history, species similar in either external appearance or basic behaviour (but still fundamentally different from each other) have been quite common. Just one example of this would be the way dolphins (mammals) and ichtiosaurs (reptiles) have both evolved into creatures which look(or looked, in the case of the long-extinct ichtiosaur) and (to a degree) act like fish. According to your argument, lelapinmechant, neither the dolphin nor the ichtiosaur could possibly exist
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