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+--- Thread: Rome fell from climate & disease + "We'll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began" (/thread-5033.html)
Rome fell from climate & disease + "We'll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began" - C C - Mar 19, 2018
When Rome Fell, the Chief Culprits Were Climate and Disease
https://undark.org/article/book-review-harper-fate-of-rome/
EXCERPT: Pundits who blame 21st-century-style moral rot miss the big picture, a new book argues. Against plague and drought, the empire never stood a chance. Sure, the empire had internal problems — vicious leaders, coups, and more. But it died mainly from natural causes....
MORE: https://undark.org/article/book-review-harper-fate-of-rome/
We'll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began (video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnFClPufcmg
EXCERPT: . . . the Big Bang model of cosmology, the most successful theoretical explanation for our grand Universe. Backed by boatloads of observational evidence, we can be very sure of its veracity. Caltech astrophysicist Sean Caroll even described the Big Bang as "100 percent true." But that percentage of surety dwindles to nothing when discussing the singularity that supposedly started it all. Where did it come from? What came before it? What caused it to "bang" in such a big way? As Carroll admitted, this singularity and its accompanying "bang" are essentially stand-ins for what we don't – and currently can't – actually know. [...] And we might not ever understand it [...] "The exponential nature of inflation wipes out any information that occurred prior to that, separating it from anything we can observe by, well, inflating it beyond the portion of our Universe that we can observe," astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wrote. We're at a dead end, it seems....
MORE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnFClPufcmg
RE: Rome fell from climate & disease + "We'll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began" - Zinjanthropos - Mar 19, 2018
Something I've always espoused.... How do we know if some key evidence relating to the BB hasn't gone forever? We will come up with something, even the math, but we may never know the absolute truth. Said it before..... don't know what that says about math.
RE: Rome fell from climate & disease + "We'll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began" - Syne - Mar 20, 2018
Science freely admits its own limitations. If only people who espouse scientism could as well.
At best, I would only assume drought and pestilence accelerated the existing decline of Rome.
That they were the precipitating event in an empire that lasted so long, seems preposterous.