Mar 9, 2017 03:01 AM
Prominent Astrophysicist Calls the Big Bang A “Mirage”
http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/promine...g-a-mirage
EXCERPT: Science classes the world over teach that the Big Bang is the beginning of our universe, as if it’s established fact. In reality, it’s a theory and one that’s been challenged periodically. In the last few years, two teams of scientists have revived the debate, and offer fascinating alternative models. A recent paper published in the journal Nature, even goes so far as to suggest that the Big Bang was a “mirage.”....
Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...sm/518853/
EXCERPT: [...] When, last month, NASA announced the discovery of seven new Earth-like exoplanets [...] The immediate reaction from thousands of people was not “what’s out there?” but “when can we leave?”
This planet is done for [...] The oceans are acidifying and filling with plastic, the air is clamming up into a soup of deadly microparticles; we’re slowly narrowing down the list of extant animal species until, finally, the only thing we’ll have left to kill and eat is each other. Get me off this rock.
[...] What’s not explained is how we’re expected to avoid bringing the crop blight with us, or why agriculture would be more viable on a desert world than one that still has some harried remnants of life. Listen to these narratives for long enough and you start to think that the problem is our Earth itself, that there’s something evil buried deep below the soil, that it’s one giant haunted house to be fled. As if whatever ghosts swarm around this place were here before we created them. All these visions of humanity’s destiny in the stars, whether they’re brought on by curiosity or desperation, imagine that we could turn lifeless planets into gardens. But all that’s happened in living memory is the precise opposite. Wastelands are already growing on this earth, steadily drying out farmlands into scrub or burning forests into lifeless ashy mud. What will happen to an earth that’s wasteland already? Fleeing into outer space isn’t a solution to any of our problems; it’s not even running away from them. Exploring the galaxy just means giving the problem more room in which to expand.
Capitalism, as David Harvey once remarked, never solves its contradictions, it only moves them around....
http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/promine...g-a-mirage
EXCERPT: Science classes the world over teach that the Big Bang is the beginning of our universe, as if it’s established fact. In reality, it’s a theory and one that’s been challenged periodically. In the last few years, two teams of scientists have revived the debate, and offer fascinating alternative models. A recent paper published in the journal Nature, even goes so far as to suggest that the Big Bang was a “mirage.”....
Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...sm/518853/
EXCERPT: [...] When, last month, NASA announced the discovery of seven new Earth-like exoplanets [...] The immediate reaction from thousands of people was not “what’s out there?” but “when can we leave?”
This planet is done for [...] The oceans are acidifying and filling with plastic, the air is clamming up into a soup of deadly microparticles; we’re slowly narrowing down the list of extant animal species until, finally, the only thing we’ll have left to kill and eat is each other. Get me off this rock.
[...] What’s not explained is how we’re expected to avoid bringing the crop blight with us, or why agriculture would be more viable on a desert world than one that still has some harried remnants of life. Listen to these narratives for long enough and you start to think that the problem is our Earth itself, that there’s something evil buried deep below the soil, that it’s one giant haunted house to be fled. As if whatever ghosts swarm around this place were here before we created them. All these visions of humanity’s destiny in the stars, whether they’re brought on by curiosity or desperation, imagine that we could turn lifeless planets into gardens. But all that’s happened in living memory is the precise opposite. Wastelands are already growing on this earth, steadily drying out farmlands into scrub or burning forests into lifeless ashy mud. What will happen to an earth that’s wasteland already? Fleeing into outer space isn’t a solution to any of our problems; it’s not even running away from them. Exploring the galaxy just means giving the problem more room in which to expand.
Capitalism, as David Harvey once remarked, never solves its contradictions, it only moves them around....
