TED talk on origin of life on Earth

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Interesting talk on the timeline, possible origin, and possible impending changes

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idfv7Lw4Y_s

[Joshpantera]

The dates keep pushing back. As is the case with civilizations. We tend to start out with conservative estimates and then watch the dial turn back as the evidence rolls in. This isn't good at all for YECist's. Everything just keeps getting older....

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Really ancient civilizations are so intriguing. The Minoans are fascinating, but we have no Rosetta Stone documents to decipher their writings. I wonder how many existed that we haven't found yet. I saw another talk on the vast civilizations that were visited by Europeans, and weren't there the next time visitors arrived due to the sicknesses the first ones brought. Some of those are being uncovered by satellite imagery. 

[Joshpantera]

Very interesting. They have an aquarium at Atlantis in Nassau, Bahamas. It's themed with Minoan imagery. Pretty cool to walk through. 

 

I don't have any problem with starting out conservative and dealing in terms of what we know about a given subject. But the problem has always been that education tends to take a hard edge approach to uncertainties like this and presents them as dam near absolute. With civilization and life on earth. The fact is that we're probably adolescent in our scope of understanding either issue. And because of that conspiracy theorists pop up and claim the opposite.

 

They argue, academia and conspiracy theorists. And then the evidence starts rolling in which doesn't really support either side. That's the big take away. The evidence comes in and proves that the conservative estimates were wrong, but it doesn't prove that the ancient civilizations found were advanced beyond us now or anything like that. They had sophistication for the time, but they were not building the equivalent of modern sky scrappers or flying in jets. There's no advanced alien space crafts recovered, either. Both parties being wrong with their respective speculations. 

 

I'm not surprised at all about life on earth being pushed back as well. Just on the tendency of academia to greatly under estimate when making assumptions. And when looking forward, academia tends to greatly over estimate things. Under estimate the past, over estimate the future. Just an observation. 

[pantheory]

Yes, quite interesting. But too much emphasis IMO on man-made global warming which is only a hypothesis. There are contrary views in science such as NASA's prediction of global cooling in the coming decades or longer.