Astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos — with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids — got built this way.
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Pretty fascinating. I took a few astronomy classes in college, and everyday I was just blown away at the shear immensity of the universe and how tiny we are.
It’s funny how a theist would experience the same thing, and think that it is so unimaginably huge, an omnipotent being must have created it.
Me being an atheist, I take that knowledge and think to myself:
Why would a god create a universe that is so huge, with so much material, with so much energy, with so much time, that is so unimaginably complex… and then billions of years later on only one tiny spec of dirt in some random solar system in some random galaxy in some random galaxy cluster… create life that then becomes millions and millions of species of plants and animals over a time span of billions of years, then create man in his own image in the last few thousand years and fuck up royally by making him imperfect, then boost his own ego by damning his children to burn for eternity in a place called hell if they don’t believe in him.
Holy crap how retarded is that idea?
On another note, I really liked a point he made at the beginning relating to the idea that something that has order must have been created, like the building he is in at the moment vs. the universe. He points out that in reality those examples form a false analogy because the building he is in was made by man from materials that already existed and that formed naturally on their own… They were just manipulated by us.
That reminds me of a debate I watched involving Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron arguing that same analogy. It was pretty retarded.
Just finished reading The Magic Furnace by Marcus Chown describing the story of how different elements are made and how stars are born and die. Like all his books this is very much popular science and doesn’t go into the real technical details and like all his books it’s a very easy and enjoyable read. Another book I liked for much the same reasons (a mix of science and history) is The Big Bang by Simon Singh. It’s great to see that people are trying to put across what are difficult questions/topics in a more accessible way, the books are actually fun to read and not a slog, rather than watching Open University and reading Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality!
Wow! When the “movie” of the universe superclusters was zooming in and out, it looked like neural tissue (and other tissues as well) under a microscope. Interesting how some patterns repeat in nature! Go science!