Pillars of Creation Destroyed 364
anthemaniac writes with news about the Pillars of Creation, an iconic structure in the Eagle Nebula some 7,000 light-years distant. The Hubble Space Telescope's image of this structure is one of the most widely recognized astronomy images ever captured. Now a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that the pillars probably toppled 6,000 years ago. From the article: "Astronomers think [a] supernova's shock wave knocked the pillars down about 6,000 years ago. But because light from that region of the sky takes 7,000 years to reach us, the majestic pillars will appear intact to observers on Earth for another 1,000 years or so.'"
Ah ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Astronomers think [a] supernova's shock wave knocked the pillars down about 6,000 years ago.
Just as the the Earth was being created!
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Pillars of Creation
Artifact
Casting Cost: 3
1T: Sacrifice Pillars of Creation, put one Earth Token into play. Treat Earth Token as a land which produces either W, R, B, Bk, or G
Re:Ah ha! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Ah ha! (Score:5, Informative)
*please mod informative, please mod informative*
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Yes, according to Archbishop Ussher's calculations, it is 6011
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I always liked the fiddly bits...
Like the "porn beaches" of France and the rest of Europe. *ROTFLMAO*
Re:Ah ha! (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of Christians will say the Earth is 6,000 years old based on the ages and the assumption that Adam's age was from his creation in Genesis 1 & 2 and not from the Fall of Man in Genesis 3. Since there is a time gap of unknown length between Genesis 2 & Genesis 3, this assumption can be either correct or incorrect.
What can be considered Biblically correct is that there have been roughly 6,000 years since the Fall of Man in Genesis 3. Of course, you also have to consider that the years recorded Biblically are 360 day years, not 365 day years. From my own calculations, it falls around 5600 to 5700 years at present (it's been a while since I did the calculations).
However, that the above does not negate Creationism. It does, however, admit that the Earth itself is of unknown age. For all we know Adam & Eve (and any kids they may have had prior to the Fall of Man, which is possible Biblically) could have lived in the Garden of Eden for millennia or just a few days. Fact of the matter is, we don't know the true age, but we do know that it has been roughly 6,000 years since Adam & Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
Assuming Astronomers are correct about this, then there could be one of two significant things going on: (1) Assuming the original posters timeline, it could correlate to the Fall of Man; or (2) Assuming another poster's statement of "it was 1000 to 2000 years ago" it could be the turn from BC to AD & possibly correlate to the events in Matthew through John, more specifically the death of Christ on the cross. Now this is just speculation and could be way off.
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Note that atheism and true agnosticism are completel
Re:Ah ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ah ha! (Score:4, Insightful)
In the interest of finding common ground, I like to point out to my Christian friends that of all the thousands of gods out there, we only disagree about the existence of one of them!
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Not all, or even the majority of children, are taught to fear a god. Also, I don't think the majority of children consider god and punishment to by synonyms. That's old testament, not new testament.
Your argument is that ignorance of god is "more active" than your own ignorance of green nazi unicorns. Regardless, the two are still strictly parallel. You are still making a ch
Actually, Swift was mistaken ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Christian: "If you don't believe in God, you're going to Hell"
Atheist: "If you do believe in God, you're doomed to ignorance"
They both preach to anyone who will listen, and a great many who won't. They both have total faith in their position and will never change their minds.
Re:Ah ha! (Score:4, Insightful)
Name exactly ONE article of faith of atheism. Or is not believing that there is an invisible rhinoceros in my living room an "article of faith"?
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Here's a few straight from atheists.org
Atheism is a doctrine that states
1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter),
2) that thought is a property or function of matter,
3) and that death irreversibly and totally terminates individual organic units.
These are philosophical statements not scientific ones. They are not proven philosophically or scientifically.
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Perhaps one website by one organization does not represent all, or even a significant number of, atheists?
Philosophy is not faith (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't call myself an atheist exactly (I'm a sort of pantheist), but I'm certainly a naturalist, so lets look at that first "article of faith" you listed:
1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter)
I assume by "natural" or "material" phenomena, you (or they) mean observable phenomena, as in 'observable in principle'; you could by some means, perhaps not *yet* technologically possible, empirically tell whether or not that phenomena in fact occurred. That is, there is some observation you could make, some experiment you could do, that perhaps we are presently unable to do due to practical limits, which would tell you whether the sentence describing that phenomenon was true.
Given that that is what is meant by that, it seems patently absurd to conclude that anything non-natural exists (which is the same thing as to say that there are unknowable truths), on the basis that:
(A) Conceivability is possibility (and vice versa). Something is logically possible if and only if it could be conceived of; if you couldn't even conceive of what it would be for something to be the case, then you clearly have no idea what it even is that is in question, and so that non-idea cannot possibly be true.
(B) One can only conceive what one could, hypothetically, perceive. Consider someone asks you to conceive of "a foo upon a fweep". You have some rough notion of something placed on something else, but in order to conceive of these things, you have to ask "what is a foo?" and "what is a fweep?", and the descriptions which follow in response must ultimately cache out in some sort of perceptual terms (it looks like this, it sounds like this, it feels like this, etc). So to conceive of something, you must understand what it woud be to perceive it; thus, you could only conceive what you could (if such a thing existed) perceive. (As an aside, this does not mean that you must undertake the act of consciously imagining something every time you are asked to conceive of it; it is merely enough to note that "yes, that is a sort of perception I could have; now what about it?")
From A and B, it deductively follows that the only things logically possible are things which are perceivable (a.k.a. observable); so if "natural" or "material" phenomena are understood to be just such observable phenomena, as it seems they are, then it deductively follows that only natural/material phenomena are logically possible. From there, the atheist can perhaps derive his other two items of doctrine, but my point here is not to defend atheism; it is to defend philosophy from the accusation that it is mere baseless comparison of different articles of faith.
Now... maybe you can find some flaw in my argument there. Maybe my premises A and B are false somehow, and I've overlooked something. Maybe my understanding of "natural" or "material" phenomena is not correct, and those terms rightly denote something other than what I take them to. Maybe you can't find any flaws but you just don't buy it anyway. The point is, there is good, some (like I) would say irrefutable evidence to support such a position. I certainly consider such a thing quite easily proven; I have just done so. So to accept naturalism is hardly an article of faith; and it seems that something like atheism - or at least, something quite unlike the supernaturalist theism common to most modern major religions - logically follows from such a position. So the atheist (of a certain variety at least) has good grounds by which to claim that his position is not one of faith.
Now, there are some logical arguments for the existence of God as well, which I'm sure you're aware of; the ontol
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Name exactly ONE article of faith of atheism. Or is not believing that there is an invisible rhinoceros in my living room an "article of faith"?
Well, strictly speaking, everything after "Cogito, ergo sum" is an article of faith (c.f. "Brain in a Vat"). There actually is a neon green rhinoceros in your living room, it's just that you are hallucinating that it isn't there.
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That's why what you describe as "speaking strictly" is pointless. Throughout your life, you have to make decisions. You can make these decisions entirely randomly, or you can base them on something. If you base your decisions on something, you can choose to base them on religion and evidence (theism) or on evidence without religion (atheism).
Agnosticism is a convenient position to take intellectually, but as a world view it's somewhat hypocritical, since it's totally useless as a decision-making tool.
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Darwin NOT Mutually Exclusive of Religion (Score:2)
Don't make the mistake that all those who believe in God also think evolution is a lie. Some believe that evolution could just be a mechanism and that the bible is full of metaphors and not everything in it is literal. I am one of those. It is also why I loathe most *organized* religions who seem to require everything they read to the literal truth and forget that the book was written by plain o
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Bummer (Score:3, Funny)
Puts things into perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
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I wonder if [...] anyone alive then will ever know what they looked like today?
Sure, they'll Google "pillars of creation" on their IPv1024-connected computers.
v1024? (Score:2)
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Perhaps there is other intelligent life out there. Let's say that our radio signals take a long time to get to whomever is listening...perhaps decades (probably longer). Then whomever out there, after researching our radio signals, decides to attempt sending a response...which in turn takes decades to get back to us. It's entirely possible we get a response to radio signals sent 50 years ago....well,
If you lived in the Eagle Nebula (Score:5, Funny)
If you lived in the Eagle Nebula, you'd be destroyed by now.
Bad use of "already" (Score:4, Insightful)
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You have clearly never watch a time-travel movie, not even a bad time-travel movie.
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Re:Bad use of "already" (Score:5, Informative)
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Sure there is. It just doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Happening in a time span lower than the response rate of the observer." If I move my mouse, the cursor moves "instantaneously", even though there's a delay significantly higher than c's round trip through mouse, cable, USB bus, CPU, AGP, GPU, VGA cable, monitor control, eyes.
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OK, in the context we're talking about, there's no such thing as "instantaneous". Unless you're some kind of living galaxy that has response times measured in trillions of years.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that that describes nobody reading this.
Again I say *thbbtttpt*. (That's a raspberry.)
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The very paper you refer clearly states that time not a constant. This is why his ideas were so interesting... it opened the door to 'instantaneous' as quite an ordinary thing. It's quite short and easy to understand (the second time you read it).
The above poster is also correct in the frame of quantum mechanics: in the quantum world, the ONLY constant is the observer. His entire post was prologued with 'Happening in a time span lower th
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Re:Bad use of "already" (Score:4, Funny)
As a guess the one your posted is childed to?
But since you neglected to quote anything and I'm not allowed to read minds while off the clock, it's only a rough estimate.
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You can't send any information "along" a quantum entanglement. How do you propose to send a timing signal along a channel that can carry no information? How do you propose to define "instantaneous" when you can't even provide a timing signal that matches your definition?
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You are, of course, technically correct. "The best kind of correct", as 1.0 would say.
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If the data is correct, then it already has happened. I realise that some poor 100-level physics/relativity courses try to push the idea that events outside the "light cone" (as you like to call it) haven't happened yet but that's baloney. The event has occurred and the pillars are destroyed, light cone or no light cone. We just haven't seen it yet.
They are ex-pillars.
They have ceased to be.
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The parent poster is incorrect about the supernova not happening yet in our frame of reference though. In our frame of reference, it happened between 1000 and 2000 years ago. It is the
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What has been witnessed is an explosion that, according to our current understanding of the universe, should obliterate the pillars with nothing that we yet know of to prevent it. Therefore it is reasonable to assume with a certain amount of confidence that the scenario described is actually what happened until evidence is presented that suggests otherwise. Of course
Proper Time Travel Grammar (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad use of "already" (Score:5, Funny)
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I was expecting this to be some sort of Douglas Adams [wikipedia.org] reference. Oh well. :(
Relativity of Simultaneity (Score:2, Informative)
Andromeda Paradox (Score:2, Interesting)
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If it hasn't been destroyed yet, then when has it been destroyed? If I were to fly toward it in a spaceship at light speed, the event would appear to happen 500 years earlier.
The simple fact is, it has already happened. It's just that the knowledge of the event hasn't reached us yet, other than the signs that it has will already be destroyed. (Gotta love those time-travel verb tenses.)
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I hate relativity.
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Accepting your relativity analysis at face value, it does not mean that the article was wrong to use the word "already". That's correct, within our reference frame. At most it means your hypothetical observer would also be correct to say it "will" happen. In other words, we can say it already happened, we just can't claim that's correct in all reference frames.
My 2 cents. IAAPBIHSRTM. (I Am A Physicist But I Haven't
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In other words, I think we all understand the cat is dead even though we haven't opened the box to prove it.
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I realise GR states that "the universal now" does not exist, so I included the caveat: "ignoring gravitational bodies and the relative motion between observer and event".
The point I was trying to make is that the GP was (IMHO) being a tad pedantic about the use of the word "already" since it was fairly obvious what the OP meant.
Now you come along, add a third observer and start talking about the effects of relativity as things are "wizzing past" each other, why?
Re:Bad use of "already" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad use of "already" (Score:5, Funny)
I'm afraid the speed of fart is not a fundamental constant of our space-time continuum.
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Makes Me Curious (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Makes Me Curious (Score:4, Insightful)
Even on Planet Earth light speed delays can be noticible (it is the bulk of a ping time that goes any significant distance, a highly impressive achievement), but once you leave Earth, everything has a significant light speed delay. The moon is just over a light-second away and the sun roughly eight and a half light minutes. (The exact distance varies over the course of the year.)
Re:Makes Me Curious (Score:4, Interesting)
The farther away anything is, the more it is going to differ from what we're seeing now.
6000 light years doesn't even make it halfway to the galaxy core ... much less to nearby galaxies (2million light years only gets us to Andromeda -- the nearest major galaxy). For all we know, it was imploded by some master race 1 million years ago, and the creatures who get to watch that explosion will be digging up our fossils and wondering what we had to do with the mass extinction we're in the middle of.
It takes us up to 20 minutes to figure out if a mars probe went 'poof' during it's last maneuver.
Voyager is about 10 light-hours out.
The North Star (one of the brightest stars in the sky until a few years ago), is over 400 light years out.
Basically, just about nothing is close to us in human terms (under relativistic rules). In fact, The Pillars of Creation are about as close as things can get.
-- But also remember that as things get closer, we can see more detail so Jupiter at 4 light hours has way more detail than any thing extrasolar. The stuff in andromeda can only be resolved to a resolution of a few light years.
Ow my head... (Score:2)
So, if we have detected a supernova that exploded 6,000-9,000 years ago, and a picture of the Pillars 7,000 years ago, wouldn't that mean that the supernova is some place between us and the pillars, ~1,000-2,000 lightyears closer to the pillars than the median of us and the pillars? IANAA so could someone correct me if I'm wrong.
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Astronomy IS time travel....well time observation to be more correct. What you are looking at happened a long time ago. How long ago depends on how far away you look. What you see is a collage of what once was, that "once" varying with distance. This is always true. It just becomes noticable and important when (and you'll pardon the pun) the distances become astronomical. I was always filled with a sense of awe at that one fact more than just abo
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The interesting thing isn't the relativistic factors, it's the simple fact that a single supernova can continue to have a significant effect over the course of a thousand years.
topple (Score:5, Funny)
some of these reporters need to check their gravity
Cake. (Score:3, Funny)
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Just wait 1000 years and you'll see the dup!
Can someone smarter than me... (Score:3)
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Although light from the "nearby" supernova travels at the speed of light towards earth, the shockwave from matter of the supernova which potentially destroyed this formation travels slower (think like the supernova generated lightning and thunder). When the supernova blew, it sent light towards earth and a shockwave towards the "pillars" (at least this is what is suggested by the latest picture).
FWIW, the bbc has a better article on this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6246333. s [bbc.co.uk]
Babylon 5 cause... (Score:3, Insightful)
speed of light speed of pressure wave (Score:5, Insightful)
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The first link I got was Wikipedia which is as good a starting place as any.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_candle [wikipedia.org]
I was so intrigued by what I didn't know I did an Astronomy Masters with no intention of changing career (ie. a recreational degree).
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Re:Cool... hope it didn't cost too much (Score:4, Insightful)
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I would imagine people with AIDS would respectfully disagree with you.
The value is in knowing (Score:2)
The value is in knowing. The more we know about the universe, the more we can make use of it.
Your statement is a bit contradictory. You present your position as if it is opposed to the previous post, but when you argue that the value of knowledge is that we can eventually use it to save ourselves, you are practically saying the same thing as the post you are responding to - that the primary goal of our research and knowledge should accomplish practical objectives. In other words, the value is in the fruits of the knowledge, not in knowing itself. The time period of these objectives just differs.
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Re:Cool... hope it didn't cost too much (Score:5, Insightful)
But a hundred years ago, did anyone see the point in measuring our speed through the ether (which pretty much everyone accepted had to exist)? What would be the point? Just a waste of money.
Astronomical measurements are used to test basic theories of physics. The basic theories of physics are then used to create new and wonderful things. These things save lives and make us more comfortable. Just because we don't know what we'll end up using the information for doesn't mean we should stop searching for it.
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The names some people choose or don't choose to give chunks of matter in orbit around a star is of little importance to real science.
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Transistor-based computers, while they rely on quantum effects for their operation, perform calculations using large numbers of quanta (electrons) on a large (in quantum terms) scale. When we look at sufficiently large numbers of quanta on a large enough scale, we analyse the bulk properties as electricity. It's at that larger scale that computation happens in a microchip - they are electrical devices, with many electrons representing each bit. The term 'quantum computer' refers specifically to computers w
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Stop wasting money on religion! (Score:3, Insightful)
Physics and Astronomy help us understand the true nature of God (and she's not a vindicitive gay hating abortion clinic bombing fat old white bearded man, FYI). So why not spend at least as much money on Physics and Astronomy to understand the universe, instead of giving money to preachers, who just lie to you, then spend it on crystal meth, blow jobs from gay hustlers, political favors, molesting little kids, and paying off lawsuits for molesting little kids.
-Don
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Its electric universe BS. On the level of cold fusion and UFO conspiracy nuts.