Satellites Expose 8,000 Years of Civilization 138
ananyo writes "By combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern multispectral images and digital maps of Earth's surface, researchers have created a new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human settlement. The approach was used to map some 14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometres of northeastern Syria — part of the fertile crescent of the Middle East. Traditional archaeology has focused on the big features such as cities or palaces but the new technique uncovers networks of small settlements, revealing migration patterns and sparking renewed speculation about the importance of water to city development."
Wilkinson & Ur (Score:4, Informative)
Wilkinson & Ur, the ones behind the project, have been doing this for at least 10 years. Check out the CAMEL project on the Oriental institute of the university of Chicago
More such projects are needed ! (Score:2)
Human civilizations started in several areas on planet Earth
North Eastern Syria is one of them
The Indus River area (India) is another. Other places include the Yang Tze Jiang delta (China), Nile delta (Egypt) and even some ancient civlizations in the Americas
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Speculation? (Score:2)
Do we need to speculate that human settlements need water?
This sounds like it should be fairly obvious ... you need water for people, livestock, plants ...
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Where's the fun in that? ;-)
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Exactly. Human settlements need easy access to water. This is why the first cities were founded near rivers (ala the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley). This should be very obvious to all. And even if it wasn't, I think we had this covered in 3rd grade.
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Again, RTFA; the answer apparently isn't as simple as you think.
Only 8000? (Score:4, Informative)
The Barada river area has been settled for at least 11,000, Jericho for at least 11,000, Byblos for at least 9,000.
Did you know (Score:1)
Humans already caused climate change once. Specifically the huns with Genghis Khan burning down forests all over Asia and Europe. He not only left a trace in our DNA by having many "wifes" making a fair share of Eurasians descendents of him, he also had a measurable impact on the climate on that time.
Wicked! Some [current.com] src [mnn.com] for claims [wikipedia.org].
Re:Did you know (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Did you know (Score:4, Informative)
The reality of the Mayan collapse was based on the confluence of population growth and soil depletion. The Mayans never developed crop rotation, so while their society grew their crop yields shrank, and everything collapsed.
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The Mayans were probably not having a significant impact on their own weather
Or, y'know, they were.
(I smell some green cultist with an agenda).
Or, y'know, scientists.
The reality of the Mayan collapse was based on the confluence of population growth and soil depletion.
Or, y'know, not that. [theatlantic.com] YMMV.
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Also, I am very annoyed that you snookered me into looking at a really long article that had nothing to do with the Mayan collapse on the pretense that it was relevant. Hey, I know, how about some real scholarly work that is, y'know actually relevant? [pnas.org]
Here's a relevant bit for people who won't RTFA:
However, analysis of Puuc soils and apparent cropping system indicates that maximal yields would likely have been sustainable for only about 75 y, with significant declines in fertility and yields certainly setting in after about 100 y (74). This duration is coincident with the apogee of most Terminal Classic Puuc centers (ca. 770â"870 CE).
Now scurry off back into whatever hole o
only 8000 years? (Score:2)
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Please don't give them more blocks to prop up their religion, we need religion like we need a hole in the head.
Religion has killed more people than drugs so I keep waiting for the U.S. to declare war on it. (I can only hope.)
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*Laugh* Seriously but no, it's not an arbitary few thousand years. They're insisting that it's less than 6,000 years because of a literal reading of genealogies leading back to Adam and Eve while being illiterate in ancient Hebrew culture and numerology, and there's an obsession in christian circles with a 7,000 year cycle with a sabbath millenium at the end.
They're just trying really hard to live in another world and damn the physics.
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7000-year cycle? As a Christian that thinks there is more to YEC than most people (who haven't read any of it) believe, I've never once in all my travels heard of a 7000-year-cycle.
In any event, the 8000 sounds a lot closer to the 6000 year YEC position than the evolution perspective (100,000? or is it 2,000,000 now?, it changes so frequently and everyone disagrees so much I can't keep track).
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They disagree because they disagree on how to define "the first human".
Two million years ago sounds about right for the "divergence of the Homo genus from the Australopithecus genus" definition. 100,000 years is about right for the "final divergence of Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis" and "anatomically modern human" definitions. There's also the "minimum cranial v
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7000-year cycle? As a Christian that thinks there is more to YEC than most people (who haven't read any of it) believe, I've never once in all my travels heard of a 7000-year-cycle.
Some millenialists think history mimics the week, with one day = 1000 years. The seventh day is the end-times, when Satan is given dominion over the earth for 1000 years.
Conveniently, when coupled with Bishop Ussher's chronology, that means that the end times are going to start any day now.
But if you're going to go all numerological on your religion, why not go with a clever observation about the zodiacal ages: We've spent the last 2000 years in the Age of Pices - and the fish is a symbol of the Christian
The shame of it is (Score:2)
Or just a few decades (Score:5, Interesting)
I once used the satellite view of Google Maps to look for old train tracks that have been torn up and gone for decades. It's actually pretty interesting. If you go out and visit spots where the tracks used to be, you can't see anything out of the ordinary. But a satellite shot clearly shows the "scars" of where the tracks used to be. Where they cut through forests, the trees are a little shorter. The soil in farm fields is colored differently. Roads bend to intersect the track at a right angle, things like that.
Here's a good example [g.co] in Washtenaw county. You can see the "ghost tracks" going southwest/northeast. If you follow them northeast, you'll see that a new subdivision was built on an area of land that they used to cut through. Curiously, the developers built no houses where the tracks were. Instead, they added footpaths, gave some houses larger backyards, and left "gaps" where houses could have been built. (I'd love to know why this was done. Any developers in the audience?)
You can follow the tracks southwest as well, but eventually you get to a region where the images were taken with a different satellite at a different time of year and the loss of contrast makes the tracks impossible to follow any further.
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There were probably ownership issues with the former track land.
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Property lines still intact.
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I do the same thing follow old rail line.
Been using it to keep track of the last remaining Wooden Trestles a long a 100+ year old line here in the Western part of NC.
https://picasaweb.google.com/104509350788295110986/TripleCRailRoad [google.com]
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Utility lines perhaps, or the railroad still technically owns the right of way.
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It's a buried pipeline, not a "ghost track".
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Many times the old roadbed is perfect for trails, such as the W&OD trail or the Capital Crescent Trail. Others get repurposed as roads, like Old Dominion Drive.
Re:Or just a few decades (Score:4, Interesting)
That particular run goes reasonably close to my house. The totally apocryphal explanation for those "tracks" was that Norfolk Southern, or whatever the iteration of the railroad was named at the time the development was planned, bought the rights to that land with the plan of bridging Ford Lake (why they would I have no idea. That'd be an expensive bridge at that point) and connecting to the auto plants (at the time GM Hydramatic and GM Willow Run Assembly), the Airport (Willow Run, with the idea of being a sort of intermodal hub) and the NS line just north of the airport that runs East - West.
In the end they backed out on cost and opted to serve both plants from the East - West line, even though it necessitated a longer trip to connect. (Incidentally, Amtrak will eventually own that stretch of line all the way from K-zoo to Detroit, adding to their longest continuous track track section outside of the Northeast corridor.) That ghost trail was also part of the line that crossed US-23. Not under, crossed. A two lane divided highway that at one point had a live rail crossing.
Interestingly, the http://www.historicaerials.com/ [historicaerials.com] images don't show the 'ghost' trail until 1963. The 1955 images don't show anything. NS also owns property much closer to bridge road (take Textile west from Bridge, look to the right. You'll see a large section of land with NS branded 'no trespassing' signs).
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It looks like a gas line to me. Following the tracks (southwest?) I found a utility building, pipes, and valves right over the footprint of the line
https://maps.google.com/?ll=42.092699,-83.702388&spn=0.000843,0.001234&t=h&z=20
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Re:Or just a few decades (Score:4, Informative)
In fact go north to the subdivision where they haven't built over the trail. And use street view on E Bemis Road right where the trail crosses into the subdivision. If you look to the north you can plainly see the Pipeline warning poles, placed next to the road on to either side of the trail. There are also such poles on the south side of the road but they don't stand out quite as clearly. It's a pipeline not a railroad track.
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Could be both. Railroad tracks are notoriously convenient for running infrastructure under. No need to dig up a street or risk somebody building over it.
A lot of fiber is run under tracks.
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Ah! That makes far more sense than my ghost train tracks story. I guess I was thrown off by how "wide" the scar appears to be in some places.
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Beer (Score:1, Insightful)
You can't make beer without water.
Civilization in America (Score:2)
Who knows... within a few thousand years we might have civilization here in North America too.
Re:doh! (Score:5, Funny)
How are young earthers going to explain this one?
Eight millennia - that's six since creation, and two more into the future.
Re:doh! (Score:5, Funny)
Look guys, stop messin with my friends. Here's proof:
[root@earth-sim173-265 ~]# uptime
12:17:09 up 2,210,805 days, 20:27, 7,029,298,112 users, load average: 0.90, 0.90, 0.95
[root@earth-sim173-265 ~]#
Now leave me alone, and get back to learning how to be humans/gods without killing each other and destroying the universe.
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7,029,298,112 users
Where are all the other animals and insects?! No wonder the whole simulation is going to shit ever since a human-only extrimist took over management!
Re:doh! (Score:4, Interesting)
The same way they explain all the other evidence for a 14 billion years old universe: by ignoring or misunderstanding it.
Right at the most simple: we can triangulate the distance to a star and determine that what we see is as old as the amount of time light takes to get here. If they deny this evidence they either fail basic math or refute relativity: the scientific theory with the best proof track record ever.
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The same way they explain all the other evidence for a 14 billion years old universe: by ignoring or misunderstanding it.
Right at the most simple: we can triangulate the distance to a star and determine that what we see is as old as the amount of time light takes to get here. If they deny this evidence they either fail basic math or refute relativity: the scientific theory with the best proof track record ever.
One creationist crank tries to explain this away by saying that the speed of light is infinite when it's headed toward you, and twice the real speed of light when it's headed away (presumably to conserve the overall travel time to a mirror and back).
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Re:doh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:doh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. God, being all powerful, could create all the evidence for an old universe. In fact, the universe could have been created a minute ago with all our memories and everything. Of course, that mean that God was a deceiver, and no different from Satan.
Really, it's all ridiculous bullshit, and if you don't get to children when they are young and vulnerable, you've got a much much harder time making someone believe it.
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What if an all-powerful, evil genius and implanted all senses, memory, and perception into your brain. How do you even know you are a 'self' and not a conglomerate of different input stimuli.
---- Someone better go read Rene Descartes....
Re:doh! (Score:5, Funny)
---- Someone better go read Rene Descartes....
That pedantic ol' windbag? I think not.
<POOF!> <crickets>
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My "self" is simply the current pattern of my thoughts. Regardless of what "hardware/wetware" they are running on, my thought patterns and memories are my "self". If some all-powerful entity could re-arrange the atoms in my brain (assuming that's what is really running things in here :-), and replace my thoughts and memories with Rene Descartes, _my_ "self" would cease to exist, and my friends and family would testify to that, though my outward appearance would be unchanged.
tree falls in the forest (Score:2)
And here I assumed nothing existed before I starting perceiving things...
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We are all figments of someone else's imagination.
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yes, mine.
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Could you please imagine Charlize Theron and Milla Jovovich coming to my house to have their way with me?
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I know we're moving off-topic, but another way to get people to believe it is by being awesome and beautiful. Many fundamentalists are beautiful and successful and kind, and when individuals whose life is not those things can believe that by joining, their lives will improve, they will believe the whole bit.
It's kind of like one of those South Park Mormon episodes.
Re:doh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that the Bible says that God is revealed through his creation as well. This would seem to indicate that God wouldn't make things appear to be a way they are not. (I say this as a Christian who does not believe that young Earth makes any sense. I could possibly see an argument being made that human's have only been around 6000 or so years (I don't personally believe this is necessary or accurate either, but I could at least see grounds for the argument (using the Bible, not science)).) Ultimately, those who claim the Bible says the Earth is only 6000 years old fail at both their own religion and science. The term translated as "day" more closely means age or period. Clearly, without a planet yet, you can't have a 24 hour day, so it doesn't even make sense to assume that the "days" referenced were literal.
Re:doh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that the Bible says that God is revealed through his creation as well. This would seem to indicate that God wouldn't make things appear to be a way they are not.
Yeah, it astonishes me that some creationists claim that God planted fossils to fool people.
And of course, would never consider that God could have written a book to fool people.
Strata (Score:2)
Terry Pratchett wrote a brilliant send-up of this, one of his early books -- "Strata". Hilarious. I've been on the lookout for news of a pocket watch in a coal seam ever since.
The Antikythera mechanism comes close ;-)
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Except that the Bible says that God is revealed through his creation as well. This would seem to indicate that God wouldn't make things appear to be a way they are not. (I say this as a Christian who does not believe that young Earth makes any sense. I could possibly see an argument being made that human's have only been around 6000 or so years (I don't personally believe this is necessary or accurate either, but I could at least see grounds for the argument (using the Bible, not science)).)
The evidence of humans dating past 6,000 years is just one more set of parentheses deep... Keep looking, i am sure you can find it!
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Perhaps my parens was confusing. I was pointing out that from a Biblical perspective, one could make an argument than mankind is only 6000 years old or so. You could also use it to point out that there is no problem with humanity being far far older. The context of my original comment was pointing out that there is effectively no way to use the actual way the Bible talks about creation of the world to indicate that the world itself is that young. I do not personally believe that people have only been ar
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It's entirely possible that some event happened around 6000 years ago that changed (all or some) of humanity. Perhaps there was a genetic change that made human minds more sensitive, or possibly even a Divine Intervention altering the souls of the then-existing naked apes. This event could have made people "More human".
I am not aware that any physical evidence has turned up to support this hypothesis. Yet.
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People started building communities; which was a fundamentalism change. It's also when you would start having a static oral history, and gain power from controlling people.
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Even easier to prove, Genesis 2:4 calls the whole creation process one "day".
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Re:doh! (Score:4, Funny)
"While I have been apostate for more than a decade"
Congratulations on your first decade of sanity.
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Creationists agree that starlight is billions of years old. They just believe the solar system, what with its young comets and all, is young. Answers in Genesis does a good job of bringing a lot of creationist articles together. And by the way, they don't refute relativity at all. Relativity's gravitational time dilation is one of the theories as to how the universe can be old while the earth is young.
You can see their articles on Astrophysics here. Don't be surprised to see that most believe in old sta
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That is what SOME creationist made up to compensate for there provably wrong belief.
Others have a different set of wackiness to excuse away there monumental flaws in their belief.
OTOH: I'm not sure why I'm responding to someone who clearly doesn't understand what Peter was talking about. Another person twisting poorly interpreted verse into their own bias.
Pathetic, really.
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refute relativity: the scientific theory with the best proof track record ever.
Eh? That'd be Quantum Mechanics.
I'm guessing that the Atomic Theory of Matter has a pretty good track record too.
Re:doh! (Score:4, Interesting)
How are young earthers going to explain this one?
There are all sorts of methods, some more creative and convincing than others(at the low end, if you and your target audience simply don't give a damn about this 'empiricism' nonsense and consider goddidit! to be a valid solution, things of any apparent age are no problem: an omnipotent entity wouldn't have any trouble magic-ing something that looks ten million years old into existence ten seconds ago...).
However, I have heard a number of stories from buddies who got into archaeology and did some fertile crescent digs; that there is an interesting demographic who has a real, visceral attack of this problem:
Your sharper breed of American christian fundamentalists, coming from an area where any evidence of human habitation is either a few hundred years old, max, or fairly subtle and 'radiocarbon dating/the flood/etc/etc. awayed' during their growing up decide that they want to do some biblical archaeology. So, off they go and they find themselves grubbing through masonry that just oozes OLD in a much more immediately dramatic way than some of the subtler isotopic dating results or other inferrential work does. Apparently some of them find it quite traumatic or transformative: The "This wall/building/house/whatever had already been standing for at least a few millenia at the point when God is supposed to have created the earth" thing is much more potent than the "Some scientists say that C14/C12 ratios in cave charcoal suggest timeline... yaddda, yadda..."
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I'll wager not too many YECs, I've seen a few that are probably legit (largely because they were clearly cribbing quotes from ICR and AIG literature). Definitely a few OECs and IDers have posted here.
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Yeah, I'll speak up as a very scientifically minded OEC who thinks the mechanisms of OEC were very likely the big bang and evolution. The order of events matches up closely and it's worth pointing out that the Bible doesn't say humanity was created separately, just Adam and Eve. In fact, it actually lends support to the theory that humanity existed either before or shortly after their creation and of independent lineage. (For those who aren't verst in Genesis, after Cain killed Able (Adam and Eve's sons)
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Other than invoking a strange variant of the Adam and Eve story, you sound more like a Theistic Evolutionist to me. Can't really swallow the whole "Adam and Eve were separate creations" bit, but then again, I can't buy the "Jesus rose from the grave after being dead for three days" bit either, so I see no point to get too uptight about it.
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Could be, my goal is to resolve my belief that Genesis is likely accurate if properly read and that scientific observations should also match up without convoluted reasoning. I do my best to try to resolve the two and it sometimes comes up with interesting conclusions that I don't know a whole lot of other people who hold, but thus far I have not found anything in way of scientific evidence that can not be incorporated to match a particular understanding of the description given in Genesis. The main area
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Hmm, that is actually very interesting. I'm not sure how it factors in to my views, but it doesn't seem to disagree any. Is there a particular reason that you don't think there could have been some type of flood, perhaps associated with a plate collision as that seems to be consistent with the description given. I have not had the opportunity to look in to the topic as much as I'd like yet, so I'm truly interested in any evidence either supporting or contradicting.
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1. Give up on the science that I can prove.
2. Give up on the religion that I believe.
3. Accept that science is how and the Bible is why.
There's a 4th that some suggest, that God created the Earth as in Genesis as we see it today. That millions of years of plate tectonics and erosion we see
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I think I may be even more out on a limb -- I'm not sure there was a one-off "Creation" of any type. I think the logical requirement for such a thing is undermined by an anthropomorphic bias, i.e. because we were born, everything has to have been born. The Big Bang, followed by the Heat Death of the Universe, seems like it could have been a cyclical phenomenon (being of a scientific bend, I'm happy to entertain any sort of refutation short of biblical authority-quoting). Local Big Bangs everywhere. The
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I get the feeling we're not necessarily all that different, though I'd challenge that there is an option you haven't considered. It is kind of close to your answer 3 because the Bible was never intended to be a guide to how things work. (My previous arguments agree with your conclusion about #4, which is just silly both scientifically and theologically.)
The point I would bring up is don't be too quick to dismiss the truth of the Bible as accurate. I think similarly in that if I absolutely can't find a re
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I've read the literature and seen the videos from the people who believe the word-for-word literal meaning of Genesis. It just doesn't align with science that we can touch and feel. So that limits the choices.
1. Give up on the science that I can prove.
2. Give up on the religion that I believe.
Sane people give up what the believe, when they can prove things that contradict it.
3. Accept that science is how and the Bible is why.
Except that there's not really a clean distinction between the two concepts. E.g., science tells us why the Earth is (approximately) spherical, and the Bible makes claims about how things happened. (Including things that didn't actually happen...)
There's a 4th that some suggest, that God created the Earth as in Genesis as we see it today. That millions of years of plate tectonics and erosion we see were just put there all at once for us.
Ah, yes. Omphalism: God created Adam and Eve with navals, even though they weren't born. Because, because, because... Well, it would actually have been a stupid thing for God t
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Sane people give up what the believe, when they can prove things that contradict it.
There are more forms of proof than scientific. They may not be scientifically rigorous, but it is incredibly arrogant to assume that just because you can't think of an answer that resolves conclusion A and conclusion B, that the two simply can not both be true. That isn't to say that a burden of proof that my beliefs are wrong couldn't be met, but I've had some very solid experiences to back my beliefs that I believe defy statistical likelihood. If you have an actual mathematical proof that God does not
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If all the ice-caps melted, there still would not be enough water to cover the entire surface.
Even if there were that much water... where did it all go?
Is there some drain somewhere that allowed it all to flow away?
Perhaps massive tsunamis could happen that might roll across the planet, but covering the Himalayas is a difficult task.
Localized flooding in any region has definitely happened, but a single flood that covered the entire planet seems a
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There is not enough water because of the fact we currently have mountains and large underwater trenches. At one point in history, the geography was considerably more flat since most of the trenches and mountains are the result of plate collisions. This is why time-scale and not nature of an event is the problem. There is more than enough water to cover the planet if the land masses were properly shaped at some point in the past.
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Studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest that the human race was narrowed down to just several or even one female at a point in our past, possibly around 180,000 years ago [wikipedia.org].
Uhm... that not what Mitochondrial Eve means. It means that everyone now living shares a common great^n grandmother. It says nothing at all about how many other women were alive at that time.
A genetic bottleneck down to a single female would of course make her the Mito Eve, but the converse is not true.
Same narrowing with males appears with the Y-chromosome. I believe the flood of Genesis is telling the story of one or more catastrophic events that nearly killed off the human race and caused the genetic narrowing we can observe today. So I think that "flood" is a metaphor for one of any number of things that could have happened over time.
There is a genetic bottleneck in human evolution, speculatively attributed to the Mt. Toba supereruption of ~70,000 years ago. But it's not nearly as tight as you would get by reducing the population to le
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Could be, my goal is to resolve my belief that Genesis is likely accurate if properly read and that scientific observations should also match up without convoluted reasoning. I do my best to try to resolve the two and it sometimes comes up with interesting conclusions that I don't know a whole lot of other people who hold, but thus far I have not found anything in way of scientific evidence that can not be incorporated to match a particular understanding of the description given in Genesis. The main area I still have issue resolving is the flood. My most likely explanation would be that for the flood to occur, it would have had to occur immediately prior to plate collisions driving up our current mountain ranges (when land mass would have been relatively flat and therefore there would have been enough water to actually cover the land), however the time scale we observe for the formation of mountains doesn't seem to gel nicely.
Also, not all mountain ranges were formed at the same time. Some are being formed today, others far, far in the past. I don't know if there has ever been a mountainless Earth, since the surface cooled enough to be solid.
Prior to that, there are a number of easy time-gaps that can be introduced (for example, man's days are not numbered prior to Genesis 3, so an alternate possibility would be some very very old people as society was developing).
FWIW, one time I worked through the numbers and came up with Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood. If my numbers were correct, it raises the question of whether he was supposed to have drowned in that flood.
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".. who thinks the mechanisms of OEC were very likely the big bang and evolution."
clearly not that scientifically minded. I suspect you don't actually know what science is. Like some three year old that thinks adding water to dirt is science.
Adam and eve are clearly an allegory. ITs trivially easy to see that, and interpretation up until a few 100 years ago agreed.
The KJV is a HORRIBLE interpretation. That becomes apparent to anyone who makes an attempt to read the myth in Hebrew.
It's about coming of age. i
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Though the Bible does pretty well on the "how" if you ask me:
"let there be light" = big bang
"streched out the heavens" = inflation, continued expansion of universe
land->vegetation->sea creatures->livestock->humans - order agrees with science so far.
How would you word it if you were explaining it to someone thousands of years ago?
P.S. Jesus on a moped is an amusing thought - just be careful who you mock!
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Except your forgetting that the sun was created after the vegetation in Genesis, and one has to do some artful footwork to make any of it actually coincide to science. This idea that it's just dumbed down cosmology, geology and biology doesn't really work, because the creative order is incorrect and why couldn't even a Bronze Age individual understand, when things were put in layman's terms, the gist of Big Bang cosmology and evolution?
To my mind, the Genesis story more owes its heritage to Sumero-Akkadian
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Where's the artful footwork? Do you not like the Bible's layman's terms?
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Because it isn't for laymen. I go out to the library and get a book on geology and planet formation for laymen, it isn't going to use obviously incorrect language to describe an event. It is going to say "the atmosphere was hazy and the sun was not visible until such-and-such-a-time". You know that I know that.
The Bible's terms, if I take your interpretation, are bad word choices. The sun existed before the planet, and green plants could not have lived in a hazy reducing atmosphere that blocked out a good c
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Likewise when Jesus is talking about vines and fruit, he isn't giving a horticulture lesson.
The Bible does not purport to be a geology book, for laymen or not, nor do I ascribe it to be such a book. I wouldn't expect a detailed description of the atmosphere as this would only obscure the point that God is behind everything being created. (please forgive my awful word play)
All I'm saying is when you're not picking apart the m
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Just to clarify here. From my old days on evolution newsgroups, OECs generally were considered to be people who believed in an old Earth, but believed humans were only a few thousand years old.
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How many young earthers reading Slashdot? Show of hands, please.
The problem is that you can't tell the true believers from the troll bedevilers. It's almost impossible for a troll to tip his hand by being too OTT, on this topic.
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My step-mother was a complete lunatic and religious fanatic who used to tell everyone that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by Satan to encourage disbelief and heretical interpretations of the Bible. Fun lady.
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FTFY.
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