Tuesday, May 24, 2005

As I write this I am watching the show _Alien Planet_ which recently aired on The Discovery Channel.

Talk about Science Fiction! Though they note it is in the future, it is shown with the same level of "this is the way things will be" that was used in the _Walking With Dinosaurs_ series they aired (from the BBC I believe) a while back. Here they make outrageous speculation, acknowledge it as such, and yet continue long.

It also presents Evolution (the particles to people kind) as a given. After all, if it happened here, it would happen many other places, right?

But even if you believe in Evolution, this program has many flaws. While the mission is claimed to have contingency plans, in the end it only has 3 landers/explorers, one of which is damaged on entry to the planet and another of which is killed while trying to communicate with an alien creature.

This is rather stupid. Would you go to all the expense and trouble to send a probe to another world and have only 3 landers? Of course not! You would have a bunch more, perhaps even hundreds. Also, the one probe is killed by something surprising it while it is trying to communicate, but is it realistic that a probe would drop all scanning to communicate with a single alien? Would it not continue to constantly scan for dangers in all other directions?

Another unrealistic access is that it seems very ludicrous that probes would be launched before a full scan of the planet was performed. With even modern photographic techniques (let alone those we would theoretically have in this future time) could discover a lot of things from the relative safety of space. This is especially true if it only had 3 probes, let alone if it had a lot more.

The show also emphasizes over and over that life now is the result of lots of accidents. As with most of modern science, it has no allowance that we are specially created, let alone specially created by a Creator who cares for us.

I don't even rate this as good science fiction. It is full of a lot of fantasy, much of it needlessly so. Instead of some balanced fantasy, they had to go off the deep end.

I see this as more attempts to prop up the modern mythology that we call Evolution. We have believed the incredulous, so we are willing to believe anything that is fed us from "experts". Are we really any different than the ancients, with their own elaborate myths and tales? Will we ever stop to realize that the truth is much more believable than all this fantasy - that a real God created everything and really cares about each of us? That is doubtful since doing so would require us to then be accountable to that God, and we can handle any level of fantasy as long as we don't need to be accountable!

Brad

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Lets get started again. :)

I am getting rather sick of hearing the Democrats talk about how the Republicans are going to stop open debate if they force a vote on judges as they are indicating they will do.

I would ask the Democrats, when has all this debate occurred? I am all for keeping the debate going, but make them debate! Make them stay there 24 hours a day until the debate is solved and things can be brought up for a vote.

An interesting thing to note, Republicans are too wimpy to pull something like this. Even if they found themselves in the minority again, they would almost certainly find themselves back in their old pattern of "go along to get along." While they may raise some issues, we have never seen strong principled conservatives, no matter how much the Democrats and other liberals claim we are just about to become a religious dictatorship. :)

As I think I have noted before, I have no great love for the Republicans, but the Democrats and their media pals annoy me so much I am finding myself much more in line with them (Republicans) than I would prefer.