Voyage to Atlantis

You may be absolutely correct.
I thought my OP was interesting because the geographical features and other aspects matched so closely Plato's accounts.

So, I conclude it's POSSIBLE Atlantis actually existed.

Why would that be a good thing?

Hope. Hope for our modern generation.

Civilizations have fallen, resulting as the dark ages after Romes fall.
But, civilization arose again.

Are we currently headed for appocalypse?
I hope not, but if you read the signs pessimistically...?

I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist.

i'm a realist.

That means, I hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.

Proof of ancient existence of Atlantis, would be akin to SETI discovering an alien civilization in the depths of interstellar space.

The impetus for the SETI program, was young Carl Sagans formula that included as the ultimate variable (unknown), "How many civilizations SURVIVED the knowledge, the capability of atomic self destruction".
The governments thought that answer would be very comforting, if there were ANY! Radio telescopes resulted and the SETI program.

 

The story of Atlantis unsettles me, to the extent that it leaves open the possibility that real estate is not an entirely sound investment !

 

Ahhh! I thought better of you, than that you'd fall into the tactic of insulting my inteligence.

I'm NOT attacking the underpinnings of science. I'm attacking BAD science, and our text books are FULL of bad science.

Why?

Because of the ideology of those who SELECTED the textbooks. the infallible, all knowing schoolboards!

You claim to be liberal. Most liberals claim that being liberal means "free" thinker, or open minded.

I'm not liberal, because I think liberal means entirely something else in politics.

But I read a lot. I think a lot. My range of interests is large.

and i take NOTHING for granted!



And I understand scientific principle.
And where theories IGNORE scientific principle.
I'm surprised you can't find examples of 'bad' science for yourself.

I don't percieve you as unthinking or unprincipled.

So I'll ask. Do you think everything called science DESERVES to be called science?

 

The recent housing collapse and economic disater we are still in the middle of, should calm your fears.


I sold my home in the US and bought a boat (two boats).
a boat can be stored in a secure area with guards. Relatively cheaply.
No property tax or insurance or vulnerability to flooding.
Maintenance less than a house. And while NEW boats lose value, older ones HOLD value. Many older boats carry price tags greater than their original purchase price.

 

It isn't a matter of your intelligence; it's the fact that you're misusing and abusing it in support of nonsensical notions.

Notions like the one that Evolution and the Big Bang theory are only in textbooks because somehow every school board in the country (and presumably worldwide?) has been infected by the same false ideology, rather than because the textbooks happen to reflect current scientific thinking.

No, I don't believe everything that gets called science is really science. The clearest example I can think of is the attempt by creationists to rebrand their religious beliefs as science, and sneak them into classrooms as the 'theory' of intelligent design.

 

so you believe in scientific principle? In scientific method?

Is science in order to BE science, held to these standards?

 

Of course. If you have a point to make, make it. I can't spend the rest of the night in Socratic dialogue; I have work to do.

 

http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~mmalacho/S...ficMethod.html

Good Science versus Bad Science
Qualities of good science:

Not based on authority
Testable
Repeatable
Universal
Measurable (Tangible)
Observable
Narrow (Occam's razor)/Simple


Okay.

Using the above requirements:

Anybody observe the Big Bang?

Anybody duplicated (repeated) it?

Anybody tested it?

Can anybody explain how it could happen, if you can't create or destroy energy (1st law thermodynamics)? Can't explain it, and CERTAINLY not simply.


Apply the same questions to gas clouds congealing into suns and planets.

Apply these same criteria to evolution. I don't mean variation. I mean a species evolving into a different more complicated species.

Are these theories scientific?

How CAN they be, if they don't adhere to scientific principle!

We could add AGW to these as well.

 

It's misleading to claim the big bang theory isn't scientific simply because no one was around to see it. I'm going to quote Wikipedia, to save some time...

The Big Bang is the scientific theory that is most consistent with observations of the past and present states of the universe, and it is widely accepted within the scientific community. It offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background, large scale structure, and the Hubble diagram.[12] The core ideas of the Big Bang—the expansion, the early hot state, the formation of light elements, and the formation of galaxies—are derived from these and other observations.

In other words, scientists have observed enough phenomena to back up the theory, even though they weren't there at the time. It's like seeing skid marks on a highway, a broken guard rail, and a car at the bottom of a ravine: you've observed enough to indicate that someone most likely ran off the road, even though you didn't watch them do it.

Your claim that science requires direct, real-time observation of an event is simply incorrect. In fact, I think your whole list of requirements is misleading, or at least your interpretation of it is. I don't have time to get into any more of this tonight; things to do. But I'll look at it after work.

By the way: as far as I know, no one claims energy was created or destroyed during the big bang. What they say is that energy was converted into matter - which is something entirely different.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/hubble_UDF.html

"Hubble takes us to within a stone's throw of the big bang itself," says Massimo Stiavelli of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field project lead. The combination of ACS and NICMOS images will be used to search for galaxies that existed between 400 and 800 million years (ranging from redshift 7 to 12) after the big bang. A key question for astronomers is whether the universe appears to be the same at this very early time as it did when the cosmos was between 1 and 2 billion years old."


Why would this be a KEY question?

Maybe because these galaxies look MATURE? Soon after the "Big Bang"?


Maybe some crawfishing about to happen?

The argument that it's alright to abandon scientific method, because the circumstances don't allow it (time), and excuse it as "the best we can do", doesn't fly.

I wouldn't hire a plumber, or carpenter, or mechanic to perform surgery on my body, no matter HOW complete a tool kit they owned or how adept they were.

Some professions don't have the RIGHT tools to do certain jobs.

Science isn't equipped to look into things too immense for experimentation, repeatability, observation, testing.

So why do scientists think they CAN or SHOULD theorize on such topics,( ignoring curiosity)?

Ideology.

 

Good Luck!

 

I have TWO boats, in separate storage 100s of miles apart, but towable, so that they can be joined in just a few hours travel over good highways.

Good Luck is not nearly so often serendipity, as MADE, using ones intelligence to be prepared!
Now if disaster befell BOTH boats simultaneously, that would indeed be VERY bad luck, and a rare coincidence I couldn't easily explain!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould

Stephen J Gould
Professor at Harvard University and curator of its Museum of Comparative Zoology, Gould attended Antioch College, then returned to Manhattan, for graduate work in paleontology at Columbia University. For his doctoral thesis he investigated variation and evolution in an obscure Burmudian land snail, anchoring his later theorizing in intense scrutiny of a single group of organisms, as Darwin had done with Barnacles.
He appeared before Congressional committees on environmental issues, was a courtroom witness in the Arkansas Scopes II trial regarding teaching of evolution in the public schools and is prominent in speaking out against pseudo-scientific racism and biological determinism. But even one of his most adamant detractors, Robert Wright, while recently attacking one of his books in the pages of The New Republic, grudgingly began his diatribe: "The acclaim for Stephen Jay Gould is just shy of being universal . . . He is, after all, America's evolutionist laureate."

So from Stephen J Gould's writings, I gleaned THESE gems of wisdom:



"No myth deserves a more emphatic death than the idea that science is an inherently impartial and objective enterprise...
Yet it continues to thrive among working scientist because it serves us so well..."


— Science in the Twentieth Century published 1978, p.344



"Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny—and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do)."

— "Capturing the Center," Natural History 107 (December 1998): 18.



“Skepticism or debunking often receives the bad rap reserved for activities—like garbage disposal—that absolutely must be done for a safe and sane life, but seem either unglamorous or unworthy of overt celebration. Yet the activity has a noble tradition, from the Greek coinage of ‘skeptic’ (a word meaning ‘thoughtful’) to Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World. […] Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism—and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.[…] Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so […].Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency—the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.”

— "Forward," In Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, NY: Freeman & Company, 1997, pp. ix-xii.

 

If you live near New Orleans and the 'bone yard' receiving these boats, you can get some great fiberglass, like hatch covers, cockpit seats, engine boxes, umm the raised surround steering station on top of cabin, (name of part temporarily eludes me), ect
Flying bridge?

Disaster for some can be 'good luck' for a one off boat builder.

 

Good serendipity!