The Tower of Babel: one of the seemingly sillier stories of the Bible. Our studies of the origin of language easily disprove it.
But the message behind this silly little story is so disturbing that it causes one to wonder what kind of mind could conceive it.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. Gen 11:6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Gen 11:7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
To the Biblical literalist, what kind of message must this convey? Even the Biblical literalist cannot believe that God was seriously worried about mankind reaching the heavens.
So it comes down to a story about human cooperation; about human potential. And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.
Can’t have that, now, can we?
So it portrays human cooperation, human imagination, human POTENTIAL, as evil. Correction: not as an evil…nothing about the story states or even implies that what the people were doing was evil. But rather, that God, for whatever reason, did not want humanity living up to it’s potential.
And going back to the snake story. God lied about the effects of the fruit, while the serpent told the truth. Again, the story is about God becoming mad that humanity might actually learn something.
Eden and Babel never happened, but the message behind each is clear enough. Learning, knowledge, cooperation, and the realization human potential, are bad things, and a direct affront to God.
The message, and the effect, are so coherent and so clear that it would seem an affront to reason to imagine that these messages were not intentional. If taken literally, one could only imagine an evil God, bent on keeping humanity ignorant and at odds with one another.
But if we assume, as evidence supports, that there is no God, what does this suggest about the writers of these passages?
The men who wrote these passages were the elite: the powerful. They wanted to keep the population weak so that they could more easily maintain their power. They knew that things like knowledge, and cooperation, and the effrontery to reach one’s potential would be a challenge to their power. So they sought to suppress it.
< sighs>
It would be hard to imagine, let alone create, something with a more vile message than the one conveyed in these stories. They maintain their power by portraying as evil the very things that would give humanity the ability the recognize them as such. They were created in an ignorant, fearful time by petty, selfish, and greedy people wishing to keep all of the knowledge and power for themselves.
And yet, this is the most revered book on the planet.
We who have managed to free ourselves from the petty suppressions of the book’s authors have a long, hard battle ahead of us.
“From law-violating subatomic particles to entirely new, earth-like worlds, 2011 was an incredible year for scientific discovery. In the past 12 months, scientific breakthroughs in fields ranging from archaeology to structural biochemistry have allowed humanity to rewrite history, and enabled us to open to brand new chapters in our development as a species.
Here are some of our favorites.”
“
The world’s lowest density material
With a density of less than one milligram per cubic centimeter (that’s about 1000 times less dense than water), thissurprisingly squishy material is so light-weight, it can rest on the seed heads of a dandelion, and is lighter than even the lowest-density aerogels. The secret — to both its negligible weight and its resiliency — is the material’s lattice-like structural organization, one that the researchers who created it liken to that of the Eiffel Tower.
“Feeling” objects with a brain implant
It could be the first step towards truly immersive virtual reality, one where you can actually feel the computer-generated world around you. An international team of neuroengineers has developed a brain-machine interface that’s bi-directional — that means you could soon use a brain implant not only to control a virtual hand, but to receive feedback that tricks your brain into “feeling” the texture of a virtual object.
Already demonstrated successfully in primates, the interface could soon allow humans to use next-generation prosthetic limbs (or even robotic exoskeletons) to actually feel objects in the real world.
Astronomers get their first good look at giant asteroid Vesta
In July of 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraftentered the orbit of Vesta — the second largest body in our solar system’s main asteroid belt. Just a few days later, Dawn spiraled down into orbit. Upon reaching an altitude of approximately 1700 miles, the spacecraft began snapping pictures of the protoplanet’s surface, revealing geophysical oddities like the triplet of craters on Vesta’s northern hemisphere — nicknamed “Snowman”— featured here. Dawn recently maneuvered into its closest orbit (at an altitude averaging just 130 miles). It will continue orbiting Vesta until July of 2012, when it will set a course for Ceres, the largest of the main belt asteroids.
NASA’s Kepler Mission changes how we see ourselves in the Universe
2011 was a fantastic year for NASA’s Kepler Mission, which is charged with discovering Earth-like planets in the so-called “habitable zone” of stars in the Milky Way. Kepler scientists announced the discovery of the first circumbinary planet (i.e. a planet with two suns, just like Tatooine); located the first two known Earth-sized exoplanets; quadrupled the number of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system; and spied Kepler-22b — the most Earth-like planet we’ve encountered yet. And here’s the really exciting bit: Kepler is just getting warmed up.
Heartbeat-powered nanogenerators could soon replace batteries
In a few years, you may never have to recharge your phone again — provided part of you keeps moving. Back in March,scientists announced the world’s first viable “nanogenerator” — a tiny computer chip that gets its power from body movements like snapping fingers or - eventually - your heartbeat.
The researchers can already use the technology to power a liquid crystal display and an LED, and claim that their technology could replace batteries for small devices like MP3 players and mobile phones within a few years.
Neuroscientists reconstruct the movies in your mind
Back in September, UC Berkeley neuroscientists demonstrated their ability to use advanced brain-imaging techniques to turn activity in the visual cortex of the human brain into digital images. So far, the researchers are only able to reconstruct neural equivalents of things people have already seen — but they’re confident that other applications — like tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching a video recording of your own dreams — are well within reach.
100,000-year-old art kit found in South Africa
Researchers investigating Blombos Cave in Cape Town, South Africa uncovered the oldest known evidence of painting by early humans. Archaeologists discovered two “kits,” for mixing and forming ocher — a reddish pigment believed to be used as a dye. The find pushes back the date by which humans were practicing complex art approximately 40,000 years, all the way back to 100,000 years ago.
Online gamers solve a decade-old HIV puzzle in three weeks
Foldit is a computer game that presents players with the spatial challenge of determining the three-dimensional structures of proteins, the molecules comprising the workforce that runs your entire body. In diseases like HIV, proteins known as retroviral proteases play a key role in a virus’s ability to overwhelm the immune system and proliferate throughout the body.
For years, scientists have been working to identify what these retroviral proteases look like, in order to develop drugs that target these enzymes and stymie the progression of deadly viral diseases like AIDS. It was a scientific puzzle that managed to confound top-tier research scientists for over a decade… but Foldit gamers were able to pull it off in just three weeks.
“The ingenuity of game players,” said biochemist Firas Khatib, “is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”
Ancient settlement upends our perception of human evolution
Tools discovered during an excavation in the United Arab Emirates were found to date back at least 100,000 years, indicating that our ancestors may have left Africa as early as 125,000 years ago. Genetic evidence has long suggested that modern humans did not leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago, but these tools appear to be the work of our ancestors and not other hominids like Neanderthals. That being said, our understanding of how and when humans really evolved continues to take shape…
Confirmed: Neanderthal DNA survives in Modern Humans
Some of the first hard genetic evidence that early Homo sapiens got busy with Homo neandertalensis actually came in 2010, but it was experimental findings published in July of 2011 that really drove the point home. But don’t worry — there’s still plenty of research to be done on everything from the details of human/neanderthal culture, to the enduring significance of Neanderthal genes in the modern human genome, to the mysterioushumanoids, Denisovans.
IBM unveils brain-like “neurosynaptic” chips
Back in February, IBM’s Watson made history by trouncing Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in an intimidating display of computer overlord-dom. But to compare Watson’s computing power to the complexity of a brain would still constitute a pretty epic oversimplification of what it means to “think” like a human, as the way each one processes information could not be more different.
Watson is impressive, to be sure, but in August, IBM researchers brought out the big guns: a revolutionary new chip design that, for the first time, actually mimics the functioning of a human brain.
NASA launches the most advanced Martian rover in history
Currently in transit to the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory — aka theCuriosity rover — was launched on November 26th. The rover is scheduled to touch down on Mars inside the mysterious Gale crater in August of 2012. Once it’s made landfall, Curiosity will make use of one of the most advanced scientific payloads we’ve ever put in space to assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support life — a mission that could redefine the way we think about life in our solar system and beyond.
A device that lets you see through walls
Radar systems that can see through walls (aka “wall-through” radar systems) aren’t unheard of, it’s just that most of them are burdened by limitations (like a prohibitively low frame rate, or a short range of operation) — that make their use in real world settings pretty impractical. But that could soon change in a big way. The team of MIT researchers featured in this video has developed a device that can provide its operators with real-time video of what’s going on behind an eight-inch-thick concrete wall — and it can do it from up to 60 feet away.
Electronics and biometric sensors that you wear like a temporary tattoo
Engineers John Rogers and Todd Coleman say that their epidermal electronic system (EES) — a skin-mountable, electronic circuit that stretches, flexes, and twists with the motion of your body — represents a huge step towards eroding the distinction between hard, chip-based machines and soft, biological humans.
Culling senescent cells postpones age-related disease in mice
In the latest effort to make mice immortal, researchers revealed that flushing out so-called senescent (aka old and defunct) cells from the bodies of mice genetically modified to die of heart disease extended the health span of the mice significantly. If you can imagine taking a pill that could stave off the effects of age related disease, then you can appreciate why science and industry alike have demonstrated considerable interest in these and other age-related findings. [Photo by Jan M. Van Deursen Via NYT]
Scientists engineer highly virulent strains of bird flu
Two independent teams of researchers recently engineered highly virulent strains of H5N1, more commonly known as the avian flu virus. On one hand, the researchers’ work is absolutely vital, because it allows us to get a head start, so to speak, on understanding viruses that could one day pose a serious risk to public health. On the other hand, there are many who fear that findings from such research could be used to malevolent ends were they to wind up in the wrong hands. Included in the latter camp is the federal government, which went to unprecedented ends to make sure that the experimental methods behind creating the strains never made it to the pages of either Nature or Science.
Regardless of your position, the development of these strains raises important questions about the nature of dual-use research, transparency, and censorship.
The hunt for the Higgs boson nears its conclusion
It’s been a long, long time coming, but earlier this month, representatives from the Large Hadron Collider’s two largest experiments — ATLAS and CMS —announced that both research teams had independently uncovered signals that point to the appearance of the Higgs boson — the long-sought sub-atomic particle thought to endow all other particles with mass. “Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012,” explained ATLAS’s Fabiola Gianotti. If the puzzle is resolved with the discovery of the Higgs, it will represent one of the greatest unifying discoveries in the history of physics.
Of course, the most rigorous, telling, and important tests will come in the form of cross-checks performed by independent research teams, the results of which will not be available until next year at the earliest. And while many scientists aren’t holding their breath, the confirmation of FTL neutrinos could very well signal one of the biggest scientific paradigm shifts in history. “
I remember when my parents encouraged me not to put my trust in any single part of Creation, but only in the Creator himself. This was their basis for rejecting astrology, power beads, and other “magical” items and concepts. Ouija boards and the occasional seance at a sleepover made them jittery,…
Call it a cosmic scene investigation. A team of astronomer sleuths has identified the trigger for a powerful supernova that exploded four centuries ago, finding it to be the collision of two white dwarf stars.
The discovery settles decades of questions over the origin of so-called Type 1a supernovas, researchers said.
Astronomers have long suspected that two stars were responsible for the explosion, with one being a white dwarf — a compact, dying star. But scientists weren’t sure if both culprits were white dwarf stars that crashed, or consisted of one white dwarf that siphoned off material from a regular companion star. Both scenarios could cause the supernova.
But some of that doubt has been laid to rest. Astronomers Bradley Schaefer and graduate student Ashley Pagnotta, both of Louisiana State University, used a Hubble Space Telescope photo of the supernova SNR 0509-67.5 as a critical clue to determine that two white dwarf stars collaborated to set off the star explosion.
The next time you see the face of jesus or a favorite character on an inanimate object or mother nature in general you might want to attribute it to something other than the supernatural.. try the brain.
Our brains are made to find faces. In fact, they’re so good at picking out human-like mugs we sometimes see them in a jumble of rocks, a bilious cloud of volcanic ash or some craters on the Moon.
But another amazing thing about our brain is that we’re never actually fooled into thinking it’s a real person looking back at us. We might do a second take, but most normal brains can tell the difference between a man and the Moon.
Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to investigate how the brain decides exactly what is and is not a face. Earlier studies have shown that the fusiform gyrus, located on the brain’s underside, responds to face-like shapes — but how does it sort flesh from rock?
Pawan Sinha, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and students created a procession of images ranging from those that look nothing like faces to genuine faces. For the ones in the middle — structures, formations, smudges and shapes that give us a pareidolic reaction that causes us to see a face — they used photographs that machine vision systems had falsely tagged as faces.
By doing a series of one-to-one comparisons, the human observers rated how face-like each of the images were. And while the subjects sorted out the photographs, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan their brains and look for activity.
The neuroscientists found different activity patterns on each side of the brain. On the left, the activity patterns changed very gradually as images became more like faces and there was no clear distinction between faces and non-faces. The left side would flare if someone was looking at a human or an eerily face-like formation of rocks.
The plaque was placed on board of the 1972 Pioneer 10 and the 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft. It features a pictorial message in the event of contact with extraterrestrial life.
A bunch of feminists got pissed off at it because the guy has his hand up, which apparently symbolizes dominance.
She’s in a passive pose and he’s in an active pose. I’d say it’s legitimate and there are probably other problems with it as well.
I ran across an explanation for this in Carl Sagan’s “Dragons of Eden:”
“The upraised and open right hand is sometimes described as a ‘universal’ symbol of good will. It at least runs the gamut from Praetorian Guards to Sioux scouts. Since those wielding weapons are, in human history, characteristically male, it should be and is a characteristically male greeting. For these reasons, among others, the plaque aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft - the first artifact of mankind to leave the solar system - included a drawing of a naked man and woman, the man’s hand raised, palm out, in greeting. In The Cosmic Connection I describe the humans on the plaque as the most obscure part of the message. Nevertheless, I wonder. Could the significance of the man’s gesture be deduced by beings with very different biologies?”
That is, the upraised hand represents not, “Bow down bitch,” but, “We come in peace.” People have their panties in a wad too often over merely POSSIBLE meanings of things. Perhaps Carl Sagan should have anticipated how the feminists would react and given the woman a similar gesture, but he didn’t, and I highly doubt that he and the Pioneer team had any misogynistic intentions.
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — and ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again.
Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous - not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful…
The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
It’s curious how some people can’t believe what the major scientific organizations in the world say about something, but then they are willing to trust a chart put together by some guy with a website, or what politicians say (they are, we all know, the people you can trust more).
