Basically the Emperor, a human who was effectively immortal due to his psychic power constantly regenerating his cells, began to be considered a god because of a combination of lies from the chaos lords and because some of his followers simply couldn't reconcile his existence without him being divine. He constantly fought against it, telling them he was not a god.

Due to the chaos lords interference, a cult formed that would accept him as nothing less than a God. They fought a huge war and the Emperor was triumphant, but was so wounded that he was going to die. Unfortunately, his mind and psychic powers control FTL travel and some other stuff, so he had his people modify a 'throne' he had been creating to help him control the daily duties his mind performed easier. The modifications would keep his mind functional even as his body rotted and decayed.

The great irony is that he began to be worshiped anyway and his skull is the symbol of the imperium because it shows his willingness to sacrifice himself to 'protect' Mankind.

The effect of trillions of human beings expressing a deep faith in His divinity has massively empowered the Emperor's mind and soul. Whatever He may have been before the Horus Heresy, the Emperor now truly is a God within the Warp, equal in power to any one of the four major Chaos Gods, and very likely as powerful as all four of them combined, as He has become perhaps the strongest spiritual force for Order in the Milky Way Galaxy. His mind must claim the life energies of 1,000 human psychics a day to empower FTL and other functions of the imperium.

I have never even heard the term before a week ago, my aunt said I should check out "scientific pantheism", The page I read was that nature itself can provide spiritual nourishment, without any magic, superstition or deities. When we look at the milky way and our jaw drops in awe, that is a similar experience in the mind to "feeling a god". , that is what I took from it so far. "But we are not talking about supernatural powers or beings. We are saying this: We are part of nature. Nature made us and at our death we will be reabsorbed into nature. We are at home in nature and in our bodies. This is where we belong. This is the only place where we can find and make our paradise, not in some imaginary world on the other side of the grave." https://www.pantheism.net/beliefs/

I'll always remember Oroville, even though it was a long time ago that I last visited the place. Even though the town is pretty shite, it's the one place I remember being able to see the Milky Way with the naked eye; breathtaking, millions of stars. I counted 17 shooting stars that night, hanging out with two hot babes, drinking a bottle of stolen whiskey. It was also my one and only close encounter (so far) with a big fucking rattlesnake.

Your video, We are just a small part of this wonderful Milky Way Galaxy, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

It almost sounds like he is suggesting to keep an open mind and learn about other cultures, religions & mythology in order to understand those perspectives; and overall to be humble to the mystery: that we do not know.

In my opinion some of his opinions were a little contradictory - he doesn't believe in any sort of god or gods, but it seems that a wiser statement would be that he doesn't know, which would correspond with the "I don't believe in atheists" theme.

Furthermore, I honestly don't think that those who (in Hedges' words), "do not explore the religious impulse" are inhuman. Even if someone never explores it in their lifetime. In my opinion - the late bloomers who have disconnected themselves from all inclination of organized religion or spirituality, to find it on their own later in life might have a few more advantages than those that did not disconnect themselves from it at some point.

My personal preference is that I do believe in god because I want to believe in god. Whether it's a metaphor, completely abstract energy, a point in spacetime, a massive intelligent energy field that existed long before the big-bang, a life-force found only on Earth or the Milky Way or a fucking super mega alien technological consciousness program experiment or even a microscopic white dude flying on a microscopic magic carpet or all of the above and none of the above. I just believe even though my version of whatever creation/god is, is completely unidentifiable, it's everything and it's nothing.

I had a theory once. It had to do with multi verses. What if bodies of gravity, such as galaxies reacted and multiplied the effects of gravity on they're prospective planes. It would be as if several millions if not billions of Milky Ways were stacked up on each other. Sure there would be "infinite", but the idea is that a number of galaxies would have moved in a different direction or some particular Milky Way didn't form properly...

No. Not everyone thinks like a theist.

I have no idea whether life exists on other planets or not. I can theorise about the probability of it, but that's as far as I'm willing to commit.

As for the nonsense "roll a seven on a six sided die" argument... I really don't know if you're trolling or just genuinely have no understanding of logic, math, probability, statistics, etc.

Here's a hint: in order to create life, you don't need a seven. If you did you wouldn't be reading this. We exist, therefore by definition life in the universe is possible.

Now, I'm perfectly willing to grant that it might be extraordinarily improbable. The video tells us that the latest evidence is that there are around 20,000,000,000 sun size stars and probably about 4,000,000,000 earth like planets. Now, the video gives the odds of life on each one at 0.1% (and then somehow comes up with 1 million instead of 4 million, but I digress).

So we have 4 billion planets that might possibly have earth like life. But let's say that abiogenesis is really, really improbable. In fact, let's say, it's 1 in 4 billion. We've been testing out the various abiogenesis theories for a while now, but I doubt we've conducted anything like 4 billion separate experiments, so it's really no surprise that we haven't observed it.

But it might be even more unlikely. Maybe it's 1 in 400 billion! Seems pretty unlikely, but let's roll with it. There are still 200 billion galaxies out there. Even if only 1% of them are like the milky way that's still 8 billion billion potential life bearing planets. I don't think it's a stretch to say that some of them could have life.

You don't need a seven, but maybe you do need an edge, or a corner!

Do you understand the difference between what I think is probable based on observed facts and "taking something on faith"?

And as for god? Well, we know for certain that life exists, so it's not unreasonable to assume it might exist elsewhere. But we have zero empirical evidence for god. None, zip, zilch, nada. Does that mean god definitely doesn't exist? No, I can't prove that. Is it probable that god exists? No, it would violate everything we know about the universe. That doesn't mean we're not wrong, but you'd think that something as powerful as a literally omnipotent entity would leave some evidence of it's existence.

As Dawkins said when asked what he would say if he died and met god, "why did you go to such trouble to hide yourself?"

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

First....nice, nice.
Second. I get your point. They should have been more clear that they are intentionally ignoring any other forces, such as the force exerted by the objects on the planet and each other, and the pull of the observer, and the pull of the milky way, the sun, the moon, Venus, etc. Because those forces are completely inobservable, even with top notch equipment, it's simpler for most to not mention them at all. They have no bearing on what they're teaching, and the smart children who see farther into the details are smart enough to know what this experiment is designed to show, and what it ignores....or at least smart enough to ask the right questions, while the less science/math minded would only be confused by the mention of them while also ignoring them. it's not exactly the same thing as teaching that 5/0=0, when it's really infinity, the exact opposite of 0.

This experiment was about what's observable, not what's mathematically provable at the tiniest detail level. Those details are for higher level physics. I will agree, it's a disservice to not mention that clearly, but I think it's implied by the parameters and the intent (teaching that acceleration due to gravity is independent of mass).
EDIT: Also, please remember that for all intents and purposes, they are releasing the objects from the same point, so they still 'hit' at 'exactly' the same time because their forces are in line, off by what, perhaps <.0000000001deg?. As you said, all solved by equivocating 'exactly' to 'nearly exactly' or 'approximately the same' or even 'observably exactly the same time'.

It's named after one of the ranks you could achieve in the original game, but I agree - "Elite: Dangerous" does sound like a 6-year-old boy named it.

I'm hyped about both this and Star Citizen, but this is due out *way* ahead of SC and the physics look more interesting.

Set in a 1:1 scale, scientifically-accurate (as far as possible) milky way? Near-Newtonian physics? I'm nursing a semi.

As a kid, I was really into astronomy, but was always bugged by the fact that books would talk about seeing the Milky Way at night, and about the thousands of stars in the night sky. I figured there was something wrong with my eyes or something, because I could never find the Milky Way, and while I never counted the stars, I thought there were only about a hundred at best.

Then when I was about 12, we went camping and on a night with a new moon, I went outside the tent after dark. I looked up at the sky and literally got dizzy at the stunning revelation that was the real night sky.

Nowadays, I always try to plan family camping trips around the new moon so my kids get a chance to see the real sky, but even out in the middle of nowhere it is getting increasingly difficult to find a spot without at least one glaring streetlight or security light.

Took my nephew to Cherry Springs in Pennsylvania - darkest spot in PA. He didn't even know you could see the milky way and was out of his mind. I was too really.

The Voyager 1 did indeed left our solar star system. But it's still within the Milky Way Galaxy that our teeny weeny solar system is a part of.

It's about the same number as the number of atoms in the Milky Way. Mindbogglingly huge.

The wedges you see in the zoomed out view of the cosmos are a shadow of the milky way galaxy spiral arms, these dark areas are the places we cannot see because our own galaxy obscures the view.

Everywhere else that we have mapped is looking out perpendicular to the plane of the milky ways spiral arms.