Your video, Carl Sagan's View On Science, Technology and the Government, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Clarkium (after Arthur C. Clarke)
Saganium (after Carl Sagan)

Neil deGrasse Tyson has truly inherited Carl Sagan's legacy. I have never been more excited to see anything else in my life!

The Carl Sagan guy was spot on with the voice.

'Carl Sagan' looked far moore like Alan Partridge, but I applaud the concept

As the late and brilliant Carl Sagan would have said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence "Bang 'em out!"

Carl Sagan's Cosmic Trip's Comic Strip.

Plain and true. I love you, Carl Sagan.

Your video, Carl Sagan - The Story of Everything, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 2 Badge!

"At one point in time, space travel only existed in science fiction, but with time and hard work, it eventually became a reality. In present day America, it seems impossible that we will ever rid our country of it's primitive, backwards, sociopathic gun culture, but just as sure as we evolved to be capable of space travel, we will also, one day, gain the wisdom to evolve past our current violent pupal stage.

Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.... but one day.

I know these words might come as an insult to those unable to dream of a better world, or for those who cling to the status quo like a piss stained security blanket woven of rotten flesh and broken bones, but there have always been people whom insist that the world is flat, the center of the universe and mounted on the back of a great turtle.

Evolution is not easy, but evolve we must. If we are ever to have any hope of co-habitating on this tiny pale blue dot, it is the only path forward."

-Carl Sagan

(just kidding... kinda... but not really)

Its not a dilemma for me, I know exactly as much as you, or anybody else do about god: Nothing.

All you can say here is that you don't know anything about God. If you don't know anything about God, then how can you know what anyone else knows about God?

Remember, I'm not the one who believes in imaginary things.

You seem to state here that your assumption that God is imaginary is a fact, which is just the same as merely imagining something is true.

The fact that people like you THINK you can no something and comfortably believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence, is first and foremost YOUR problem.

There are good reasons as to why someone could believe in a God, but I wouldn't believe in a God based on those reasons alone. I believe in God because of personal revelation. The scripture says that this is the way that God reveals Himself to everyone. My question to you is, could God reveal Himself in such a way to you that you could be certain that He is?

When it comes to grounds for making knowledge claims, well, in my view knowledge, like the universe and life itself, is a bottoms up thing, we start at zero, and then build gradually on sound arguments and evidence. Like Carl Sagan once put it: "science is a candle in the dark" and that candle is shining ever brighter. Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and now we can stand on Newtons shoulders and see even farther.

My question to you here is, how do you ever get past zero? The ground of the sound arguments and evidence that you're perceiving is your own reasoning power. How do you justify your reasoning as being sound without using circular reasoning?

I answer the question about whether there is a god in exactly the same way as I would about santa clause. I'm pretty sure, based on the aforementioned hard-earned knowledge we do have, combined with the fact that we have NO information suggesting there might be one, that there isnt one. But at the same time I recognize that we cannot be absolutely certain. I do regard it as a fact as good as any that there is no god.

There isn't a good reason to believe Santa Claus exists but there are good reasons to believe that the Universe was created by an all powerful being. The idea of God has explanatory power. The very question of whether the Universe has an intelligent causation is a rational question. My question to you is, how would you tell the difference as to whether the Universe was or wasn't designed? How could you tell which Universe you lived in?

Its not a dilemma for me, I know exactly as much as you, or anybody else do about god: Nothing.

Remember, I'm not the one who believes in imaginary things.

The fact that people like you THINK you can no something and comfortably believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence, is first and foremost YOUR problem.

When it comes to grounds for making knowledge claims, well, in my view knowledge, like the universe and life itself, is a bottoms up thing, we start at zero, and then build gradually on sound arguments and evidence. Like Carl Sagan once put it: "science is a candle in the dark" and that candle is shining ever brighter. Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and now we can stand on Newtons shoulders and see even farther.

I answer the question about whether there is a god in exactly the same way as I would about santa clause. I'm pretty sure, based on the aforementioned hard-earned knowledge we do have, combined with the fact that we have NO information suggesting there might be one, that there isnt one. But at the same time I recognize that we cannot be absolutely certain. I do regard it as a fact as good as any that there is no god.

http://videosift.com/video/Carl-Sagan-s-Pale-Blue-Dot-with-new-video

In 1981, Frank Tipler[3] put forth an argument that extraterrestrial intelligences do not exist, based on the absence of von Neumann probes. Given even a moderate rate of replication and the history of the galaxy, such probes should already be common throughout space and thus, we should have already encountered them. Because we have not, this shows that extraterrestrial intelligences do not exist. This is thus a resolution to the Fermi paradox—that is, the question of why we have not already encountered extraterrestrial intelligence if it is common throughout the universe.

A response[4] came from Carl Sagan and William Newman. Now known as Sagan's Response, it pointed out that in fact Tipler had underestimated the rate of replication, and that von Neumann probes should have already started to consume most of the mass in the galaxy. Any intelligent race would therefore, Sagan and Newman reasoned, not design von Neumann probes in the first place, and would try to destroy any von Neumann probes found as soon as they were detected. As Robert Freitas[5] has pointed out the assumed capacity of von Neumann probes described by both sides of the debate are unlikely in reality, and more modestly reproducing systems are unlikely to be observable in their effects on our Solar System or the Galaxy as a whole.

Another objection to the prevalence of von Neumann probes is that civilizations of the type that could potentially create such devices may have inherently short lifetimes, and self-destruct before so advanced a stage is reached, through such events as biological or nuclear warfare, nanoterrorism, resource exhaustion, ecological catastrophe, pandemics due to antibiotic resistance.

A simple workaround exists to avoid the over-replication scenario. Radio transmitters, or other means of wireless communication, could be used by probes programmed not to replicate beyond a certain density (such as five probes per cubic parsec) or arbitrary limit (such as ten million within one century), analogous to the Hayflick limit in cell reproduction. One problem with this defence against uncontrolled replication is that it would only require a single probe to malfunction and begin unrestricted reproduction for the entire approach to fail — essentially a technological cancer — unless each probe also has the ability to detect such malfunction in its neighbours and implements a seek and destroy protocol.

wikipedia my friend

>> ^Tojja:

Missed the boat a little, but for those who want to read the most intelligent summary of the salient scientific considerations associated with abortion, have a read of an article by Carl Sagan himself (co-written by Ann Druyan). Absolutely thought provoking and relevant: http://2think.org/abortion.shtml
Thanks for the link! I especially appreciate that Sagan brings the science and facts to bear in his consideration, and it's impossible to argue with his methodology. I have to say there's something personally gratifying in that we've trodden some of the same ground in our little dialectic.


Sure, I disagree with his ultimate conclusion, but that's because I believe there's a distinction between human cognition and human consciousness (or "ensoulment" as he terms it).