Viruses are specialized. They won't attack aliens. Bacteria might. It's the fungi in many respects that are the masters of this planet. If we manage to destroy ourselves so badly that we take out most multicellular organisms as well, it'll be the fungi that rebuild the ecology.
It'll probably be the fungi that the aliens have to worry about too.
Any one taking care of a cat knows this well.
And in fact they bump into some sort of algae that lives in the atmosphere that really likes the saline mixture that makes up most of the liquid in our bodies.
I feel I've gotten the best of both by doing that.
Note: I'm not saying viruses don't have conditions they need met, they do, obviously. I'm saying they can attack an alien just as likely as they can a human.
Both of those things are important to all of the viruses we have experience with.
For that to be true, you need some governing rule of life, not 'could easily be a widely used'.
(You'll note, I phrased my other reply in terms of us not knowing)
The writing is nice but flawed. Since War of the Worlds, we have advanced tremendously and no longer need intelligent design or creation myths to explain microorganisms.
Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance. Small mutations over millions of years led to the tiniest organisms, not "creatures", and most microorganisms don't even interact with higher life forms. It's only after epochs of time that complex mammals arose, breathing air, and these mammalian hosts then did provide the harbor for pathogens we know today.
Give the dude a break on the athiest rant, he's been dead half a century.
Your statement "If it has an answer" only holds if you say that any truth science can't prove doesn't exist
But this isn't true. See Halting problem etc. There are things for which the answer can exist & yet be undeterminable
This is fine. I prefer to look at it this way: science is searching out a subset of knowable truths. The origin of the universe is interesting only insofar as we can dredge up relevant information, but coming up with an origin story or not isn't what proves the validity of science
Science isn't about getting all the answers, it's about getting the answers right & at it's best admitting when we got the answers wrong
When someone asks "If God doesn't exist what created the universe?" I say "I don't know, I don't care"
You can say we can't possibly understand how the heart works because we do not understand the entire evolutionary tree leading up to the human race and how the circulatory system evolved over billions of years and ergo heart transplants are impossible. This is trivially false and its false for the same reason parent posters assertion is false. Everything is how it is because of initial conditions ergo everything connects back to time zero but we can still use the abstract understanding we do have to make models and predictions.
The initial conditions were so uniform that it doesn't take the same level of detail to understand what happened, and we can look all the way back to the CMBR. A particle-by-particle reconstruction of interactions since the big bang won't make much of a difference in our understanding of what happened on Earth. Virtually all of the interactions arrived in our solar system in a very noisy fashion during star formation and it was up to the resulting sun to pump negentropy into the rocks and other matter.
There is no thing called "science" that finds answers. There are scientists who can form hypotheses about the universe they can see and perceive and check whether they are consistent with what they can see and perceive.
We are mostly ants on a balloon:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-fact-tha...
We do not know where the balloon came from.
That’s equivalent to suggesting people can’t do chess. Semantically it may be accurate, but it’s intentionally obtuse.
Language doesn’t actually work that way.
Anyway, science isn’t experiments and building hypothesis etc. That’s part of the process, but really quite small pieces of a greater whole. It’s the long processes of generations refining and testing earlier ideas that finds truth.
It is important to understand that scientists are individuals with individual incentives. While some have an inherent drive towards getting closer to truths via the application of the scientific method, others may find other things more important.
Abstracting "the science" from scientists is a convenient way of training other people in the acceptance of the proposition that there are inherently qualified arbiters of truth.
You can play chess, as in follow the rules, or be a scientist, as in contribute to the progress of science, but nobody is the physical embodiment of chess or science.
Edit: To be as clear as possible, the President isn’t Democracy, but Democracy still exists in that you can meaningfully destroy it.
I am afraid I am lost.
Science is similarly emergent behavior. You need the exchange of ideas, not just say a science fair where people go through the motions of experiments, but those experiments don’t get used by others to design new experiments etc.
What is supposed to be reproducible is the act of collecting and processing data to ensure that your conclusion isn't based on error, falsehood, or happenstance. What he is promoting is a basic misunderstanding of both science and logic.
People with preconceived anti science attitudes do this all the time. They face you down at high noon in their fancy duds, six guns ready at their hips sure of themselves and ready to kill and draw pearl handled.... water pistols.
They went looking for the correct answer to satisfy their religion not a commitment to truth and found cheaply manufactured baubles they are sure are deadly weapons because the very skills that would enable them to see it clearly would prevent them from looking for such easy answers in the first place.
tl;dr At some depth, you ask questions beyond the scientific method itself.
I will also argue that atheism is a religion. There is nothing more exciting than being able to throw off the rules of one god by replacing him with another who asks for nothing.
Nature is like gravity it is a label we attach to things in order to communicate about some aspect of our mental models of the universe we share or imagine we share sufficiently to communicate theories about the underlying thing those models point to. It isn't in most cases not imagined to be a sentience modeled after ourselves but rather an abstraction around some aspects of everything in the overarching model.
Religion, Philosophy, Science are all systems of models of the world but they belong in different category based on characteristics in the same way that a trout, a dog, and an duck are all animals but they aren't all fish just because they all swim.
Religion especially western religion has classically been a pre scientific exploration of different theories about how the world came to be lacking virtually all actual understanding and focused on the idea that something much like man writ large was responsible for the universe and that the man who acted as conduit to the wishes off that man would derive some measure of that beings power mirroring primitive social structures and extending them skyward to the fanciful creations of our own mind. As if an ant had imagined the entire world was a giant burrow made by giant ants who could make their wishes known to lesser ants by way of the arrangements of your dogs droppings in your yard.
Science is merely a system for harnessing the same imagination but directed towards testing our fanciful explanations and building an increasingly powerful set of facts and models that are extremely likely to be somewhat true. We by the nature of our brains are builders of models and we must have them to exist and to progress but we don't need to build a system that glorifies the very flaws to which our minds are most heir to and exploits them. That is to say we haven't replaced God with nature we have simply built mental models of the universe that don't contain a first cause because we don't believe there is a conscious act at the center of it all.
Those of us who have wings know that a wing isn't a different kind of fin and a rocket engine isn't a different sort of wing and naked is not a style of pants.
There is no reason that we can't at the end of a long road have a pretty good idea how how life on earth came to be in the same way as we have a pretty good idea of how to continents came to be as they are. It wont be perfect but it will keep getting better every year as we learn more.
Your god was invented thousands of years ago so someone could claim to speak for him and attain status within his or her tribe without hunting more animals a trick that amazingly still works NOW. Throwing off the yoke of his adherents doesn't free one from the obligation of life, meaning, your family, or your fellow man. It is a harder obligation not an easier one. You incorrectly frame casting out comforting lies and facing down a terrifying truth as an easy way out but nothing could be further from the truth.
If a lie it is and I for myself call it a lie then adhering to it would be an unacceptable act of cowardice. If you truly believe it then to you it is courage to adhere to it but neither of our experiences is a lie and you definitely do not understand mine or any other alike.
Another fallacy and incorrect assumption that's clouding the discussion. Don't group all religions together then toss them all out as equally invalid.
They're not talking about personal experiences, they're talking about objective truth, and of those there's only one.
For example
> science does not have the tools to reproduce the beginning of the Universe. If it's not reproducible it's not Science.
What followed in this thread wasn't a discussion of religion. The post you are directly replying to directly dealt with the charge that it is impossible to scientifically examine the beginning on life on earth because it wasn't reproducible and ergo not science based on your misunderstanding what reproducible means.
If you look again up thread you will see that religion was discussed in a different part of the thread. Did you mean entirely different statements were strawmen? If so what and again please be specific.
I have myself been very specific in the arguments I refuted so you can do the same.
People with preconceived anti science attitudes [..] went looking for the correct answer to satisfy their religion not a commitment to truth
This says "people", not "all religions". Moreover it says "people with [attribute]", which is a properly defined subset. If you take this statement to mean "all religions", it is you who is conflating "anti-science attitudes" with "all religious people", not the GP.
We have many things labelled to be a theory that are complete enough to be acceptable answers while still being considered relatively incoherent or insufficient to science.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e2/f0/16/e2f0165777598a13c246...
Anvils would not be possible without the universe ergo we cannot possible predict solely on our knowledge of Warner Brothers physics and prior plot lines that the anvil trap he is laying will fall on his own head comically flattening him yet somehow leaving him alive and ready to chase the road runner again in the next sketch.
Our models don't capture every aspect of the world but good models capture enough to make increasingly good predictions about the past and future and the more we test them and winnow out the bad we approach but can never achieve perfection. The origin of life isn't inherently any different than the evolution of the continents, the planets, or the tree of life over the eons. No fundamental barrier stands in the way of our understanding. You didn't "close the debate fully". Nobody who didn't start out agreeing with you now does and its because they understand things you do not.
It is very arrogant of any ideology to pretend it can explain things it can't.
Islam passes with flying colors because it isn't superstitious.
Science is a matter of theorization and subsequent development of confidence through testing theorization.
It is arrogant and manipulative to view science as black and white and then call everything white due to a lack of 100.000% confidence.
Hang on. Are you implying that science created artifical life from just elements? Because that would be news to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
Given the history of shamanistic figures explaining the natural world in terms of magical spirits and having magical definitions replaced with natural ones thousands of years one can perhaps be forgiven for concluding that the original of life was just another domino waiting to fall.