Shadowy Man

Well, according to Spergel et al. (astro-ph/0302209) it is expanding at 71 km/s/Mpc.

RBH

I have a faint memory (possibly made up!) that someone (Ulam, maybe) anwered Fermi's question about why the aliens weren't already here with the observation "They are. They're called Hungarians." That was when Hungarian mathematicians (and physicists?) seemed to dominate a good deal of the disciplines.

RBH

Tuff

For creationism, there are these rocks that have this gas inside of them that dissapates as soon as the rock is smashed (how this was discovered I do not know)

The "evidence" they provide is that they were created out of thin air - creatioism. how would evolutionists counter that?

And does anyone know the name of the rocks, or have heard of this?

Doubting Didymus

Well, I'd never heard of that, but neither do I see exactly what the problem is. Is it supposed to be impossible for gas bubbles to form in stone during volcanic cooling? I would have thought this would be an expected consequence of volcanic activity, but I'm no geologist. I suspect the initiators of this argument are not geologists either.

Lobstrosity

True, but these methods of travel are highly speculative at this moment. Faster-than-light travel would violate a key law of relativity and would give rise to all sorts of paradoxes in which it's possible, for example, to receive a message from someone responding to a message you haven't even sent them yet. Given the nature of these paradoxes coupled with overwhelming empirical verification of relativity, I don't think it's reasonable at this time to include such concepts in assessing the Fermi paradox.

Lobstrosity

As Didymus said, have these creationists heard of volcanos? It is not strange to have lava cool with gas bubbles inside. In fact many forms of lava rock are incredibly porous and airy. I haven't heard of these rocks specifically, but I fail to see how they support the idea of creationism in any way. Similarly, I fail to see how they impact evolution at all. No one argues that rocks evolve via natural selection. Why would an evolutionist have to "counter" this?

Jayjay

About Fermi's Paradox... like beausoleil said, it has not as much to do with us peeking out there with telescopes as it is about the ability of a technological civilization to colonize the galaxy within a few million years or so. At the moment, we don't know if interstellar travel is possible or whether civlizations will self-destruct once they invent nuclear weapons, but we also don't know of any clear obstacles on the way. Extrapolating from our current knowledge about laws of physics and technological development in recent millenia, it seems quite likely that we'll be sending probes or colonists to other solar systems eventually. Appealing to "we don't know that for sure because we haven't seen it yet" is like the creationists' appeal that we can't see kinds changing into other kinds.

But, you guys raised some interesting points about my crackpot idea of Fermi's Paradox counting as evidence for creation. If it doesn't, what exactly would it take for something to be evidence for creation, in the same sense that TalkOrigins' "29 evidences for macroevolution" (sorry, no link, but surely you've all read it?) qualify as evidence for evolution?

Lobstrosity

Jayjay, all we're saying with regards to the Fermi paradox is that it doesn't provide a strong argument for the fact that we're alone in the universe. There are simply too many unknown variables to assess what is and is not probable or expected. No one's appealing to the creationist stance that we do not know because we haven't seen it yet. We're appealing to the scientific stance that you not make hard assertions without evidence to back them up. We can hypothesize, but these speculations will all be functions of varables we have no current way of estimating (e.g. the typical lifespan of an intelligent species or the drive they might experience to explore every star in the galaxy). No one is saying we need to specifically "see" in order to believe.

This is what we believe: no alien life is here (although do we really even know this much--do we know that life on Earth isn't the product of alien seeds or that some probe isn't currently in high-Earth orbit watching our every move?). So from that you want to make the claim that no intelligent life has ever existed anywhere in the galaxy because no physical law prohibits travel between solar systems. It is this leap from observation to conclusion that science and logic won't let you make at this time. It's just far too broad in scope. That's like my saying that since no physical law prohibits you from visiting my house and since I've never seen you in my house you must not exist. It's simply a sloppy argument and when you make those here you're going to get called on it.

I'm not sure if it's possible to prove creationism given the nature of the claims its making. I can think of two things that would give strong credence to it, however:

1) Demonstrate that new species can appear suddenly and supernaturally, independent of all other species. Demonstrate that species can be created by, well, creation, as opposed to evolution. This would be strong evidence that creationism is a viable explanation. Of course, there are problems with this when you then argue vehemently that such a demonstration is impossible since God has done all his creation and doesn't feel like doing any more of it.

2) Show that the earliest life on earth had the same level of complexity of the life we find on earth today. If one of the earliest records of life we can find is a horse right next to a human skeleton, evolutionists will have some serious explaining to do. Sadly, all evidence points to the fact life on earth began 3.5 billion years ago as simple prokaryotic cells. (I do not call these complex because they are not very far removed from mere molecules, and we know that complex molecules can naturally form sans intelligent creator.) Then over time you find life slowly beginning to get more and more complex. Humans are perhaps the pinnacle of intellectual complexity and we have only been around for a geological microsecond. The predictions of evolution and creationism with regards to initial life on earth are completely different. You use objective, repeatable science to prove to me that no life (or at least that no life we currently know about, so that this doesn't become the impossible case of proving that something doesn't exist) can be found that existed before humans and that the earliest fossils of virtually every species (or hell, I'd even accept the earliest fossils of every "kind") can be dated back to the same time and you've got a very strong case for creationism. That's not so hard to do, is it? At the very least no one can claim its impossible.

Jayjay

I did not say that creationism can be proven, all I'm suspicious of is the claim that there is no evidence for it at all. Looking at the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ at talkorigins, evidences like "fundamental unity of life" or "molecular suboptimal structures" do not sound much more convincing in isolation than Fermi's paradox.

You gave two examples of evidences, but what I'm looking for is qualifiers that would allow all the things listed at Talk.Origins to count as evidence for evolution, but at the same time not classify anything observed so far to be evidence for creation.

Lobstrosity

I think that might be an impossible task given that anyone who supports creationism can argue that God created every creature the way we observe them because he wanted to. Any evidence for evolution can still be consistent with creationism. I don't think any evidence for evolution is ever going satisfy an "either evolution or creationism" criterion. In my opinion, all evidence for evolution can do is make it seem more and more likely. Basically you can show that what you expect from evolution is what really happened whereas all you can say with regard to creationism is that the observations can be consistent.

By the way, another example of evidence that would cast doubt on evolution is if it was impossible to arrange species in a geneological tree. If genetic traits were scattered randomly amongst individuals, this would be completely inconsistent with evolution. For example, if there were a few reptiles, a few birds, a few amphibians, a few fish, and a few mammals with mammary glands, evolution would be unable to adequately explain the distribution of the mammary gland genes througout the animal world. In fact, if creationism was the true explanation for our origins, I would expect the classification of species (specifically the grouping of species into classes, families, orders, and genuses) to be wholly impossible.