Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
Joz said:Gee, I just asked.
Well it wasn't me.freeandfun1 said:Some people get very antagonized by this kind of discussion,
If you ever decide to post in the religion forum, give me a shout.I just don't believe it is the right forum.
no1tovote4 said:Y'all can go ahead and hijack the thread if ya want. I won't mind. I think it is interesting how discussion travels from one subject to the next. Freeform like a real conversation.
Perhaps you were referring to this:no1tovote4 said:There is considerable evidence of the byproducts of life on the planet. They have found many different gasses in the atmosphere of the planet that are byproducts of life. One is Formaldehyde, and others that I cannot remember at this point but will try to find a specific story on the gaseous products of life being found on Mars.
Signs of current life on Mars, researchers claim
Methane signatures seen hinting at possibilities underground
By Brian Berger
Space News Staff Writer
Space.com
Updated: 2:47 p.m. ET Feb. 16, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6981361/
WASHINGTON - A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.
The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASAs Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.
What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, which took place Sunday, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.
This perspective image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo
Camera on board ESAs Mars Express spacecraft, shows the
central part of the Valles Marineris canyon on Mars.
Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in 2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio Tinto riverso-called because of its reddish tintthe product of iron being dissolved in its highly acidic water.
Stoker did not respond to messages left Tuesday on her voice mail at Ames.
Stoker told SPACE.com in 2003, weeks before leading the expedition to southwestern Spain, that by studying the very acidic Rio Tinto, she and other scientists hoped to characterize the potential for a chemical bioreactor in the subsurface an underground microbial ecosystem of sorts that might well control the chemistry of the surface environment.
Making such a discovery at Rio Tinto, Stoker said in 2003, would mean uncovering a new, previously uncharacterized metabolic strategy for living in the subsurface. For that reason, the search for life in the Rio Tinto is a good analog for searching for life on Mars, she said.
Stoker told her private audience Sunday evening that by comparing discoveries made at Rio Tinto with data collected by ground-based telescopes and orbiting spacecraft, including the European Space Agencys Mars Express, she and Lemke have made a very a strong case that life exists below Mars surface.
The two scientists, according to sources at the Sunday meeting, based their case in part on Mars fluctuating methane signatures that could be a sign of an active underground biosphere and nearby surface concentrations of the sulfate jarosite, a mineral salt found on Earth in hot springs and other acidic bodies of water like Rio Tinto that have been found to harbor life despite their inhospitable environments.
One of NASAs Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity, bolstered the case for water on Mars when it discovered jarosite and other mineral salts on a rocky outcropping in Merdiani Planum, the intrepid rovers landing site chosen because scientists believe the area was once covered by salty sea.
Stoker and Lemkes research could lead the search for Martian biology underground, where standing water would help account the curious methane signatures the two have been analyzing.
They are desperate to find out what could be producing the methane, one attendee told Space News. Their answer is drill, drill, drill.
NASA has no firm plans for sending a drill-equipped lander to Mars, but the agency is planning to launch a powerful new rover in 2009 that could help shed additional light on Stoker and Lemkes intriguing findings. Dubbed the Mars Science Laboratory, the nuclear-powered rover will range farther than any of its predecessors and will be carrying an advanced mass spectrometer to sniff out methane with greater sensitivity than any instrument flown to date.
In 1996 a team of NASA and Stanford University researchers created a stir when they published findings that meteorites recovered from the Allen Hills region of Antarctica contained evidence of possible past life on Mars. Those findings remain controversial, with many researchers unconvinced that those meteorites held even possible evidence that very primitive microbial life had once existed on Mars.
Joz said:I bet that smart-ass attitude was really cool when you were in high school.
Not really. I'm a bartender. It's just one more service I offer.MJDuncan1982 said:As I'm sure your response to sarcasm was as well
no1tovote4 said:Y'all can go ahead and hijack the thread if ya want. I won't mind. I think it is interesting how discussion travels from one subject to the next. Freeform like a real conversation.
The Church and Evolution
The Catholic Church has never had a problem with "evolution" (as opposed to philosophical Darwinism, which sees man solely as the product of materialist forces). Unlike Luther and Calvin and modem fundamentalists, the Church has never taught that the first chapter of Genesis is meant to teach science. F.J. Sheed writes in his classic Theology and Sanity that the creation account in Genesis,
... tells us of the fact but not of the process: there was an assembling of elements of the material universe, but was it instantaneous, or spread over a considerable space of time? Was it complete in one act, or by stages? Were those elements, for instance, formed into an animal body which as one generation followed another gradually evolved-not, of course, by the ordinary laws of matter but under the special guidance of God-to a point where it was capable of union with a spiritual soul, which God then created and infused into it? The statement in Genesis does not seem actually to exclude this, but it certainly does not say it. Nor has the Church formally said that it is not so....
Pius XII correctly pointed out in the encyclical Humani Generis (1950) that the theory of evolution had not been completely proved, but he did not forbid
that the theory of evolution concerning the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter-for Catholic faith obliges us to hold that human souls are immediately created by God-be investigated and discussed by experts as far as the present state of human science and sacred theology allows (no. 36).
In his catechesis on creation given during a series of general audiences in 1986, John Paul 11 provided the following discussion on the first chapter of Genesis:
This text has above all a religious and theological importance. There are not to be sought in it significant elements from the point of view of the natural sciences. Research on the origin and development of individual species in nature does not find in this description any definitive norm.... Indeed, the theory of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the truth about the creation of the visible world as presented in the Book of Genesis.... It must, however, be added that this hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty. The doctrine of faith, however, invariably affirms that man's spiritual soul is created directly by God. According to the hypothesis mentioned, it is possible that the human body, following the order impressed by the Creator on the energies of life, could have been gradually prepared in the forms of antecedent living beings (General Audiences, January 24 and April 16, 1986).
The Church's quarrel with many scientists who call themselves evolutionists is not about evolution itself... but rather about the philosophical materialism that is at the root of so much evolutionary thinking.
The Church's quarrel with many scientists who call themselves evolutionists is not about evolution itself, which may (or may not) have occurred in a non-Darwinian, teleological manner, but rather about the philosophical materialism that is at the root of so much evolutionary thinking. John Paul 11 puts the matter succinctly:
The Church is not afraid of scientific criticism. She distrusts only preconceived opinions that claim to be based on science, but which in reality surreptitiously cause science to depart from its domain.
This remark was aimed at biblical exegetes, but it certainly applies to Darwinian science, which contains hidden philosophical additives.
In the area of theology, the Magisterium has warned against the teachings of the French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who concocted from evolutionary theory a kind of process theology that, among other things, implicitly denies original sin and the existence of first parents of the human race who differed in kind from whatever may have preceded them. In Humani Generis, Pius XII also condemned polygenism, championed by Teilhard, Rahner and other theologians, which holds that we are descended from multiple ancestors rather than from one historical person named Adam (no. 37).
The Church insists that man is not an accident; that no matter how He went about creating Homo sapiens, God from all eternity intended that man and all creation exist in their present form. Catholics are not obliged to square scientific data with the early verses of Genesis, whose truths-and they are truths, not myths-are expressed in an archaic, pre-scientific Hebrew idiom; and they can look forward with enjoyment and confidence to modem scientific discoveries which, more often than not, raise fundamental questions which science itself cannot answer.
Joz said:But from the beginning of Genesis to current day, the earth has been in existence about 6,000 years.
freeandfun1 said:other than G-d Himself.
CivilLiberty said:Not to change the subject, but why do you spell god "G-d"?
is it your own 133L$P3@k?
A
Well, if you don't believe in Creation or the Bible there's not really much for us to discuss. You don't believe it, I do.CivilLiberty said:Um, are you joking? Or are you a young earther?
The reason I ask is that young earthers are, like flat earthers, believers in a false premise, disproved with mountains of evidence.
Do you actually believe in the young (6000) year old earth, and if so, how do you reconcile this belief with the facts, such as the evolution of life over 3,500,000,000 years, millions of years of natural earth formation, such as the Grand Canyon?A
CivilLiberty said:Not to change the subject, but why do you spell god "G-d"?
is it your own 133L$P3@k?
A
February 19, 2005
Evidence of Life on Mars?...
Via Instapundit, an article in Space.com suggests NASA scientists may have found evidence of life on Mars -
A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.
The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASAs Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.
Unfortunately, it ain't so, the story is based on hearsay. From Carol Stoker -
1. On Sunday night we were attending a private partyof space exploration enthusiasts in which there was a discussion about the possible meaning of the resultsfrom recent Mars missions. We engaged in the discussion and expressed thoughts and opinions as individual scientists on our own time and did not represent ourselves as speaking for NASA.
2. No one at the party identified themselves as a reporter, and in fact no reporters were present. This article is based on hearsay about what somebody at the
party thought they heard us say. We think this represents extremely poor journalistic standards.
Also, NASA's issued a press release -
News reports on February 16, 2005, that NASA scientists from Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have found strong evidence that life may exist on Mars are incorrect.
NASA does not have any observational data from any current Mars missions that supports this claim. The work by the scientists mentioned in the reports cannot be used to directly infer anything about life on Mars, but may help formulate the strategy for how to search for martian life. Their research concerns extreme environments on Earth as analogs of possible environments on Mars. No research paper has been submitted by them to any scientific journal asserting martian life.
That's too bad, I was hoping it to be true. It's only a matter of time before we do find life on Mars; as soon as we get our ass off this planet.
I don't appreciate not being allowed to play anymore. And this discovery does not disprove anything I've said.MJDuncan1982 said:Question for some who believe the universe was created in 6 days and is six thousand years old (Joz I know you are exempt because you said life was created 6,000 years ago - just a general question):
An explosion bigger than the one Kepler saw was just detected. The star is about 50,000 light years away so that means the explosion occurred 50,000 years ago. How does this mesh with a universe that is only 6,000 years old? Is God a deceiver or is the Bible not speaking literally? (or is there another option?)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4278005.stm
I misunderstood. You have my apology.MJDuncan1982 said:which you did.
Joz said:I misunderstood. You have my apology.
