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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
if we were part of this effort to spread life, and the 'project' has already been underway for thousands or millions of years, then breaking the continuity of knowledge of the project would be counter-productive to the project itself.
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Of course it would be. But think of how much knowlege has just been lost over time. Wars have spured the burning of libraries. Anything held in these libraries is lost. If stuff disappears, people start to forget it and it becomes myth. I'm sure that with some slight modification, most creation stories could support an interplanetary colonization project. I also recall something about the only copy of a book by Archimedes being erased because some monks needed paper. In it, he had the beginnings of calculus (the concepts of infinity and integrals) and some very advanced geometry. We didn't have the technology to read the erased ink until recently. With this knowledge gone, Newton had to reinvent calculus from scratch.
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If reality is unknowable, then science is a waste of time.
All we can ever do is make our best observations and measurements, and proceed towards our goals with the information we have.
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You are right in that all we can do is make our best guess. If we didn't, we wouldn't be doing anything. I'm just trying to point out that concrete evidence is only as strong as the wrecking ball that tries to destroy it. There used to be solid evidence that the world is flat. At the time, there were people that believed that and people that believed it was round.
Current evidence supports that it's round. Future evidence may support that it's actually a cube. Until then, we have to pick one.
You have to realize, however, that science and religion are the same thing. They are merely different ways of arriving at the same place. The ultimate goal of both is to understand the universe. The only difference is that one resides in observations and the other resides in thought. So your notion of an unknowable universe would invalidate both. The reason that both are valid, however, is that the universe
is knowable; you just can't be sure if what you know is true.
One following says that candles emit light. The heat excites the electrons in the atoms and they spit out photons. Another train of thought says that candles suck darkness. The black stuff on the wick is the collected darkness. Shadows are a result of the candle's dark sucking capability being blocked by an object. Combining this theory with some form of areodynamics could explain defraction. The photon theory is just an illusion, like the flat earth notion that people used to have. Both theories have valid points. The best we can do is pick one and see where it takes us. Like science and religion, some will choose to follow one path, some will choose to go another.
Someone mentioned earlier that there are infinite paths between two points in space. The same holds true in this journey to understanding the universe. How you get to the end doesn't really matter as long as you do. Some paths will be longer, some will be shorter. As long as everyone ultimately arives at the same place, it doesn't matter how they get there.