Discussion (20)¬

1. smee says:

   May 23, 2018 at 1:28 pm

   Ha Ha Ha!

2. DocAtheist says:

   May 23, 2018 at 1:31 pm

   Yeah, Ha Ha!

3. machigai says:

   May 23, 2018 at 1:35 pm

   teehee

4. Laripu says:

   May 23, 2018 at 1:58 pm

   I think Jesus should also play an instrument.
   Which do you think it ought to be?
   Harp? Flute? Bassoon? Or by a miracle, simultaneous sax and violins? (That’s a pun, right there. 😉 )
   Or should he merely conduct a chorus of wailing voices rising from the pit of hell?

   So many choices. 😀

5. Donn says:

   May 23, 2018 at 3:12 pm

   Looks like he might be playing a very small concertina.

6. Troubleshooter says:

   May 23, 2018 at 3:15 pm

   There’s no way J&M (and throw in Moses, for that matter) would take an honest look at the belief systems they’ve spawned, any more than their followers can bear to read their holy books objectively. The violence, patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia would scream back at them, loud enough to deafen, if they dared.

   And call me a curmudgeon, but I can’t laugh at that.

7. John Cowan says:

   May 23, 2018 at 5:57 pm

   Obviously Jesus is the singer, since Mo is the guitarist. That’s all a band absolutely needs. A rhythm section would be good too. Thor, perhaps.

8. Nasser Ben Houdja says:

   May 23, 2018 at 9:16 pm

   The problem of mindless belief
   Is constant irrational grief
   They murder out of hand, people
   They don’t understand
   Joining the ranks of the rapist and thief.

9. Ophelia Benson says:

   May 23, 2018 at 10:43 pm

   Ok then I request Bad Moon Rising.

10. Someone says:

    May 24, 2018 at 12:17 am

    I can see these two performing an acoustic version of South of Heaven, with Jesus on bongos.

11. M27Holts says:

    May 24, 2018 at 9:50 am

    Plenty of Christian rock and pop bands! Even one of my favourite musicians Neal Morse is a born again xtian and has spent the last ten years of his career writing overtly xtian lyrics. Pity really because he is a truly gifted musician!

12. Kim says:

    May 25, 2018 at 10:51 am

    Burst out laughing on this one

13. Deimos says:

    May 25, 2018 at 12:07 pm

    Happy Towel Day Froods !

    Apart from reading the Hitchhiker books I can highly recommend reading the Wikipedia sections on the subject.
    An excellent way to celebrate a great non-secular holyday.

    They also provided a link to a Dawkins theory linking the Infinite Monkeys concept to Evolution theory, I do
    love obscure science.

14. M27Holts says:

    May 26, 2018 at 1:45 pm

    I thought that the infinite monkey hypothesis has more to do with physics than biology? The whole point about evolution is that the gene pool is finite and that there are a lot of possible combinations of DNA. But that too is a finite number…

15. FreeFox says:

    May 30, 2018 at 9:14 am

    Hi, I’m the Internet Atheist. / And I’m Skeptic, the Edgelord. / And tonight we’re going to acknowledge that our smug beliefs about religion are actually mostly a straw-man we use to feel intellectually superior to others, and undertake an honest reassessment of the role of spirituality in human culture and psychology. / Really? / What? No! Silly git…

    Also, the Infinite Monkey Theorem is a metaphor for the occurrence of extremely low probabilities in vast random samples, and as such can be applied to both biology and physics, and it doesn’t actually need infinity, just very large numbers. Very, very large numbers. ^_^

16. jb says:

    May 30, 2018 at 11:48 am

    It is very likely the the universe — even just our own universe, let alone any hypothetical multiverse — is physically infinite in extent. It follows that somewhere (in fact infinitely often in infinitely many places), on a planet very much like to Earth, a monkey is taught how to type, is placed in front of a typewriter, and types out Hamlet perfectly on its first try. This isn’t even speculation, it is a mathematically certain consequence of an infinite universe.

    (Elsewhere, a tornado sweeps through a junkyard and assembles an airplane). 🙂

17. FreeFox says:

    May 30, 2018 at 2:36 pm

    I find that a fascinating problem, jb. Not the monkeys, but the reality of infinity. Firstly, I don’t think that physicists are quite so certain of the universe’s infinite size as you seem to say, but even if it were infinite, given that the universe is expanding and the further two points are apart the more space there is between them that is expanding and thus the further points are apart the faster this distance grows, there is a limit beyond which we can never see, since objects in that distance are moving away from us faster than light and thus their light (or any other signal) can never bridge this expanding space between us. Right now the size of the observable universe is still limited by the age of the universe since the “big bang”, and thus around 47 billion light years, but due to this expansion of the universe effect it can never be larger than 62 billion light years, and if dark energy is constant and the universe’s expansion will keep speeding up, the size of the observable universe will shrink.

    Now, what I find fascinating is the question whether everything beyond the horizon of this observable bubble can be said to actually exist at all. After all, by definition nothing, not the least bit of information from there can ever reach us. And it’s not even like in Black Holes, that slowly transform everything into Hawking Radiation that eventually will leak back into the universe outside the Black Hole. Any object beyond that slowly shrinking horizon where space is moving away from us faster than light can in no way exert any influence on us. We could actually observe the last photon from a star reach us, and see it disappear when the next following photon can no longer make it.

    Can anything beyond that line be said to exist? Would a monkey typing a Shakespearean play on a planet beyond that line count as being “real” at all? Isn’t the universe (in any meaningful way) thus limited to that bubble of maximally 62 billion lightyears in every direction (and shrinking)?

    Because within that bubble, even if you are very generous with Drake’s equation and assume a lot of life sufficiently advanced for typewriters on a lot of planets (and if you do assume that, I would love to hear your explanation for the Fermi Paradox) it probably would still take many lifetimes of the universe before you get one monkey who by sheer coincidence can type out the flawless entirety of Hamlet on the first try.

18. jb says:

    May 31, 2018 at 2:52 am

    Max Tegmark has written a fascinating book, Our Mathematical Universe, which among other things goes into the question of spatial infinity. Right at the beginning of the book, on page 5, he states that “…the leading theory for what happened early on is called cosmological inflation, and it suggests that space isn’t merely really, really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life…”. The reason for this is that “inflation” is a necessary part of most modern cosmological theories, and the thing about inflation is that once it starts there seems to be no way for it to stop, and it just goes on creating space forever. (There is more to it than that, but you’ll have to read the book). Tegmark does some rough calculations and concludes that the nearest exact copy of you is located at a distance of about 10^(10^29)) meters, and that the nearest exact copy of our entire visible universe might perhaps be 10^(10^118)) meters away. I’m using “^” as a power symbol here, and those numbers are of course incomprehensibly large. (Tegmark has no difficulty with the idea of realities that we can never interact with, and I have to say I don’t either).

    I don’t see the “Fermi paradox” as being a paradox at all. There are at least two straightforward non-paradoxical explanations for the absence of aliens: 1) It could be that in the end interstellar travel is just impossibly difficult, and nobody ever does it. So the galaxy could be full of civilizations that never visit each other physically, and whose highly efficient communications we never intercept. Or 2) intelligent life might be really, really rare. There are something like 200 billion stars in our galaxy, and most of them probably have planets, but while that might seem like a big number, as numbers go it’s really kind of small (see above!). It could be that most galaxies never host an intelligent species at all, and most that do only get one. I think both of these explanations are perfectly plausible, but personally I lean towards 2).

19. DC Toronto says:

    May 31, 2018 at 4:35 pm

    Thanks freefox and jb … now I have some new ideas to look up. It’s nice to see some positive and interesting conversations at J&M again.

20. two cents' worth says:

    May 31, 2018 at 6:02 pm

    I forget where I heard this idea, but someone suggested that perhaps (at least part of) the reason why we haven’t found any signs of sapient ETs is a variation on jb’s point #2. Around the universe, various species are constantly branching off from earlier species, developing, and becoming extinct, like fireworks going off randomly. Different species have different lifespans (from the time they become distinct to the time they go extinct). It may be that the odds are against two sentient species being at overlapping stages of development (say, when they both are looking for intelligent life beyond their home planets) and being on different planets that are physically close enough for these species to be able to notice each other before at least one of them goes extinct. Other factors may make the chances of ET contact even smaller. For example, what if ETs are using what we call dark energy to communicate, and the radio waves we use are dark energy to them?