h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

now that's a puzzling but interesting mystery: it's about the entry linked to yours and called "the roswell incident"...

what happened to all the information/details etc which were in the unedited version?!... the researcher had obviously spent a lot of time to put it all together... this hard work is definitely not visible in the "official" version...

i personally chose to link his original version to my page...
in the end if we want people to decide what the "truth" is, fine, but at least they should have a chance to get as much info as possible...

that chance hasn't been given here...

as for the ultimate conspiracy of all it must be the one that refuses to accept that things which cannot be explained MIGHT exist...

scientists even "explain" some ufos sightings with fire balls... interestingly enough NOT all scientists believe that fire balls exist... ooops...

the time where we had to believe that scientists were always right has ended... lots of scientific theories which were 100% foolproof not so long ago are now questioned...

we were told for example that no object could travel faster than light... it was so impossible they said... well now there are starting to think differently...

the funny thing is that no-one is actually saying to the scientists: "hold on a minute i have been forced to believe what i have been told for all these years, i even laughted at people who dared think differently and NOW you are telling me that you were wrong all along...?!"

at the end of the day it might not be such a good idea to rely
on scientists to explain everything...

an example would be during hitler's reign where scientists were "proving scientifically" that the races the party wanted to eliminate were "inferior"...

oh and by the way, this is an historical FACT... does that make me a conspiracy theorist as i used the "f" word?!...

but enough for tonight...

talk soon...

I wouldn't rely on scientists to give me the time of the day.Sometime around the end of the 19th century ,a group of farmers came to French Academy of Art & Sciences with a bucket
full of rocks that fell from the sky . Those people were ridiculed
by the most prominent minds of the time , because it was(and still is) scientifically impossible for a scientist to acchieve a non-linear conciousness.

What do you mean by non-linear?

Same as "lateral", only "non-linear" sounds more insulting.

Ah! Well, then that statement is wrong. Science is not possible if you are non open-minded.

Of course, if you want to say that scientist are also human beings with all weaknesses that implies, your're right ...

All I wanted to say is that most of the scientific work is "like fitting
wheels to a tomato-time consuming and utterly useless."If scientists could learn to concentrate on the usefull and ignore the useless and the harmfull,this world would be a much more
cefpret place.

... and you wouldn't have a computer to type that.

Touché.Still, I lived and worked effortlessly without computers for
many happy years untill I discovered that one cannot get a decent job without a basic computer skills.You see, that really pissed me off.I don't like being forced into anything, and that is
precisely what technology/science does to the world-imposing
the choices of elite.That's no democracy, that sucks,man.

The thing that you have to remember about science is that like any other human endeavour it will always be subject to the illogical idiocy that has been characteristic of our race from the word go. The guy is bang on when he points out that scientific minds were giving credance to Hitler's crackpot beliefs on the one side and debunking them on the other. The same thing happened when people finally realised that tobacco companies had been selling them carcenogenic chemicals in a handy dandy little packet. The authorities wheeled out the men in white coats who swore that smoking gave you cancer, the tobacco companies duly wheeled out their own men in white coats who in turn swore that it did not. Science tends to serve the purpose of those that pay its research bills and the image of the noble scientist labouring away for the good of humanity as a whole is sheer crap...He who pays the piper calls the tune, full stop!

Possibly you mean the people involved ... as I said, they are as imperfect as all other human beings, but that's not very original I would say.

But for science itself that is not true. There have been discussions, arguments, manipulations, frauds, ideological misguidance, and even murder in the history of science -- because human weaknesses were involved. But truth only has survived, albeit not always via the direct way.

that reminds me of another story; not that long ago i was told by science followers that nuclear plants were safe and those who were not saying so were just scaremongers...

chernobyl happened only a few years after that "open-minded" statement...

loup

They are safe.

oh good...

Oh yes, there have been lots of cases where science did not want to get the fingers burnt. In that case everything is denied or ridiculed, without further research. It has happened with bones found a little more then a century ago. No scientist was willing to accept them as fossil remnants of long extinct animals. Finally, after long exchanges of arguments it was accepted and now a whole world of extinct animals is there for everyone to see. And we can go back to a time someone came with the idea that earth was not the centre of the universe and someone else maintained earth was round and not flat.

If scientists were just conservative zealots, they would have been marginalised -like Christian church, for example.Science poses
much bigger threat because of it's frantic progress which doesn't leave any time for judgement and adjustment.Given the time, humanity would inevitably come to conclusion that most of
the acquired knowledge is not necessary at all and that some of it is downright dangerous.

Yes, you can put progress itself in question. Some cultures like the American natives didn't strive for progress and were very happy with it.

However, most people love to play with new inventions and things like that. My personal theory is that not the *level* of technical achievements is significant, but its current change with time. A hoover was a great help for women in the 50's, but today it's taken for granted and people really don't love using it (even those who know it from the 50's). Today's toys are mobiles and other gimmicks.

I'm afraid nature has built us in a way that we are curious and perpetually trying to create new tools. And that's the motor of science. And while I see that scientist make human mistakes, I still think that the basic methods of science are mature and successful, if you accept progress.

Science is aiming at discovering things. It formulates questions and want to find answers to them. First a hypothesis is stated, next a way is sought to test this hypothesis in order to see if it fits all the requirements.

Another thing is technical development. This a done by using scientific discoveries and applying them to make a tool of a gadget that can be sold to the general public or used for some industrial purpose.

Lets not mixt science and technics, please. All that can be said is that some scientific discoveries can have technical applications, that's all.

Science exists as a creation of mankind and as a result inherits man's flaws just like everything else that man has a creative and/or intellectual input into. The fact is that while science may turn up what appear to be imperical and unbiased facts the truth is that these facts have come to light as a result of the particular motivations and agenda of the "scientist" that uncovered them.

The people that you have to watch out for are the fools who treat science like a religion (while at the same time often deriding those of a religious persuasion) and never question anything that it might be anything other than impartial and infallible.

I agree that the scientists are only human , but no other human activity has such a potential to send the whole planet to kingdom
come.This is where word "responsibility" comes in and, frankly,
I've seen very little of that in the last century. Take the H-bomb test ,for example.Russians and Americans performed it around the same time but only the American results reached the public,
of course.The explosion was underground and US Army built the
several kilometers long concrete tunel with instruments to measure the power and the speed of the blast, posted every 100 meters along the tunel.The results were so weird that even the army chickened out and banned further testing. Namely, the blast was,if my memory serves me, 16 times stronger than expected, all instruments along the tunel were triggered in the same time(?!) and the photos from the ground revealed something baffling. There was a organic looking structure above the ground zero and in it's centre there were stars. The constelations identified were at the other end of the sky at the time.(source:Time magazine)
Are the scientists capable to unravel the fabric of the universe?I don't know, but I'm sure that given the chance, they will. And not because science is evil, but because it's infantile.

Why do dogs and NASA scientists howl at the moon?

Because neither of them can get up there to pee on it.