Hubble Deep Field View courtesy of NASA/JPL
So why do we hard-headed, skeptical, science-y and atheist types have the nerve to celebrate holidays with religious overtones? Well, for one thing you don't have to believe in witches and flying broomsticks to enjoy Halloween. But Jennifer Oullette blogging at Scientific American does a much better job of explaining how we praise our seeming insignificance in the
Great Schema:
Accepting Copernicus meant removing man from his place at the top of the cosmological food chain. “The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe later wrote of the implications of a heliocentric universe to 17th century believers. “Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind.” Until the modern era of space exploration, however, when the Hubble Space Telescope took this image of the Ultra Deep Field ...
- Lynn Margulis forever changed the way we view evolution, right down to every organelle in every cell in our bodies, with the fascinating endosymbiotic theory. She passed away quietly this week a few days after suffering a major stroke at age 73.
- I used to think Tom Turkey's feathers were the most unique thing about dino to bird evolution. But in this semi-Thanksgiving post I speculate it's their super-charged lungs that really did the trick for both clades.
- Astrobiologists proposed a new system for gauging the habitability of exosolar planets. Speaking of life on alien planets, DemFromCT and I were so fired up we converted Newt Gingrich to Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from planet Giedi Prime in the Dune series.
- A new report offers some evidence that the most extreme Venus syndrome scenarios of human-induced climate change may not be a certainty. Hey, a hominid can hope:
Andreas Schmittner, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., and lead author on the new study, notes that, while man-made global warming is happening and tiny changes in global average temperatures can have huge and deleterious effects, the atmosphere may not be as sensitive to carbon dioxide change as has been reported.
- The Mars Exploration Rover Curiousity is on the pad at Cape Canaveral and set to launch at 10:02 AM EDT today.