On October 10, 2008 the Space Shutle Discovery will be launched on Hubble Servicing Mission 4 (SM4), a dangerous and complex venture who's goal is to repair and refurbish the space telescope and make it better than new, so it could last another tens years at least. Now what does this have to do with Sarah Palin?
More after the fold.
Few NASA science projects are as beloved as the Hubble space telescope. Since it was repaired for the first time in the early 1990s, the satellite has produced some of the most beautiful photographs ever taken and gotten some extremely important data, including the age of the Universe. But is this data real? I know what you're thinking, "what kind of bullshit is that? Of course the data is real." I agree. But Sarah Palin doesn't.
Eight days before the Hubble mission is due to go up, Palin and Joe Biden are going to debate at Washington University. She admits to being a creationist. If you are, and I don't mean "Intelligent Design" which admits the Genisis is factually wrong, then you have to take the whole package, and that includes astronomy.
A certain DANNY R. FAULKNER, Ph. D. wrote a paper in the journal of the notorious Institute for Creation Reserch. the author goes over a number of theories as to how the stars, which were created on the fourth day, could appear to be millions or billions of light years away when the universe is only six thousand years old.
To be fair, the guy tries mightily to make sense out of the proven facts when they clearly cannot be reconciled with a six-literal-day creation which took place in 4004 BC. Here's a sample of what he says, and it's important to think about in a possible question to Palin in the debate or at a Town Hall, if you can get in:
Most creationists have adopted the concept of a fully functioning universe as the best explanation for the light travel time problem. In the garden Adam would have been a particularly healthy male. If we could go back in a time machine and examine him we might have concluded that he was 20 to 30 years old. Of course we would have been wrong, because Adam was created only a few days before. In other words, creation implies some sort of apparent history. It is argued that in like fashion, for the stars to serve their intended purpose (for the marking of time and seasons) their light must have reached earth in time for Adam to see them two days later. Thus God must have created the light in transit.
But did Adam bear the scars of past history, such as injuries that never happened? When the fossilized remains of large extinct and previously unknown creatures were unearthed over a century ago, some Christians responded that the fossils were created in the rocks and that the creatures never existed; they just appeared to have existed. Most people would reject this as absurd. Yet the creation of starlight in transit raises a similar philosophical point. In the spring of 1987 a superdeca [hypernovae] was observed in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Since that time the progress of the explosion and its aftermath have been carefully observed. We have been able to piece together many fine details of what happened. But if the notion of light created in transit is correct, then none of the observed events happened. How is this different from God creating fossils in the ground? This idea also has no predictive power like the other two suggestions above, which relegates it more to a philosophical idea rather than a scientific one.
That's where we've got 'em! How can the Vice President, who's been traditionally been in charge of oversight of the space program since the Kennedy administration, have a decent relationship with the scientist-bureaucrats running NASA which she thinks that it's possible that distant galaxies might not exist and everything they're doing, including spending billions of dollars on repairing the Hubble are bogus and a waste of time and money?
While it might be quaint to think about Adam and Lillith (Eve was his second wife, but that's for a different diary) riding on the back of a diplodocus, questioning the existence of Orion Nebula or the Andromeda galaxy is something completely different.
It's about education. Should teachers lie to their kids?