petercharters wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw
Oh yeah...
petercharters wrote:I always have a problem with the whole "conspiracy theory" approach to life.
I can imagine that there are indeed plenty of conspiracies involving getting re-elected, removing political opponents, winning contracts, embezzling public finances and so on.
I can believe that there are organisations such as the Vatican that are sitting on many tons of old documents (or destroyed them years ago) to prevent there being evidence that contradicts their doctrine. Just as there are banks and financial institutions that really, really don't want all their complete books and records explored and audited.
Military secrets, secret stealth aircraft or internet surveillance programs? Sure.
Though note that even the largest, most organised, most secret program in the world, run by the NSA, still got revealed and plastered across the world's media.
However, there are just too many "conspiracies" I have to just ask "Why? Who gains from turning this into a big conspiracy"
No one. Especially since the bigger a conspiracy is, the more likely it is to leak.
There´s also the epic fail by a huge number of conspiracy nutjobs based on "oooh the US government hides it from us" and variations on that.
Ehm... Ok, so if that´s true, how exactly are they getting the govts all over the world to suddenly follow their orders when they can´t even get their hardcore allies to automatically agree with even small matters?
And based on some claims of conspiracies, what´s the point if the freakin conspiracy is so ridiculously big that more people are already in on it than not?
No, i´m of similar opinion, i´m sure there´s lots of conspiracies going around, but i seriously doubt most of those shouted about in various media exist.
And in historical research, it´s just not a matter of conspiracy, it´s simply that most researchers doesn´t believe in the odder claims made and therefore it usually isn´t considered "canon", nothing odd about it, even if it´s sometimes sad because at least a rare few of those "can´t be real" things have a fair probability of being real.
And the kneejerk reaction blocks proper investigation for no good reason.
petercharters wrote:How on earth did they manage to get almost the entire community of world-wide scientists - a figure in the millions - to sign up to faking all modern science - particle physics, cosmology, archaeology, chemistry, biochemistry, genetics and all the other stuff that goes into proving that the earth isn't 6000 years old?
"They" can´t. There´s simply far too much that even an average person could doublecheck (and figure out) on their own.
petercharters wrote:Much as I loved the series, that was one of my uncertainties about the old Stargate series. By the end of it - something like 15 years of time - tens or hundreds of thousands of soldiers must have cycled through Stargate Command, been crews aboard human warships, inhabited Atlantis, received alien tech to examine, worked in companies providing equipment for the SGC, etc etc etc. It's like imagining that the recent war in Afghanistan wasn't against the Afghanis or Islamic fundamentalists, but against a huge alien invasion force based out of a landed 10-mile wide alien mothership, and it's all been covered up. Those weren't IED injuries - they were plasma burns. And it's all being hushed up
[takes a quick note, that might make an interesting premise for a novel - The Camouflaged War]
Yeah, one of my big issues with the series as well. And even with dramatisation, why do they have to make people so stupid sometimes?
And why oh why spin the original story off in directions which just made it more and more questionable?
I mean, what´s the point of coming up with ever more absurdly, ridiculously overpowered enemies, when you KNOW that they´re just going to do a "I press the -activate God mode- button, we win" anyway.
Compare to, lets say the Buffy-tvs series(much better), they only do that at the end of season 4, while the ends of s2,5 and 6 are more or less tragic(and i don´t know anyone that predicted who would be the "-real- big bad" of s6) and only really just s3 ends in a mostly unambigious "win".
SG-1 could have been SO much better with a minimal bit of moderation or at least caution in the writing...
And the other SG series too often took the worst of the original and made it worse.
At least it spawned hordes of decent fanfiction.
petercharters wrote:What we didn't do was say "It's Aliens At The Center Of The Earth With Big Magnets!!!!" or "Goddidit!" The Theory of Intelligent Falling is not a good one.
petercharters wrote:If we abandoned London or New York for twenty thousand years, there would still be some signs.
NOT much though. There is for example a fair amount of contention about just how long modern buildings would survive if there were no longer any humans around... Some say, less than 1k years. And their arguments are not exactly bad.
And a lot of our high tech is surprisingly fragile over longer times. What there would huge amounts of would be plastics, but it´s uncertain if it would in recognisable forms after such a time.
