The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

I often find myself getting very disappointed that I live at this time. The reason is that we're so limited in our understanding. By this I mean, we're really starting to make headway in physics and technology, but, by the time I'm old, we probably won't have colonized a place like Mars.

This is really disappointing to me. Sometimes, I go out at night with a telescope and my son and we take a look at the stars. It's fun and always interesting. But I get, well, upset that I'm not going to get a chance to go there someday.

I'd like to see what, if any, planets orbit around Proxima Centauri; I'd like to hear what probes indicate intergalactic space is like; I'd like to hear whether or not we find a way to break the galactic speed limit (either through the use of wormholes or somehow through the use of a controlled black hole); and I'd also like to see what the sunrise looks from the surface of Mars or Titan.

But, I never will, and neither will any of you. Does that disappoint anyone besides me?

I look at it in a way that's similar to my outlook on my economic standing.

Would I like to have been a Steve Forbes or Bill Ford or Woody Johnson and be born into so much money that I never have to worry about working in my lifetime?  Sure.  But ultimately, being born in America means that I was already better off than 90% of the people born in the world.  So I accept my good fortune and move on.

Similarly, while it would be great to live in the future, being alive today is so startlingly superior to being alive just 100 years ago that I am happy with what I have.  The thought of what my life would be like 500 or 1000 years ago is very troubling.

Plus, humans haven't destroyed the planet (yet), which is a big potential downside of the future.

I sometimes find myself thinking that growing up 10 years earlier than I actually did would have been cool. I find the 60s and 70s a fascinating time period. As for the future, I don't think we will make it too much longer. Maybe a few more generations and we will be all but a minor footnote in the history of things........

Sometimes I get disappointed I live in this era.  I say disappointed because humanity should be so much further along than we currently are.  We have the technology and tools to be SO MUCH more advanced and englightened.  It's a shame knowing how much we could accomplish if we were united and worked together as a planet.

I'd rather have lived in the past, where I wouldn't know any better and things were just so much simpler.

However, we are living in a great time in our history, with the electronic revolution, computers, internet, space flight.  Think about all we've done in just the last FIFTY years; it's pretty insane.

Sometimes I just wish aliens would land on earth, tell us we're doing it wrong, and stop believe in stupid things like ghosts and god, because they are killing our forward progress.

Agree. Interesting question. I would have preferred being born in the mid 1930's to 1940. That would mean I would witness the greatest achievements and best economic times in USA history and I would be mid 70's to 80 years old now.....too old to care about all this shit going on now. lol

My M-I-L is 90 and I asked her the other day if she planned to vote.  She said, "I am 90, I no longer give a crap!"

 

I would have enjoyed living in different historical eras, for entirely different reasons... I would have enjoyed living in medieval times because I often just want to pull out a sword and lop off some fool's head.  I would have enjoyed living in Europe in the late 18th century, because of the amazing music that was being created by guys like Mozart, Beethoven and others.

I'm not disappointed in this era though, because for every negative like political corruption, fiscal idiocy, religious extremism and reality TV, I can counter with a positive like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, scientific/medical advancements and a good shrimp and bacon po'boy sandwich.

Keep in mind that it's a lot easier to be happy about living through the Cold War when you know the result.

Also keep in mind that some of these time periods would result in (for example) being drafted for Korea or Vietnam (unless you're talking about being born somewhere else).

If you find someone who is honest about both the positives and negatives of growing up in their era's, you will find out it is no different than what we experience.
Everyone looks back with rose-tinted glasses. Every era/time frame has its own issues that made people nervous, frustrated, happy, angry, etc.
It is fun to think about going back in time to experience some different eras...that is why books and movies are still made about it.

That is definitely a glass half full outlook. You would also witness the worst economic times in US history.

I would definitely like to have the experiences of other eras but I think we tend to glamorize them and look at the positives while overlooking the negatives. Every period has its good and bad points and I am fine with where I am.

This is a fascinating statement especially since I think it's probably quite popular today. For some reason it's easier to believe that aliens are a foregone conclusion while ghosts and gods are just plain nonsense, but the principle facts behind them are pretty much the same, ie the fact that there's very little physical evidence to support the idea that any of them exist.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that aliens don't exist, actually I'm pretty sure they do exist although I don't think they've ever been to Earth. I just find it fascinating that many people find it easier to believe in the existance of extraterrestrials then in the existance of a supreme being. I wonder why that is? If you think about it the idea that humans were created by God is not that different from the idea that the human race was somehow "seeded" by aliens.

There's a huge difference between:

- believing that aliens exist in (at least) one of the thousands of trillions of planets around the hundreds of trillions of stars in the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe

and

- believing that aliens have visited this planet

I agree. I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought those ideas were similar, only that I believe the first notion to be true or at least possible, but not the second. That's partly what makes this fascinating to me. We can easily accept the idea that aliens exist despite the fact that we haven't encountered them, nor probably ever will. Isn't this similar to what faith is for many?

There is actually a third possiblity, that I am leaning towards believing.  Not that aliens have visited (as in came and then left) but that all life on earth evolved from space aliens.

Not intellegent life that came in a spaceship, but mircoscopic single cell organism attached to a meteriot that landed in the "premortal soup" and was the first life on earth (as opposed to the concept that life orginated on earth)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

It's called Panspermia. Now take that one step further and assume for a second there is a "race" of people that have existed for millions of years in another galaxy, much longer than the human race. Suppose they had gotten so advanced that they're actually capable of putting those single cell organisms on a meteriot or something similar and blasting it out into space far beyond their own galaxy. They don't really know where it will end up or how it will turn out, but they are trying to "create" something. And lets suppose this happened millions of years ago. If Earth really was "created" this way, wouldn't the "creators" kind of be gods to us? Creating us from nothing so to speak? Not exactly how we usually envision a god, but still a supreme being in some ways? No? If we can believe that it could happen by accident, why not not an accident?

I find that believable. 

I don't find Adam and Eve any more believable than the Easter Bunny. 

Hoodie, that's a reasonable point, although I'm not sure how it could be verified or disproven.  I'm no biologist, but I recall reading some articles on some early-stage verification of the assimilation of amino acids from "primordial soup."

Pappy13, I think the belief in aliens is mostly borne out of math; it presumes that under similar conditions, life would evolve on other Earth-like planets.  And given the (literally) astronomical numbers of galaxies, each with billions of stars and potentially trillions of planets, extraterrestrial life seems like a mathematically foregone conclusion.

Well I think Adam and Eve is a nice story to tell your children maybe to try to help them understand why we go to church on Sunday's or something along those lines. Pretty hard to describe to a child what I just described to you and have them understand it in any kind of meaningful way. Heck there's probably a lot of adults that would look at that as crazy too. My view of religion is you take from it what you can and don't necessarily subscribe to it 100%. Make it work for you rather than getting too caught up in the details which is probably just somebody else trying to make it work for them. I'm Catholic, but I'm also divorced and remarried. I don't think that's a bad thing, I think I made the most of the situation I was in. Got 2 great kids from the 2nd marriage, how can that be wrong?

Not so sure about that.

In general young kids should not be told stories which include acts of fratricide.  It tends to make them nervous around other siblings.

Plus the moral of this story is....

a) knowldge is bad.  (not really consistant with what their kindergarden teacher tells them)
b) childbirth is painful because Eve misbehaved.
c) God is vengeful and spiteful.  (not sure how that explains your rational for going to church) 

Completely agree, however "life" doesn't have to be anything like Human life. Aliens may be so different from us that we might not even recognize them as lifeforms. They might be a lot "older" than us and further advanced then us and our primative brains. Perhaps we don't even understand things well enough in our current evolutionary state that we could even imagine how these lifeforms exist. They might "know" of Earth and the "really really primitive lifeforms there", but they might not even care. If these "aliens" were to come to Earth, we probably wouldn't have any other way to describe them other than "Supreme Beings". Is that really so hard to imagine especially given how many things we thought we once knew not that long ago and now realize was just plain wrong or simply the best way we could understand it at the time? There's still lots of things we don't really understand about ourselves and we've had a lot of time to study ourselves. Who's to say what it is that we don't understand having had no experience with it? Humans in general don't like to think about things that we don't understand. We want to find explanations for everything and when we can't we tend to be very skeptical despite our track record that there's LOTS of things that we didn't really understand or couldn't explain at one time or another.

I find it hard to believe that there aren't MILLIONS of things in the universe that exist that we don't understand yet.

You're taking my response far too literally. I wasn't really trying to use the story of Adam of Eve to explain why we go to church, I was trying to imply that there are reasons that the story of Adam and Eve exist which have nothing to do with the story itself. It's merely a story.

By the way, I've never heard of B. I don't believe that's from the Catholic faith at least I was never taught that. Not that I was taught A or C either, but at least I've heard those arguments before, B is a new one. Who taught you that? And what does the story of Adam and Eve have to do with the story of Cain and Abel? 2 different stories.

okay you can consider it a different story...it is the next part. 

Catholics aren't big into quoting the Bible so I've never actually seen that verse before or at least I don't remember it. Another verse of the bible that is confusing to say the least. That's probably one of the reasons Catholics aren't big on quoting the bible.

I get where you're coming from.  I'm not sure if aliens exist, and if they do, if they're been to earth or not.  However, it is certainly more conceivable that out of the millions of planets in our galaxy (not to mention the others in the other millions of galaxies) there would be other intelligent beings as compared to some all powerful vengeful magical space-zombie.

As for the origin of life, we simply don't have enough data at this point in time to draw a correct conclusion.

^
Ha! Never thought about that, oh hell I'm using this the next time. Good call Pappy.   :D

As for the OP I'm extremely happy I live in this era. Yeah, it would be nice to live in the future and all it has in store for us but I'm not too concerned with it either, just enjoying what we have now. What if things suck later on? Wars? Aliens wipe us all out? Disease that wipes out the planet? Nah, I'm ok with now. And F living in the past. Thinking of living without all the conveniences, technologies and entertainment of the present, hell no.

Catholics aren't big on quoting the bible because they know they would sound stupid.

You are funny!

The moral of the story is the fall of man, the consequences of that fall, and finally the retribution of a loving God. Things were great, we screwed up and have to suffer the consequences, and God made a way for us to get back to things being great again because He loves us.

Adam and Eve lived forever in paradise and walked in the presence of God until they they decided to do the one thing he told them not to do, eat from the tree of knowledge. God warned them that they would die if they did. At the point they ate they became spiritually dead and thus, separated from God.

Secondly they were punished. Labor would now become painful for women, work would now become toilsome for men, and snakes would now crawl on the ground and become more cursed than any other animal.

Lastly, he made a promise that a child born of a woman would come along and defeat sin and pave the way back to God. To show His love and to give a sign for things to come God sacrificed an animal to cover their shameful nakedness.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Is your point....

a) Catholics don't have a clue about the bible.
b) The bible is stupid so anyone quoting from the bible would sound stupid.

If it's a) from above, then you're at least partially right. I was not taught to memorize the bible, instead portions of the bible were read to me, but then explained what was meant via a nun or priest for example. So no I can't quote the bible to save my life, but that doesn't mean I'm not familiar with what the bible teaches. Every religion has their own way of interpreting the bible and teaching what the bible says.

If it's b) from above, then you are welcome to your opinion, but I can't agree with you there.

Sometimes I get frustrated that I live in a time where science is not as respected as I'd like and we still have a large percentage of the population that looks to faith for answers, in regards to things like gay rights.  I don't mean to start an argument, but I believe that there will be a time when society looks back at things like limiting gay rights and creationism and shakes its head at the way that our society handled it.

As someone who feels like that, I feel ahead of my time -- and that sucks.

There have been numerous societies that have denied God throughout history. Even Israel itself has turned their backs on God at different times.

You do understand that the moment the word "until" hit that sentence, the word "forever" obviously became inaccurate.

Shoot, my bad...I forgot that we were talking about the Bible, where accuracy and reality are abandoned in favor of establishing and enforcing the Church's rules for human behavior through ridiculous stories and threats of eternal damnation.

So in this story, knowledge is something to be feared and shunned.

I think that was Hoodie's point.

I never need to know what scat sex or anal rape feels like. In the same respect God doesn't want us us to experience everything because it isn't beneficial for us (as said in the Bible). He was protecting us from the knowledge of the consequences of sin. That is a knowledge we could have done without. 

I could be wrong, but I don't think we want to devolve this thread into a religious debate.

Oops, missed this one.

Our curiosity and search for knowledge has led us to many terrible things: torture devices, biological weapons, and the like.

However, I can think of few ideas more abhorrent than the notion that the search for knowledge itself is something to be shunned.  It is very telling that in the Bible, the ultimate flaw of humanity that caused all grief and despair for the human race is... that we wanted to learn more than what we already knew.  Whether the mindset that we "already know enough" and "shouldn't be trying to learn more" persists in religion to this day is a question I leave to the reader.

I want to know what scat sex is and am to afraid to google it.

^ Poop.

Are you sorry you asked now?

Yes....but way happier that I did NOT google it.