I'm not obliged to accept your assumptions as fact. If lenses were around, dont you suppose there's a chance somebody had 2 and held them up to look thru both and discovered magnification? Your "fact" denies that possibility.
Do you have any idea at all of what the world was like in the first decade of the 1600s? We're talking about the Age of Exploration, when countries and city-states were all about religion, war, and above all, making money. When Galileo saw that Really Cool Stuff in the night sky (the moons of Jupiter, the mountains on the Moon, the phases of Venus, and sunspots on the Sun), he was excited and tried to show people. He set up a telescope so people could look through it.
You know what happened? They couldn't care less about looking at the planets. They couldn't see the point. But the point that they did see was that anyone with a telescope could look out to sea and see when the merchant ships were coming in. A merchant with a bit of advance knowledge could get an advantage over his competitors and make a better deal. Or in the case of warfare, there would be less chance of surprise attacks.
If the telescope had been around during the time of the ancient Babylonians, it
would have made it into the history books. Whole economies and battles would have been different. And someone other than Galileo would have been the first to look at the planets and record what they saw.
O-kay... so a few people with extraordinary eyesight could see Uranus... if they knew where to look.
Earliest known sighting of Uranus, credited to Flamsteed, who in the late 1600s would not have been using just his bare eyes. But it was still Herschel who got credit for the official discovery in 1781.
Don't even try to spin it that somebody with extraordinary eyesight saw Neptune and Pluto.
I said the cloud was invented to explain long term comets, I dont know how that inspired you to run off after imaginary comets and the Kuiper Belt. I believe future analyses of these comets and the Kuiper Belt will lead us to another planet beyond Pluto. But I do not believe long term comets formed in some distant all-encompassing cloud of (m)billions of comets reaching half way to the next star system.
The Oort Cloud is theorized, not invented. Astronomers accept this theory. The Kuiper Belt is certainly not imaginary, since Pluto is part of it and so are the other KBOs that have been found.
I have no idea why you think the comets I named are imaginary. I saw both
Hyakutake and
Hale-Bopp myself. So did many other people around the world. Are you going to insist that all of us were just imagining things? Please note that at the time when Hale-Bopp was visible, I was taking an astronomy course in college. Are you going to tell me my instructor was lying to us?
Do you have evidence the Earth didn't have water? Igneous rock can form in water, but I dont know the fate of the Earth. There's a bunch of water in the crust and mantle so I imagine it'll take death by red giant to cook it out slowly enough to disappear before the planet. Maybe thats the ultimate lake of fire...
Igneous rocks form as a result of volcanic activity.
As for the "fate of the Earth," a few billion years from now, Earth won't be here.
I might be confusing you with someone else, but I thought you were an anthropologist of sorts, someone already knowledgeable about the subject of mythology. But you have never read the Enuma Elish? I posted the relevant section and provided a link, you could have read it already in less than a minute. Reading the arguments you're debating is customary, no?
No, you're not confusing me with anyone else. I majored in anthropology. And I did study a lot of mythology. But none of it was remotely to do with Babylon.
You said nobody had a telescope before 1600, that is not a fact, its your assumption. Dont get mad at me for pointing that out if you're gonna argue creation myths are false because you decided nobody had a telescope. No telescope would tell them the world was covered by water before the creation of the dry land and life, the Bible would though
I argue that creation myths are false because there isn't a shred of evidence that they're true, or even plausible.
And you don't need a telescope to tell when there's water on the ground or in front of you. Even I don't need that, and my eyesight's pretty bad these days. So I don't know what your last sentence even means. It's basically a word salad.
Unless you have some evidence on hand that shows the evidence of a telescope existing before the 1600s, it's more than just an assumption.
We have no reason to believe that telescopes existed before that time. That seems to be your own personal hope, or something like that.
It's like an obsession... similar to EltonJ's silly Atlantis stuff, or the pretzel-twisting argument earlier this year where a couple of people here clutched at the most minuscule of straws to "prove" that Noah's flood happened.
Which has a higher probability of being fact, nobody in the 5th century had a cell phone or nobody had a telescope? A high probability of truth is not fact... You can "usually consider" your assumptions to be facts but I'm not obliged to agree.
I pulled the cell phone out of the air to use as an example. I could just as easily have said that nobody in the 5th century had an electric guitar, or a plate of my original-recipe peanut butter cups that only I know how to make. Your insistence of "but maybe they did" won't make it true. There's no evidence for cell phones, electric guitars, my original recipe peanut butter cups, or telescopes in the time of the Babylonians.
This would literally have been impossible. Magnification was already known and was the usual purpose of various lenses for a couple of thousand years.
The purpose of the second lens is to properly focus the magnified light from the first lens. Not simply to magnify and anyone trying this before the 17 th century or thereabouts likely wouldn't have seen a thing because the technology for making the glass and shaping lenses was poor before this time. Serious scientific work on optics had to wait until the era of Newton, Snellius etc.
Almost as soon as the telescope arrangement was discovered it, inevitably, found a military use. If anyone had discovered it earlier the same thing would have happened.
Altogether there's a lot to say against the notion that someone may have invented the telescope before 1608.
Thank you for being a voice of reason.
Telescopes were invented in the 1600s, that is a fact... what is not taught as fact is nobody ever had a telescope before the 1600s.
If somebody had a telescope before the 1600s, it would have been invented before the 1600s.
And your argument is just silly. If something was invented or accomplished for the first time in a particular year, it makes sense to teach it that way. By your reasoning, our Canadian history students should be taught that "Confederation happened in 1867. But that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened 300 years earlier and everybody just forgot."
Now? Where have I insisted my opinions and interpretations are facts?
All through this thread.
My case doesn't depend on a telescope, that was the rebuttal offered by Val et al. She called it "fact" and I said it was an assumption, not a fact.
Considering that you're insisting on magic knowledge that couldn't have happened without either ancient telescopes or aliens - the evidence for both of which is extremely lacking - I think it's a sound rebuttal.
It is a fact? Why dont you accuse Val and others of this "Gotcha, I win" when they declare their opinions are facts? I dont think my argument is improved by redefining "fact" to accommodate people who think their assumptions are facts.
Unlike you, I am stating facts.
"The telescope was invented in the 1600s" appears to be a fact, yes.
1608, in Holland, actually. It's
Hans Lippershey, a Dutch spectacle-maker, who gets the credit.
It was invented in the 1600's... What is not a fact is "nobody before 1600 had a telescope". Something can be re-invented when knowledge is lost.
Where do you keep all that straw you're grasping?
Several years ago I read a science fiction story about a manned trip to Mars, and the characters in the story got a shock when they discovered an abandoned spaceport on there. The point of the story was that since it took less than a century for us to get from rudimentary flight to Moon rockets, it wasn't far-fetched that numerous advanced civilizations had risen and fallen throughout human history. And every time they fell, the subsequent one had to start over from scratch... over a period of over 100,000 years. The characters in the story had found an Atlantean spaceport.
Nice story. But there's not a shred of archaeological or geological evidence that it happened, or even could have happened. It's the same with your Babylonian pseudoscience. No evidence.
If telescopes existed prior to then as lost knowledge, then surely they would have some day been found via archeological digs.
Created objects don't just suddenly disappear and cease to exist.
If an object is unique, it could. But telescopes are not unique. They're not even rare. I have two of them, and the classified ad pages of any astronomy magazine are crammed with ads for various kinds of telescopes, lenses, tripods, cameras, and so on. And even in the 17th and 18th centuries, anyone with an interest in science and who had the money could purchase or make a telescope.
Computers existed in the stone age.
You cant prove that they didn't so I am right.
I'm tempted to post the link for a animated series of Star Trek fan films called "Stone Trek." Think of it a cross between
Star Trek and
The Flintstones. The computers in that series are literally made of rocks.
They're entertaining little cartoons. But they're not evidence that our prehistoric ancestors had computers and space ships.
I didn't say telescopes existed in the stone age, I said claiming nobody had one before the 1600s is not a fact
It is a fact that I've made that factual claim numerous times in this thread. Look up my posting history if you've forgotten.
The dictionary established the meaning of fact...and pantheon. I never claimed my opinions were facts.
Yes, you have.
I'm not the one claiming my assumptions are facts, and I didn't make a great fuss - y'all did that. Val declared her assumption was fact and I said it was assumption. That was followed by several people telling me facts dont need to be facts to be facts and I haven't heard the end of it yet.
No, I did not claim my 'assumption' was fact. I claimed that my facts are facts.
And please don't refer to me as "Val."
that... it wont take you 45 years
The Oort Cloud is not an explanation for all comets; well, Oort may have believed that, but his theory has undergone modification as we learn more about the solar system. But he was trying to explain the long term comets with his cloud. This is what I said:
