Meteor shower tonight - we're doomed, I tell you!

[5129frederick]

There's a meteor shower due tonight just after ten.  If you look east you should see them between ten p.m. and two a.m. if, like me, you're a night owl.  As forecast by St. John the Divine in the Book of Revelations.  Don't believe me?  Read all about it:  Revelations ct. 6 vss. 12 - 14 inc.

"And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackclothof hair, and the moon became as blood;

and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken by a mighty wind ..." 

Ok,so we all know just one star is thousands of times bigger than the earth, so we'd be instantly oblitterated, so logically what John was seeing was a spectacular meteorite shower - something that happens several times a year along with earthquakes, which is why I'm writing this tongue in cheek.  Meteorites are pretty small anyway but as the enter the earth's atmosphere at anything up to twenty-two miles per second, they give off a huge display as the break up.  

For those who take the Book of Revelations seriously, as Fraser (Dad's Army) would say:  "We're doomed - doomed, I tell you..."  

[bankhaunter]

The footprint business is easy to deal with, originally they were erroneously thought to be human footprints but proper investigation showed that not to be the case, however despite the evidence some young earth creationists continue to promote them as showing man and dinosaur existed at the same time.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy.html

Unfortunately YECs repeat 'evidence' that has long been refuted even in one example 'polystrate trees', the true explanation can be found in a book written in the 19th century.

When it come to peoples apparently vanishing I think one should bear in mind that what we would think of as a small or moderate sized town would have been considered a large city in the distant past and there could be a number of reasons why such places could disappear and their population disperse, local climate change, possibly the water supply drying up, a variation or loss of trade etc.

The Mediterranean area is subject to a lot of volcanic activity so any coastal civilization that did not erect monumental structures could indeed vanish overnight and if the land sunk beneath the sea at a later date it would be very hard to discover the normal small traces, pottery shards, stone tools etc.

It is generally considered that climate change combined with competition by modern man was responsible for the end of the neanderthals about 40,000 years ago, after those we only have modern man left and the fact that there are gaps in what we know about them/us over the years doesn't automatically mean there was anything unusual that happened.

The reasons for apparent disappearances in more recent history are very interesting, it was once thought the Anglo Saxon take over of Britain was by invasion and conquer but we now know that not to be the case however it's not properly known exactly how it occurred.

Neither do we know what happened to the Picts, why they seem to completely vanish.

The one thing that would show evolution to be false would be a fossil in the wrong place that includes any trace of humanoids, so far that's never happened.

[cee-dee]

I didn't know about the footprints.

However......... As to finding old humanoids, just because none have been found YET doesn't mean there are none.

To that end, let us say I hid a needle in a haystack and challenged you to find it? After a week of looking and you'd not found the needle would you then say there was no needle there?

OK, I know it's "different" because you'd know a needle was there and we don't know there's any remains of old civilisations to find.

After all, some of the remains of old settlements were completely unknown not so long ago.

[peteryola]

I saw 33 meteors last night over a couple of hours ( not continuously ) and only stopped looking because observer fatigue was setting in at around 00.30...