Tsunami Hit New York City Region In 300 BC 147
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists say that sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate a huge wave crashed into the New York City region 2,300 years ago, dumping sediment and shells across Long Island and New Jersey and casting wood debris far up the Hudson River. Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, says that size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. 'If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm,' says Goodbred. An Atlantic tsunami is rare but not inconceivable, says Neal Driscoll, a geologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is not associated with the research. The 1929 Grand Banks tsunami in Newfoundland killed more than two dozen people and snapped many transatlantic cables, and was set in motion by a submarine landslide set off by an earthquake."
Fools, the fools! (Score:5, Funny)
The 1929 Grand Banks tsunami in Newfoundland killed more than two-dozen people and snapped many transatlantic cables, and was set in motion by a submarine landslide set off by an earthquake
This is exactly why you shouldn't stack submarines. The fools!
so this is what happened when atlantis sank .. (Score:2, Funny)
a big wave hits new york and new jersey. now just backtrack where the origin was, and boom! atlantis found.
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I think there might be something wrong with your timeline...
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Never mind that - Atlantis seems to have been on Santorini in the Mediterranean, the rest is just speculation.
What's more interesting is that if it has happened once it can happen again. Living by the coast is a blessing but also a curse. Living inland has it's good and bad sides too. More extreme temperature differences between winter and summer, but less risk for severe storms except for some areas that suffers tornadoes.
So even if the ocean makes living easier it also comes with risk. But people are livi
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> What's more interesting is that if it has happened once it can happen again.
I just struck this match, and it lit ...
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After it burns out, let me know how many times you have to strike it before it re-lights.
proof it (Score:1)
Yeah, but it was okay... (Score:5, Funny)
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I thought it was Bloomberg. And he has been re-elected ever since.
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...because Rudy Giuliani was mayor at the time and handled it well. And never passed up an opportunity to mention that he did so, either.
A noun, a verb, and 300 BCE.
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Yeah, that's about $2.50 in American money, right?
News for nerds (Score:5, Funny)
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and they had dupes in 150 B.C. and 1300 A.D. !!
This isn't a new worry (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would think Long Island would take the brunt of force from the New Haven area. Echoes are bound to hit, but they're much lighter than the initial impacts.
I suppose a sufficiently powerful quake from the right direction in the NE could send a wave down the sound. Talk about racking up the property damage...
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Umm, sorry you got the math wrong.
It is the tsunami WAVE that travels at 1000km/h. There is no way the water itself travels at that speed. (It is almost the speed of sound. Do you really believe tsunami waves cause ocean to fly hypersonic?)
Think of the sound: it travels at 340m/s, which does NOT mean that the medium (air) travels at that speed.
The correct way to estimate tsunami's energy, I believe, is to calculate its *potential* energy. I.e., (200km*pi*1m^2)*1000kg/m^3 * 9.8m/s^2 * (roughly) 0.5m = 3*
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Does this mean that the detonation of 1500 Tsar bombs would make the ocean fly supersonically?
That would be an awesome sight :-)
But probably the last ting one ever saw...
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Could happen again (Score:1)
Re:Could happen again (Score:5, Informative)
You're talking about La Palma [wikipedia.org].
And yea, no one is really sure what will happen when it goes into the sea. It depends a great deal on how it goes, I suppose.
My money is on Yellowstone violently erupting, which shakes apart La Palma.
Which gets the attention of the martians...
Re:Could happen again (Score:5, Informative)
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You must be a fellow (amatuer, like me?) volcano-seismo-doomsday-ologist :-) Not many people would have known not just the island, but the volcano's name at the drop of a hat. Nice!
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I can't remember the name of it, but I read about an island somewhere off the coast of Africa. It's a giant chunk of rock that's split in such a way that its eventual collapse into the ocean is near certain.
Well, there's one scientist who thinks its near certain, and a BBC documentary that focused on his points of view and made them sound like fact. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen, but it's not the certainty that the documentary made it sound.
If I recall correctly, other scientist are far from convinced that his assumptions are right. I believe some theories predict slow land slides instead, which wouldn't cause tsunamis.
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I can't remember the name of it, but I read about an island somewhere off the coast of Africa. It's a giant chunk of rock that's split in such a way that its eventual collapse into the ocean is near certain. When it happens, the amount of water suddenly displaced could potentially cause a tsunami that we here on the East coast would definitely notice.
The US should put an instrument on that rock. When it stops transmitting, they have a couple of hours to evacuate the east coast of North America.
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I was reading my copy of "The Geology of Spain" (ISBN:1-86239-110-6) a couple of weeks ago in preparation for a holiday to Mallorca and I got distracted by the section on the "Islas Canarias" (Spain's island province off the NW coast of Africa). As of 1998 (Geological Magazine, v135, p591) there are some 15 slide deposits identified around the islands of the group, and at least 3 slides from La Palma itself. Of cou
Today... (Score:2)
They'd call it neighborhood improvement.
Obligatory Science/Religion post (Score:1)
> and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. "If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm," says Goodbred.
And this is what makes science, science. The fact that it COULD be wrong and (good) scientists not only recognize it, but relish the possibility.
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You wrote your post seemingly from a point of view that says science must be separate from religion. If that is true then I have to ask why you think that? For example, if the Holy Bible says there was a Great Flood then isn't it science's responsibility to prove it right or wrong? If not then I don't think there is any room to call Christians idiots for believing in something that can't be proven. Many of the events in the Bible can be proven but if science isn't going to take the time to do that then ther
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1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this
Cumbre Vieja (Score:1)
Cumbre Vieja is a volcano in the Canary Islands that if it were to blow could cause a tsunami from the eruption or, worse from a large landslide. Its tsunami would hit the East Coast of the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja [wikipedia.org]
http://www.iberianature.com/material/megatsunami.html [iberianature.com]
I've seen the evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
I grew up 5 miles from the water on Central Long Island's "South Shore". When I was a kid my friends father had a large garden, about 80 yards by 20 yards. Every year when he would till/turn the soil, large crumbling shells would turn up. We always wondered why they were so close to the surface in a place that had been above sea level for millions of years. Maybe this is the answer.
Don't confuse tsunami with turbidity currents. (Score:2)
There was a tsunami, triggered by the Grand Banks 1929 earthquake, but I wasn't aware of it killing many people at landfall. Then again - two dozen people is only a couple of years of Canadian oil exploration deaths, so it's still not that many.
But the cable snapping has generally been attributed to the progression of a
Re:Good news for the young earthers.. (Score:4, Funny)
The great flood must have been somewhere else. There weren't that many Jews living on Long Island back then. But poor New Jersey.. Even mother nature was dumping its garbage there.
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Even though I am an atheist, I still don't find this funny. Even if you don't believe, you should have enough knowledge of history to know that 300 BC is concurrent with Ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, and there was certainly no worldwide flood at that time. I guess I shouldn't be surprised you don't know your history, being your a product of the government school system, whose goal is to propagate ignorant and easily-malleable voters.
Second virtually every culture in the world has a record of a fl
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Young earth creationists shouldn't be "tolerated," their view is akin to, "The universe was born from the Great Banana in the year 500BC, and as a test of our faith, it was made to appear as if 13.x billion years old in every conceivable way."
Re:Good news for the young earthers.. (Score:5, Funny)
Intolerant people should not be tolerated...
Oh. Wait...
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Extortionists should not be fined..
whoosh, i know, i get it. It's ok to kill someone who's trying to kill you. We punish harmful behavior, that's the whole point to civilization.
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Kidnappers should not be jailed...
That's perfectly understandable if you use the Obama's administration's reasoning [abcnews.com] on why Bush era torture shouldn't be prosecuted. "This is not a time for retribution. It's a time for reflection. It's not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution.'"
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They and other specific groups of fundamentalists, of any religion, commit certain specific harms upon the future of the human race. Their particular views are immune to questioning, held to be incontrovertible truths. There are fundamentalists who believe that those who convert away from their belief are heathens, and don't deserve life, or liberty, or their belongings, or other things. There are fundamentalists who believe that scientific research and questioning our origins is blasphemy, and should be sh
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>>>They and other specific groups of fundamentalists, of any religion, commit certain specific harms upon the future of the human race ..... Many sects of the Abrahamic and other religions still practice despicable practices and wage war on each other for petty differences in the form of a god they all think exists.
>>>
So the Third Reich was justified then, in your opinion. They were simply eliminating dangerous people for the betterment of society. (cough)
Ass.
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I didn't say fundamentalists deserve to be slain, I said they don't deserve to be tolerated in discussion or in politics or in education. We can't force people to think rationally, but it should be the duty of rational people to attempt, at least attempt, to make the world a better place by keeping such irrationality out of harm's way. Public discourse is one thing, but there is no doubt in my mind that teaching that evolution is "just a theory" and teaching the "weaknesses of evolution" to kids who are ins
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>>> [African-americans] shouldn't be "tolerated," their view is akin to...
Fixed that for ya. You see, I consider your views just as bigoted as one of "those" persons. I see no difference. Whether it's prejudice against a color, or a sex, or a believer, it's still prejudging an entire group as if they all think alike. It is wrong.
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Of course they should. The mentally ill should be pitied, not ridiculed.
What they shouldn't be is indulged, or allowed to infect others with their illness.
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Ah, certainly. I tolerate people who think Sponge Bob Square Pants is cool too, but I'm in favour of not letting them participate in government.
I think your friend commodore was moderated down below my threshold when I replied... my post is what I think, but as a reply to yours it was in fun.
Commodore him- (or her-) self seems to be a little full of it despite (or because of) his alleged non-public education. Most cultures have flood myths but most are poorly dated. They might all refer to the same event
Re:Good news for the young earthers.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your analogy is REALLY flawed. Being Black doesn't imply a certain rational framework, or adherence to a certain theory. As far as I know, no ethnicity has a defining body of theory, that once they change their minds, they change their race.
I just stopped believing that the Earth Revolves around the Sun, therefor I ceased to be white.
Your statement is rather silly, since basically your saying that no group that holds a view contrary to science, reason, or evidence, should be discredited, even if this opens a very large can of worms, since there are so many contradictory views. This is especially true when you make a statement of an ontic nature, which is falsifiable such as the claims of the young earthers. Either the world is 3000 years old, or it isn't, and proof would exist that would prove or disprove one or the other claim. Faith never plays into it.
Intolerance would be saying "never tolerate religious group x", which is almost as bad as racism, even if it is much more prevalent than racism. Though oddly religious groups seem much less tolerant than anyone else, since your are a bad bad person if you don't align with their sexual, social, or ideological mores.
I have nothing against religion, or the religious as long as they don't try to muck with my life, or tell me what do based on what their supreme deity of choice told them, since that argument has no bearing on my life. If they keep their ideas away from me, I'll happily ignore them. UNTIL, that is, they try to pass of faith for reason because of religious arguments. The second they say something disprovable, it is fair game, and they shouldn't complain when someone attacks it with evidence, science, and reason.
I cannot scientifically disprove God or gods, but I can easily disprove the world being 3000 years old, or similar claims.
There is no right to be wrong, especially when you try to spread falsehood as unassailable truth (there is no such thing as an unassailable truth, truth should be attacked at every chance we have, just to make sure truth is REALLY truth, and some some pleasing falsehood that makes us happy).
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The problem I have is with the atheists who like to make fun of and insult the religious. It doesn't help their arguments at all. Not even the most rational person will react well to insults let alone change their mind.
I'm not saying you have this problem, but I suspect this is what Commodore64_love is driving at (and missing...). And yes, the religious do so too, but pointing that out is like the little kid crying "mommy, mommy, but he started it." Both sides sink to the same old dreary level of name-calli
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I agree, when confronted with reasonable people, it is always best to be reasonable no matter how strong you disagree. But when people aren't willing to be reasonable, or are trying to force something down your throat (this goes for everyone, not just the religious) by means other than logical argument, then I can see some hostility.
There is a certain class of people who are right, will always be right (no amount of evidence to the contrary), and who thus think they know better than you, and thus should ha
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I find it funny that you object to religious folks imposing morality upon you, but you seem to have no objection to people like Bush or Obama doing exactly the same thing ("We must spend your money to bail-out the rich AIG and Chrysler executives. It's good for society.") Why is the second form of tyranny/force any better than the first?
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Actually, I object to both, since both are taking away my freedom of choice (money is a form of having choices).
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Odd thing, I live in a Democracy (well a Republic, but still), therefore a majority of the people (or at least states) voted for Obama and Bush. Under this political system, this means that they have a limited amount of time to do our (the majorities) bidding, and if they don't we get rid of them. To sum it all up with a cliche, people get the government they deserve.
There really isn't much point in complaining, vote for "the other guy" next time, though I'm guessing he will be just as bad. We seem to be
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Odd thing, I live in a Democracy (well a Republic, but still)...
Sorry to be a pedant, but this always bugs me. If you live in the US, you live in a democracy (small "d"). You also live in a republic (small "r"). The terms are not mutually exclusive.
A republic is any country which is not ruled by a monarchy, or similarly styled leadership. As the US is governed by a President, this makes it a republic. A democracy is any country governed by an elected representative. As the President, Senate, Congress, Governors and every other conceivable leader are all elected by vario
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Yes, yes, small lower case "d" and "r". Absolutely correct, though you should have put them in quotes; just to drop a pedant bomb on you as well.
I know, though, that republics and democracies are not mutually exclusive, but generally anytime some on states "the U.S. is a democracy." some uninformed wanker will leap from the woodwork and yell "No! We are a republic!" as if the were mutally exclusive, and as if being a republic was somehow inferior to being a democracy, and this is the fault of whatnot and wh
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>>>I just stopped believing that the Earth Revolves around the Sun, therefor I ceased to be white.
You exaggerate that point, but you are close to the mark. There are many blacks who say Bill Cosby is "not black" or that Obama is "not black enough" (he's only half black). It's prejudice pure and simple, and it disgusts me. All such generalities disgust me. Just because someone belongs to a certain group like black, or woman, or jew doesn't mean they all think alike.
"All fundamentalists are a dan
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Disgusting bullshit. Even if you were running-around in a white sheet, I couldn't hate you anymore because I think your comment is sick, sick, sick.
No it isn't. Anyone who holds a mere mental structure above human beings (the definition of a fundamentalist) is a threat. This hold true to people who believe in a political ideal to the point of threatening to destroy society, people who hold a religious ideal above the lives of others. Any purely mental, abstract construct should never outweigh human consid
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Race, gender, nation of origin -- all of those are things that are outside of our control. If I'm a black woman from Italy or a white man from South Africa, those are unchangeable facts. Beliefs are not put to the same standard. Prejudice against an innate characteristic is wrong.
Prejudice against a belief is different. People who believe, defend and hold an opinion that is poorly supported, leads to incorrect conclusions should be subject to criticism and judgment. See: politics, science, anything
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If I recall correctly your examples were Agnostic in the end.
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Your arguments are jumbled and misinformed. You are conflating "young-earth creationists" with anyone who believes in a god. None of those scientists you mention believed in the god of the bible, or indeed any kind of god that requires willful ignorance of the scientific understanding of the world.
You saying that he's calling them idiots directly implies that you think they are all young earth creationists.
You keep perceiving an intolerance of the demonstrable lies of one small group as an intolerance of th
Einstein did not believe ina personal god (Score:2)
Choosen quotes :
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in
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being your a product of the government school system, whose goal is to propagate ignorant and easily-malleable voters.
Careful, you're superior private education is showing.
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Careful, you're superior private education is showing.
And YOUR inferior education is showing.
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And you're sarcasm detector is broken.
And you're starting an irreversible reaction which will ultimately result in the longest reply chain in the history of Slashdot.
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Maybe this is why Commander Data doesn't use contractions. If you consistently say "you are" then there's no confusion.
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Okay, as long as I don't have to use emacs.
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Re:Good news for the young earthers.. (Score:5, Informative)
citation please? some cultures have flood myths but where did you get the idea that they all pin the date down to circa 8000BC? and how circa is circa? Indeed the dates seem to be all over the place [wikipedia.org]. They also seem to involve their cultures surviving the flood, which isn't much use to people trying to prop up the Genesis flood story. Unless noah's family traveled the globe restablishing exact replicas all the cultures of the world and then carried on as if nothing had happened. Presumably noah had at least one black kid, and one asian kid, etc.
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Missed the point. I'm not debating theology; I'm debating tolerance. I find it rather annoying that I hear certain "liberals" preach tolerance and then 5 minutes later they slam religious people like Jews, Christians, or Muslims.
A true liberal doesn't give a damn what his neighbor believes, and he supports tolerance in ALL cases.
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If the timing of the flood accounts wasn't your point, then you ought to have left it out. It's a pointless distraction, at best, and the fact that you begin the paragraph introducing it with "Second," indicates that it's intended to be part of the argument.
But worse is your condescending attitude towards the original poster's - at least as you imagine it - and the completely gratuitous political slap which presumably you only included to tie things in to the general attack on (liberal) intolerance. If th
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"educational background," should follow the final hyphen.
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>>>worse is your condescending attitude towards the original poster's
He's lucky that's all he got. In my mind this person is probably wearing a white sheet over his head. It's exactly the same prejudiced bullshit, and it disgusts me when I see people make comments like, "All fundamentalists are a danger to society."
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You missed the point of the OP. Criticism is not the same thing as intolerance. He wasn't slamming jews muslims and christians. He was pointing out that science-denialists will present this information out of context to try and actively deceive people into thinking there is a scientific basis for the genesis flood. Do you think that criticising demonstrable misinformation is intolerant? Perhaps we should be more tolerant of HIV-denialists, and holocaust denialists? Oh wait, they aren't hiding behind a banne
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it depends on what your definition of tolerance is.
To me tolerance is simply having the maturity to agree to disagree, acknowledging there is one correct and are many incorrect answers to a question, be it is there a flying spaghetti monster, the answer to 2+2, or whether we evolved.
Tolerance to some liberals means that everyone should agree that there are no absolutes (which ironcically is an absolute statement) and libel, slander, or persecute anyone who disagrees with their idea. They speak with a forked
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Can you name one who advocates this and where they said it, i.e. give a cite?
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the liberal media, for starters. ;)
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OK name someone in the media that has advocated that position. Not generalities but a person saying this is there position.
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No you made a statement which was the very first line of your argument. He's absolutely right to ask for a citation. Otherwise, you just showed an example of why the belief is considered stupid.
Liberals preach legal tolerance, that is people can't say stupid stuff with no fear of legal penalty and in fact the full protection of law. That's quite different then demanding that when they say stupid stuff they don't get called on it.
Things like posing about the good quality cultural records from 10,000 years
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Concise and spot on.
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noah's family traveled the globe restablishing exact replicas all the cultures of the world and then carried on as if nothing had happened. Presumably noah had at least one black kid, and one asian kid, etc.
That sounds like a great sitcom!
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One problem is that in folk tales (for this argument including religious documents), multiple similar events tend to get conflated into single archetypal events, even if originally well-separated in time and/or distance. And at this remote, barring a time machine there's no good way to determine which such events got conflated, other than guessing by reason of known proximity.
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But the funny thing is there was a big flood in the region around that time, it was the flood of the mediteranean base when the atlantic ocean was flooding the metiteranean base at the end of the last ice age 10.000 years ago.
The Mediterranean has a deep connection to the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar. The depth of that place is 300 meters or lower. Sea level never got low enough for the Mediterranean to lose that connection. The Black Sea is a different story. There is a theory that the Black Sea flooded with water about 8,000 years ago roughly. Among other things this is alleged to have triggered the Indo-European diaspora.
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So.. and I am guessing just like you.. your saying that because the Republicans of the last administration had the support of fundementalist religous zealots, it is therfore a good bet that someone who is not so, must be a Democrat ? ... all atheists are Democrats ?
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Second virtually every culture in the world has a record of a flood circa 8000 BC, from the Jews to the Eqyptians the Iraqis, Indians, and Chinese. Apparently *something* happened that year... perhaps a side effect of the melting ice flows after the previous glaciation. Again I guess I shouldn't be surprised you didn't know this.
Proof please. It's called pre-history for a reason.
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I get tired of people asking for citations in posts. If people say something, and you think it's wrong, GO FIND EVIDENCE THAT IT IS WRONG. Don't sit there expecting everyone else to do your work for you.
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That's a list of flood stories from pre history. Far far less than cultures having a record of a flood datable to a particular time.
1) Most of those stories don't claim to be historical
2) They aren't describing a common event
3) They didn't happen in 8000 BCE
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Thank you. In all fairness I couldn't have put those 3 objections together until I saw the list of myths. I knew before I got your piece of the affirmative case was that there is no historical record of anything anywhere on the planet from 8000 BCE. So I could have something much weaker like:
"If they are historical they didn't happen in 8000 BCE"
but your list is what crystallized "they aren't describing a common event".
But I needed a specific list to be as specific as I was. In other words because you ca
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The original post clearly was basing his statements on something, it would have been reasonable to at least try to figure out what that was, instead of of saying something that essentially amounts to "you are
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Agreed. I said as much when I directly countered the ggp "we don't have historical records of anything from from 8000 BCE". I gave him a specific point of dispute.
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There no accurate records from 8000 BCE, I wish there were.
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Well, there is a hypothesis that a land bridge at the Bosporus was breached around 5600 BC, causing a massive flood event creating the Black Sea. While the origins of the Jewish people did not occur for several thousand years after that, even a "mild flooding event" taking years or decades would be a story handed down by people living in the region, and spread throughout the world in subsequent millennia.
Of course, this doesn't make the Biblical, world wide flood historical in any sense.