In the week when nerds make their annual pilgrimage to San Diego Comic-Con, I couldn’t resist this little tidbit on science fiction meets science fact. Last week, a poster was revealed for the upcoming Star Wars movie Rogue One. As you can see, the Death Star looms large over a surface-bound skirmish. While fully acknowledging that the Death Star doesn’t exist as such and so obviously computer graphics and Photoshop were involved in rendering this image for our galaxy, one might wonder if it would be physically possible to ever photograph such an image in the land of Luke and Leia. As it happens, optically speaking the poster is a plausible image–although it raises some red flags about the gravity involved in this scenario. The math and the physics aren’t particularly complicated and the conclusion isn’t terribly profound, but I like to be reminded every now and again that our human intuitions need to be sanity checked.
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dinosaurs
Science in Review: Aviaries Are Frightening in the Dark
I’ve been to Jurassic Park. I don’t mean I’ve seen the movie; I mean that I have been to a place where you can see living dinosaurs in simulated habitats. The sign outside says National Aviary, but that’s just to keep the crowds to a manageable size. Birds are the closest living relatives to Tyrannosaurus rex, and you can even think of them as the dinosaurs that survived extinction by going small.
The notion that birds and dinosaurs are related is only meaningful within a framework of common descent. Otherwise, the similarities are nothing more than that. Thanks to Tom Ingebritsen’s recently concluded series, we’ve seen that accepting the proposition of common descent needn’t require abandoning a Biblically informed faith. So that makes me wonder, what lessons can we learn from evolutionary science? If it is a reliable model of the means by which God created the world, then perhaps God did so partly to illustrate principles that would be beneficial for us to emulate.
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