IIRC, the "hundreds and hundreds" was an obvious and sloppy voice-over (of the original "billions and billions") to drive home the fact that it was edited.

Let me just say...that if God was a city planner, he would not put a playground next to a sewage system.
- from the motion picture Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Nitpick: the new Cosmos is on the Fox Network, not the "Fair and Balanced" [sic] Fox News Channel. But I agree the irony is delicious.

Well, hold on. "The word of God" and "inspired by God" mean two very different things, the former being "fundie" and the latter decidedly not. I think it's important to keep that in mind when considering the 75% statistic. And I'd be curious to know how it splits on the "word" vs. "inspired" opinion, especially how it splits geographically.

And that's definitely a Good Thing (TM). I don't recall the theologian who said this, but the Bible is not a book, it's a library.

Fair enough. But I don't think anyone would disagree that our modern secular humanistic moralities have been at least shaped in part by the bible and other religious texts.

More to the point, Newton's law of gravity assumed that gravity acted instantaneously across space.

Einstein didn't have a "first" theory of gravity. His 1905 paper on special relativity had nothing to do with gravity, but it did postulate that no physical effect (including gravity) can propagate faster than light. Ten years later, he finished his general theory, which was indeed about gravity.

In Einstein's general theory, gravity acts at the speed of light, but that doesn't "satisfy" Newton's assumption of instantaneous action. Einstein's general theory does approach Newton's law for the case of smaller masses and shorter distances. And Newton's law can be "patched" to accommodate the speed-of-light propagation of gravity, but not the other effects in Einstein's general theory, such as large-mass corrections, space-time effects, bending of light by gravity, and so on.

I think you might want to watch the show again. BTW, this thread is about radio waves not gravity.

Radio waves and light waves are both electromagnetic radiation, just at different wavelengths. In vacuum, electromagnetic radiation travels at speed c for all wavelengths. In non-vacuum media, there may be some dispersive effects that cause the speed to change with wavelength, but those effects are very small in air.

In short, radio waves travel at the speed of light because, in a very real sense, radio waves are light, just not light at a wavelength our eyes can see.

I think the answer is in this novel.

To me, the greatest irony in A Clockwork Orange is that a crime is committed against the criminal, by brainwashing him into not being a criminal (well, not being able to be a criminal.)

Whoa, Saint Peter just posted as AC!

But an hourly basis? Down here on Earth, about 6K to 7K people die every hour. You must be taking that time-dilation drug in Heaven.

IIRC from the DS9 episode, O'Brien experienced a simulated sentence but actually spent very little time in prison. In this way, he was "punished" but without taking away a great deal of time from his life.

And that makes me wonder: rather than use this drug to make 30-year sentences seem to last 1000 years, why not use it to make shorter sentences seem like they last 30 years? Setting aside the important issue of how long it takes to rehabilitate someone, there might be a case for an incarceration that takes up less of a person's lifetime and fewer resources of the correction system.

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
-- Will Rogers

Well isn't that spehshull. Doing our little superiority dance, are we?

TIL what tardigrades are. They look like Heimlich from "A Bug's Life" only they're much, much smaller.

Strictly speaking, it's 144,000 chaste male Jews. Jehovah's Witnesses are gentiles. (Some are married and female. Strike three for them.)

The problem, as usual, is people reading the bible literally. Revelations (like Genesis) is an allegorical story intended to convey a philosophical idea. Interpreting it literally is just crazy, but of course, people do it anyway.

A more complete version of the Marx quote (from the same Wiki source):

I think it's important to include the extra context when citing this famous quote from Marx.

I agree with GP: Prayer != Meditation. One is not better than the other, they're just different.

See my earlier post on this subject.