I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.

Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?

Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?

#science #nature #technology

@coreyspowell The train of thoughts, that everything observable has already been seen and it’s more efficient only to scroll through the old scriptures (as current LLMs do) and deduce from there (as future AI might perhaps do) is at the basis of classic SciFi literature, like Asimov‘s Foundation. There it always predates the downfall of civilization itself, for obvious reasons.
Until now that appeared to me as an unrealistic projection, so it‘s really scary to see that idiocy play out for real.
@Gernotti @coreyspowell No observation needed for creationism.