Wow. I used to be worried that he would shunt space funding over to useless programs like institutionalized education. After this, my tune has changed. Go Obama!
We have hit this point in modern society where the concept of truth has been blurred by both opinion, religion and science itself. If we take truth to be a measure of veracity (dur), and absolute truth as the binary projection of that (true/false), we find that there is no absolute truth in anything. There is no absolute truth in the bible, nor is there absolute truth in the Copenhagen interpretation.
Right now, there are bitter battles being fought in memespace over truth. global warming is one example of this. Does it exist? I don't know, I am not a scientist and I know not to trust CFD sims. There are equal weightings of opinion on either side. So what I mean by the truth being obsolete is that consensual truth seems to have disappeared. Everyone carries a zone of personal truths with them and now that we have such incredible accesses to information, we are seeing these zones interact violently.
So the concept of consensual truth is obsolete in the internet age. Is absolute truth also obsolete?