mistermack

In the same way that you can feel the wind more, the faster it's blowing. If it's still, you can't detect it. Just that if the dark matter were to be hardly moving, then maybe you can maybe create an energetic collision by having the target moving at near the speed of light.

Could it be that dark matter is moving so slowly that we can't register any evidence of collisions? If so, maybe they could look for it by looking at particles in the Large Hadron Collider, as they travel, rather than when they hit a target.

"How does intelligence play into it? " The answer is fairly obvious. The change made by photosynthetic organisms was not directed, it was a blind unthinking process. Human action can be directed and targeted. That's the difference that intelligence makes. So we can think about what we want, and then do it at a phenomenal pace, compared to evolution. Yes. And that's a fundamental difference. We went from the first plane to landing stuff on Mars in about a hundred years. There's obviously nothing comparable in evolutionary history. The reason we are special is because of science, and all of that came out of our advanced brains, that are in a totally different league to those of any other species. The basic ingredients are brain size, brain development, and language skills, plus our inherent ability to copy and learn from others. They are all typical ape attributes, taken to the extreme. So if the argument is that we are nothing special, because other animals have all that stuff at a lower level, I'm arguing that it's the level that's all-important, because we've passed a line, where we can do science, and nothing else is close. Chimpanzees are the nearest, and they are six million years away, IF they happened to evolve in the right direction.

We call that wanking round these parts.😉

That should be obvious. It's whatever I would do. 👌

You couldn't have got it more wrong. We are special, in comparison to ALL other life on earth, in that we can intelligently alter our environment. Whether you regard that as a good or bad thing is irrelevant. No other creature gets anywhere near what we can do. And the pace of change is incredible, compared to the past. If you compare the last 100 years to the previous 100 years, it's like a different planet. You say that given enough time we won't be, you have no way of knowing that. In any case, "given enough time" is irrelevant. Does the eventual heat death of the Universe have any relevance to us today? It's the present and the near future that counts.

An asteroid put paid to any chance of further evolution of T Rex. But his little cousins managed to hang on, to eventually evolve into hillbilly fried chicken. Same thing could happen to us, but in our case, the species would survive a similar impact, even if we lost huge numbers. A much bigger impact might finish us off though.

It didn't.

Why?

I think that on evolutionary time-scales, we are right on the brink of a fundamental change in human evolution. Evolution by natural selection is in it's final years. It's nearly gone in most countries already, because in those countries, most humans live long enough to reproduce. It's getting replaced with evolution by human selection. At the moment, that involves some people deciding to have lots of children, and at the other end of the scale, others deciding to have none, or just one. So at the moment, evolution is drifting very slightly towards the kind of people who choose to have more children, if there is such a type. But in the very near future, human selection will get a lot more intrusive, with the progress being made in genetics. Already, they are working on eliminating genetic disorders, but in the very near future (in evolutionary terms) people will be opting for taller fitter better-looking offspring made to order in the genes lab. So the human race is destined to look more and more like me. ☺️

Amazing ! https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/12/investing/us-oil-production-russia-saudi-arabia/index.html

I meant an ocean desert. I imagined that people would get that, but I guess there's always one who needs it spelt out. https://www.sciencealert.com/in-the-heart-of-the-ocean-lies-a-desert-and-scientists-just-found-what-lives-in-it

Rubbish. I said no such thing. The point is that if you want to guarantee electricity supplies, it's academic if some countries get "most" of their energy from renewables. They still have to cater for the times when the sun's not shining and wind's not blowing. So they need the generating capacity to cover it. You have the same capital cost, whether you are using the equipment or not. So the country has to finance two lots of generating capacity, the renewable and the fossil or nuclear. It's like owning a Rolls Royce, and never using it. It's dead money and it still needs maintenance. All to cover the current shortcomings of renewables. I understand why governments still push renewables. There are votes in it, if they are seen to be "green", and it's a very good policy to diversify where your energy is coming from, to cover unexpected international energy supply problems. I wouldn't like Britain to be too reliant on Russian oil or American gas. I'm simply pointing out that the economics of renewables are generally being misrepresented, by viewing them in isolation. To the price of every unit of renewable electricity, you should be adding the true cost of covering it for blank periods.

I'd love to see solar power get cheaper and take over the job of providing our energy needs. But at the moment, the true picture is never being told. Solar power is subsidised by fossil fuel. People need electricity when it's dark, and solar power doesn't cut it. There are ways of storing power during the day and releasing it at night, but they would make solar power hugely expensive. So fossil fuels have to do the hard bit, and solar power does the easy bit. But that means that fossil fuels are subsidising the shortcomings of the solar industry. If the solar industry had to supply all of it, they would be losing a fortune at current prices. The same applies to wind power. Combining wind and solar spreads the load a bit, but you still have to have fossil fuels subsidising their inherent inability to keep generating power when it's needed. At the moment there's no sign of any breakthrough in energy storage. That's why I'm a fan of nuclear power. It's the way to go for the future, and what's holding it back isn't the rise of renewable energy, it's politics, and the constant improvement in extraction techniques for fossil fuels.

That also makes us special. I'd like to see dolphins or chimps fuck up the planet. 😏

I said in my post that other animals have cultures. In our case, it's so extreme that we put men on the moon. You might not call that special, but I would. Our nearest rival species are still at the bashing things with stones level. What more do you want to call us special? We are special in the degree of development of features that are either rudimentary, or non-existent in other animals. Anyway, I'm not posting here to support the OP. I'm just posting my thoughts, on the discussion.

A hugely important factor in the history of invention is culture. If you take intelligent animals like octopuses, they can innovate and display surprising intelligence in problem solving. But their inventions die with them, and the next generation starts from scratch. If your population has a culture, it means that you learn from each other, and beneficial behaviours spread around populations, and pass down the generations and can be built on. We humans are the most extreme example of this. Other animals have cultures of sorts, but nothing like the level that we have taken it to. And of course, language plays a huge part in the process. I don't know what the language skills were like at the time that we became bipedal though. Probably basic to non existent, but the learning culture can be pretty strong just from observing and copying.

It should be pretty easy. You design a floating buoy with a vertical pole that extends down and is attached to the sheet, and keeps it from rising. You would need some clever mechanism to take the up and down wave action out of the equation. For the sheet to rise in one place it would have to sink equally in another, because the water would have to go somewhere. If you had some vertical sheets at intervals, creating cells and preventing sideways circulation, the whole thing could be kept pretty stable. It would be the sort of thing that you improve over time, with experience. For a lot of engineering projects, you have to be doing it and seeing what works to evolve a design.

Americans are full of crap, all this bleeding heart guilt over black Americans, while actively colluding with and supporting the Israelis in their never-ending brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Forget the historical atrocities. Stop doing it now, and cut out the blatant hypocrisy.

I just looked up equilibrium temperature, and it's the theoretical surface temp without any greenhouse atmosphere. So the equilibrium temperature here on Earth is -18 c. The greenhouse effect knocks that up to an average surface temperature of + 15 c. Since water vapour is the major greenhouse gas, and we are presumably looking for a planet with plenty of water, you would be best advised to look for a star with a planet like Earth, with oceans, and an equilibrium temperature of approximately -18 c. I would personally think that planets are not the thing to look for, if you want to colonise other stars. The most useful things to find would be rocky and watery lumps in huge quantities, free floating like Saturn's rings or a protoplanetary disk. You would then have raw materials, easily available, to build space stations to live on. Planets have the major drawback of costing mega-bucks to launch things from. Smaller bodies free-floating could be mined and used with hardly any energy costs. If we had something like that available near the Earth, it would make a big difference to the problem of living in space.

If there is a line, it's constantly on the move. Just a thousand years ago, everything in existence was on the "designed" side, and nothing at all was on the other side. There was no available explanation, other than "god did it". Gradually, virtually everything in existence has been jumping across the line, to the non-designed side. Darwin shifted most of the important ones, and Einstein did a good job on the rest. Laptops should be included, because their designers evolved naturally. They are just like the beaver dam. So the magic "line" really equates to the gaps in our knowledge. You would have to know everything, to eliminate the line entirely. It's the good old god of the gaps argument, dressed up as "where is the line?" Edit : Of course, if something was discovered that could not under any circumstances have occurred naturally or by human means, the proper conclusion should be that it's evidence of aliens, so an intelligent designer should still be the final possibility, the filling in of the final gap. Not the FIRST conclusion you jump to.

My own guess would be that it's to do with Neanderthal dna. The last stronghold of the Neanderthals was around Southern Europe/North Africa, and that's where the pointy noses seem to be historically clustered. Sub Saharan Africans don't have any Neanderthal dna, and usually have flat noses. Eskimos and Inuit have flat noses, so if it's an adaptation to the cold, it takes a long time to happen. Of course, that's just a guess, I'd give it no more than ten percent chance of being right.

Even among the apes, there are big differences in mating characteristics. We humans have the biggest penis. A male silverback gorilla has a penis that's about 1.25 inches in length (from memory), even though he's twice the size of the average man. Chimpanzees are in the middle, but have huge testicles, and Man has the biggest penis of any ape. It all reflects different lifestyles. Silverbacks dominate a harem of females, and can mate any time they feel like it, without sexual competition or the need for consent. They compete by fighting and dominance. Chimps are believed to have the huge testicles, to compete via sperm, by flushing out the sperm of a previous mating by a rival. Humans have a tendency to pair off, but also there is often a lot of infidelity as well. Why we have the biggest penis might be related to walking upright. The penis is more visible, so there might be subconscious selection for size by females. But that's just a guess. It could be that we use more varied positions, or the lack of a penis bone. Or it could be again related to stronger pair bonding, as I speculated earlier. Human females don't "come into season", in the way that other primates do. They are ready to mate most of the time, and that could be related to bonding as well.

I don't have my original link, but google came straight up with this : https://www.parents.com/getting-pregnant/trying-to-conceive/how-many-attempts-does-the-average-couple-need-to-conceive/

Humans are not very fertile, on average. I read a summary of a study recently, that concluded that a young couple, trying to conceive a child, has sex nearly 80 times on average, for each pregnancy. Many deer only do it once, to get a doe pregnant. Human children are vulnerable for such a long time, that it was very important, in our evolutionary past, that a female should have a male in attendance, to provide protection for both of them. So sex is not just to impregnate females in our case, it's a bonding mechanism to protect the vulnerable members of our species.