insane_alien

no, not always, intelligence on our level hasn't existed for most of the history of life on earth. it need not necessarily arise. no, not sheer chance. randomness is involved in evolution but only at the mutation stage, the mutations are then selected for by natural selection. what happened was we got in an evolutionary arms race and won by way of outsmarting everything bigger and stronger than us that would see us as food.

soo... transistors? that seems a little but wasteful especially as we could easily build a 1bit computer that would run much much faster than 1Hz. I also fail to see the advantage of 1-bit of cache, typically you want to store more than that.

aircraft carriers and cruise ships would also be too small.imagine a cube made out of eiffel towers thats going to be about right.

really? i've never seen a mall that big. biggest one i've seen is about 500m long and maybe 150m wide that would mean it'd have to be 600 meters tall. i think it'd have to be a very very large mall. wolfram alpha lists it as being about 8% of the water in sydney harbour.

regarding the fuel efficiency, extra efficiency can be achieved through super/turbo charging, intercoolers and so on but these all add complexity. it won't be as simple as cutting things out increases efficiency. for simplicity( be warned this will be unsafe and uncomfortable, but functional) you would likely want to have an elevated fuel tank to allow for a gravity feed, a reduced gearing system (two or three gears tops) no suspension, chuck the seats(you can sit on the chassis) simple square chassis frame, do away with the steering column and have a bar you move from side to side (essentially, you do the job of the steering rack). no instrumentation and there are various others. again, this is not something you'd want to ride in.

97 million tonnes or enough to form a cube 355m on a side if in a solid block orders of magnitude are funny things until you get your head around them. and it IS difficult to get your head round them because a lot of stuff occurs outside the range of normal human perception. its easy to think of a n object a few tens of centimeters across but trying to think of an object a few pico meters across is very very difficult and seems impossible until you understand it. its likely the reason for the disbelief at 1 million years to pump 1 cubic inch of air at only a few millions of molecules per second. the mind isn't good at handling these scales at first because nothing it encounters under normal circumstances is even close to it. the mind thinks of 10 million as BIG it also classes the number of atoms in a cubic inch of air as BIG so it thinks BIG/BIG = small but what it really is is MASSIVELY BIG/BIG = BIG

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1*10^18+NaCl+molecules typical grain of salt, 97 micrograms and a cube 0.356 mm on a side http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1*10^23+NaCl+molecules 100000 grains of such, a cube 1.65 cm per side, thats 4.49cm^3 at least, more with packing densities.

it wouldn't be evolution working backwards (that concept is inherently false) but rather a form of convergent evolution, it would arrive at new arms from a different direction than the initial evolution. the new arms would have more wing like features than arms evolved without going through wings.

who says aliens would have a superior intellect? who says they're visiting the earth? I believe aliens exist, I don't believe that they're probing rednecks in the rear end or even anywhere near here.

i fail to see any proof there. we don't think of aliens as some controlling entity or even a reference point for deciding our place in the universe. life managed to appear on this rock so it is possible that it has appeared on other rocks as well. this is the current consensus on extra terrestrial life. and most of it will likely be microbial maybe even plant like. technological civilizations such as ours probably exist to. even the most pessimistic estimates for the probabilities of life turn up an astounding number of alien life. so there probably are aliens out their, I doubt if they are aliens as depicted by hollywood though.

it'd be pretty easy to fake, but really, why bother? i honestly doubt that if they were to fake it that they'd do it by way of digital editing. They'd just make a real one. seriously, at some point you are just going to have to trust someone as it is impossible to trace back moment for moment the movements of any one person. his parents say he was born in hawaii, hawaii says he was born in hawaii and so on. it was ridiculous in 2008 and its ridiculous now. you can't be calling for evidence then denying the evidence the moment its shown.

the burner is external to the envelope of helium it functions more like a hotair/helium balloon hybrid. inside the primary balloon which functions like a hot air balloon there is a secondary balloon filled with helium, the helium is heated by contact with the hot exhaust inflating the primary. this will explain it better

well, the practical advantage is a larger volume with no mass addition so the gas is less dense, not a clue what the temperature would be, hotter than the surrounding air which at those altitudes could mean -30*C and they heat it with gas burners.

that has been done for some of the balloon altitude/endurance records. you typically don't want to use it until you get very high up to save on fuel costs.

there would be some plasma formation, this is inevitable. yes, but this won't change significantly in the altitudes the balloon is able to operate at. i'd say at a push you could get to maybe 50km max. far below minimum orbital height (due to atmospheric drag) so you'll still need to accelerate any payload to 7.5 km/s yes, there will be lower drag to start out with but not really that much saving compared to the vast velocity you must attain to maintain an orbit.

the payload would first have to slow down first match speeds with and dock with the balloon. it would also have to go quite deep into the atmosphere. altitude =/= orbit which would have to make most of the journey by rocket. the big problem with launches is the velocity not the altitude

it means somebody needs to learn proper mathematical syntax so there is no ambiguity.

i think the theoretical limit is one cycle can be as short as it takes a photon to travel between the two furthest points on the processor. the frequency would be the inverse of this. although, due to the materials of construction and the need to communicate with other parts of the computer means it will never achieve the full potential.

its not addictive. the only way it might be addictive is if the consumer gets an adrenaline rush from breaking the taboo about it but it won't be from any chemical properties of the meat itself. other wise pork would be very addictive as it is similar to human flesh.

my point was that the OP was saying clothes are only for warmth. an apron is an item of clothing that serves a protective purpose. i could have chosen trousers and walking through a forest with lots of brambles or nettles. the point would have been the same but less amusing.

tastes like pork but sweeter according to 9/10 cannibals.

go fry some bacon while stark naked, you'll find out other good reasons for clothes.

if you have a way of predicting the location and magnitude of earthquakes then i'm sure there will be a nobel prize and a whole heap of money in it for you.

but area 51 actually does exist. just not in the way conspiracy nuts like to think though.

0.2-1mg/L according to the WHO http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chlorine.pdf chlorine levels in swimming pools will be higher and will likely vary from operator to operator.