StringJunky

I'm struggling with it as well. That's why I asked. I wanted to see people's views, rather than having, or arguing for, a particular viewpoint.

. OK., let's say "How did life begin in the universe?" However you cook it and wherever, chemical synthesis over a vast expanse of time created what what we are today and life elsewhere. The subject of that primordial synthesis is called 'Abiogenesis'. Whether current ideas of the paths of this synthesis are right or wrong is irrelevant. It does not invalidate the subject. When talking about origins of life you are talking about abiogenesis; that is what it means, it is a discipline, not a theory, just as biology is the science of living systems, or physics is the science of the behaviour of matter. Abiogenesis is a particular category of scientific investigation.

Thanks, yes, I meant phototrophes. Still learning the lingo. It was nice to read that some of my medical heros as a child, like Pasteur, Koch and Lister, are given a good overview in the historical perspective. In retrospect, I'm resuming an interest I had 40-odd years ago... it feels familiar. Hopefully, I can work through the book and have a fairly good basic understanding of the principles of the subject by the end.

!mooᙠ !ƨqoO

!ollɘH ,llɘW .won ƨu bnuoʇ ɘv'uoy oƨ ,ʜA

Just thought I'd mention that the book is super and will be getting a hard copy. I've read the first 50 pages or so and the style is very accessible to me. Thanks. I thought about getting a microscope, but looking into it, it's pretty expensive for a phase-contrast job and I'd need an aseptic environment and methodology which I don't have, so, I'll make do with the pictures. I couldn't better stock images anyway. I'm confused by 'aerobic anoxygenic bacteria'. does this mean they require oxygen (aerobic) and don't produce it (anoxygenic)?

Stick to the question. When does it go too far?

After Apple's shing-dig with their government, the UK government wants Whatsapp et al to do the same. Does isolated incidents, such that occurred recently in London, justify wholesale, unimpeded surveillance of everything that we, the public, do? This is more of a philosophical/ethical question but this event and the Apple one could be points of reference. The UK must be equal to N. Korea, in surveillance terms already, with the amount of cameras placed everywhere here. i feel the government won't stop until they have access to everything and can see everything. Is that the mark of a free cduntry?

You'll get there if you keep trying. I'm a lot older than you are.

The sun is 330,000 times heavier than the Earth and you would need at least 25 suns to make a blackhole; 330,000 x 25 = 8,250,000 Earths..Laying that many Earths side-by-side gives 7918 (rounded) x 8,250,000 = 6,532,350,000 miles. Edited.

Just because someone is innocently ignorant or naive about something, doesn't give you a justifiable licence to ridicule.

Rght.

Yes to the first part but not the second part of your sentence. If they could move relative to space that would imply the existence of an aether but there isn't one. Movement can only be determined relative to something else within space. If here was an aether we could say there is an absolute speed, using it as a reference. In the same way, if there are no things then we can't say how big it is or even that it exists.

It seems that way. Physicist Sean Carroll, being paraphrased by somebody, referring to one of his books, said "If you take the words out of a sentence, does the sentence still exist?" Without any form of reference, 'space' becomes meaningless.

Can't the signal between the lock device and the receiver just be encrypted?

If we put a ruler in space we can measure it. If we can measure it, it is physical. I am defining physical as: That which pertains to physics. Physicists measure things and study their behaviour.

Both. The whole gamut of possible wavelengths.

No, our eyes don't have the receptors to work below 400nm.

Yes and the same less than 400nm But I chose the visible spectrum because we have the potential to see it when it reflects off something.

Yes, and you won't see it's effect until it reflects off something, passes into your eyes and excites the rods and cones in your retina. If no photons are exciting them, how can you see anything but dark?

Visible spectrum. Unless the light reflects off something, you won't see any light. When you shine a torch up in the air, some of the light is reflecting back at you from the air molecules, water molecules and other particles floating around, hence, you see a beam.

Yes, you won't see a narrow light beam in a vacuum that was passing in front of you, across your range of vision. It needs to scatter off something to pass into your pupils, then you'll see the object it scattered off.

Even if you are from the panspermia school, you still need abiogenesis to start the panspermia... you can't get away from it. In panspermia, did life just magically spontaneously appear, somehow leave another planet, traverse the near-absolute-zero cosmos, then land on Earth? Choose the simplest of the likely, competing scenarios first; abiogenesis on Earth. Space is too cold and vast for much to happen relative to a nice, hot hydrothermal vent spewing out cocktails of compounds and creating a highly kinetic environment. Edited to add.

If there isn't any telepaths there won't be any empaths as there isn't a great deal of difference; it's information that's supposedly being transmitted in both cases. JC's post is perfectly sensible and evidential in its own right. There has been at least a hundred thousand years, since Homo sapiens evolved, for it to become common, which it would have if it existed.

Yes, that second lad has a surreal style... Michael Jackson on steroids.