Xyph

It would eventually completely decay, I think. A half life of 15 minutes means, roughly speaking, that in any given 15 minutes there's a 50/50 chance that any given atom will decay, so that last atom is going to decay sometime.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

How do you differentiate between you and the cells that make you up?

Oh yeah, hm. You'd still need an initial repulsion to start the expansion though, since, I think, by the time things started to converge on the other side of this sphere with a 3-dimensional surface, the fact that galaxies were moving towards each other again would be fairly apparent.

Because the same science that has led to all the modern comforts you mentioned also points to such a conclusion. Why in the world would you, who rely on, and realise you rely on, the achievements of science every day of your life, decide that that same science is invalid when it comes to matters of theological significance?

No it can't. Everything is moving away from everything else. If there was a center, there would be a clearly defined spherical shell of galaxies moving away from an empty central region, but this isn't what's happening.

That's utter nonsense. You haven't answered the question at all. Look, let me simplify it for you: If Creationism is science, then why is science applied only to the created (albeit very badly) and not the creator? If a fish with an elephant's head is the sort of thing you would class as a transitional form, I recommend you learn more about evolution.

That's not an answer, it's just a rephrasing of what you've already said. So I repeat my question: What, exactly, do you want? Would something half fish and half elephant satisfy you? The difference here, even if what you've said were true (which I'm skeptical about, to say the least) is that modern day scientists are not all pushing racist or sexist agendas, whereas all Creationist organizations are pushing religious agendas. Further, even if it were true that whites simply evolved from blacks, there's no inherent racial bias here, since there's no absolute standard of evolutional superiority. And you haven't responded to my main point. So how can you consider Creationism science?

But that implies a center, whereas observation suggests there isn't one. If the universe is on the surface of an expanding hypersphere, there doesn't need to be a center, and expansion can be completely uniform.

If things were to look the same as they do now, for what you're proposing (until we reach the halfway point when things start to converge again) the universe would need to be on the surface of a static hypersphere with five spatial dimensions. This seems a lot more complicated than the expanding 4-dimensional hypersphere that is usually proposed to explain the universe's apparently uniform expansion. Edit: Oh, I've just realised that that 5-dimensional version would be the representation of a 4-dimensional universe that ends in a Big Crunch, with time represented as a spatial dimension.

While I'd like to think there's no-one rational who would yield to Creationist nonsense quite as easily as the hypothetical person in the interview does, the fact remains that most people who are successfully deceived by Creationists are not experts, which should tell you something about what it takes to accept it over science. What would satisfy you as a transitional form?! There isn't a perfect record of every minor variation of creature that ever existed, you know. Gaps in fossil records don't mean nothing existed in between. Are not amphibians a perfect example of a transitional form between aquatic creatures and surface dwellers? What do you want, an animal that's one half elephant and one half fish? That doesn't stop it from being religiously inspired. Have you ever met a Creationist who isn't religious? Are there any organisations dedicated to Creationism that aren't religious? If it wasn't for religion, would Creationism even exist? Saying "God did it" (or "an Intelligent Designer did it", if you insist) is clearly not science no matter how it's used, since you're no closer to understanding the process than you were in the first place and are postulating something above all established laws of nature to explain a natural process, and something that cannot be examined scientifically. If Creationism was a science (and don't fool yourself, it isn't) the next step would be to extrapolate the methods used by the creator and the properties of the creator itself. The fact that pretty much all Creationist organisations adhere to religious doctrine that has not been scientifically obtained, and spend more time poking imaginary holes in established scientific theories than doing this should be proof enough of how unscientific (yet deceptive!) Creationism is.

If you really want instantaneous communication, I would go with nanoscale wormhole links. They're at least theoretical and vaguely scientifically plausible, if nowhere near to being provable or buildable at the moment.

Centrifugal effects would probably make too little difference to be noticable - on a highly speculative note, though, you could try something like inserting a lump of degenerate matter (neutronium, quarkonium - probably the latter would be better since it's less likely to destabilise) into the core. I'm not sure you wouldn't just end up with a black hole, or what other undesirable effects it might have, but at least you'd be able to keep Ganymede looking pretty much as it does now if it worked. Getting it there probably wouldn't be too much of a problem either, since it would just fall towards the core anyway, but there might be seismic effects on the way. If you increase the gravity, the orbit is going to be altered, though - there's no way you can avoid this. Heating it up is probably going to require an orbiting artificial sun of some sort. ...Helium? That's going to be unhealthy on the vocal cords.

A, D, C and G, B and F, E, I thought, but then, I really know very little about GR or SR.

Edited. Oops, nevermind. Didn't notice the 2 pages.

But however feeble our bodies are, it'll be our big brains and thumbs that will, potentially, allow us to survive the destruction of the Earth. Out of interest, what would it take for you to class something as the pinnacle of evolution?

Seems possible enough, although I doubt it's been done. Unless the camera was the same size as the room, though, I'm not sure if the view from inside this spherical LCD would look quite right.

I stopped reading at, "Another reason why we should prevent women from working is because of the bible."

There might be very minor variations, but I doubt there'd be anything extremely significant. We are all the same species, after all, and thus have the same optical system (relatively speaking).

If we had been more evolutionarily adapted to survive without artificial aids, we probably would never have developed the intelligence we have in the first place. Creatures with big claws, sharp teeth and eyes that can pick out prey that are little more than dots on the horizon don't need to develop technology to survive, or the intelligence to develop it. Granted, there is an intermediate stage in the collective life of (probably) every species that does manage to develop technology, when technology is overindulged in and abundant without actually guarding against any large scale catastrophes, and even preventing further evolution, but this is a necessary stage to reach the point when it will be necessary. When the sun expands and the Earth is roasted, no amount of natural defenses are going to help animals that haven't built the technology to go somewhere else. Still, we could be doing fairly well for all we know. We're the only global civilization we know of that has developed technology, so we don't exactly have anything to measure ourselves against. For all we know, most species with the potential to escape the demise of their sun get locked into a religiously inspired Stone Age early on, and eventually get wiped out. On the other hand, we might be one of the few species without the foresight to implement a system of eugenics and avoid technological overindulgence as soon as such a thing appears necessary. We just have too little experience with technological civilizations to say how well we're doing at the moment.

OK, there are a few things I don't really understand about this, so I'd appreciate it if someone could explain the following in layman's terms, assuming it can be done in such a way... 1) How exactly is antimatter produced? It's done in particle accelerators, I know, but since, presumably, all there is to work with is matter, I find it hard to see how antimatter can be got out of it. 2) Having established that antimatter can be produced in some way, and given that, for example, a positron and an electron will annihilate each other in a burst of gamma rays, apparently the energy resulting from such annihilation can be used to create these particles again - but can it be done this neatly in actuality? How exactly are the energies focused into forming particles? Will concentrated photons always coalesce into particles with mass at some point? 3) Given that particles can be created, somehow, is there a way to control the output at all, or is it necessarily left to chance? Could theoretical particles such as WIMPs, gravitons or exotic matter be produced using a similar method?

Hm, but is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle likely to be fundamentally impossible to bypass, or is it feasible that it could eventually be overcome? I've heard of something called Weak Measurement, which supposedly could lead to a way around it, although I don't know if I've understood it properly.

I don't think it's too much to ask that a planet orbits in the same plane as all the other planets, which is mainly why I don't see why Pluto is considered a planet. That said, if something the size of Jupiter had a similar orbit I would probably feel differently - but then again, Kuiper Belt objects generally aren't gas giants. On the subject of planetary classification systems, this one seems extremely plausible, although it's perhaps not as specific as some others have the potential to be.

Is it at all likely that we'll eventually be able to build things on scales smaller than nanoscale? What problems would we encounter when building things out of nucleons, or even quarks? If the quark has a substructure, could we go beyond? Is it at all feasible that we'd eventually be able to build even on the planck scale?

Consciousness is the feeling of self-awareness and apparent free will in creatures that have evolved a complex brain through being in situations in which they have needed (and succeeded) to learn new skills to survive. I don't know what quantum consciousness is. Got a link? Edit: A quick Googling has turned up a few results that seem to be pretty metaphysical, so I would guess, in this case, it's an attempt to define sentience by turning to Quantum Mechanics, which I suppose is apparent from the name, really. Another result claims that the process that gives rise to consciousness operates on the quantum (or planck) scale, which would make sentience a quantum phenomenon. I'm not sure what difference this makes, besides being an interesting curiousity, though.