MaxCathedral

I won't do a full ten count, and I suppose some of you will have over ten... but I will start by mentioning some obvious ones... The Wheel Fire Darwin's odd idea that all living creatures share a common ancestor.

No, No, I am not talking about the O'Neil play, but the rather fascinating news the the "Iceman" found in Italy and dated at 5,000 years ago may not have been murdered per se. With Dna showing four different human blood traces, (not his own), the new word is he may have been in a "combat" situation for 24 to 48 hours before his death. Apparently caused by an arrow to the back. There are also defensive wounds on his hands, rib cage, wrists. No one knows for sure, but he took at least two of them out. Actually retrieving the arrow from their bodies to re use again. One theory, it may have been a "boundary" issue with the Iceman and his community.

Reply #3 quote: Personally I think pi, the ratio between the diameter of a circle and its circumference, is much more amazing, and appears in a much wider variety of places, but we all recognise it as 'part of the woodwork', so it's invisible. MrL Jakiri wrote that. I found the statement so tantalizing I must as him or anyone to elaborate. Tell me of the wonder of Pi.

Intelligence, you constantly surprise me.... First...math is not a man made structure. One plus one equals two. If there were no humans on the planet that that would still be true. This lack on your part to grasp abstract thought as shown by your crude remarks concerning religion fascinates me. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" Act 1, Scene 5.

I found Glider's response to be amazingly well written, concise and packed with pertinent information.

Most of the following is culled from http://www.space.com, my favorite science page. This one of course being my second favorite. It appears that a 27 year old untrained theorist named Lynd has said some amazing things about time. I have heavily edited from the article. Goals never reached The most famous paradox invented by Zeno, the Greek philosopher, is called "Achilles and the tortoise." A tortoise gets a 10-meter head start in a race against Achilles. Zeno says the tortoise can never be passed. His logic: When Achilles has run 10 meters, the tortoise will have moved a meter; Achilles goes another meter, and the tortoise crawls 10 more centimeters. The race continues in this ever-more boring and incremental fashion. A related paradox, called the dichotomy, argues that you can never reach a goal. First you'll have to travel half the distance, then half that distance, and so on. You might as well stay home. Reality is different, of course -- goals are reached and tortoises often lose. But philosophers and physicists have not been able to explain the paradoxes away. Lynds claims the paradoxes result from an incorrect physical assumption from long ago. From ancient times to the present, philosophers and physicists have assumed that objects in motion have determined positions at any instant in time. It's not true, Lynds says. "I'm surprised this hasn't been realized before," Lynds said, calling many aspects of his theory very simple. No flow of time One implication of Lynds' work is a really hard to wrap a mind around. If he's right that there are no instants in time related to physical processes, then there is no such thing as a flow of time, because such a flow inherently requires progression through definite instants -- exactly what Lynds forbids. So are we all frozen in time and space? Impossible, he says. "If the universe were frozen static at such an instant, this would be a precise static instant of time -- time would be a physical quantity." Again, you'll recall, Lynds does not allow this. Perhaps you smell another paradox on the horizon. However, Lynds reasons that the lack of instants is what allows Nature to have time that we can, in turn, watch go by on our clocks. Confused? You are not alone. It will likely be some time before Lynds' ideas are shaken out by his new, lofty peers and determined to be revolutionary, interesting or just plain wrongheaded. Max: In short Lynd is against the idea " that time can be thought of in physical, definable quantities. In essence, scientists have long assumed that motion can be considered in frozen moments, or instants, even as time flows on." "There isn't a precise instant underlying an object's motion," he said. "And as its position is constantly changing over time -- and as such, never determined -- it also doesn't have a determined position at any time" Understand? Waiter, check please? Time does not exist.....I think?

Is there another you, right now watching TV somewhere on the other side of the Universe? Some sceintists think so. You see we can only see so far out into our own Universe. Or what we think are the limits of our Universe. It is possible that in a another Universe, your exact double (except with three arms because of a different evolutionary path) exists. This would be an Alternate Universe. An Identical Universe would produce an exact copy of you, history, everthing. You could meet yourself, and change some things....on that planet only of course. Finally, there is the Quantum Dice Universe. A universe where Germany won WWII, or Custer beat the Indidans or Rome never did fall. This idea of Parallel Universes also brings into play the idea of time travel. If you could go back and kill your parents, would you disapear. Not so, say some theorists. You would only not be born in that space continum multi world. As Hawking said, "If time travel is possible,where are all the future tourists?" Well, its far from a hard science subject, which is why I placed it here......(the sound of Twilight Zone kicks up)....because you have just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.

In brief...Kepler's Laws are as follows: 1. The orbits of the planets are ellipses, with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse. 2. The line joining the planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times as the planet travels around the ellipse. In others words, the planet moves fastest when it is near perihelion and slowest when it is near aphelion (furthest from the sun.) 3. The ratio of the squares of the revolutionary periods for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their semimajor axes. In other words, period for a planet to orbit the Sun increases rapidly with the radius of its orbit. Mercury, the innermost planet, takes only 88 days to orbit the Sun but the outermost planet (Pluto) requires 248 years to do the same.

Well, it turns out I have found out the answer to my own question thru the old fashioned way...reading a book. Only 5 percent of the known Universe is made up of Matter. The rest is a mysterious stuff called Dark Matter. We really don't know much about it. In fact some have argued that the Universe is "invisible". We can't bottle the stuff or take with us to lab, but its there. On top of that, there is another little thing called Dark Energy. Anti-Gravitional by its very nature it is causing the Universe to expand forever.

Out of the six cataclysmic mass extinction events that have occurred since life arose on Earth, we have found the impact craters for four of them. There's some food for though :-s Max goes out and looks deep into space.....shudders...

My understanding that is that such gas giants as Jupiter, and the moon have been taking the hits for us...for a long, long while... However, I dug the article and fwd to several people. Will it happen....given enough time....I suppose so.... We theorize it did once before...and the dinos left us...

The cosmic soup seems to be made of these three items... Can someone...briefly....explain them..and what percentage in the soup they comprise.

I have heard figures from 80,000 years to 5 million to 20 million years....... The accepted figure seems to be one hundred thousand years ago, man first appeared... If we accept that the Universe is 15 to 18 billion years old, the milky way 12 billion years old, mother earth at 4. 5 billion years old... When do we first appear in the timeline?