RoyLennigan

its not an event that you can wait around to happen. its going to happen very gradually with short periods of intense environmental change that spurs selection for more rare traits. so it could be a few hundred years or it could be a few million years.

it all depends on how smart you are. i've been on many mind-enhancing substances including lsd and mushrooms. never, i repeat never have i had the desire to do anything like walking into traffic or jump from a building. on these drugs i feel like i am part of the world around me and i so i know, even better than while sober, what would happen if i did something like that. the most dangerous thing i've done while on acid is balance across a boardwalk about 25 feet in the air and a couple hundred yards long. but i would never have even contemplated getting up there if it had been any higher than it was. the people who end up dying or seriously hurting themselves on these kinds of drugs are the ones who arent smart enough to know how they could affect them. it is not the fault of the drug, it is the fault of the person taking the drug. psychadelics like lsd and mushrooms have absolutely no chance of doing any physical harm to your body just by taking them, no matter how much you take. you could OD on applesauce before you ate too much acid to kill yourself. the only problem is when you start taking it from strangers or when you don't know what you are taking and what it will do to you. i only messed around with stuff that i got from friends who had tried it before so i knew what to expect. its only a coin toss if you have no clue what you are doing, in which case you should not be doing drugs. i would be immensly glad if all the people who were ignorant of how drugs work just quit doing drugs so that there would be more for the ones who knew the purpose of drug use (and its not just to get f***ed up and feel different). on hallucinogens i've had powerful revalations on how the world around me works, and i've felt myself as part of the universe, not just in it. as mimefan was saying, it is due to the irresponsibility of those taking the drug that causes them to do such irrational things like jumping off a building--it is not because of the effects of the drug alone.

no processes in the universe are random, including evolution. the closest to randomness you get is probable events at the quantum level. every action is dependant upon these quantum events, and so everything is just a probability. but when looking at actions on a larger scale--say the reactions of chemicals and the formation of life--it can be seen as being deterministic. effect follows cause; life is formed by this loooooooooooong chain of cause and effect. thus, the origin and evolution of life is not random.

there are no steps forward or back in evolution. changes occur due to the environment an organism lives in. obviously, in the environment the snake was in, hips and hind legs were of less use than no legs at all. maybe the sleek body made it easier to evade predators, or dig underground, or swallow their prey whole, etc. whatever the cause, it the change allowed the snake to survive better than others without the change, and so its genes were passed on to more offspring.

if you take theory as being faith, then why are you attacking it thus, unless you expect your faith to be attacked in return? with all due respect, i'd rather read from the nature around me than from the words of a book. nature cannot lie. and to the thread starter, thank you for the timeline, its a really great visual aid for understanding the order of what most likely progressed.

i'm not sure if we understand the force behind light. photons are created when one or more energized electrons move down in orbital levels around the atom. the distance the electron falls matches the frequency of the photon emitted. the reason we can 'slow light down' is because we can make it travel through mediums other than a vacuum. light is constant in a vacuum, the speed is c. but when travelling through water, or glass, or other objects, the speed is slower. it is by changing the medium that we slow photons down. photons have a mass of zero (as do hypothetical gravitons). there is nothing lighter than it. there might possibly be negative mass particles, but they havent been found. because it has a mass of zero, and zero is the least mass in the universe (that we know of) then it makes sense that nothing can go faster than it. einstein shows us that as you approach c, the speed of light in a vacuum, your mass gets infinitely larger and you will therefore need an infinite amount of thrust to propel you faster. this is obviously impossible (at our current comprehension). i don't see the relevance of the question. i would think that, logically, all movement is at a fixed ratio to the speed of light. the greater the mass, the more force is needed to propel it. you are right that photons do not have any mass. it takes in infinite amount of energy (not the same as all the energy in the universe) to push something at the speed of light. as the speed of an object increases, so does its relatavistic mass. the greater the mass, the more energy is needed to push it. photons are massless, so they always travel at the speed of light, they can't travel any slower or any faster. but light travels at different speeds through different mediums, and the fastest through a vacuum. i would imagine this means nothing can travel faster than light through the same medium, but i am not sure about this.

the theory that our universe is comprised of 11 dimensions is purely conjecture. there is no evidence supporting this. i believe it was developed as part of string theory. i think that a singularity (what supposedly exists at the center of a black hole) would be 1 dimension, but i am not completely sure.

neutrinos have a mass, though very small.

perfect humanity would be complete understanding among everyone. there would be no ability to lie. there would be only shared memories and experiences instead of language. math would be our written record.

i've read from several articles that dark energy creates a negative pressure and would therefore push all matter away from it. if what this guy claims is true, then how would it be possible that black holes appear to suck matter towards them?

everything has been shaped and reshaped, i'd be surprised if there was any kind of 'object' anywhere in the universe that was 13 billion years old. but the matter that makes up everything in the universe--me, you, the computer, etc--is as old as the universe.

an atom is matter, a photon is a quantum of the electromagnetic field. atoms do not make up EM waves. i think you are confusing atoms with particles. what he was asking is how could you theoretically get matter from energy; how could you turn an EM wave into matter.

the only evidence for dark matter is the fact that it is the only thing that can be explained mathematically to fit the known model of the universe. it was proposed because it could explain why the universe is (or was) expanding increasingly. this diagram explains the theory better: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/101bb2_1.html i am also curious about gravitational attraction over large areas. i think most physicists say that gravity travels at the same speed of light, while a few mention that gravity isn't limited to a certain speed, seemingly in contradiction to GR. that 'boiling pot' theory would only work if gravity somehow traveled faster than light. much, much faster, which doesn't seem to hold up in GR at all.