Red_Ninja

Personally, I geniunely can't be arsed checking out other browsers. I got to a point where IE was annoying me. I downloaded Firefox (fair enough I had Mozilla before that) and haven't looked back. I've noticed a fair few people don't think much of tabs - all I can say is that is must be a matter of opinion or taste, because I personally love tabs. I absoloutely hate IE because it makes me open a new window for every page I want open. Often when browsing I'll want at least six pages or more open, with perhaps one or two loading while I read another. IE opens too many windows and then the OS starts messin about with them, stacking them, etc. So, no expert, but I much, much prefer Firefox.

Fake as the day is long. Lots of problems with the background (do I remember or am I imagining a very modern looking watch on someone's wrist?) but particularly damning about it for me was the interview with its "discoverer" - who promised to send the film in for analysis (bear in mind this footage is meant to be from half a century ago) and never did. Says it all really. While I believe aliens exist as a virtual certainty, (70 sextillion or so stars observable folks?) I am very skeptical about intelligence emerging on different worlds that are either (a) spatially close enough for contact or (b) not evolving millions or hundreds of millions (billions anyone?) of years apart.

I imagine you haven't gotten to the details quite yet then ?

I found Joao Magueijo's Variable Speed of Light (VSL) theories to be very interesting, and no more or less plausible than the inflationary theory of the early universe. Also involved were the likes of Andy Albrecht, John Moffat, Stephon Alexander and others. General idea is that c, while a constant and fundamental speed limit at any one time, has had different values in the past and will have different values in the future. The idea was that it would help to explain the homogenity of the universe and some of the other 'big bang mysteries'. You don't need inflation to make the universe all look the same if the speed of light was higher in the early universe. One interesting outcome of one of the VSL flavours developed by Magueijo has to do with cosmic strings. Cosmic strings are theoretical objects predicted by many successful particle theories. They haven't been observed as of yet so of course no-one knows if they actually exist. They aren't dissimilar in origin to the magnetic monopoles that worried Alan Guth. Cosmic strings are long threads of concentrated energy extending across the universe. When you 'plug' cosmic strings into a particular VSL theory, something interesting emerges; the speed of light could become much larger in the immediate vicinity of the string, as if 'coated' by high speed light. That would in fact create a corridor with an extremely high speed limit, extending across the universe. Because the local speed of light would be far higher, you could reach incredibly high speeds without relativistic effects such as the twins paradox. You wouldn't need to worry about your civilisation being long gone when you got back. Since along a VSL cosmic string the value of c may be much higher, we could move at very high speeds and still be travelling much more slowly than the local value of c. If possible at all; it's for some other species to work out (aliens!!!) as ours is sadly to dumb to even feed itself and keep from wrecking the planet

Now that's what you just got to call a big number Charles Lamb, who I believe was an author from the nineteenth century, once said "Nothing puzzles me like time and space. And yet nothing troubles me less than time and space, because I never think of them." In the old Newtonian model, time was simply a line into the infinite past and on into the infinite future. By constrast at that point in history, people generally believed that the universe had only existed a few thousand years. One major implication of infinite time is that the universe should have reached thermal equilibrium. Every line of sight would end on a star and the sky would be akin to the surface of the sun. I don't really understand the mathematics of relativity because they're too hard for me, but the concept of spacetime means that time is simply a dimension along with the spatial dimensions, and that in a way you could view that four-dimensional model of spacetime as a finite area with no boundaries - like a four-dimensional analogue of a sphere. On Earth, you can go in any direction for as long as you like and you don't reach a boundary where Earth 'stops'. The universe is then seen like a four dimensional version of this. If you go far enough in one direction in the universe you'll eventually end up where you started, though you'd have to be travelling faster than light which is just another way of saying it can't be done. In this sense, old philosphical questions of the type that so troubled Immanual Kant become irrelevant. What happened before the Universe was created or after it ends is akin to asking what's north of the North Pole. Nothing is. Again much of this is stuff that I've just read and to an extent remembered hence it might be inaccurate but you get the general idea This is just my opinion but I suspect brighter people have a similar one: it doesn't seem as if you can have time without space - they seem to be essentially the one animal. An interesting point, and one I hadn't really considered before - yes on that level you cannot even really be said to be the same person from one second to the next. Common sense, which von Goethe said was the genuis of humanity, semms to tell us otherwise though - if we disregard the physical person and concentrate on the perception, or intelligence, consciousness, whatever - the entity that we can perform abstract thought with and are unconsciously aware of everytime we say 'me' or 'I' - doesn't differ wildly from one moment to the next. On the contrary in a reasonably intelligent, happy and open minded person their personality grows, takes on new facets and new memories. We percieve a smoothness in the universe. We know deep down that even the most tranquil country scene is in fact a seething maelstrom of atoms - but that's not what we see. We see stillness, smoothness and continuity. Heheh...! Of course, this is where we get right down to the nitty gritty of personal belief, things I don't have a good argument for but feel instinctively. I believe that there are things about humans that differ wildly from everything else known. There are many peculiarities about humans that I don't buy the brutally simple darwinian arguments for. We are esentially able to create order if we choose to. We can turn white noise into one frequency. I know that under strict dynamics we are creating more disorder than order, but this mostly dissapates into our surroundings and our perception is left with a tidy room, a fixed road, whatever. We choose to reverse entropy in our immediate surroundings as far as our peception is concerned. As an example let's imagine an untidy room and work out roughly how much chemical energy is needed for a human being to perform the motions and thoughts required to tidy it. We get some kind of value in Joules, and then strike a little match in the room, releasing the same energy. Everyone knows we don't get in a tidy room, but on a really simple level we've put the same energy in both cases. The difference is that one of the examples involves energy that was directed - but how do we quantify the thing that gave the direction? To me it's unquantifiable and therefore it has to be 'outside' science. I feel that simple things set us apart as an animal, appreciation of music and art, a sense of humour and an ability to laugh - how does laughing make us more likely to survive as an organism ? Or storytelling ? Yet these kinds of things are central to our nature. For these kind of reasons I believe there is something semi-supernatural about human consciousness. In a way I believe in a soul for reasons such as this. Oh, and more recently I've read some of the research of a professor called Ian Stevenson, who has (pretty thoroughly) researched some five thousand or more cases of young children, all around the globe, who were spontaneously claiming to have lived another life recently. Pretty startling - I like it because it's fairly hard science and doesn't involve any hocus-pocus. Very true, I don't really see philosphy as something that falls outside science's scope. It simply allows for more speculation !

Yeah the Ion Drive looks like it might be a reasonably effective way of getting probes about the solar system. Sort of the flipside from a chemical rocket, very very light thrust (I've read about it being compared to the weight of a sheet of paper) but it keeps going and going and in the vaccum of space it eventually builds up to truly tremendous speeds, of course over a very long time !

I also, pointlessly enough, ponder the "self" issue quite a bit. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, thinking about 'self' and what it means as a word and as a concept. But you just hit a conceptual brick wall every time. There is the silly and somewhat half-assed idea of the 'thermodynamic miracle' - and I can kind of see the sense in it. The idea is that any one human being, as with many things, can be regarded as a thermodynamic miracle. The probability of your parents meeting, and their parents, and theirs, all the way back through three or three and a half billion years of evolution means that as an individual configuration of DNA, you are really very unlikely indeed in terms of the number of possibilities DNA holds. In terms of probability over a short term you can say its equivalent to air spontaneously turning into gold. I like to skip right past questions such as 'does reincarnation really exist' because it cannot be conclusively proven. I prefer to look at the implications of us assuming it exists, if only for a moment. If we live a number of lives, do we live an infinite number ? Do we only exist as humans, or as creatures without self-awareness ? Do we exist on other planets as other conscious creatures, or do we spend millenia long strange lives as some kind of semi conscious dust cloud ? One thing that seems to be important to this idea - is that your 'soul' has to forget everthing that has some before when it lives a life as a person or whatever. If we could recall everything, surely it would overwhelm us or make our life seem utterly pointless. If we imagine that the cases shown in which people seem to 'remember' information from a previous life are true, then we have to imagine that those memories only persist in a vanishingly small number of cases. Philosophically and in terms of how you live your life, it seems to make next to no difference - you either survive as a consciousness and are reincarnated with no memory of your previous life, or you live one life and die. From the point of view of your consciousness running through this process, they're one and the same. You may at least imagine that the arrow of time runs true and that even you have more lives coming after this one, you'll never be 'this' person in 'this' life again. This also leaves individuals with an imperative to live the life they're in as if it's the only one you're going to get.

For an alleged 'intelligent' species, human society is utterly stupid, and largely dispicable and reprehensible. The global economy is essentially a glorified pyramid scheme, with a few hundred centi-millionaires and billionaires who are so rich that they get richer by doing nothing, and at the same time literally tens of thousands starving each day. Human technology is amazing. Our social technology is creaking and ancient. "Peak Oil" is nearly upon us. 2004 saw the lowest number of mega-oilfields come online since sometime in the 20s as I recall. Supply will soon dwindle (how long will they keep finding excuses such as terrorism for increasing oil prices?) while demand continues to grow (look at the growth of economies such as China or India). We can't, or won't, find an alternative to oil - largely because it threatens the economic interests of people who are so rich they live in a rareified bubble of opulence and don't come into contact with the 'great unwashed'. These people will always have oil because they're so few and so wealthy. These people will ensure, as organised religion did for thousands of years, that the human race returns to the dark ages. All the above is just my opinion naturally, but it can be viewed in very simple terms. We are witnessing a battle between 'infinite' growth and finite resources. There can only be one winner and we know which that is. Despite all this I live in hope that we can find some kind of redemption before it is too late. Sorry for the melancholy post

Black holes have been shown by Hawking (mathematically, naturally) to emit a very small amount of radiation. As I recall it's a bit of a side-effect from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Empty space cannot have zero energy in it, because we would then know the energy of it exactly (not allowed). So the universe is seething with 'virtual' particle-antiparticle pairs, which appear from nothing and return to nothing. Their existence has been indirectly measured with the casimir effect (put two plates really close together and they get pushed closer together, because more frequencies exist outside the plates than inside, and this can be measured). The event horizon of a black hole means that sometimes a particle-antiparticle pair will appear on different sides of the horizon. The one outside the horizon escapes, taking a little bit of the black hole's energy (and therefore mass) away. Wait around for a few orders of magnitude the current age of the universe, and black holes themselves will dissolve in a shower of gamma radiation. Black holes fascinate me - they seem to be an example of nature going 'wrong' - the event horizon is a little veil that nature throws over the singularity - 'sorry buddy, you can't look in here'. Staff only.

Greetz folks, first post. As I recall, and I found this interesting at the time, (I was only a youngster and couldn't keep my head out of a book on the Solar system by Patrick Moore) Venus has the odd distinction of having a day that lasts longer than its year i.e. Venus orbits the sun in less time than it revolves on its own axis. Its motion is also retrograde in that the sun rises to the west and sets to the east. Is the best theory for explaining this still that Venus underwent an impact with a massive body well back in its history ? Cheers