Sisyphus

Now THAT's a stereotype I haven't heard before. Seriously, though: there IS a consensus, even if the average armchair pseudoscientist doesn't know what "consensus" means. It shouldn't be a secret, because it's true and it's highly relevant to major decisions we have to make as a society. It would, of course, be better if people understood what that actually meant, and WHY it's a consensus, but realistically, I'd rather see ignorant faith on the grounds that "science works" and it's the best information we have than ignorant skepticism on the grounds that "they used to think the world was flat!!!1!!1!111".

It's not just aquatic animals, either. Most animals have densities close to that of water, including humans.

Maybe it would be good to list a few examples. A ball falls via gravity, and the Earth is pulled towards it with the same force. A rocket flies through space, throwing spent fuel out the back with the same force from which the rocket as a whole accelerates. I swing at a baseball, and during the time of contact, the ball exerts the same force on the bat as I exert on the ball. A car drives down the road, pushing itself forward with the same force that it pushes the entire Earth backwards underneath it. The wind moves a turbine, and is slowed by as much force as is needed to turn the blades. I push a boulder across a field, and the boulder and myself are propelled forwards with the same force that the Earth is propelled backwards. I try to push the same boulder across a frictionless field, but, since I can't exert any sideways force on the Earth, I can only push the boulder forwards if I move backwards.

I don't think so. The Earth and the ring would have the same center of mass, so they shouldn't change position relative to one another from outside gravitational influence like the moon. However, since it's an unstable equilibrium, if anything does move it, it will just keep on moving and crash into the Earth...

I guess I'm just echoing what other people have said, but I'm not sure what it is you want people to DO. War is something we choose to enter in to and we can choose to leave, but nobody is choosing crime. We might just as well have picket lines on Pelosi's lawn protesting old age. It's just not something the government can solve. Help? Maybe. But I'm afraid we'd be talking about a welfare state, or a police state. It would involve majorly pragmatic, and majorly UNFAIR decisions, and libertarians everywhere would riot in the streets, and then we'd be back to where we started. You'd have to jail people who hadn't actually committed any crimes yet, and/or basically bribe people into not being criminals, rewarding the dangerous. But even then, there will always be crime, because there will always be crazy people, and there will always be times when people passions get the best of even relatively normal people. Frankly, I'm not sure why violent crime is so high in America compared with comparably developed nations. Saying something about "guns" is bound to be a gross oversimplification, because we see cultures with more guns (Switzerland) and less (almost everywhere else), all of which have drastically lower murder rates. Similarly, it's not about being "soft" on criminals, since the "softest" nations also have the least violence. So handing out death sentences left and right isn't going to solve anything, either. It SEEMS to be just a very, very deep cultural thing, and existing not because of but for the same reason as the extreme and casual violence of our popular entertainment. What's more American than the cowboy show? My dad grew up in an era when half of television was these shows, where people fetishize their guns and a dozen guys in black hats never fail to get killed several times a day. Why? Who knows? Maybe it goes all the way back to the "independant frontier spirit," or even the fact that almost all of us are descended from people who gave up everything they had to come to a land of wild but vague promises of wealth and adventure.

It would be unstable. There would be nothing pulling it out of place, but nothing holding it in place, either. You would need to be constantly nudging it back in place.

A firm tone of voice.

I'd say a domestic cat is probably the way to go. Stealthily wander the streets as a badass predator, then go home to my guaranteed meal and warm bed. Sweet.

Why would you think that you accelerate? Velocity is changed only by force, and every force acting on the car is slowing it down. The ice merely reduces one of those forces, the friction with the road.

A Dyson sphere (which is NOT from Star Trek, which took Dyson's real concept and represented it poorly) would be an extreme example of that, but there's no reason a space habitat need be that enormous. Think hollowed out asteroid, or just very large space ship. The idea behind "warp drive" is presumably to "fold" spacetime around the ship so that it's perpetually travelling a shorter distance. While such a geometry of space is theoretically possible, what's probably NOT possible is actually generating such a thing. (Any even remotely realistic scenario for "superliminal" speed involves not actually going faster than light, but taking shortcuts through folded space or wormholes.) But usually words like "hyperspace" in SF are just shorthand for "magical faster than light engine." And yes, Mars would probably be one of the prime locations for permanent colonies, as would various moons of Jupiter and Saturn. "Mining" Jupiter's atmosphere for hydrogen or anything else is pretty impractical, though, since the escape velocity is so huge.

There is no obstacle except the extreme distance and therefore travel time. It's entirely possible that the best we can hope for is decades or even centuries of travel needed to reach even the nearby stars. As far as intergalactic travel is concerned, the journey could take millions of years, which, I imagine, is far to long a timespan to realistically plan for. If faster than light travel is possible, that makes things considerably better, of course, but it probably isn't. Most likely, outward expansion will take place within our own solar system, and in the form of permanent space habitats. Think about it: if we could design a ship self-sustaining enough to make a centuries-long journey to another star, then why leave the ship at all? We can make our own worlds.

Actually, we are slowing down. Growth rate reached its peak in 1963.

Man. If you can't trust your own toilet seat, what can you trust? Get something sturdy, your life will feel more in balance.

I guess I stand corrected. My only experience with psychology has been from the philosophical end, reading Hume, Kant, Hegel, William James, Freud, etc. The guy I know with aspergers was totally at a loss with that stuff. But it makes sense that systematized behaviorism and such would be just as easy as math tends to be.

I assume he's referring to all the recent "marriage amendment" nonsense, which EVERYONE IN AMERICA knows is just about sticking it to homosexuals. I don't really buy the "selfish" bit. Care to explain? Also, not that liberals don't have their own anti-civil liberty causes, but I don't agree that all your examples qualify: Public smoking bans can and are legitimately defended on the grounds that smoking in public spaces forces other people to breate in your tobacco smoke, which goes considerably beyond the "your rights end where mine begin" slogan of libertarians. You ARE infringing on their rights, and so your rights have to be weighed against theirs. I'm undecided, but liberals tend to see it as "your right to kill yourself in public is less important than my right not to be killed by you." And the separation of church and state? I mean, seriously? That's ABOUT civil liberty, about not giving an inch towards a government religion. It's about defending principle even when the particulars seem irrelevant or even negative, analogous to the ACLU standing up for the KKK's right to demonstrate. I don't see how you could possibly say it's an effort to restrict liberty. Of course, you might mean "intolerant" in the sense of specifically attacking Christianity (which is not true at all), or trying to marginalize religion. Except that any idiot knows that combining government and religion corrupts them both. But then, any group that thinks being told that they can't impose their religion on everyone else consitutes THEM being persecuted is probably mostly composed of idiots, anyway. But yeah, the trans fat thing was stupid. I believe there IS an argument to be made, it's just (IMO) a much weaker one, and I'm too tired to be devil's advocate...

Yes, and the ones who figured it out knew the difference between "flat" and "round."

I have no idea what that means, and I'm pretty sure you don't, either.

It exhibits some but not all of the characteristics by which "life" is defined. It's not that they "don't know." It doesn't meet the characteristics, so it is not alive. That's all that "being alive" means. Just like, as you say, with planets - it's not that they "discovered" that Pluto isn't actually a planet. They just changed the definition, and Pluto no longer fit.

I have recurring nightmares of escaping from something, vaguely some kind of mental hospital, and being relentlessly pursued by an evil version of myself, and sometimes shapeshifting zombies. Occasionally it ends well, when I realize I'm as powerful as any being in the universe (which is true, since the universe is my dream), and I incinerate them all with my mind. Alright, Freud, do what you want with that one.

4! is 24, but 4!!!! isn't! 4!! is 24!, for example. And 4!!!! is 24!!!. In other words, we're talking about an obscenely, obnoxiously big number. I'm not going to try to calculate it.

That doesn't actually work, though. Well, it does, but you have to violate every law of physics to make it work. What, objects making daily billion-light-year-radius circles around me for no apparent reason? Sounds good to me! (That's why "inertial" reference frame is always specified.)

I, too, am a fan of geocentrism.

Yes, that's exactly correct. "Person," from a scientific perspective, is necessarily going to be a term defined with arbitrary cutoff points. I revert to Freeman Dyson's wisdom: "Defining life is a question for lawyers, not scientists." I do not, however, necessarily agree with the absolute emphasis on legality. I don't believe that ethics=laws. We should try to base our laws on our ethics. Yes. Science can't make these decisions for us, but, as I see it, it is highly relevant in two ways. First, it can give us more data on which to base our decisions. When the consensus was that black people were something like halfway between a white person and a gorilla, the question of how they should be dealt with was trickier. When it became clear that the differences were far more subtle and mostly cosmetic, it became a moot point. Secondly (and more importantly) it can create, via technology, new situations that render previously adequate frameworks obsolete. Right now, person is only vaguely defined: "like us," as Dak says, or "equivalent to homo sapiens." This vagueness causes problems with questions like abortion and terminating life-support for the braindead. However, those debates are nothing compared to the potential debates over things like designer organisms (when even "homo sapiens" becomes a more and more arbitrary category) or AI, and we should be aware of those difficulties before we push technology in those directions.

Oh, well I guess it's settled then.....

I don't really think a concise definition is possible, but I'd like to hear some ideas. I say this because I believe the most profound ethical dillemas of this century will revolve about this question. When it comes up: Slavery/racism: One of the questions surrounding the ethics of slavery was about whether blacks and whites were fundamentally different and fit for different roles. Abortion: This debate is all about basic disagreements over when is the beginning of a human being with the rights guaranteed thereof. Scientifically, it's an arbitrary distinction. Ethically, it makes all the difference in the world. Animal rights: What about being human makes humans "people," and can those criteria be applied to other organisms, and to what degree? Genetic engineering: Even if humans are people and no other natural animals are, what about human/animal hybrids? What degree of modification from human makes the organism no longer a "person?" Could other animals not even related to humans make the jump to personhood through engineering? Artificial intelligence: What about completely non-organic intelligence? How can intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness be evaluated in such an alien form, and what rights would such an intelligence have? Extraterrestrial life: Similar to other questions, if such life developed along utterly different lines so that normal person/animal distinctions don't apply, how do decide our ethical and moral obligations towards such life?