Sisyphus

My ideas are not based off gross speculation. They aren't my ideas, and they're based on over a hundred years of theory and experimentation. But you're right, I'm not 100% sure. I'm not 100% sure about anything, nor could I imagine being so. So, to clarify. Your claim is that the universe is not more complicated than it seems, and you still feel confident making absolute assertions about time and space without even studying? That seems like such a strange claim from someone who believes in an omnipotent god, that the universe is so small and simple and easy to understand. How can you possibly be SURE you understand Creation? BTW, those rhetorical questions you ask all have answers, but they probably each require whole topics. No, you do not have to know how large the universe is to know that it expands. Yes, there is experimental proof of time dilation. (In fact, we use technologies that have to take it into account in order to even function.) I hope you appreciate the irony of this, though: vs. Eh?

I am in awe of your debate skills.

It would be more precise to say that useful information (or any causality) is not transferred at faster than the speeed of light. The particle spookily seems to influence its entangled partner instantaneously, but conditions in one location do not affect conditions at the other faster than C.

It seems like you're thinking of space and time as an overarching, solid framework in which all the "stuff" there is is placed. However, it has been discovered that this is not the case. Space itself expands over time and bends in the presence of mass. The farther you go back in time, the less space there was. Time is not a constant clock ticking in the background, but different depending on where you are in the universe, and what your velocity is relative to everything else. It happens that more time can pass for one person than another, and that events that are simultaneous for one person are not so for another. And on and on. It would be unreasonable to expect you to understand all of this right away, or even to take my word for it that these things are proven to be the case. In fact I encourage you to look into it yourself. All I ask is that you admit that the universe is more complicated and less intuitive than it seems, and that there are things you don't understand. And so comments like "I am 100% sure of this," or even "there isn't sufficient evidence for BB" (when it's clear you haven't really grasped what the BB is, let alone the evidence for it) are not warranted. Ok?

Depends on what you're talking about. A body that is merely rotating isn't accelerating as a whole - its center of mass isn't moving. Its parts are accelerating. So you have to look at the forces on, say, one molecule of a spinning top. And in that case there are lots of forces - intermolecular forces holding the whole thing together. In the case of the solar system or the galaxy, what keeps the whole thing from just flying apart is gravity. That's the Newtonian force keeping the Earth constantly accelerating around in a circle around the Sun.

You mean the rate at which the stuff where the CMBR is receding originated. (The CMBR is right here, which is why we can see it.) But then, that stuff isn't the farthest away stuff, so objects outside the visible universe are receding even faster. And if the universe is infinite, so is the maximum rate of recession.

Yes. Why are you addressing this to me, though? I said "this can't be repeated enough," meaning it's worth saying over and over. But dogs are a good example of fairly rapid evolution. Dogs split off from wolves only a few thousand years ago to fill a niche of hunting partner of humans. They're not fully a different species yet (wolves and some breeds of dog can still produce offspring), but they've obviously undergone a great deal of change in an extremely short period of time. This can partially be explained by the fact that humans intentionally use the principles of evolution to alter the breeds. Select for what you want, discard what you don't. The intent lets it be more rapid than it otherwise would be most of the time, because artificial selection is a sure thing (pick the bigger one) and natural selection is statistical (the bigger one is more likely to survive and breed).

I think very often the thinking goes something like "I don't need to read it because I already know it's wrong because it disagrees with the Bible." The religion itself forbids doubt or questioning, so honestly considering alternatives isn't an option. That's why very often you can't make any progress at all until you convince them that it's possible to be religious and believe in evolution. However, aside from giving examples of all the people who fit those criteria (like the Pope!), it's hard to do without having a theological discussion, which is against the rules here.

Every living creature is an intermediate step, as is every fossil ever discovered. This can't be repeated enough. However, there will always be "missing links," because we don't have a catalog of every single individual who ever lived. If I look at you and your grandfather, I'm not going to say the theory of you being related is a sham because I can't find your father. But maybe we should backtrack. What is that you mean by "intermediate stages," exactly? I ask only because, in my experience, most arguments against evolution are based on misunderstandings of what evolution actually is. So what is it that you think evolution predicts we would see that we aren't seeing? Or maybe even more broadly, could you briefly summarize how you think evolution is supposed to work, so we're all on the same page?

And that's a huge draw! The great majority of the space shuttle's mass at launch is the fuel needed just to get it into orbit. To go anywhere else, the great majority of the mass of what's left would have to be fuel also. Newton's third law is not very forgiving, and having something to "react against" that you didn't have to "act" on in the first place would be incredibly valuable, and is probably the only way craft will ever make really long trips in any kind of a useful timeframe.

I recommend you have a look at that link to talkorigins. Here it is again: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

The galaxy is not a soup, and stars are not floating on the surface of fluid. The galaxy is freely drifting matter, and the primary force at work is gravity. The soup slows due to viscosity, and the stuff floating on the surface is sucked in by the vortex of the stuff its floating on. I don't know what "deceleration brings stuff together" even means. Also, the galaxy is not gathering stuff in the center, any more than our solar system is. We orbit the center, just like the Earth orbits the Sun.

A black hole can be of any mass, from that of a subatomic particle to millions of suns. An object is a black hole if its mass is condensed beyond the point where any known force can resist its own gravity and prevent it from collapsing into itself indefinitely. Because of this, relativity predicts that all of the mass of a black hole becomes concentrated in a single point of infinite density. Most likely this is not the actual case due to quantum effects, but what actually happens is not resolved.

It is impossible to go the speed of light or beyond, and light never has mass. However, it does have energy in proportion to its frequency, and moving towards a light source will increase the frequency of light from that source. This is called "blue shifting," because colors shift towards the blue end of the spectrum. The opposite, when moving away, is called red shifting. (Blue and violet have the highest frequencies of visible light, and red has the lowest.) So, when moving faster and faster towards something, the light coming from it will be higher and higher energy, and that means more and more dangerous radiation. So while it's not really possible to "dodge" light (there's too much of it, and you can't possibly see it coming anyway), the faster you go, the more you will need to shield yourself from the radiation coming from the forward direction.

No. I happens no matter what. It is true that the Earth's magnetic field shields the Earth from the full effect of solar wind (without it we would have barely any atmosphere at all), but it isn't weakening.

It's true that there isn't actually such an area. And even if there were, the entire universe is permeated with the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). You could physically block yourself off from it, but whatever you're using to block it would itself be emitting radiation. At a certain point, the energy you give off will come into equilibrium with the energy you're absorbing. With the CMBR, this will happen for objects at about 2.725K. So yes, it does happen, and it's very cold, but not zero.

So in other words, yes, there is a force behind it: the bombardment by solar wind.

It seems quite plausible that something which satisfies the currently accepted definitions of life will be created artificially within the next few decades. In other words, a "robot" that exhibits some form of homeostasis, organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. This would be "alive," though not necessarily using water. (Most computers are happier without any water at all!) Of course, that might not be useful to astrobiologists, since such things would be "intelligently designed" rather than evolved all the way from abiogenesis (and the designers would be native water-worlders). They'd need a plausible hypothesis for non-water abiogenesis to know what else to look for.

Hehe. No. Mokele is talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve It's not that other people didn't contribute their genetics, it's that from this person there is an unbroken matrilineal line (mother to maternal grandmother to maternal great grandmother, etc.) to every single person currently alive on Earth. Read the "common fallacies" section in the linked article for clarification.

That's it? So you spin it, and friction/viscosity eventually brings it to a stop. The stuff floating on the surface gathers in the middle as per a standard vortex. What is it supposed to be an analogy for?

No, there aren't an even number of days in a year even in pre-Colombian Mexico. That comes from the Earth's rotation and its revolution around the Sun, not what anybody decided.

We do emit "waves." That's why you can see people on an infrared camera. Everything emits electromagnetic waves, depending on its temperature. I don't know much about string theory, so I won't comment on that. The pineal gland produces melatonin. I'm assuming you think it's more than that because of its historical importance. It's pretty much in the center of the brain and its function wasn't immediately obvious, so people speculated that it was particularly important in some mystical way. It is very important, but there's no evidence whatsoever that there's anything mystical about it. Be careful about what new agers and the like assert as fact - it's pretty much all bullshit. (Also, never trust the History Channel!)

Because days don't divide into years evenly.

Modern humans have access to (and are bombarded with) more and more information, and have more and more options for intellectual stimulation than ever before.

Think about that for a minute. We know how accurate the various calendars are, because our measurements and observations are vastly more precise than those of the Maya (or Pope Gregory). This is because we have so much better tools than they did, and vastly more extensive understanding of astronomical events. All the Maya could do was measure angles by hand and look at the sky with the naked eye. Given that, the accuracy of their measurements was extremely impressive, but it still shows its limitations.