swansont

Yes, and AFAICT it’s completely unaffected by the label you hang on it. If I call a rose a floofernurg, what actually changes about the biology or the aesthetics? Nope. You’ve not shown that anything changes. Much like being able to say you’re rich. There’s a psychological shift. Not a scientific one. There’s a bias that occurs because of the view that humans are special, but that’s driven by religion and perhaps philosophy (the article touches on this) so that spilled over into biology (scientists are human, after all). There are people who insist that humans aren’t animals, but that’s not driven by science. Purpose would be your burden to show, but I don’t see how expanding the scope of what is considered conscious gets you there. As the article points out, you have a tough job explaining why some things are conscious and others are not. Like a lot of biology, that demarcation is going to be fuzzy and shifting that line doesn’t eliminate the problem, but likely makes it harder. e.g. an atom is conscious, but certain collections of them are not.

Yes, the wealthy are always held accountable for their transgressions. </sarcasm>

The Coulomb barrier is given by U= kQq/r^2 Having 6x the charge means the barrier is 6x higher (It’s also wider, which would affect tunneling) so the naive solution would be that you need 6x the KE, but there are also momentum considerations since the masses are quite different. But it will be of order a few MeV

You still have the problem. All you’ve done is redefine things. It’s like Syndrome says in The Incredibles - when everyone is super, nobody is. It would be like redefining “rich” to mean having at least $1000, and then giving everyone $1000. Nothing really is changed all that much, and there’s a huge disparity in wealth because billionaires still exist. But hey, we’re all rich. Saying everything is conscious is a semantics issue. It doesn’t really address any science. You don’t know any more than you did before. You still have to figure out why there are different levels of consciousness, and why, unless you think humans and other animals are just exhibiting stimulus/response behavior, in which case we’re done. Problem solved. And you’re going to have the issue of having to accept and defend inanimate objects being conscious when they fit into this suddenly very broad definition.

Yes, we’ve known this for quite some time.

I’ve only seen it in terms of atomic de-excitation and tunneling

Has that ever been observed in nuclear decay?

Ah, so that’s the strawman you’re “dismantling”

I would think that other available sources of electricity would set the price. You can’t just choose to jack up the price. And if a business realizes that fusion isn’t cost competitive they won’t build the plant.

Who is telling Biden this? Actually telling him, not mouthing off online. —- At this point in the 2016 cycle, Clinton was polling about 10 points above Trump. Polls aren’t votes. There’s a lot of campaigning left to do.

Likely, and some descriptions might be a little sloppy and use “bigger” to refer to the energy (or mass), which is ~125 GeV (GeV/c^2) as opposed to a proton, which is slightly less than 1 GeV

I’d be interested to know where you heatd that. I’d be surprised if there was a physical size associated with it. It’s not a composite particle, so there are no constituent parts. It can’t decay in steps; once it decays it’s not a Higgs anymore. But the decay products could also be unstable.

Cold neutrinos, perhaps. But where are you going to find a space with only neutrinos in it?

No. There are multiple problems with that scenario. Spin, Pauli exclusion, a mechanism to form a bound state, lack of evidence of an electron being a composite particle even if you could. Probably more. Attacking this from a position of ignorance about physics isn’t going to go anywhere useful.

Electron capture is slightly affected by pressure. Otherwise no. (There have been a few anomalous results showing some temperature effects but they aren’t repeatable)

We don’t, in fact, “know” this. Neutrinos would only be present if the decay involved the weak interaction. Nope. This is fiction, based on flawed understanding.

Which one, hydrogen or carbon? It’s different. Nuclei have to overcome the Coulomb barrier (electrostatic repulsion) to get close enough to fuse. Two protons don’t fuse easily (you’d form He-2) but deuterium and tritium do; they require about 0.1 MeV. It’s not an exact number, because the particles can tunnel through the barrier

No you claimed fusion was “not gonna be cheap” and have not done anything to back up that assertion.

But you’ve claimed rather more than this. I don’t think there’s any argument that intelligence can improve your chances of survival. From an evolutionary standpoint it’s a tradeoff of whether it’s worth it, because a bigger, more complicated brain requires more resources. Mounting evidence of what? That other organisms have intelligence? That’s not a paradigm shift. Are there scientists who think there is no intelligence in other animals? If “mind in nature” means something else, then you’ve not communicated it very well. I do object to the way intelligence is used in some cases. If you took this same approach in physics we’d look at how an object accelerates when dropped but reaches a terminal velocity, or how a fluid in a system moves faster when pressure is lower, and ascribe it to intelligence, which is ludicrous. It dilutes the meaning of intelligence to bandy it about so casually. As for the wall of text, that’s generally agreed to be an ineffective technique. You should not rely on the reader to pick an example. You’re making the argument, so you should be in a position to present the best example.

I can’t help but notice this doesn’t address the point at all. Just distraction.

1. Trump does not get held to this standard, one of many “accurate reporting” issues that exist (sins of omission ate still sins) 2. Sleeping in is completely consistent with having jet lag.

This isn’t the “humor” section And…? Is there an official expiration on jet lag? The one-hour DST shift messes me up for a week.

But again, we’re skipping past the discussion of whether to do it. Would it stop the media penchant for peddling narratives? Does anyone think they would pivot to actual reporting, or go on a “dems in disarray” binge that would put the current “reporting” seem restrained. My bet would be on the latter What happens when some big flaw is revealed in the replacement candidate, that comes to light when they’re placed under scrutiny? Are you going to replace that candidate, too? edit: take a look at all the stuff about RFK jr that’s come to light recently, only because he’s running for president.

Because rocket launches never fail and deposit their payload back on earth (either immediately or from a decaying orbit).

The sun’s mass is 2 x 10^30 kg, and it converts about 4 x 10^9 kg per sec into other forms of energy (ultimately, sunshine) The volume comparison isn’t relevant. The earth isn’t made of (mostly) hydrogen, nor is it undergoing fusion