J'Dona

Yes, but without light or oxygen it's not going to get very far. It's all very well having a single protein strand but a single celled organism couldn't even respirate in that environment. I don't know which one you're talking about in lava and permafrost, but I'm sure those ones must be dormant in some way as biochemical reactions can't occur in those conditions, as far as I konw. Either way, it's not the same as a gas giant. The original questions were whether extraterrestrial life would be more intelligent than us and whether it would look like humans, which simply isn't possible on a gas giant.

Whoa, please don't interpret that as me saying life in the liquid hydrogen mantle of a gas giant is possible. Boiling hot and high pressure... those conditions might be comparable to a mild version of the surface of the Sun. It might be possible for life - microbial life - to exist in the very upper layers of atmosphere in a gas giant, but only if the gas giant is very nicely and very improbably suited for it and only if it arrived later via an asteroid or comet (highly unlikely). As far as I know there's no life that can make a living off of raw hydrogen gas, or (if they're lucky) some inert helium every now and then. If there was any oxygen, the chances are it would react with any hydrogen gas to form water which promptly falls down into the mantle. Some gas giants have things like sodium in their atmosphere (the first planet to be "explored" was one passing in front of its star and they detected sodium in it, by infrared spectroscopy I believe), but that still doesn't help life very much. And even if there were the amino acids etc. needed to start off life, they would be too heavy and would fall down into the mantle. Non-carbon-based proteins (e.g. silicon-based) either just can't work peroid or are completely out of the question as they would be too heavy. I think the conclusion we can draw from this, since all planets seem to be either rocky, gas giants or ice (way too cold for life), that any complex life could really only form on rocky planets. In that case, the Earth seems a reasonable point to draw examples from, and there's no life on Earth that could survive on a gas giant so we can say for now that it cant with some certainty.

There's no reason why they would have to look like humans at all, to be honest. Instead of thumbs and hands they could have tentacles (a bit 50's scifi, but anyway) and live underwater. They wouldn't need to have heads as their brains could be anywhere in their bodies, and the main sensory receivers in the human head (eyes, ears, nose, tongue) - if they even had them - don't necessarily have to be in a head if the brain isn't. They could breathe and ingest through holes in their backside for all we know, though it's a frightening thought... :/ But there we have it: an intelligent, non-bipedal squid that eats through its rear and meets all the criteria put forward! But yes, gravity and distance from star alone have a massive effect on the development of life and possibly even on thumbs. I thought it was the other way around but low gravity actually drawfs plant growth, so a smaller planet has smaller plants (say goodbye to all the 1km tall trees in so many stories) and if a plant is further awat from the sun then it will need to have more efficient leaves to collect sunlight, or some completely different form of photosynthesis. So plants would be short, flat and spread out, and no species would need to be particularly tall, which are qualities that affect animal evolution. Now, if we're on a smaller planet that's further from the sun, the atmosphere will be much thinner and colder, so plants might not be able to photosynthesis at all, in which case nothig would live if we're assuming that photosynthesis is the basis for life. This is an example of how gravity and distance from a star can affect growth of life, and if you want a real-life example, look at Mars. This case doesn't necessarily prevent the rise of opposable thumbs and so forth, but it does affect the chances of them coming about and they way in which they might. To answer the original question: what are the chances of an alien life form being more intelligent than us? If you're talking about one that we might encounter or detect, then pretty high; they would have to be spacefaring in which case they might be about 50 years behind us or up to millions ahead. In terms of the whole universe, I think the chances are pretty much 100%, considering its size.

A typo or a joke, I'm assuming...

Erm... I think I forgot about cases where the y value tends to + or - infinity in the same way on both sides of the asymptote, like y = 1/|x| or y = 1/x2. I was only thinking of cases like y = 1/x, where the y values tend to infinity in both the poitive and negative directions. That's why I wondered why x always had to be positive, because I was wasn't considering all cases, sorry about that. :/

Why does x always have to be positive?

Well, if you take the graph of something basic like , then as the x value approaches zero from the positive side the y value increases quickly, and when the x value approaches from the negative side the y value decreases quickly. So the y values are becoming more and more different as the two x values become closer.

Not only that, but when an object approached from the other side, the two objects would become increasingly different in values as they came closer together. (if you can apply values to objects...) However, in terms of reality, there is one major case of this: mass as v ---> c. Or if you meant real objects, then watch as you drop something into a black hole, and it slows down until a point where it appears not to be moving, just on the event horizon (and then the photons run out and it disappears or something). It really has been wasted by the black hole, but it appears not to have been. Unless I'm mistaking the situation; I saw that on TV so there's a high chance it's wrong.

Style? ExtraSense? ":-) I am Master of Science. :-) :-) :-) :-)" Smoooooth... *flush* EDIT: Sorry, I apologise.

"Ending" suggests present tense, i.e. it is currently ending, which holds in any point in time. Therefore it didn't advertise, but rather is currently advertising that end, and it wouldn't be doing that if we'd already reached that point, and no refunds are available unless the product is faulty, and it hasn't been delivered yet so that's impossible to determine. Corporate loopholes ahoy. I keep your money. Erm, actually, I'd just hoped that everyone here would agree on the answer and work out the clearest proof of it, to end the debates about it elsewhere online. Maybe we need to work on our own solidarity before trying to help 9-year-olds on gaming forums...

As far as fair rebukes to offensive other threads go, this one gets the cake. If you're talking about from childhood, before a child knows much about sexual activities, I'd say that it wasn't, and that heterosexual or homosexual behavior or discrimination is merely a result of societal pressures. But if you're talking about after someone has determined their "mental" sexuality if you will and who is fully mature... than I would say that it is. Male<--only-->female action is so ingrained in the heterosexual psyche that anything outside of that seems outright offensive, and the same would apply to homosexuals. Of course some people brought up to be gay or straight might find the discrimination against the other "alignment" to be offensive or feel suppressed from what seems natural to them, and may switch as a reaction, among other reasons, so homo/heterophobia isn't a definite thing. But it's certainly an inherent and ultimately natural development, based on human psychology. We can only hope that people can become openminded in the future... Particularly when casually flagging 10% of the population as genetic defects.

If the USA's reason for backing Iraq was that they didn't want Iran to win, then they still backing Iraq. Also, the other source (about 9600 words of text, with over 150 different sources) contains a lot of analytical review of the same situation, which you haven't mentioned in your last post. I only put the CNN link in there in case you thought I was only looking at liberal sources. Also note the bold text at the top of the CNN one: Tell me, if this is true, then how does it not suggest - in any way - US backing of Saddam Hussein? Doesn't the sale of arms and the assistance in construction of biological weapons count? If it isn't true, and you aren't trusting CNN news (which is a good idea), then what media outlets do you trust? I ask because I can assure you, it only gets more left-wing from there. I don't know much abouts transactions between the USA and the bin Laden family, so I can't say anything there, but can't you look up on this information yourself if you doubt it? We shouldn't have to be the only ones bringing up edivence, unless you intentionally want to make youself look uninformed.

I don't know if anyone else has seen this, or how much of an affect it wold have on definition of when life starts (though I imagine they would), but here's something that might be interesting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3846525.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3105580.stm (both same topic)

Well, a kilogram always has a mass of one kilogram, though its weight changes depending on local gravity. When someone weighs themself and says "Oh my god, I weigh XXX kilograms", they're actually measuring weight, but the scale is calibrated for Earth's gravity so it can give a measurement of your mass in kilograms. So weight, being a force, is what changes in gravity, not mass. E = mc2 doesn't relate to potential energy due to changes in weight though. In this case, E is just the energy in total terms of what's put out during, say, a nuclear reaction (heat, sound, light, kinetic, etc.), and the m is the mass, but not weight. So E = mc2 is basically just a relationship between energy and mass, and since mass is constant regardless of gravity, E = mc2 applies anywhere. EDIT: My god. I notice over a month later that I wrote "it" instead of "its weight", thereby suggesting that mass changes with gravity (even though I said it didn't lower down). I can't believe nobody laughed at me for that.

Here are two links for your Aardvark, found in 5 minutes on Google: http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/ShalomIranIraq.html (all 155 information sources at bottom of page) http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/26/column.novak.opinion.iraq.history/

True, if all the things you've mentioned there did go through, the human race would be in a spot, but I doubt that it'll ever really end as such. It might get into a pit that takes centuries or even millenia to recover from, but not end. Of course, the human race's sense of awareness regarding oil and climate change may be a road to self-doomnation, but if we get to that point there'll still be a room of oil businessmen in a compound somewhere underground, laughing and drinking beer...

I guess I'll be the first to ask... why's that?

If you're assuming that 1 - 0.999 = 0.0001, then of course it will equal zero. Here's the simplest reasoning I can think of why: 0.0001 is a decimal point followed by an infinite number of zeroes, with a 1 at the end. But infinity has no endpoint, hence you never, ever get to the 1. So it doesn't exist.

Thanks... it seems like there are quite a few writers on these forums. I know what you mean about "being dormant" for a while. The first major thing I wrote (a novella, and still the largest) took about two years, which just goes to illustrate what I mean by that. When you say you've written a few books though, how large are you talking about? I'm just wondering what you mean by dormant, that's all, because if they're big then it shows that you've got the discipline whilst you're writing them, which is all the matters, it's just the space in between that's a problem. I think a flywheel device is basically some way of keeping the rotation of a station in space constant while things are moving on it. If you had, say, a station with one ring connected to a stationary shaft in the middle, going through the middle of the ring, you could have spacecraft docking at the middle (which isn't turning) and still have the ring rotating, simulating gravity. But if in this case, eventually friction between the two will start to turn the shaft along with he ring, and the ring's rotation will slow down. I think you can counter the slowing effect on the ring by having a flywheel on the shaft turning opposite the shaft, so that overall the same force is slowing the ring as is speeding it up, and rotation and gravity are constant. You'll have to constantly put power into the shaft and flywheel though, to overcome the frictoin and not slow down themselves, or the shaft will start rotating and make docking a problem. In the design I chose, the two rings move together and are directly linked, so they travel across on enclosed bridges of some sort (or enclosed high-speed trams, as they're 400m apart). I tried thinking of how to travel between rings at different speeds, but any solutions I could come up wit were bizarre and dangerous, so it might be more problematic than it's worth, particularly as you'd have to go through diffreent gravities to get there. Thanks for the compliments though... and no, there's no way I'm published yet. You're right that everything at this stage is just preparatory work; my current goal to write at least 1000 words a day is mainly to improve my writing so that when I come to do the stories that I've wanted to do for a while now, and put a lot of thinking into, I won't mess them up. If it's all research and preparatory work, then you're improving your skills for when you write something later, and you'll do it better. Just take confidence in these words by David Gerrold: "Your first million words are for practice. They don't count. Remember that. After you've written a million words, then you can take yourself seriously." A million words is about ten novels... But if you write, say, 2750 words a day, then you'll have written a million words in just one year. If that's about seven hours a day, it's about the same as people spend watching TV in the USA, or the same that people spend playing RPG's in Korea. For ten novels.

I think the flywheel would be necessary only if you had different parts of the station rotating at different speeds, like the rings rotating around a "stationary" central shaft or some such, because otherwise friction between the different parts would mess up the angular momentum and the rotational rates. That's only if you have individual moving parts though. By the way, I finished the description of the station on time but I'm not saying where I've posted it online so as not to embarrass myself. I've settled for a station with two rings which rotate together with the whole station, including the central shaft, except for two parts at the end of the shaft away from the rings which rotate against the station so that they appear relative to incoming spacecraft, allowing them to dock. In the centre of the shaft is a flywheel to keep the station's rotation constant at the rings. Maybe I didn't need two rings, but I suppose the extra shaft spcae allows more room for the flywheel and cargo, and the docking ports.

Right, thanks for the explanations. I'd also like to point out a mistake I made which I feel foolish about now... I said that I thought that gravitons had mass, and also travelled at the speed of light in the same breath. No need to point out the error there. :/ TheProphet, I'll read up on that part of The Elegant Universe soon. I've got it here at home, just by my desk in fact, and I'd read the first third or so before college concerns forced me to postpone it. Now that college has finished, I'll be able to continue reading it and hopefully find out what I need from that. Also, I believe in the back of The Elegant Universe (p. 392, second paragraph in mine) they give a formula describing any object's motion through spacetime as a result of their velocity in space and velocity in time, which is said to always equal c. As one increases the other decreases, and in the end you have photons which, when travelling at c through space, are not technically travelling through time relative to themselves, which I believe is what you were talking about before. I seriously need to read that again, not the least because my university interview is coming up (again...)

I was under the impression that gravitons, being the predicted but still unobserved force carriers particles for the gravitational force, would have had to travel at the speed of light based on the recent observations of Jupiter when it passed in from of a binary pulsar or some such, allowing them to determine gravity's speed somehow. It was measured at about 1.1c plus or minus 0.2c, which basically makes c the most likely point for it to be. But if gravitons are supposed to be the particles that give mass, I can't imagine how they might travel faster than light, given that their mass would increase to infinity as they approached light speed. I don't know anything about tachyons though, so I can't say anything there. I can't imagine how one photon might be able to travel faster than light just because another is travelling slower though... how would the two rely on each other in that way? Are you talking about some form quantum entanglement between photons, or just spontaneous properties that, in the grans scheme of the universe, cancel out their otherwise bizarre properties somehow? If some theories predict that high energy photons could travel faster than c though, I'd like to know which theory this is and read up on it.

Ah, I thought for some reason that if you had two rings on the station rotating in opposite direction, that they wouldn't cancel but rather double the effect, but that was judst me not thinking it through properly. That would probably work out well, but I was just hoping for a solution that didn't split the population in two, as that would cause problems in moving people in between. Unless of course you had some system set up where... nevermind. That would take up too much power. :/ Another idea I had was to have the whole station rotating, including the docking "pylons" or whatever you want to call them, except for one thing. The pylon has a number of rings which can move independantly on the outside. When a ship approaches, the rings rotate so as to stop rotating relative to the ship allowing it to dock easily, whereupon the ring resumes and spins again with the ship attached, simulating some light gravity on the ship itself if it's held in the right way, though the ship or space plane would need to load/uload from the "top" for the gravity to be real, and it would be different as you moved out along the wings, so that might be difficult. Another problem with this is that as the ring rotates it makes the station rotate very slightly in the opposite direction, and when the ship docks it effectively gains msas, which affects the rotation again, so the station would be expending fuel every time something docked. EDIT: Just found an excellent article here: http://www.permanent.com/s-centri.htm I'm only halfway through now, but it explains artificial gravity quite well, so I think I can decide on some dimensions from this, which should help in determining the shape and structure based on the resulting angular velocity. EDIT2: One question that should really be on my Earth-Moon barycenter thread, but I don't want to bring it up again just to ask it or make a new post for it as that would be spamming: how much might the position of L1 vary with the Moon's perigee and epogee, and would a station there need to expend a prohibitive amount of fuel to remain there, or no more than if the point did not fluctuate?