Edtharan

If they used a procedual generation of the "world data" in the simulation (ie the simulation calculates what the data should be according to a set of rules if and as needed) then any internal entity when interacting with something would cause the simulation to calculate the needed data only during the interaction and run a more basic simulation when they are not interaction. This may be a stochastic (?spelling?) algorithm. This would free up a lot of processing as the universe is mostly enpty space (but if we looked at that enpty space then the simulation would generate the data needed to simulate it at a higher level of detail).

...snip... From what you wrote the most likely corect scenarios would be (in order of most likely to least likely): 1) There are no aliens 2) There are aliens but the technology does not exist for interstellar travel. 3) There are aliens and they have contacted humans (either because they aren't interested in us or just haven't come here yet). Based on the most likely scenario of contact with an alien spiecies: remote contact, eith through time (via archiological evidence, not time travel) or via radio and assuming a public contact not a consiricy theory/government coverup/Men In Black contact and theat the Alines are also a comunicating spiecies (which the most likey would be if they have advanced technology). First would come an exchange on mathematics. This would help further comunication as mathematics seems to be universal and not just a human concept. The maths would most likely include various mathematical "proofs" and equations that have been discovered and explored (one would most definitly be ther fibonecci sequance as this seems to be a universal sequance that can be seen in galaxy spirals and other such objects as well as living organisms here on Earth). Eventually we will establish a "pidgin" language that would be a simplified version of the 2 languages (the main language of the Earth discoverers and the Alien contacters). This will facilitate comunication of more abstract concepts. Eventually there will be an exchange of belif systems (if they have them) and some humans will take them up, much like some of the aliens would probably take up some human beliefs. As for technology, I think tha twe will embrace a lot of it and even start to develop our own (the difference in psychology between us will mean that we will come up with new ways of using their discoveries). It might be 1 or 2 generations where we will feel left behind (if they are more advanced) and a relitvly short period of social and economic disruption as the new technologies and social ideas are implimented. think back to the technology that your grand parents had, and compare it to the technology of today. We are not any more physicaly or mentally advanced than our grandparents, but we deeal with concepts and technology that to them (when they were our age) would seem like magic or something from an Alien technology. And yet we use it without too much trouble. We are a tool using spiecies and weather the tool is a mental or a physical one, we will adapt it and ourselves to take advantage of it.

They could still just strap a powerful engine onto your ship (maybe a robotic ship) and thrust you in a different direction before you got to the planet (if you then choose to blow up the nuke any way it would be your own fault). And I am sure that Aliens that can create and use intersteller travel would have other methods available to them that we could not think of to divert or even halt the explosion of a nuclear detonation. Any life form that has any sense of self preservation would fight for it's own survival. If we started performing this kind of aggrssive behaviour to an advanced spiecies, they would then fight back. I think that they would at least give us a chance to intergrate into the greater intersteller community. It sounds like you are projecting an your own sense of paranoia onto how you think an alien would behave. Canberra. Yes in the capital city of Australia we have Kangeroos on our front lawns (though not every day).

Originally Posted by mr d There is a few inconsistancies in your arguments. First you state that the ailens want to keep us bottled up because we are so dangerous. However You say that the aliens are willing to deal with "Those in Power" and support the current regimes. The ones who are keeping us so dangerous. If these Alines had enough influence over our governments to force them to keep their secrets (for all these years and over many governemnt leaders) then they could have the knowledge and influence to make us less of a danger. But this hasn't happened. Why? This is the main inconsistancy of you post. If one could travel faster than the speed of light then a Nuke would be completly usless against you. Just say someone fired a nuke at your ship. You could just fly off, let the thing explode and then come back and destroy whoever fired the nuke at you (all before they could even react). Or say they shot it at one of your settlements. Traveleing faster (or even just close to the speed of light) you could intercept the nuke almost as soon as it was launched and then have time to dissarm it (due to their superior infomation proccessing capabilities) by cracking the encryption on it. Or just attach a FTL engine on it and shunt it far off in a location tyhat it would do no damage (say the middle of a star). If you had the ability to travel between stars in a resonable time frame (say a maximum of 10% of the life expectancy of the spiecies) then you would have, at your disposal, technology that would make a nuke usless and would this fear that you think they would have. This contradict your point 3. Besides, humans are not psycotic. We are very territorial, and most of our agressive behaviour can be attributed to sex (or more acurately the desire to reproduce and the competition that is nessesary to insure the best genes are passed on). We have the ability to perform Germline (?spelling?) genetic manipulation (the changing of the genes passed onto the next generation via genetic engineering). Although AFAIK this has not been done on humans, it has been done to a few animals (even selective breeding that has been going on for thousands of years is a crude form of this) and many plants (transgenics). If we developed this power in only the few decades since the discovery of DNA, then what could an Intelegence with far greater technological development do in the time they have been here (well over 100 years)? Where will our geneitc science be, in say 50 years? What about civilizations that have discovered radio communication (like us) but have not yet discovered intersteller travel. Or (as you suggested they are doing to humanity) spiecies that the "Big Brother" aliens are keeping in a state of technological restriction and have radio communications. These two senarios SETI could detect. The reson SETI has not detected any aliens is that we have not realy looked for them. The are covered by SETI is an extremely tiny fraction of the available stars in even our galaxy (not to mention the other galaxies). We have looked at only a few thousands of stars with SETI but there are billions of stars in the galaxy. This is why we havent found ET yet with SETI. The equivalent of this would be looking out your front door and not seeing any Kangeroos (we do get them in our front yards here in Australia ) and then claiming that Kangeroos don't exist because you haven't seen any yet.

Originally Posted by Phi for All But if God created evil as a method for us for spiritual growth then God would not be interested in waveing his hands and righting all wrong. As this would be against God's design. Originally Posted by aguy2 Hence my asertation that evil is a nessesity.

The egyptians did not exactly believe this. This beliefe is a modern one (formed in the victorian era IIRC). The egyptians believed that who ever was burried in the pyramid would be reincarnated in the afterlife. There was nothing about energy grids or such. From http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/viewcolumn.php?id=26 How did they move it then? If it was moved then it could be built. How does moving blocks of stone proove the existance of this world grid? Actually they have a prety good idea how they built the pyrimids as they have discovered texts from the people who actualy buit them as well as some of the tools. They have even found some of the names of the people (including grafiti as well). The secret of building the pyramids is that you need a large workforce that is focused of the task at hand, with a few brainiacs at the top who understand how to do it. If the government of any country could mobilise the same amount of people and resources that the pharos of aincent egypt could, they would have little trouble in building a pyramid. However in todays economic climate this would be near imposible. It's not the knowledge or that we lack the understanding of moving large slabs of rock around, it's the people and costs involved. Just look at the Panama cannal. this is a chanel dug across a country to carry ships. It crosses mountains and everything. This kind of engineering was compleatly beyond the ability of the egyptians (or else they would have not been confined to the Nile and other convenient water) but it was available to us, without the need for supernatural forces or beings from other worlds to achieve.

If God is All Powerful and evil is not then there is no contest - God wins. So why hasn't God done so? Could evil be nessesary, and therefor eliminating the existance of a competition (as well as the nessesity for a win)? Evil may be a nessesity like death is a nessesity. Without death we do not grow (evolve), so maybe that without evil we can not grow spiritualy. In this senario good or evil can not win because there is no competition.

That is very cool . It gives a new meaning to the phrase "Storm in a teacup."

How long can those viruses survive outside of the body anyway (without these tissues)? And as this is not a medical product it does not nessesarily have the burden of proof that medical producs have (AFAIK). Also how many people will catch a cold off of a tissue? Don't they usually spread by touch or through droplets in sneazes and coughs?

AFAIK: It would because the electrons with spins that create an attractive force would be forced closer to the pole and the electrons with spins that create a repulsive force would be repelled (creating a skewed distrabution of the electron orbitals around the atom). The magnet would have to be very strong and I am not sure that any material could handle that field strength without flying apart from it's own magnetic repulsion.

What about using a sterling engine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine ). Or several in series until the work gnererated is no able to justify the extra weight. The wings could be used as the heat sink (colder air flowing across them with pipes to cool the working fluid (water or steam) undernieth the outer skin.

Would it be posable to use a system like they do in some satalites, where they convert radiation directly into electricty and run an electric engine for the plane?

Possably, for large animals or large populations of animals, but if either of these existed then they would most likely have been found by now as it is hard to hide either of these situations. To find the area that the animals use (so that you can go out and prove their existance) you will need to get several images of the animals. Also several frames of images will help identify them as animals, rather than oddly shaped patches of IR relection or emmision. Most IR images that you will see is either highly processed already (and not raw data) with the specific objects that you are looking for highlighted in some way, or in the movies (which is just a special effect). The IR images that you might see on the News for a police chase has been highly processed to highlight the specific IR signatures that humans and vehicals produce to aid the police intheir efforts. If you watch closely you will notice that even the police dogs do not show up as good as humans do in these images.

Yes they can be that stupid. There is a phonomena that is called religion. Each religion (ther may be a few exception I don't know about) professes to be the One True Religion. If this is the case then only 1 group can be right and all the others are wrong. This leaves the majority of people on the planet believing in, and devoting their entire life to a dumb idea (and if no religion is right...). So from this I can say that there can be a lot of people that do believe in dumb ideas and let those ideas influence how they act and so just because a lot of people say they saw something and believe it was aliens is no garuntee that it was aliens. Me too. Actually if aliens are visiting us then they would be able to hack into the internet and perform searches for stuff like this, so they are likely to see these posts and maybe the weill respond to our requests

Remote sensing (like IR and arial photos or satalite imaging) would not be useful to pick up individual animals in a jungle environment. Not only is there other sources of IR emmisions (sunlight reflections, decomposing plant matter, radiated heat that has accumulated over the day, other animals, etc), but the fact that there is a canopy to the forest. The leaves and other plant matter will absorb IR radiation and what it doesn't absorb it will either scatter (reflections) or break up its general shaoe with sections that do absorb IR. Also resolution is a big problem. The higher the resolution that you require the more expensive it is and the longer it will take to trall through the massive amount of data to find any group of animals. To have any chance of determining an animal to be a unique spiecies by remote IR the you would need an extremely high resolution (less tha a cm per pixel at least but the higher the better). This high a resolution is not comercialy available (the existance of spy satalites of this power is debatable though ). Stll if you could get this resolution than you would litteraly have to trall throught the data of the jungle centimetre by centimetre to find the animals and identify them as a unique spiecies. This resolution problem and the data it generates is the main reson that many remote sensing projects don't just use realy high resolution systems. They just use a resolution that is optimal for the data processing capabilities available and the detail needed for the project. And also why the use them for locationms that are already known. Remote sensing is not usually used to find things, but to gain more infomation about locations already known (some times when looking at this data they will discover an anomaly in the data and investigate, and so find something). The most likely way that any small, theoreticaly existant, group of medium sized dinosaurs would be found is with boots and eyes (ie going there and looking), but of course you would need to know roughtly where to look so it would probably be as part of some other expedition or by nearby, local populations of people. True, not only for carnivores but also for the vegitarians. There is fossil evidence that dinosaurs were warm blooded (endothermic). There is a fossilised heart of a dinosaur that was examind with a CT scanner that made a 3D model of it. In this image it showed that the heart was more like the heart of a warm blooded animal (similar to a bird's) that it was to a cold blooded reptile. Other evidence is in fossilised trackways of dinosaurs. These trackways show that a dinosaur could achive fast running speeds as well as being able to maintain them for long periods of time. No known cold blooded animal has ever been able to achieve these feats. Most cold blooded animals can and do achieve fast speeds, but can not maintainthem for a long period of time (I'll chalenge any croc to a marathon any day and I know that I will win as I am warm blooded). Also the decendants of dinosaurs are birds and these are definitely known to be warm blooded. So from this evidence it seems that dinosaurs were most likely warm blooded (or somthing similar) and so would need a high metabolic rate to maintain thier teperature. The only known direct decentant of dinosaurs that is still alive today is the birds, and these animals show many similarities to that of dinosaurs. Infact there is now fossil evidence that some dinosaurs had feathers, and this further blures the line between birds and dinosaurs. It could be that birds are realy dinosaurs that have evolved to use their feathers for flight (that they are pretty much just flying dinosaurs with a beak).

A simple biological fact is that the larger an animal is the more foor it needs. Also a simple physical fact is the larger an animal is the more room it need to move in. A large dinosaur, say something like a apatosaur, would need a large area of open grassland to move around in, it could not hide in the dense rain forests and such. Also it would need to consume a large amount of vegitation. A preditor would be worse because they need to have a large amount of prey to feed on (the prey needs to breed and grow in size to provide a decent meal). Of course not all dinosaures were big, most were smaller (chicken to dog sized). Animals such as these could concevable be still hiding out somewhere like the amazon, but it would not likely be a large population as a large population would likely show up is some way (tracks, feeding areas, local stories, used by locals, droppings, carcases, nest sites, etc). Also in these areas there already exist large, top level preditors that would put pressures on these small populations. Which leads to another way of sampeling a potential site for dinosaure existance. A theoretical dinosaur population would have some impact on the food availabe for other animals in an area, reducing the available food. This would show up as an indirect evidence for the existance of a population of undiscovered group of animals inhabiting an area, and could have this indirect effect over a much larger area than their needed territory (as it will involve not just animals compeating for food, but also the animals that would prey on them). So there would be no large animals still present, but a small population of smaller animals could still exist in a remote location. However this small population would be very much subject to extinction pressures and so would have difficulty surviving without human interfereance. Trophy hunter would not nessesarily be interested in a dog sized dinosaur (Hunter: "Look I killed me a dinosaur". Other person: "So what. I've seen lizards bigger than that." ). Instead, they may become part of the illigal stuffed animal trade, or as exotic pets. There are a few reptiles that have survived scince the age of the dinosaurs (there are other animals like sharks, fish, etc). One the Newzeland Tuatara (spelling?) is a reptile (not a lizard) that has survives scince the age of the dinosaurs, and is infact a truly bizzare animal as it has a vestigal third eye in the middle of its head (it is a light sensitive patch that is covered by a scale). And of course the largest reptilian that has survive scince the dinosaurs is ofcourse the Crocadilians (Crocadiles, Aligators, etc), some of which can grow very large. A large enough population of animals (about 1000) to successfully breed over a long time without human interference an aid, would make a significant imapct on the environment that it exists in to show up either by direct evidence (tracks, nests, etc) or with indirect evidence (impact on other spieceis in an area, etc) that curent survays would most likely have been able to pick up some reliable evidence of their existance. So it is still posable for a small population of dinos to still exist the chances of it are very small.

Even if you just think about it without making any mesurements, we must have the same elements in us as the soil. We do not just spontainiously create our bodies, the matter that makes up our bodies must come from some where. We get this "stff" from our food (plants and animals). Where do these foods get thier mass? Animals either get it from other animals, or from plants. Plants get their "food" from the soil and atmosphere (sunlight just helps them convert all those inorganic molecules and atoms into organic molecules). So by following this chain all the way back, we can only come to the conclusion that all the "stuff" that makes us up, must come from our environment (ie the soil).

Im would say yes, but they are in the incorect proportions and molecular configureations to produce a living human.

Yes they are findinf more and more physiological and archiological evidence that birds are just a feather type of dinosaur. Infact the are finding evidence in foassils that some dinosaurs were feathered like birds. So for those that say the evolution could not hapen because there has never been any intermetiate forme (from dinoausrs to birds for example) then there is no evidence for it. the fossil evidence is now showing that there are intermediate forms going from dinosaurs to birds. And this is compleate enough that we can't actualy point to a fossil and say that that is definitly a bird like dinosaur, but it is definitely a dinosaur or that is a dinosaur like bird but is definitly a bird. They mrege from one to the other through the intermediate forms. And this is with a fossil record still not even close to 100% complete.

I have seen someone use the bible code to get the sentance "The bible is false". If this can be got from the bible code in the bible, then either the code is fake or the bible is. You choose.

I would guess it is because of fear. Fear of the unknown, Fear of death, Fear that their beliefs might be wrong, Fear that their life might not be of significance (in the grand scheme of things), Fear of morality (both theirs and others), Fear of abandonment (there is no one looking out for them) and so on.

I thought this was done by knocking off atoms or molecules that have a higher energy (temperature) than the other. It was not so much cooling as removing "hot" atoms and thereby lowering the average temperature of the group.

I think that it is less arrogent to assume that we are an intelegent animal (compared to the creatures on our own planet anyway) that has evolved through natural processes (with no attribution to a superior being). In effect we are (in the grand picture of the universe) as insignificant speck living on an insignificant speck (the earth) orbiting an average star in an average galaxy which is one among billions and billions of galaxies in the universe. But is it not also arrogance to assume that some higher being would "tinker" with the universe that they created just to cure someone of a desease. That we would be of any consiquence to a being that could cause miracle is supreme arrogance of the highest order (unles it is true, then it in its self would be a miracle of the highest order). One posability of the "mirracle" that hasn't been discussed is the posability that the desease could have been misdiagnosed, and that it could have been a condition similar to ceribal palsy with similar simptoms, but that the body could correct for it. As the saying goes "To err is human." Also a reverse placebo (noncebo iirc) may also account for the symptoms and the placebo (countering the noncebo effect) could account for remition of the desease. Also we do not full understand the desease or the human body (and how these things could interact). Useing this lack of understanding as proof of a divine being (or of miracles) is arrogance on both fronts (religious as well as secular). To assume that you can see a gap in our understanding and call that proof of a divine being is taking it upon your self to define that being (and therfore most certainly wrong). Isn't there a line in the bible that states "Thou shal not use the name of God in vain"? Is not seeing a gap in our understanding and stating that it is "God" (for wan't of a better term) using the name of God to prove your beliefs (and therefore a form of vainity).

I have been thinking a bit more on this concept. What if the plate are not parallel but are angled (eg \ /) or curved like the bell of a trobone? If the magnetic field was adjusted so the the virtual particles could colide with the plates in one direction but not the other. Would this cause a tunneling like effect of electrons from mone plate to the other as the are anhilated on one side and the surviving electron from the virtual pair interacts with the other plate? Would this then create a potential difference between the plates. this seems to produce energy from nothing, so where does the energy in the potential difference come from? (I think that the magnets would loose their charge some how due to the interaction of the magnetic fields created from the moving virtual particles - but I am probably wrong)

The reason you can never achieve absolute Zero temperature dose not need QM or the falability of our models of the laws of physics (our models can be broken at extremes but the reality out models are simulating can't) to prevent it. To cool something you must move heat away from it. This heat has to have some where to go (Heat is a for of energy and energy can't be created or destroyed). So you must have something of a lower temperature so that the heat can move there. This means that to achieve a temerature of 0 kelvin then you must have something at a temperature lower than 0 kelvin. If you think about this then you will reliase that as 0 kelvin is the theoretical lower limit for temperature then nothing can be below this and so no temperature can be lowered to 0 kelvin.