Sayonara

No it is not a unit of measure. It is the subject of the measurement and as such cannot be applied to anything as a unit. You don't use "a volume" to measure the capacity of a bottle, you don't use "a distance" to measure the length of a plank of wood.The metric system is not a parent unit, it is a systematic framework of which the units of metric measurement are components. These aren't semantics, they are the bare-bone facts of what you're discussing. Your discussion of potential for time travel actually works better on its own rather than backed up with wobbly bits like that

I think he's trying to point out that the labels we apply to things for ease of reference are labels.

Technically... yes.

Why is it that the American news agencies are interested in vague speculation that that system might have had life in it at some point (y'know, unlike the other 100,000,000,000 systems in the galaxy), and the British news agencies are more interested in the implications for astronomy?

Mushrooms are the spore-bearing structure of a fungus, and fungi have a fairly different biology to animal and plant cells. It's been a while since I had to think about this subject, arrrgh... Fungi can reproduce both sexually and asexually at the same time. As far as I know they do not in fact have 36,000 genders - in fact I'm not sure they have genders at all. Remember that sexual reproduction requires recombination of genetic material from two individuals, not necessarily from a "male and a female", terms which are meaningless when you are dealing with unicellular organisms or the true hermaphrodites. I can't actually remember how fungi reproduce sexually (fungi = dullness) so I'll be back with more info!

A meter is a unit of distance, a quantifiable dimension of which we can easily conceive. By your logic therefore 'a Time' is a unit of ???? Oh wait - it's an 'hour' is a unit of Time. I guess that makes time a quantifiable dimension then. Just as with meters, kilos or ohms, it doesn't matter how you quantify something - it's the fact that it can be measured against universally absolute scales that matters. You just restated what I said after that bit so I can't grumble The movie analogy is a fairly widespread way of looking at time although you do put it more succinctly than most people. I think to keep this model stable you would also have to enforce the additional assumption that there is only one possible 'timeline' that can exist in the universe, and we have no way of proving or disproving that (kind of a pain really).

But imagine the fun

Why has W not made it here yet? Imagine the fun.

Don't run, DUCK! Boom boom

You are assuming there is no force acting on the spinning object. We have already told you that there is a force, and explained why using basic proven physics. Therefore all that remains is to tell you "stop being stupid", and mock you if you don't.

Occam's Razor. It's not likely that life evolved twice, separately yet similarly, at about the same time, on the same planet. Until evidence to the contrary appears, or we have better data about the frequency of life-creating conditions in this galaxy, assume all organisms on Earth are descended from one root biochemical process (an ancestral unicellular proto-organism, if you like).

M-Catz means that in theory it should be easier to visit the past than the future, because the events of the past in his temporal model are not cause-dependent (they have already occured as a consequence of prior events), whereas events in the future are cause-dependent and two-way foward travel would have to resolve the multiple outcomes of causality without fixing them into any sort of dimensional chronology. This falls down slightly because just as we perceive events prior to now as being fixed and past causality relationships resolved, so would anybody who was native to a future we visited. Therefore if we were able to visit a future and observe causal outcomes we would have to assume that either: (a) There is no guarantee that during the period between the present and the future, events would follow the same causal pathway on subsequent visits, or indeed during the 'natural' evolution of the timeline, OR (b) All events in time are mapped strictly and immutably, and our present is no more 'special' than any other present. Throughout history there has been a great human tendency to assume that civilisation is at the leading edge of existence itself. However, just as we recognise that the Phoenecians and the Babylonians and the Roman Empire occured in the past, we should also consider that 'at some point' (as meaningless as the phrase may seem in this context) there will be a civilisation that considers us to be of slight historical note. Unfortunately, since we have no way of verifying how often history prior to our civilisation has been altered by people meddling with the timeline (if this has ever or will have ever happened), that really doesn't give us any clue at all as to whether or not the past or present are mutable. And of course there's a good chance all of time exists as a special case dimension, which would mean that everything that will ever happen all happened 'at once', and it is only our perception of events that is moving, not time itself.

So, to summarise: There are no answers, yet somehow we can still be wrong. Without commiting yourself to anything you see the mistakes of others, and if they don't agree with you that they are incorrect then you ascribe this to their ego. Or did I just misunderstand you? Slightly worried by your outlook here

See my comment above.

You are wrong. Light, wind and water power can all be used efficiently and effectively not just to augment fossil fuels, but to completely replace them. That's before we even start considering biofuels such as vegetable oils, husks and bamboo. What gets in the way is money. And not because there isn't enough of it - quite the opposite in fact.

For the last ****ing time, no matter if it's teleportation on Star Trek, teleportation in theoretical physics, or teleportation in the ancient lost city of Atlantis, the process could not and would not involve moving atoms from A to B. All that is transmitted from A to B is the INFORMATION required to RECREATE the original object. Anything else - as I have stated plainly before - is magic, and not science.

No, I mean the absolute size of the groups, not the relative sizes. Two equal groups of 1,000,000 individuals each have a much better chance of developing a concept that would be inpregnable to two equal groups of 10 individuals.

I think I communicated it better

Go team :banana:!

If the Antartic cap melted levels would rise, because the vast majority of the ice there is on a land continent. The ice at the Arctic pole is basically just floating about, so you might as well consider it to be part of the oceans.

Ages ago when Focus magazine was new and less crappy, I sent that in to the questions page. They printed it with a picture of an iceberg and everything \o/

Black hole & gravity man?

Yes, ice expands rather than contracting, because the bonds are less space efficient in the solid form or something... That's why ice floats in water - it's less dense.

Presumably it would depend on how large and diverse the groups were, and also what you considered to be 'roughly the same time'. Humans aren't the best sample set (in fact, monkeys aren't either) because we have a tendency to communicate.