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Kinda sorta. The name highway is applicable in the sense that those concrete thingies on which you drive can be called highways at 5:00 PM on Friday during a driving rainstorm. About the only thing that is driving is the rain. A more fitting name for this concept would be the planetary Brigadoon conestoga wagon trail. "Brigadoon" because the lanes open up very infrequently. Most of the time, this is like listening to the road closure status on the local radio, only worse. Imagine if instead of working on just a few major interchanges your local friendly highway department authorized work on all interchanges at once. Every once in a rare while the connection from the Crosstown Expressway to the Loop will be open. Most of the time it will be "you can't get there from here." Conestoga wagon trail is more apt than highway because even if you can get there from here, the journey will take a *long* time using the "planetary superhighway". BTW, good luck in your search for an over older thread to necromance.

This is homework. We don't do your homework for you at this site. Instead we help you do your own homework -- and that means you need to show some work before we can even get started.

You're right. The energy yield, assuming complete annihilation, is 4.9×1027 joules (to two decimal places).

Nope. It's 2.4×1027 joules. E=mc2. Here m=2.7×1010 kg, and c2 is 9.0×1016 m2/s2. The resultant explosion will most likely be a lot less than 2.4×1027 joules. Some annihilation will occur when the asteroid and anti-asteroid collide. However, that initial explosion will generate shock waves that will break the asteroid and anti-asteroid apart. Most of the material will survive that initial explosion. Some of the material will be in the form of vaporized gas, some will be ejected from the solar system, but a lot of little chunks of matter and antimatter asteroid will survive -- and will still be orbiting the Sun. End result: thousands, maybe millions, of little near Earth antimatter asteroids. I don't want to be around when one of those antimatter chunks hits the Earth's atmosphere.

We don't even have a few pounds, cipher. From http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html Can we make antimatter bombs? No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as `typical' hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already. Let's ignore that and assume you did manage to come up with 2.7×1010 kg of antimatter and assume that you somehow could use it to utterly annihilate Apophis. The resultant explosion would yield 2.4×1027 joules of energy in a very, very short period of time. That is the energy from the total amount of sunlight that hits the Earth over a span of 436 years! Even worse, that energy would be in the form of extremely energetic gamma rays. That would probably kill us all.

That you clearly do not understand the terms you are using and that you claim to be an assistant professor is not amusing. It is very sad. I strongly suggest that you read up on Popper's concept of falsifiability. falsifiability is an essential characteristic of a scientific theory. Your claim that your "theory" (scare quotes intentional) is unfalsifiable is an admission that you do not have a scientific theory. You know that you are trying to foist a stinking pile of sophomoric philosophical nonsense on us? That isn't sad. It's scientific fraud. Let's look at one of those predictions. That is a bunch of meaningless word salad and is untestable. When, exactly, will this purported "macroevolutionary event" occur, and what will we see when it does occur? What "thermodynamic instability"? This is an untestable claim because of its vagueness and its lack of specificity. At any point of time in the future when this "event" has not yet happened, the response can be "well it hasn't happened yet." First off, couple of suggestions: Drop the "Reader" nonsense. It is obnoxious and condescending. You've written scientific papers; so be honest: Do you write them this way? Drop the -gyre nonsense. Slapping a Greek suffix on things doesn't make your purported theory true. All it does is make it look like you are obfuscating. That said, you have not answered Klaynos' question on how your theory explains how magnetism is just a relativistic electric field. There is nothing about special relativity or gravitation in your theory. How can you claim to have a theory of everything when your theory does not address those concepts? That is a typical crackpot claim. Do you really want to go down that road? It is not our job to disprove your theory. That is your job. You as the proponent of a theory must identify a testable prediction from your theory that distinguishes your theory from existing models. That it is not quantitative is a death knell in and of itself. The new age nonsense doesn't help. That it is unfalsifiable (your own words) is yet another death knell. Theories, unlike cats, do not have multiple lives.

You need to learn the terms you are bandying about. If something is not falsifiable it is worthless, absolutely worthless, in the field of science. Evolution is a falsifiable theory. So are general relativity and the standard model. On the other hand, the existence of a supernatural, all-powerful being is not falsifiable. It's supernatural, after all. If you cannot think of a test that could prove your idea wrong you do not have a theory. All you have a stinking pile of silly sophomoric philosophical nonsense. You have no theory. No prejudice. Just being blunt. You have a stinking pile of nonsense. In particular, you have nothing unless you can make specific quantitative predictions of the outcome of an experiment. You claim to have a theory of everything. That term has a specific meaning. You really shouldn't use that term unless you know what it means. You have a theory of nothing.

I'll be blunt: This is a pile of crap., and a big stinking pile at that. There is no math. The garbage on planetary orbits is nonsense, and so is the garbage on atoms. Hint: the Rutherford model of the atom never gained traction. From the website: "I The Author, am presently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in a basic science department at a major medical school in the United States of America." This speaks volumes of the low quality of the US education system.

Bzzzt. Wrong. A thing that is not falsifiable is not a scientific theory.

Do you know what those adjectives mean? Incommensurable means unable to be compared (with what?) Since you did not say what your theory is incommensurable with, I can only assume that you mean it is incommensurable with everything: Existing theories, reality, ... If that is the case, why would I even be interested in reading it? Why would anyone? Irreducible means unable to be reduced. And you know this because?? Catholic presumably means universal here. Aren't you being redundant when you say this is a theory of everything? Unfalsifiable means it cannot be shown to be false, which in turn means you do not have a theory. Empirically validated means you have tested it. Against what? You just said your theory is unfalsifiable. With what? Do you have your own personal particle collider? Validated means someone has checked your work. Who? Did you submit it for peer review, or did you validate it yourself (never a good idea). Testable. But wait! You said your theory was unfalsifiable. Complete has a couple of different mathematical meanings, neither of which apply where. I am completely baffled with regard to your meaning. Consistent. Sorry, you can't prove this. Godel's theorems are going to get in the way.

Sure they do. Four of the many books written by non-American authors in this subject: The Prince, Mein Kampf, The Art of War, Quotations from Chairman Mao.

Why do some people think Bush was behind 9/11? Why do some people think Obama is not a US citizen? Why do some people think the world will end on 21 Dec, 2012? Why do some people think that water retains a "memory" of some solute even after diluting by a factor of 1:1060? Some people are so disconnected from reality that there is no explaining their thinking except as a professional study by psychologists in delusional pathologies.

I don't accept AGW to the extent claimed by most of the adherents as fact. I particularly do not accept it as a fact that demands a complete revamping of our economy and our way of life. That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. I don't accept all the incredible hype pumped out by the AGW crowd. AGW is a multi-decadal phenomena. Those who believe in AGW are correct when the wacko anti-AGW crowd talks about record lows in Podunk or record snowfall in England. So what's all this crap about AGW being the cause of the flooding in Pakistan or the heat wave in Russia? For now, that appears to be weather, not climate. (What's happening Russia may be a clue that it isn't just weather, but we'll have to wait for winter/next spring to really know for sure.) I don't accept the incredible vitriol against those of us who are not true believers. A senatorcritter (all of the people in the house and senate are critters, not people) proposing, even in jest, that us non-believers be rounded up and relocated to that recently calved glacier was beyond pale. People in government positions should never joke about relocation or reeducation programs. I don't accept that the science is settled. We have only recently learned about climatological phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, etc, that apparently have a huge impact on the climate. We simply don't know enough about the climate to be making extreme economic and cultural decisions based on a science that is still in its infancy. Part of my problem is that I know too many meteorologists. My first career involved working with weather satellites. I worked on one of the first satellite-based ozone measurement experiments, I worked on remote sensing of vegetation, and I helped build and install weather satellite ground stations around the world. I worked with a lot of meteorologists and a few climatologists back then. I still keep in touch with some of them. Meteorologists as a group tend to be rather skeptical of claims of AGW. I guess I fall in the luke warmer camp. The question in my mind is not whether CO2 has an impact on the climate. The question is the magnitude of those impacts and whether feedback mechanisms will mitigate or exacerbate the effects. An impact less than the extremes projected by the IPCC makes the problem smaller than many other problems faced by humanity. Addressing AGW would be solving the wrong problem. Humanity has had plenty of other impacts on the environment. We have changed the face of the planet. While many of those changes are essential to sustaining a population of 7 billion and counting, many are not. Spending money to mitigate those known, significant, and to some extent curable impacts would yield a better bang for the buck than spending money on what is potentially a non-problem. ------- <Rant> What the <expletive deleted> is the deal with the random fonts, random font sizes, and random line spacing here? I didn't do that (at least not intentionally). </Rant>

Nice AGW love fest going on here. I'd join -- except I'm not a believer. All of this talk about beliefs gives cause to wonder which is the side of reason. Senatecritters want to put us non-believers on an iceberg. A question for you true believers: Is the need to believe in AGW a strange brew of whatever you all on the left eat and drink, maybe some weird reaction from too much sushi and espresso?

There is no need to invoke speculative concepts such as multiverses or an infinite universe, Mr. Skeptic. Hoyle's fallacy is a fallacy in this finite little corner of our singular universe.

Is this your standard MO, cypress? Picking on someone who doesn't know the right terms to use, who doesn't quite know the specifics of the subject matter, and thereby claiming victory? That is just sad, sad, sad. Pretty much everyone at this site is an amateur on the subject of abiogenesis. Of the few biology experts we do have at this site, none are (as far as I know) experts on this particular subject. They are instead experts in the evolution of some particular existing set of species. So even if you did do a better job at debating us does not mean you are right. It would just mean that you did a better job than a bunch of naive ninnies. Oh, one last thing: You have not done a better job than us amateurs.

I hope that last sentence is true. I'm not holding my breath, though. This thread started with an implied religious contention (life is impossible, therefore god created life) and a blatantly false misrepresentation of abiogenesis (Hoyle's fallacy). I'm only going to say one thing on the first issue: Assuming for the sake of argument that life is impossible, how do you know that it was your god that created the original life? How do you know it wasn't Agdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, ..., or Zeus? (See this thread) Hoyle's answer is both right and wrong. How is it right? Simple: He correctly calculated that a nearly impossible event had a nearly impossible chance of occurring. There is only one minor problem with his calculation: It has nothing to do with how life did form. Life did not form by having a bunch of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms magically come together to form the first DNA molecule. The odds of that happening is indeed a near impossibility. This is where he is wrong. Using this gross misrepresentation of how life formed as proof that life did not form is a straw man fallacy. The conditions on the early Earth favored rather than disfavored the formation of life. The current train of thought is that life formed via some pre-biotic chemical evolutionary process. The early Earth had a reducing atmosphere that was conducive to the generation of complex hydrocarbons, including amino acids. How those eventually formed life is an open question. There are two leading trains of thought, gene-first versus metabolism-first. Life did not spontaneously erupt in either scenario. It built up over time precisely because the laws of physics favor the formation of ever more complex molecules given the right circumstances.

Brad opened the window, jumped into the building, and landed on the floor of the 22nd floor. Brad is a window washer.

We must be living in different universes. I see only one person who is agreeing with you, and that person is clueless about probabilities. Nice one, piling a fallacy on top of a fallacy. Should we call this cypress' fallacy? His answer is wrong, as both of my links (there are several others) show. The correct method is to say until we have more knowledge it is best to not to practice numerical proctology.

OK, thanks for that. And yes, the location sucks. When the underlying software thinks I have last visited seems quite random. Sometimes it will thinks I last visited 8 minutes ago, other times, two days ago. The appearance is that it just pulls a number out of the hat. Does it really? I got completely random results when I tried to search for 41,000. The old search tool had lots of options. I could make it search only in selected subfora, look only for posts by a particular user, have it report results either as posts or as threads. I can't even find an advanced search tool with this new scheme. Another complaint: The underlying formatter is both too smart and too stupid at the same time. Heck, it is worse than Microstuff's Word, which is saying a mouthful. It is very easy to get mixed fonts when cutting and pasting. It is very easy to get stuck in a list. Where is the Make plain text button?

Why are all of you bandying this 10-41,000 number about as if it is anything but fiction? cypress was asked to provide a reference multiple times; that reference was never given. I'll give a couple; there are plenty more out there. "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations," http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html Every so often, someone comes up with the statement "the formation of any enzyme by chance is nearly impossible, therefore abiogenesis is impossible". Often they cite an impressive looking calculation from the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, or trot out something called "Borel's Law" to prove that life is statistically impossible. These people, including Fred, have committed one or more of the following errors. ... "Hoyle’s fallacy," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoyle%27s_fallacy Hoyle's Fallacy, sometimes called the junkyard tornado, is a term for Fred Hoyle's flawed statistical analysis applied to evolutionary origins. Hoyle’s fallacy is a surprisingly easy mistake to make when one has not quite grasped how powerful a force natural selection can be. Hoyle's Fallacy predates Hoyle and has been found all the way back to Darwin's time.

I'll try to be nice: The search tools in this new setup are awful. (Whew, no curse words. Told ya' I'd try to be nice.) The "View New Content" button has a rather random view of what is new. How do I find the posts made in the last day? The last two days? How do I find posts made by a particular user? Going to the user's profile and clicking "posts" shows the full text of the last two or three posts made by the user. Want to search for content? Doing a search forums gives random nonsense. Doing a google search on "<content> site://scienceforums.net" is much more likely to find what you are searching for. Edit: I now see that you have the merge working But it doesn't show a separator between the merged posts. Another issue: Touch a post, even 5 seconds after you post it, and you get "This post has been edited by ..." displayed at the bottom of the post. Any way to make that only show up if there is some reasonable lag between the initial post and the edit?

Minor correction: Those times are in US Central Time. Other than that, what you said is correct. This is not necessarily the best time to see the moon. For example, the moon will reach fullness on Aug 24, 2010 at 12:05 PM Central Daylight Time. You could see the full moon at that moment quite nicely from Tibet, but not from Houston.

Please show a link. A full is not visible at noon. To see a full moon at noon you would need to look down at your feet and be able to see through the Earth. The best time to view a full moon is at midnight.

Just because grass grows continuously does not mean it can tolerate the onslaught of an excessive number of herbivores. Overgrazing is a real problem. This is a simplified version of an overgrazing problem.