darkangel199

taken from Newscientist.com: Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet. “15,589 Number of species threatened with extinction” Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust. "The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet? “9.7 Average eco-footprint of a US citizen, in hectares” If tomorrow dawns without humans, even from orbit the change will be evident almost immediately, as the blaze of artificial light that brightens the night begins to wink out. Indeed, there are few better ways to grasp just how utterly we dominate the surface of the Earth than to look at the distribution of artificial illumination (see Graphic). By some estimates, 85 per cent of the night sky above the European Union is light-polluted; in the US it is 62 per cent and in Japan 98.5 per cent. In some countries, including Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, there is no longer any night sky untainted by light pollution. Pretty quickly - 24, maybe 48 hours - you'd start to see blackouts because of the lack of fuel added to power stations," says Gordon Masterton, president of the UK's Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar will keep a few automatic lights burning, but lack of maintenance of the distribution grid will scuttle these in weeks or months. The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society. The same lack of maintenance will spell an early demise for buildings, roads, bridges and other structures. Though modern buildings are typically engineered to last 60 years, bridges 120 years and dams 250, these lifespans assume someone will keep them clean, fix minor leaks and correct problems with foundations. Without people to do these seemingly minor chores, things go downhill quickly. The best illustration of this is the city of Pripyat near Chernobyl in Ukraine, which was abandoned after the nuclear disaster 20 years ago and remains deserted. "From a distance, you would still believe that Pripyat is a living city, but the buildings are slowly decaying," says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who has worked extensively in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. "The most pervasive thing you see are plants whose root systems get into the concrete and behind the bricks and into doorframes and so forth, and are rapidly breaking up the structure. You wouldn't think, as you walk around your house every day, that we have a big impact on keeping that from happening, but clearly we do. It's really sobering to see how the plant community invades every nook and cranny of a city." With no one to make repairs, every storm, flood and frosty night gnaws away at abandoned buildings, and within a few decades roofs will begin to fall in and buildings collapse. This has already begun to happen in Pripyat. Wood-framed houses and other smaller structures, which are built to laxer standards, will be the first to go. Next down may be the glassy, soaring structures that tend to win acclaim these days. "The elegant suspension bridges, the lightweight forms, these are the kinds of structures that would be more vulnerable," says Masterton. "There's less reserve of strength built into the design, unlike solid masonry buildings and those using arches and vaults." But even though buildings will crumble, their ruins - especially those made of stone or concrete - are likely to last thousands of years. "We still have records of civilisations that are 3000 years old," notes Masterton. "For many thousands of years there would still be some signs of the civilisations that we created. It's going to take a long time for a concrete road to disappear. It might be severely crumbling in many places, but it'll take a long time to become invisible." The lack of maintenance will have especially dramatic effects at the 430 or so nuclear power plants now operating worldwide. Nuclear waste already consigned to long-term storage in air-cooled metal and concrete casks should be fine, since the containers are designed to survive thousands of years of neglect, by which time their radioactivity - mostly in the form of caesium-137 and strontium-90 - will have dropped a thousandfold, says Rodney Ewing, a geologist at the University of Michigan who specialises in radioactive waste management. Active reactors will not fare so well. As cooling water evaporates or leaks away, reactor cores are likely to catch fire or melt down, releasing large amounts of radiation. The effects of such releases, however, may be less dire than most people suppose. The area around Chernobyl has revealed just how fast nature can bounce back. "I really expected to see a nuclear desert there," says Chesser. "I was quite surprised. When you enter into the exclusion zone, it's a very thriving ecosystem." The first few years after people evacuated the zone, rats and house mice flourished, and packs of feral dogs roamed the area despite efforts to exterminate them. But the heyday of these vermin proved to be short-lived, and already the native fauna has begun to take over. Wild boar are 10 to 15 times as common within the Chernobyl exclusion zone as outside it, and big predators are making a spectacular comeback. "I've never seen a wolf in the Ukraine outside the exclusion zone. I've seen many of them inside," says Chesser. The same should be true for most other ecosystems once people disappear, though recovery rates will vary. Warmer, moister regions, where ecosystem processes tend to run more quickly in any case, will bounce back more quickly than cooler, more arid ones. Not surprisingly, areas still rich in native species will recover faster than more severely altered systems. In the boreal forests of northern Alberta, Canada, for example, human impact mostly consists of access roads, pipelines, andother narrow strips cut through the forest. In the absence of human activity, the forest will close over 80 per cent of these within 50 years, and all but 5 per cent within 200, according to simulations by Brad Stelfox, an independent land-use ecologist based in Bragg Creek, Alberta. In contrast, places where native forests have been replaced by plantations of a single tree species may take several generations of trees - several centuries - to work their way back to a natural state. The vast expanses of rice, wheat and maize that cover the world's grain belts may also take quite some time to revert to mostly native species. At the extreme, some ecosystems may never return to the way they were before humans interfered, because they have become locked into a new "stable state" that resists returning to the original. In Hawaii, for example, introduced grasses now generate frequent wildfires that would prevent native forests from re-establishing themselves even if given free rein, says David Wilcove, a conservation biologist at Princeton University. Feral descendants of domestic animals and plants, too, are likely to become permanent additions in many ecosystems, just as wild horses and feral pigs already have in some places. Highly domesticated species such as cattle, dogs and wheat, the products of centuries of artificial selection and inbreeding, will probably evolve back towards hardier, less specialised forms through random breeding. "If man disappears tomorrow, do you expect to see herds of poodles roaming the plains?" asks Chesser. Almost certainly not - but hardy mongrels will probably do just fine. Even cattle and other livestock, bred for meat or milk rather than hardiness, are likely to persist, though in much fewer numbers than today. What about genetically modified crops? In August, Jay Reichman and colleagues at the US Environmental Protection Agency's labs in Corvallis, Oregon, reported that a GM version of a perennial called creeping bentgrass had established itself in the wild after escaping from an experimental plot in Oregon. Like most GM crops, however, the bentgrass is engineered to be resistant to a pesticide, which comes at a metabolic cost to the organism, so in the absence of spraying it will be at a disadvantage and will probably die out too. Nor will our absence mean a reprieve for every species teetering on the brink of extinction. Biologists estimate that habitat loss is pivotal in about 85 per cent of cases where US species become endangered, so most such species will benefit once habitats begin to rebound. However, species in the direst straits may have already passed some critical threshold below which they lack the genetic diversity or the ecological critical mass they need to recover. These "dead species walking" - cheetahs and California condors, for example - are likely to slip away regardless. “784 Number of species that have gone extinct in the wild since 1500 AD” Other causes of species becoming endangered may be harder to reverse than habitat loss. For example, about half of all endangered species are in trouble at least partly because of predation or competition from invasive introduced species. Some of these introduced species - house sparrows, for example, which are native to Eurasia but now dominate many cities in North America - will dwindle away once the gardens and bird feeders of suburban civilisation vanish. Others though, such as rabbits in Australia and cheat grass in the American west, do not need human help and will likely be around for the long haul and continue to edge out imperilled native species. “388 Number of species listed on the invasive species database” Ironically, a few endangered species - those charismatic enough to have attracted serious help from conservationists - will actually fare worse with people no longer around to protect them. Kirtland's warbler - one of the rarest birds in North America, once down to just a few hundred birds - suffers not only because of habitat loss near its Great Lakes breeding grounds but also thanks to brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in the warblers' nests and trick them into raising cowbird chicks instead of their own. Thanks to an aggressive programme to trap cowbirds, warbler numbers have rebounded, but once people disappear, the warblers could be in trouble, says Wilcove. On the whole, though, a humanless Earth will likely be a safer place for threatened biodiversity. "I would expect the number of species that benefit to significantly exceed the number that suffer, at least globally," Wilcove says. On the rebound In the oceans, too, fish populations will gradually recover from drastic overfishing. The last time fishing more or less stopped - during the second world war, when few fishing vessels ventured far from port - cod populations in the North Sea skyrocketed. Today, however, populations of cod and other economically important fish have slumped much further than they did in the 1930s, and recovery may take significantly longer than five or so years. The problem is that there are now so few cod and other large predatory fish that they can no longer keep populations of smaller fish such as gurnards in check. Instead, the smaller fish turn the tables and outcompete or eat tiny juvenile cod, thus keeping their erstwhile predators in check. The problem will only get worse in the first few years after fishing ceases, as populations of smaller, faster-breeding fish flourish like weeds in an abandoned field. Eventually, though, in the absence of fishing, enough large predators will reach maturity to restore the normal balance. Such a transition might take anywhere from a few years to a few decades, says Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. With trawlers no longer churning up nutrients from the ocean floor, near-shore ecosystems will return to a relatively nutrient-poor state. This will be most apparent as a drop in the frequency of harmful algal blooms such as the red tides that often plague coastal areas today. Meanwhile, the tall, graceful corals and other bottom-dwelling organisms on deep-water reefs will gradually begin to regrow, restoring complex three-dimensional structure to ocean-floor habitats that are now largely flattened, featureless wastelands. Long before any of this, however - in fact, the instant humans vanish from the Earth - pollutants will cease spewing from automobile tailpipes and the smokestacks and waste outlets of our factories. What happens next will depend on the chemistry of each particular pollutant. A few, such as oxides of nitrogen and sulphur and ozone (the ground-level pollutant, not the protective layer high in the stratosphere), will wash out of the atmosphere in a matter of a few weeks. Others, such as chlorofluorocarbons, dioxins and the pesticide DDT, take longer to break down. Some will last a few decades. The excess nitrates and phosphates that can turn lakes and rivers into algae-choked soups will also clear away within a few decades, at least for surface waters. A little excess nitrate may persist for much longer within groundwater, where it is less subject to microbial conversion into atmospheric nitrogen. "Groundwater is the long-term memory in the system," says Kenneth Potter, a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Carbon dioxide, the biggest worry in today's world because of its leading role in global warming, will have a more complex fate. Most of the CO2 emitted from burning fossil fuels is eventually absorbed into the ocean. This happens relatively quickly for surface waters - just a few decades - but the ocean depths will take about a thousand years to soak up their full share. Even when that equilibrium has been reached, though, about 15 per cent of the CO2 from burning fossil fuels will remain in the atmosphere, leaving its concentration at about 300 parts per million compared with pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. "There will be CO2 left in the atmosphere, continuing to influence the climate, more than 1000 years after humans stop emitting it," says Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually calcium ions released from sea-bottom sediments will allow the sea to mop up the remaining excess over the next 20, 000 years or so. Even if CO2 emissions stop tomorrow, though, global warming will continue for another century, boosting average temperatures by a further few tenths of a degree. Atmospheric scientists call this "committed warming", and it happens because the oceans take so long to warm up compared with the atmosphere. In essence, the oceans are acting as a giant air conditioner, keeping the atmosphere cooler than it would otherwise be for the present level of CO2. Most policy-makers fail to take this committed warming into account, says Gerald Meehl, a climate modeller at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder. "They think if it gets bad enough we'll just put the brakes on, but we can't just stop and expect everything to be OK, because we're already committed to this warming." That extra warming we have already ordered lends some uncertainty to the fate of another important greenhouse gas, methane, which produces about 20 per cent of our current global warming. Methane's chemical lifetime in the atmosphere is only about 10 years, so its concentration could rapidly return to pre-industrial levels if emissions cease. The wild card, though, is that there are massive reserves of methane in the form of methane hydrates on the sea floor and frozen into permafrost. Further temperature rises may destabilise these reserves and dump much of the methane into the atmosphere. "We may stop emitting methane ourselves, but we may already have triggered climate change to the point where methane may be released through other processes that we have no control over," says Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA in Boulder. No one knows how close the Earth is to that threshold. "We don't notice it yet in our global measurement network, but there is local evidence that there is some destabilisation going on of permafrost soils, and methane is being released," says Tans. Solomon, on the other hand, sees little evidence that a sharp global threshold is near. All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here. Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery. And if the visitors chanced across one of today's landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic - and maybe even paper - to bear witness to our presence. "I would virtually guarantee that there would be some," says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. "The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time." Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it. But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19225731.100 Well, that's just depressing isn't it? that about does it, we humans have ruined the world. Maybe we should just find a nice cozy planet, pack up, and leave eh? give the earth back to the creatures we've stolen it from and hope it really does bounce back eh?

hmm it doesnt surprise me. If i was any country without nukes i would want one just to deter the nuclear capable countries from bothering me. Iraq didn't have nukes, U.S. invaded and put it in chaos. Iran doesnt have nukes (just my guess, maybe they do) U.S. will probably invade them NK has nukes, U.S. wants to see the peace process work out. it looks to me, have nukes, people just talk, don't have nukes, you get invaded if a superpower or their allies dont like your politics or just dont like you in general. No wonder NK wants a working launchable nuke. If not who knows what will happen down the line.

i think this entire discussion is crazy. We know it wont last forever,you are only debating when it will run out, not if. And we know that it puts bad stuff in the air and causes all kinds of problems. We should be moving away whether we've rached "peak oil" or not simply because of all the hazards and problems oil causes.

Its from a hgher dimenson. UV from higher dimensions acts in ways we cannot even comprehend. That's why it can hit every place on earth at 17:10 exactly in all time zones. Because its higher dimensional UV light, and since it moves through upper dimensions we only see it as "appearing" and "Dissappearing" such as things in higher dimensions do.

with gas it doesnt matter, because so many countries want gas they will just re-sell it to another country.

see, i was always thought a singularity was where matter was crushed to a infinite density, where gravity is infinitely strong, and where spacetime has infinite curvature. i thought that was in the center of all black holes. So that's not an actual physical thing? its just what happens at the center of a black hole?

oh, gotcha. i just posted an interesting artcle in the relativity section, but a particular part caught my eye and says what i am trying ot say better than i said it: "That would be an even bigger headline than the black holes. It could be that there is a whole new universe a millimetre away from our heads but at right-angles to the three dimensions that are here," Dr Cox said. "That would be a real paradigm shift - our relegation to a little sheet in a multi-dimensional universe. Dr Cox said." http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/stor...ectid=10400645

Baby Bang experiment could open door to new dimension Monday September 11, 2006 Deep underground on the Franco-Swiss border, someone will throw a switch next year to start one of the most ambitious experiments in history, probing the secrets of the universe and possibly finding new dimensions. The Large Hadron Collider - a 27km-long circular particle accelerator at the CERN experimental facility near Geneva, will smash protons into one another at unimaginable speeds trying to replicate in miniature the events of the Big Bang. "These beams will have the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier slammed into the size of a zero on a 20p piece," Brian Cox of Manchester University told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "We are going to make mini Big Bangs. "There has never been such a jump in particle physics. It will go into an area that we don't really understand," he added. The fundamental goal of the massive machine is to answer the basic but crucial question of how matter was created at the birth of the universe. "We don't know what 95 per cent of the universe is made of - which is a bit embarrassing for a subject that claims to be fundamental," Dr Cox said. "There is dark matter. It is all over the place but we have no idea what it is." "There is also something called dark energy, and that is an even bigger question. "It makes up about 70 per cent of the energy in the universe, but again we have absolutely no idea what it is. "It is an incredibly exciting machine. It will be turned on next year and run for at least a decade and probably 20 years and the first results - if the machine behaves itself - should start coming out within a year," he added. If the theories are correct, the machine will create tiny black holes that evaporate and possibly even find particles that offer evidence that the three dimensions known to mankind are just a fraction of those that exist. "That would be an even bigger headline than the black holes. It could be that there is a whole new universe a millimetre away from our heads but at right-angles to the three dimensions that are here," Dr Cox said. "That would be a real paradigm shift - our relegation to a little sheet in a multi-dimensional universe. "That kind of thing is really profound and will capture the imagination that perhaps the origin of mass won't, although it should. "For the first time in many decades we have built a machine that exceeds our powers of prediction. "New processes are bound to be discovered. We are truly journeying into unknown territory." Dr Cox dismissed worries that by adventuring into the unknown and creating tiny black holes, the machine could even destroy the planet. "The probability is at the level of 10 to the minus 40," he said. MINI BANGS * Scientists aim to reproduce miniature versions of the so-called Big Bang, which is thought to have started the universe. * To do this they will smash protons together at huge speeds along a 27km tube known as a particle accelerator. * They hope to create tiny black holes or find extra dimensions in the universe. * They estimate the possibility of accidentally destroying the planet as extremely low. * The risk is calculated at about 10 to the minus 40 - a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=325&objectid=10400645 a few questions, first one, is this really possible or are these guys full of it? second one, i thought black holes period suck in anything that crosses their horizon. if so, then how will we be able to stop them before they suck everything in or simply rip a hole in our planet? final question, would this create a naked singularity since we are making the black hole? Edit: if this proves ther are hgher dimensons, then will string theory be more widely accepted and regarded as fact?

isnt the perception of time moving just that, a constant refreshing of the present with updated movements? I just figured that, if their are other dimensons, such as a 5 dimensonal space or more, maybe some of these people who claim these ablities have somehow managed to act in these other dimensions, and if so, then it would explain why we cant detect what happens. As to how one gets "out of sync" i would assume it could just be a random mutation. Since evolution is constant, maybe they are the first "prototypes". (i am by no means a scientist, i thank Dr Kaku for the whole hyperspace other dimension thing). i just assume there is a rational reason for these type of things if they are true.

true on the ghost point. but telekenesis could definately be manipulating objects in four dimensonal space. maybe something went wrong in their brains, and even though that cant "see" in four dimensional space consciously, maybe their subconscious is doing the controlling in 4 dimensonal space but their rational conscious brain cant interpret anything higher than 3d space so they, like us, just don't see what's happening in 4d space. we label it as "supernatural" or "magical" or a "miracle". maybe the medical miracles are all just people's subconscious reaching into hgher dimensional space and then into the patients' or loved ones' 3d body and removing the illness making it appear like its a "miracle".

While i was at work at the IRS i was sitting at my desk doing nothing but staring at the flashing cursor for an hour. Well being bored i began blinking in sync with the cursor, that was flashing green and white, well i noticed that, not suprisingly when i closed my eyes a split second before the cursor changed to green and opened them for a brief moment then closed them again, like that in sync with the flashing that the color of the cursor appeared a solid color. Then i had a thought, maybe, what people percieve as ghosts or having telekenetic power or esp is nothing more than their minds somehow shorting out and getting "out of sync" with our normal three dimensional world and perception. Maybe these people see the blinking while we only see the solid colors. These people that claim telekenetic powers somehow can interact in higher dimensions, so what we percieve as them "moving things with their minds" is actually nothing more than them acting in a higher dimension, as much as a 3d person could do seemingly impossible things in a 2d world, these people can seemingly do impossible things in our 3d world. That could also be why we do not see any scientific proof because we cannot percieve and detect things that happen in higher dimensions. the same with ghosts, maybe the reason some people seem them and others dont is because for some reason they can "see" things in a higher dimension. It probably is random which is why these people dont see ghosts everywhere. The same thing could apply to dark matter. Maybe we dont know what it is because its merely a "shadow" or rather the "sphere" of the hyperspere. or in 2d people terms, maybe darkmatter is the 2d square they see when it is really a cube. discuss.

Sure we coukd. I think if a superior species came around in a few generations they could have whipped all the "fight" out of us and eventually the newborn people will grow up only knowing their masters and not know anything else. Get rid of the "old rebellious bunch" (us, our kids, their kids) and start the next generation off as pets and bam. there you go.

I am sure the U.S is not too thrilled about this. And i am sure that Iraq will accept the offer, which wll probably piss off the U.S. and Iran will laugh all the way to the bank. The U.S. rermoved the only person basically keeping the two countries seperate, what dd they think would happen when them ajority of Iraq are Persian, like Iran? Now what will the U.S. do? Afterall this is al la result of the democracy they want installed all around the world. Wil lthe U.S. handle it the way they handled Hamas being elected? Basically tell them if you dont choose someone else we will not gve you any aid? or will they respect the Iraqis decisions as a supposed soverign nation?

you're wrong. Justl iek any religion their are people who take certain parts of the religion and use it to brainwash people. Their are racist tendencies in most religious teachings if you look deep enough. Are there some bad muslims, sure there are, are all muslims bad because of the few? not a chance. I used to live in the deep south of the U.S. and i ran into entire towns where black people were not welcome. I have been harassed, embarrassed and held unlawfully for no good reason. I have seen white people grab their purses as i passed by for no reason. Yet i don't run around forums preaching about how evil and racist white people are. youk now why because i know all white americans are not racists and hateful pigs even though a percentage of the white american population is. If i came on here and said that white people are truly the cause for the worlds problems and i can provide links to show white people causing problems would that still justify me saying something like that? hell no it wouldn't. And if i said it i would be ready for any consequence this private forum, which i dont have any right to be on or say anything on decided to deal out to me.

I never said Atheist was a bad thing. i am sure their are some bad ones but i never said all were bad or evil or anything else like that. And furthermore i would not make an absolute statement like that, because it would merely be bait to stir people up into a flame war. All i am saying is people should be held responsible for their statements, especially if you can't prove that the statement is true. saying Islam is the cause of all the worlds problems and they all should be wiped out is wrong and can only be seen as a statement meant to inflame and hurt other people. Free speech has consequences, if you can't deal with them then you should watch what you say. ( i know no one said that but i am just using it as an example)

Its not right to down an entire religion because of some of their members do bad things. Free Speech comes with responsibility and consequences, if you cant face the consequences then don't say something. Racism in any form should not be tolerated. And people should not get special treatment, if someone says something that violates the rules of the forums then they should be punished. Saying muslims are evil and Islam is evil is meant to be inflammatory and those kinds of statements should not be tolerated. Same if someone said it about christianity or Athieism.

Its a shame scientists had to wait so long for this political garbage. And to answer your question Jim, i do not think its hypocritical to be pro choice but anti death penalty. It's simple, until you can show me unequivical proof that at 3 or 4 weeks that's a baby then i don't believe it is. Whereas we know that people on death roll are people, and the fact that their seems to be more and more of them found innocent before they are put to death or worse, after they are put to death we should not have it. Wen dealing with the life of a human being on this earth you better be absolutely sure they committed the crime before you kill them.

Bettina, they were not terrorist, just civilians. And you're right, right now the UN is still being a joke. They should be in there to make sure both sides stick to their agreement...

well, considering they snuck into the country and kidnapped these people i would say that's why. didnt they just get all riled up about their soldiers being kidnapped?

BEIRUT (AFP) - Nasrallah is a bad surname to have in Lebanon, as Israel tries to break the militant group Hezbollah. Fourteen-year-old Mohammed Hassan Nasrallah found out the hard way when Israeli airborne commandos seized his father and four other men in eastern Lebanon, even though they are unrelated to Hassan Nasrallah, the firebrand head of the Shiite Muslim movement. Mohammed was asleep, together with his father, mother, brothers and sisters, when Israeli elite troops broke into his home on August 2, breaking the doors and shattering the windows of their home in Hay al-Osseira near the eastern city of Baalbek. "They started shouting, they took us out one after the other and tied our hands behind our backs," he told an AFP correspondent in the Bekaa Valley. Hay al-Osseira, located at the eastern entrance of Baalbek, a main Hezbollah stronghold, had been abandoned by its residents following Israeli bombardments. But Mohammed's father, Hassan Diab Nasrallah, did not want to leave his grocery because he was afraid of thieves. But Wednesday's night visitors did not want to steal canned food. "About a dozen soldiers broke into the house. They put the women and children on one side without tying them up. They placed the men on the other side. I was with the men," Mohammed said. Israel said 200 elite commando troops carried out the operation, the deepest ground incursion into Lebanon since the Jewish state launched its offensive on its northern neighbor on July 12 when Hezbollah captured two soldiers to secure a prisoner swap. "They were shouting and mistreating us. My mother interfered and told them to have pity on the children and treat us nicely," Mohammed said. But one of the Israelis responded: "Shut up or I will kill you," according to Mohammed, who said the serviceman also "fired shots over her head." Mohammed was taken with his father Hassan Diab, 60, his brother Bilal, 28, the fiance of his sister Hassan al-Borgi, as well as neighbors Ahmad al-Awta, 60, and Mohammed Shakar, 50. Escorted by a hundred soldiers, they walked for an hour and 20 minutes until they reached the helicopters which had landed in a field. "All along the road, they were asking questions. They spoke fluent Arabic, some with an accent. They asked us if we were Hezbollah members, and if we were related to Nasrallah," Mohammed said. The family name Nasrallah is common in Lebanon, both in Muslim and Christian communities. But the Hezbollah chief is from the southern village of Bazurieh, and is not related to the Nasrallah family from the eastern Baalbek region. The Israeli soldiers boarded the men on the helicopters, then one of them turned to Mohammed and kicked him, he said. "They untied me, kicked me in the back and told me to go away," he said. It was 2:20 am (2320 GMT) when the helicopters flew out of the region, with the captives whom the Jewish state said were Hezbollah members. "I started running with my slippers. There was an armed drone which was firing around me. I was not hit, but I was injured by a flying piece of rock in my back. I hid in the first empty house that I saw," he said. When the shots ceased around 6:00 am (0300 GMT), Mohammed left the hideout and rushed to his uncle's house in Baalbek. He found his mother, Um Bilal, who now only has one hope: that the International Committee for the Red Cross can give her news of her husband's whereabouts. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060803/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictlebanon_060803184155 Hmm, i could have sworn Israel just carpet bombed half a country for the same thing? well actually these people were not even soldiers. Talk about hypocrites...

hmm, how about Geology maybe?

well, i think maybe they just don't want to be bothered? I don't see why a alien species should act like a human when it comes to exploring things. And if they can travel interstellar distances their technology is so far advanced past our own would we even know they were here to begin with?

could it be a type of "shadow of something from a higher dimension? like if we stick out hands in a two dimensional world we will also appear to pass through objects without interacting with them at all and our hands would certainly seem "exotic and new" because of the amazing things we can do. Couldn't it just be some type of higher dimensional form of matter or some kind of higher dimensional thing? and isnt it theorized that gravity passes through dimensions, which is why its so weak? maybe this higher dimensional thing is effected by gravity because gravity passes through dimensions? (sorry for my very unscientific sounding idea.)

its a great idea. Its happened before so why would it not work now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_of_Palestine