Phi for All

Congratulations! Boris will probably build you a wall to celebrate.

I've suddenly lost interest in talking to you. It's a waste of time if you aren't interested in removing your ignorance. Best of luck, enjoy your day.

What don't you trust about ice core samples? We drill down, remove the ice, and it's makeup tells us about how that region developed over time. I gave you a link to the evidence that proves you wrong, and you ask me to prove it again? I'm having a very difficult time understanding you. Do you understand how evidence works? Do you think the Atlanteans were an ice-bound civilization? Do you think they were able to make fire without wood? I don't know why you mention this, or how it's relevant to the Atlantis/Antarctica relationship you're trying to establish. It seems like you're wilding ranting about several things all at once. Can you stick to one topic at a time, please?

I don't know what you're talking about. Watch what? I don't know what you're talking about. I showed you some evidence of ice core samples that show Antarctica has been ice bound for the last 30 million years, so unless you think humans had a civilization there further back than that, your idea that Antarctica is really Atlantis is false. This is entirely possible, but still just guesswork.

It's not about "making sense". Making sense to you or me is far too subjective to be called science. Instead, we've taken core samples and found many interesting things (but no signs of civilization). So no, Antarctica is NOT Atlantis, or at least not a pre-historical civilization sort of Atlantis. No evidence supports your idea, unless you have some?

We can talk about any point of relevant science, as long as you can do it without referencing astrology, religion, numerology, Atlantis, or any other unsupported belief.

It's just a guess, without any kind of evidence or reasoning that supports it. I can't trust it to explain anything. Kindly study some science, then come back and we'll have a talk and a laugh.

... meaningfully without evidence in support of your position. Evidence, in this case, is the mathematical model you're using in your argument. If you read the rules you agreed to when you joined, you'd easily see this isn't a matter of censorship at all. It's a matter of rigor. But it fits the standards of a Moderator who is a physicist working with atomic clocks. Those are some rigorous standards, and we're very grateful for them, let me tell you. Perhaps your publisher told you to stay away from the math in your books (I think Stephen King once said that each equation in your book cuts the readership in half), but here we need evidence to support arguments, especially if they run counter to mainstream science. Those explanations currently have the preponderance of evidence on their side, but here we'd be interested in discussing anything that supports what you're saying, as long as it follows a reasoned methodology. Does that make sense? Nobody is censoring you, nothing about our process is telling you you can't talk about something. We're telling you that, if you're going to make assertions, you need to support them in order for us to discuss them meaningfully. Imagination needs to follow the rules in order to be science.

Envy is a possible outcome of intolerance, but my point was more about limiting your own possibilities because you've chosen not to deal with a certain person or group of people.

Any input affects your mind, but controlling it is another matter. The kind of control you're suggesting would be extremely costly and it's doubtful it could be used without leaving some trace of the activity. There are far cheaper methods of mind "control", like advertising, well-written articles, videos, movies, anything that can persuade or change our emotions. Chemicals could be used, but again, they would leave traces and they couldn't all be covered up, not on a large scale. If you're thinking of some kind of electronic means to influence how people think and behave, some kind of emission or wave or signal that takes over the brain, I think we have far too many ways to detect such things. Keeping them secret would be almost impossible. I think the biggest argument against the existence of mind control is the effectiveness of our media. They use words that have broad interpretations, and concepts that resonate to many people. They want to entertain, make us laugh and cry, get us to buy their products, vote for their candidate, support their issues, and try to control our minds in a pleasing way, so we won't "mind" them doing it.

Yet you present none of it here?! In my experience, mathematicians don't pass up an opportunity to speak in their favorite language. This looks like a bit of flim-flam, trying to hustle us past the problems so we don't see them. Without the maths, you have no model.

Personal opportunity. Every individual you tolerate and cooperate and communicate with represents chances for advancement in multiple areas. The people you can't tolerate are lost chances to prosper.

Not this, not ever. Far too costly, far too risky, and it doesn't address the reasons we create the rubbish. Even if we could figure a cheap way to send it to space, we'd just be using resources up at the same rate. We have ways of making sustainable products, but current manufacturers have a LOT invested in the current infrastructure, and don't want to spend the money to change. It would be far better to start making our plastic products from plants.

I would change "no gravity" in this instance to "no gravitational influence of its own". If you had such a vacuum, and suddenly introduced matter into it, it would still be affected by spacetime curvature from any nearby massive objects. I'm being nit-picky, but "not generating any gravity in the area of a vacuum" is different from "gravity doesn't affect the area inside a vacuum", so I wanted to make sure of what you meant by "no gravity".

This is like me complaining to the Kansas City Chiefs that when you throw as hard as their quarterback Patrick Mahomes, you lose the ability to understand how to play football. This can create a lot of issues to the development of sports. What a load of crap! In reality, it's actually more like a scuba diver who works so much underwater, they lose the ability to think in flat planes on dry land, and always look at the world in 3 dimensions. It's not a bad thing at all. I wish I could instantly run equations through my head and view the world in terms of maths and balance and physical relationships.

! Moderator Note We don't attack people here. Stick to attacking ideas you don't understand, and at least you won't be breaking the rules.

! Moderator Note Thread closed.

I really thought there was hope for you before you claimed this. I don't think we can help you. I think you need to find someplace where they love to talk about guesswork and everybody gets to make up their own definitions for things. Here, we appreciate accumulated human knowledge analyzed using the scientific method, since historically it's shown itself to give us the most trustworthy explanations we've ever had. I don't trust your knowledge of physics and chemistry because you've already shown you don't know what you're talking about. I wish we had a good way to get through to you, but until you stop acting so willful about the things you don't understand (like science being here before humans), there's little discussion can do for you. You'll just keep repeating what you've misunderstood, and we'll just keep thinking you can't possibly be serious, and we'll keep voting your posts down because it looks like trolling. This is a mainstream science discussion forum.

* big sigh * Models are the mathematics that describe what we have observed about a system, using symbols and concepts to offer an explanation with precision that words rarely accomplish. Theories are the verbal expression of the mathematical models. They are our current best-supported explanations for phenomena. THEY ARE NOT PROOF! Best. Supported. Explanations.

I always hate pointing this out to people because it seems like an Appeal to Authority, but in this case it's especially relevant. I'm grateful for our professional scientists who take their time to help put meaning and trustworthiness into our discussions, and it's my hope that anyone coming here with ignorance can have it dispelled if they're willing to listen and learn to people who do this for a living. It's great that people think so highly of science, but it's a methodology that has to be applied correctly by humans, so it can't be infallible, by definition. If science and observation was perfect, we wouldn't need peer review. We wouldn't need theory. We could just observe that all swans are white, claim it to be proven, and never check on swans again.

Sorry, but that's not a great answer. It's a cop-out. You're basically demanding that aliens exist and are here, ignoring that there's no evidence that strong to support such a assertion, and then claiming that operating on some kind of unfamiliar "frequency" we don't understand makes them invisible. Communication is all about patterns, and we're pattern-finding machines with some of the best communication skills on the planet. While there are maths and physics concepts we don't fully understand, it's doubtful that lack of knowledge would stop us from recognizing patterns aimed at communicating information. We might not know what an alien communication says exactly, but do you really think we would fail to recognize an attempt to communicate? I was actually thinking of that as a reason why NOT to have flying cars. If you remove traffic congestion through automation, why do you need to fly? And if you need to fly, why do you need a car? I suppose if self-driving cars made auto insurance unnecessary, the same might apply to self-flying cars, but I don't think you'll ever remove the issue of liability. Still, I don't think flying cars are going to be anything but a billionaire's diversion. I don't want to be in the skies with some of the people I've driven on the ground with.

Do you really think most drivers could learn 3D? I don't, and I can't even imagine what it would cost to insure a flying car, much less all the things it might collide with. Right now I'm probably not covered if I plow into the 35th floor of a high-rise building. Also, we're going to need a few orders of magnitude more air-traffic controllers. I'm skeptical that energy is the only thing flying cars suffer from.

Yuck, that's terrible reasoning. Lack of evidence for or against something is NOT evidence of lack. Your reasoning might hold up in a court trying to convict someone, but lack of evidence for another civilization simply means we haven't encountered one, NOT that they can't exist. We are allowed to say "We don't know", you know.

! Moderator Note I'm afraid this is something only YOU see. If you find a way to persuade others, let me know and I can open this monologue up to discussion again.

Everything you're saying is a guess, obviously. You have no way to know any of this. This is why your subjective opinion doesn't mean anything in science. You can't possibly know we're the first intelligent creatures in the whole universe. No amount of solid reasoning could support such obvious guesswork. Friendly advice: you should confine your assertions to your own threads. If you keep polluting mainstream threads with your misunderstandings and preachings, you're going to get banned. Mainstream science only in mainstream sections. If you want to disprove science, start in Speculations and bring tons of evidence.