Phi for All

And that's where the politics comes in. If everyone agrees that the probability of existing debris colliding with itself and other satellites, as well as threatening future space efforts, doesn't warrant the expense of capture/relocation, and we aren't going to do anything else about them, then we need protocols on what to do when collisions do happen. Or we just agree that if, say, part of the weather satellite China destroyed in 2007 collides with one of your satellites, we chalk it up to bad luck and improbable odds.

Honestly, the very idea seems to be the prison, if you ask me. Worse still, the concept basically throws away the key as well, ensuring one never has a chance to get out. If you're making this analogy up, why not make it possible to change? There's currently nothing you can do about your location within the universe. For all we know, this may be the only place anywhere that can do what Earth has done. This is a place that makes life possible in the first place. Once you have that, you get to be in the story, and whatever role you end up playing, at least you're playing. It takes a lot of little bits to make a life possible, and a lot of maintenance once the life is up and running. As long as all the little bits are working to a certain standard, life continues. The show continues to play. Tragedy, comedy, there usually is a mix of both, all happening in a specific way because you're a part of it, you affect this part of the universe, your life is part of others and you matter. The alternative is, the show ends, the theater goes dark, the story stops for you. There is no doubt in my mind that many people are living difficult, sad, awful stories, stories that make me weep but also make me determined to do my part to help. My heart goes out to anyone living in harsh and uncaring circumstances. You're part of a society of the most cooperative, intelligent, capable species on the planet, and all I can say at this point is that you haven't met the right humans yet if you consider yourself a captive. I would argue that your worldview needs to include a mechanism for positive change, whether it's a key, or a ladder, or even a shovel to dig your way out.

We're one big conflicted bag of mixed nuts. We'll pay 2.5 times what the average country pays for healthcare, as long as we pay half of what the rest of you pay for gas/petrol. Too bad our emissions are going to cancel out your extraordinary good health! We've subsidized our sugar industry for the last 200 years, and they have thanked us by keeping the price of US sugar twice as high as world average. There is a lot of entrenched crazy in the US. Half the country is screaming about the other half being too liberal, when the rest of the world can plainly see we have practically ZERO liberal representation in our government. Every argument is equal, performed loudly, and always across a two-sided fence. I wish we were the center of attention for some other reason, like, we stand up to the big banks and tell them nobody is too big to fail anymore. I'd go all John Wayne for THAT!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be using "singularity" wrt BBT in a different way than I'm used to. Don't we call T=0 a singularity only because our models can't define it any other way? Isn't it more like the math stops giving us useful results, rather than the singularity being some kind of black hole? You talk about "events within the singularity" and it makes it sound like a physical place rather than a way to denote a lack of data that makes calculations break down.

Please observe that you have redefined what being a slave is, and are now chastising others for not knowing that you changed the definition. Perhaps swansont considered everything he was able to. Please take responsibility if you're going to use alternative meanings for well-known words. That's fair, don't you think?

If I were Jeb Bush, I couldn't write checks to Trump fast enough for his uniquely invaluable help to my campaign.

This doesn't sound right, but it may just be your perception. Do you have anything in writing to prove a contract was unlawfully changed? With the data you've given us, it sounds like you can't do anything but learn a harsh lesson. You're going to have to explain what happened in more detail if you want better answers.

The people who vote conservatively in the US, for the most part, don't require their representatives to be on such good terms with the facts. They often make decisions with too much "heart" and not enough brains. Sometimes it seems like they'd rather continue off the cliff rather than embrace effective change.

The conservative opposition to a decent wage has been extremely successful, mostly due to the spread of misinformation like I see in the OP. Gloom & doom, can't afford to same-sex marriage because the terrorists in the Obamacare raise taxes with the minimum wage immigration welfare checks, so we shouldn't be Communists. Support the troops!

I prefer to think that all the small genetic pieces go together to provide a stage for human life to emerge, similar to the way conditions have to be just right for fire to emerge from its mundane requirements. Life is an event, it's a canvas, it's whatever you make of it, but it's made possible because of all the little things that have to be just right to keep it going. So we aren't special biologically. Life is potential though, and human life, with it's high intelligence, has a great ability to affect the future. I suppose if you want to think of us as robot vehicles, it's more like life is our motor, with all its power and potential, and our intelligence tells us what kind of robotic vehicle we should power.

Kudos to those trying to teach someone it's sometimes better to float with the flow of the water than to carry your canoe upstream (especially when your destination is downstream anyway). I think conway might have been able to admit he was wrong back on page six, but he feels he has too much sunk cost now on page fourteen. Most everything since has been semantics. I'm going to close this now.

! Moderator Note No more of this, please.

Exactly! Evolution is measured in populations over vast amounts of time, but the changes to each generation are usually small. But no matter how many generations you're looking at, it's still just evolution. My favorite way to show this is the laryngeal nerve. In the first vertebrates, this nerve connected their gills to their brains. As these little fish evolved into everything else that has a backbone, some species lost their gill function, but later used it to form a larynx capable of making sounds. But the nerve connection, as the many various species evolved, got wrapped under the heart. As species grew in different ways and sizes, the laryngeal nerve grew longer, so instead of a short nerve from our brains to our throats, it goes down past the larynx, wraps under the heart, and then goes back to the throat. There's a great video of Richard Dawkins dissecting the throat of a giraffe and exposing this nerve. From the giraffe's brain, under the heart, and back up again to the larynx is a good four and a half meters. Evidence that small changes in allele frequency in populations over time eventually lead to really big changes and speciation. Even changes that don't make sense, or give benefit.

! Moderator Note In point of fact, the whole thing is one big error, inconsistent and incomplete. You should NOT be proud that nobody understands you. You talk about bodily experiences being visible and invisible in dreams, and nobody can correct you because they don't know what that means. Get a clue, you aren't doing science, you're making stuff up and declaring it true. You are woefully misinformed as to our understanding of dreams and consciousness. Just because you don't understand an explanation doesn't make it wrong. Last warning. Read the rules, and the special rules for Speculations. If you don't step up your game and start using terminology everyone else can understand, I'm going to close this thread. Don't bother responding to this modnote here, report it if you have an issue with it.

That does seem a bit big for most collections. However, if you have enough Au, Pt, and Lu to fill 15cm cubes, I could probably be persuaded to put the whole thing together for you, for a price.

I know they make a periodic table sample cases for educators. It has small vials of the elements, but they leave out the toxic and radioactive ones since there are usually kids involved. I have no idea how expensive they are.

Excellent! Darwin did the groundwork for evolutionary theory, and today it's arguably one of the strongest, best supported theories science has. Evolution is a fact, and the Theory of Evolution gets stronger every day, whether you look at the details or the big picture.

! Moderator Note I specifically asked you not to make up phrases in this sloppy, word-salad style. Nobody recognizes any of these concepts but you, you don't support them with anything intelligible, and it's NOT science. We're a science discussion forum. Please go start a blog. You're not welcome here if this is the way you're going to treat this site, and science in general. We ask that discussions here follow a set of rules, and you ignore those. We love ideas here, but wild, unsupported, buzzword-filled guesswork?! Not so much. You aren't debating me in this thread, I'm here to enforce the rules, so please don't respond to this modnote. I'll leave the thread open for a bit for responses to your "challenge", but you need to start supporting yourself with more than guesswork you claim is "proof".

I'd like to see the relevant quote from the authors. If you aren't a creationist or a proponent of ID, then microevolution is just focused on the details, like natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, while macroevolution is focused on the bigger picture, common descent, speciation, as well as environmental/geological influences over vast amounts of time. As Delta1212 mentioned, the recipe is the same whether you're looking at a slice of cake or the whole cake. I've seen creationists try to insist that microevolution is real (because it's pretty plainly happening every day), but macroevolution is not (mostly because of willful misunderstandings about what fossils are). Creationists don't want Earth to be very old, and don't look at all the evidence that supports speciation and common ancestry. They want to make a false distinction between the two different perspectives of the same phenomenon, for religious purposes.

! Moderator Note No. You've posted here before, you know you can't post non-mainstream guesswork with no supportive evidence in the mainstream sections. I've moved this to Speculations, but even here, you need to support your idea much better than this. If you can't abide by our rules, I'd like to suggest you start a blog. You haven't been discussing science so far, which is what we do here. You've been posting like an author, not someone interested in discussing how your framework stacks up to reality, with a mixture of professional and amateur scientists. Please stick to the parts of your idea you can support with evidence. Please avoid making up terms only you will understand. And please answer any questions members may have.

For the same reason we hope a Type III civilization doesn't know about us, we don't want them to land well.

Resources like metals and minerals? Maybe not. Water, more likely. But they might also want to use any nuclear fusion technology we have lying around, anything capable of putting out around 386 billion billion megawatts of power. This could mean setting up some kind of Dyson Sphere, and Earth may just be in the way. Or we might be a convenient source of ores for its construction. When you build with mud, sometimes a few bugs get trapped, and you never notice.

I hope you'll take this the right way. It's not about you, it's about your methods. You start out in this thread talking about how you dropped out of school and know little about science. You then tell us you're interested in a fringe concept that's been sidelined because there are models that anyone with a science background can see are better. You have a LOT of misconceptions, but each time they're corrected ("I can't think of a reason why male human testicles are on the outside!" "It's because sperm require a lower temperature than the main body provides."), you take that data on board, but your method fails to turn it into useful information, like "Perhaps I should study what everyone else thinks is correct before becoming convinced of something I really know little about". We show you there's a whole bunch you don't know, yet you still insist that you have a "gut" feeling the geocentric model is correct. Your biases are being confirmed emotionally, because you don't understand the science intellectually. You insist a creator is necessary, but can't explain intellectually why. Again, a "gut" feeling, more akin to faith than to trust. Why believe something so strongly when it has NOTHING to back it up, to support it? I feel your methods here are leading you to make very emotional decisions at a point in your life when you're having a difficult emotional time. You want something to be true rather than wanting to find out what's real. Emotion vs intellect. Both are very important, both have their place in our lives, but when it comes to science, and explanations of various phenomena, intellect is the better tool to use.

And as dimreepr alludes to with the Douglas Adams quote, it's a mistake to view phenomena backwards from the perspective of how nicely it works out for us. Start with how the water cycle works, how it does what it does and how that developed. It's a bit easier to see it wasn't designed for us, we and other species merely take advantage of it as an adaptive measure.

Spoken like someone who misquoted a famous man. Oh goody, a flaming generality. Can you please show how EVERYBODY that doesn't want to create or choose a government is lazy and cowardly? Seriously, where do you get off making a statement like that? Do you know EVERYBODY and their motivations?!