Phi for All

I don't think this is what's been presented at all. Who assumed any guarantee? We've always had pioneer mentalities as well as homestead mentalities, and darned near everything in between. Unless there was some imminent danger that threatened everyone, I don't see how anyone would feel abandoned just because some humans wanted to explore the system, building facilities using their own resources to help them continue to explore.

This is one way of thinking. It's been a very BAD way of thinking for you, in terms of 1) comprehension, 2) feeding your natural enthusiasm for learning and 3) allowing you to build a solid foundational understanding of what you're studying. It's not working the way you might want it to, but because you're stuck in this methodology you've chosen (electricity is wrong! science is wrong!), you're going to probably defend it because change is difficult. Another way to think is that maybe you've missed some important data, something that causes you to misinterpret, for instance, the relationship between electrostatic fields and electric currents. It' very common for things not to make sense when your study of it is incomplete. You need to resolve your issues with the theories, and you have lots of people telling you why your concerns aren't valid. This approach you're taking is wasting your time. Unless you start with the basics and see where you went wrong, and most importantly embrace where you may be wrong and be willing to listen, you're just going to continue handicapping your education. Physics doesn't always have to be intuitive or make sense. What's important is that it works, and works so well and so consistently that we can predict what will happen in a given situation. That's what mainstream theories do, and if you feel you're the only one who feels they're contradictory, I suggest that the problem most probably isn't with the way everyone else is thinking. Nothing personal, focusing on ideas, processes and behavior here.

The media is largely responsible for misinforming, misquoting and misrepresenting science to the general public, so I would love to see examples like this done as media advertising for your candidates, explaining the benefits of scientific funding, and how skimping on it even a little cripples us a lot in the long run. People respond to more in-depth analysis like this if you keep it simple and graphic. This reminds me of the Baltimore Needle Exchange program Malcolm Gladwell references in The Tipping Point. It's a good example of how the media causes a knee-jerk reaction but can also be used to better inform the public once they report the story from all angles and drop the sensationalism. The problems of a complex world most often need complex solutions, and scientific research is one of the best ways to gather the spectrum of information necessary for making informed decisions. Taxpayer funding is one of the few ways we have of keeping research as free from commercial and special interests as possible. Science needs that neutral platform to work best, imo. Best of luck, Oz. Get out there and cast your vote for smart.

Sin really needs better wages.

For some people, science is a definite interest but they didn't connect it together with the math in school, or they didn't study with the passion necessary for a comprehensive approach to the methodology. Or they just went into the arts or business but kept up an interest in popular science. That was me 30 years ago in high school. Sometimes those folks pick up on something that doesn't fit the pattern, and because they don't have the nuts and bolts knowledge, they think they've stumbled onto something others have missed. They love science and they'd love to help it advance but they don't have the time to put into going back and starting from scratch with the basics in science education. That's usually when they start justifying why they don't need math to understand physics and cosmology (this is where I parted ways with that crowd - this is when the crazy gets you). Their "theories" are intuitive (uncluttered with math), they're beautiful (cherry-picked), and they have that intangible quality that lures the new crackpot into thinking, "Sure, this means I'm disagreeing with thousands of brilliant people who have spent their lives devoted to science, and there do seem to be large parts of reality that don't agree with me either, but the more you tell me I'm wrong the more I know I'm onto something!" I think it's akin to winning the lottery. You put in a little effort and expect a huge reward. The crackpot and the lottery winner both feel justified in skipping over all that tedious hard work ("Hey, I've been thinking about my theory for a YEAR!") and claiming the huge prize that has eluded everyone else. So I guess when we discuss their "theories" and start shooting holes in them, the crackpot sees us trying to take away their lottery ticket.

Right now, a lot of non-profit effort is aimed at global space policy governance. Not as sexy as a moon colony, but even getting the world to agree who's responsible for orbital debris is a huge headache. Everyone wants to be in space, no one wants to take responsibility and they all want special treatment. You might want to consider moving down to DC. Anything to do with space is going to be heavily influenced by government, and the policymakers all work in DC. Brussels or Paris are good hubs for the ESA. I've been thinking lately that the moon might make a good base for space mining operations. I don't know if that would qualify as your "human civilization". I read where some private firms are working on a drone vessel that would seek out an asteroid, attach itself to it and pilot the asteroid slowly to the desired area. Silly to bring them down to Earth when we could park them near a moon base to more easily get to the materials.

! Moderator Note Moved from Speculations to The Lounge as this is more imagination than speculation. Less rules to comply with here. I guess the key here is to decide if the life you think is being controlled is what you want it to be. If you like your life, who cares if it's being played by someone else as long as it doesn't feel that way? Does that make sense, that as long as you don't feel you're making decisions you normally wouldn't, as long as it feels as though you can control what you do, then whether you're in control or someone else is is irrelevant since it feels the same? If you don't like your life, then you should make every attempt to change it. Believing that someone else is in control of you is a quick path towards giving up.

I see little use for bringing materials from asteroids back to Earth. One of the things that makes space travel so costly is starting out with such a huge expenditure just to make it offplanet with enough resources to do anything. If asteroid resources stayed in space for use in space, our costs for working in space go way down. As far as NASA expenditures, they've always paid big returns in technology and engineering advancements. And why wouldn't we want offworld expenses to be met with offworld resources? Do we need to strip this planet to explore the rest of the system?

Like most analogies, yours breaks down when taken too far. Evolution makes conservative changes over long periods of time, but it does NOT always take the fastest and easiest way. The laryngeal nerve used to connect our ancestor's brain to its gills, a short little gap that looped over the heart. As those little fish evolved into all the vertebrates we have now, that nerve continues to connect the brain to the gills (or larynx for many now). And it still does so by looping over the heart, but now the heart, brain and larynx have shifted into many variations. Those variations have brains that are much closer to the larynx than to the heart, yet that laryngeal nerve still loops around the heart instead of taking the "fastest and easiest path". In giraffes, the laryngeal nerve can be over 15 feet long for a connection that spans less than a foot!

This seems inconsistent with the purpose of a science discussion forum. We're here to interact socially in a loosely structured debate format for educational goals. Not caring is anathema to learning. And one goal of science is to provide explanations that are so trustworthy you don't have to rely on belief to embrace them.

You may be using a different definition of animal, perhaps a religious one. How about a fish, you want to be a fish? You come from a long line of fish, you know. But the rules say you're probably a primate, another good reason we need order.

Climacophobia or bathmophobia are also possibilities. Maybe the spider was scary because he was by the stairs....

How is doing just what you please the decision of a sapient person? We have a access to a great deal of power. We're social alright, but we're also highly communicative tool-users with high intelligence. There's a hundred ways a day we can run afoul of each other, trying to share this planet between 6.5B of us. Rules mark patterns of behavior, we LOVE patterns for helping us make sense of the world. The utility of rules is in providing a framework so we all know what our civilization expects of us. Then we can all do as much of what we please as possible. Minerals can't type and plants usually speak in first person plural. What are you?

Relationships, drugs, alcohol, money, sex, these things produce or mix with chemicals to alter our perceptions (usually for the better) and become integral to our lives. We feel withdrawal when we don't get enough of them. I would advise finding a replacement that doesn't have the negative side that drugs and alcohol do. Music or theater are good emotional and creative outlets that make you feel good and offer the chance to meet other people. Community college courses in subjects you always meant to study are likewise great for feeling good and meeting others.

Once you start cannibalizing the asteroids and even the planets in your system for the materials to build a Dyson sphere, you need to start thinking about how to get to the next available set of resources. I think building the Dyson sphere is what would "power a wave of intergalactic colonization", not the completed sphere itself. Considering the time and expense of building an entire sphere, I think it's more likely we'd start a ringworld that would never get built into a complete sphere (but would still put out incredible amounts of power) because there are simply too many available planets which would be cheaper to colonize (even though they may not be ideal). This all assumes we don't come up with a mega-technological leap in space transportation in the very near future. But at some point, there will be another technological leap, another substance like gunpowder or gasoline or uranium discovered, another process like fusion that will help us travel further faster. In all of this, we have to learn to get along better within our own species and keep ourselves alive long enough to reach out far enough to encounter another intelligent species. Certainly possible, but when you figure how relatively short a time we've been capable of scanning for intelligent life, it's not very probable that we'd have found some by now. It's a very big galaxy.

Too many people lack the patience to appreciate the level of trust derived from such a considerate, contemplative, thorough process like the scientific method. In their scientific explorations, they come up against a river blocking their way and just want to throw a log across or take a big jump and hope to find some solid ground. Meanwhile, science is building a bridge big enough and trustworthy enough for all of us to cross safely.

But Einstein was well educated in mainstream math and physics of the time. And it doesn't matter that he argued with himself during experiments and research, he still shared his work each time he wrote a paper, and he argued with others then. He didn't work in a vacuum, he didn't shun mainstream science, he took mainstream science further. He understood "the box" thoroughly, so he was able to know when to work outside of it. I can appreciate anyone who wants to be like Einstein, but I don't think cherry-picking the bits of his life that sound attractive is very intellectually honest. Do the work, study the best explanations we currently have, try to make them better, but don't have the audacity to NOT study physics to a deep degree and then claim you're being like Einstein because you think current physics is incomplete or wrong. That's not what Einstein did.

I look at them as required reading. It's important to take a look outside the mainstream since that's usually where everything not currently mainstream can be found. But you have to worry about someone who claims to have studied extensively yet also claims that SR is plainly wrong and we need to stop using it. One observation I've unofficially made over the years here is that science is really difficult. It has so many overlapping layers of prerequisite knowledge! It's hard to get past a certain level of physics without a great deal of math, and chemistry becomes more necessary the further you study biology. That's a ton of studying and some people become convinced there's an easier way, a way that satisfies curiosity, intuition AND laziness. Some people aren't driven to put the puzzle together piece by piece; they want to start guessing what the picture is using intuition and "outside the box" thinking. It's a form of confirmation bias, because this type of thinking tells them what they want to hear: they don't need all that study. They can learn this stuff on their own. They don't need the math, they don't need the chemistry, they don't need all that time-consuming piecing-together of evidence. Why gather supportive evidence when crackpottery feels more like proof? You need to be able to shoot holes in the arguments of your peers, so you need to be rational and civil about it. It also requires that the poster understand that any criticism of his idea is not a personal attack. This hinders a LOT of discussions here, imo. Science is supposed to be dispassionate about ideas, reviewing them carefully, looking for flaws, willing to embrace them if they work better, equally willing to admit they're wrong (or not better) when shown why. Crackpots can almost be like religious zealots, convinced they have answers rather than explanations. They often hold their ideas sacred, entwining themselves inextricably with them so it makes it difficult to criticize one without seeming to criticize the other. And they sometimes seem to want that, because persecution makes them even more certain they're right.

The two changes I'd like to see are: 1) No more "this sums ups exactly what I want to say so I'm just going to keep referring you back to it" videos. Point to certain bits, or link the video but perhaps quote the parts that are particularly relevant, that's OK. The arguments a video presents are not evidence in and of themselves but are usually based on real evidence at some point. I personally feel that rigor demands I at least put thoughts I learn from others into my own writing style. And it's the style of others that I come here to read as well. 2) No more "I'm just going to film myself asking what I would normally ask in print" videos. Remember that this type of discussion forum is a very loose type of peer-review. It's important for everyone involved to be understood, and for ideas to be picked apart to remove what's bad and let the good continue. It's very hard to do that with a video. You have to keep repeating the video to make sure you quote the person correctly, and I feel it's too much to ask to strip our convenient quote tags and copy/paste capabilities away to make it more convenient for those with cameras. And I admit that part of me thinks I'm being used to drive up You-tube hits, especially when I have to replay a video several times to pick out certain arguments. If I just want a story, I can watch the movie. If I want to enjoy a story by the great Moontanman or timo or Bill Angel, I'd rather read the book. As swansont mentions, we don't need new rules since soapboxing is already covered. Link to a video, use it to support your stance, but the video shouldn't be pointed to ad nauseam, "see my link in post #X", in further responses. And the whole stream-of-consciousness video rant just has to stop. Can you imagine if people started replying in video too? Gah!

Please look beyond your fears and understand that we shouldn't even be suggesting you lose weight, which is normally a good thing for most. Without a face-to-face examination from a doctor, you could be doing the absolute wrong thing by curbing calories. It may sound like good advice but right now you're trying to make logical decisions based on emotion and need. You need data. You need to know what you're up against. You need to maximize the efficiency of your limited resources. You can't afford to be spending anything until you know whether or not it will help. This is not best handled with guessing and internet opinions. There has to be a viable way you can have your blood tested to see if you're diabetic. This is a gap in your knowledge that needs to be filled with solid evidence, not fears and guesses. Clinics, universities, private organizations, there should be a way to get that test done. The most important part is that you need to see the need. Forgive the fat kid who overindulged and deal with the mess he made in the smartest way you know how. The next step is to find out more about the mess. Don't be too-closed-minded about this.

I see what you did there.

"Who is it?"

You're pretty young for Type II. You HAVE to go see a doctor about this.

Much depends on what you're telling the reader it contains. It's extremely likely your claims could be fraudulent. You should consult an attorney specialized in publishing. Locked, or preserved for posterity? It's all in the perspective.

I can hope that consciousness has properties that allow it to continue after our bodies are dead. It's a type of belief that doesn't cost me anything and might give some comfort. Not really scary at all. Too far removed from me to be scary. There's too many scientists in too many countries for all of them to "deny" a "new science". If something works, it works. It can be suppressed, it can be misused, it can be exploited but it can't be denied if it works. It's completely possible for us to overlook one, but in that case I'd have to argue that if we couldn't recognize it, perhaps we weren't ready for it yet. I use this analogy a lot now, but remember that we knew about the steam engine long before we had the rest of the technology and knowledge to take advantage of it. The "sense" part comes from what's inside the box. If you spend more time in the box, you get a better sense of how layered our explanations for natural phenomena are, and you get a better understanding of when it's necessary to search "outside the box". Define "magic". Something for nothing? Poof! from thin air? Or the ability to manipulate the elements? Make metal stronger or start fire with your thumb? Magic to you or magic to someone a hundred years ago? You'd seem pretty magical to someone from 1913, with your GPS and mobile phone and your common knowledge of things that were known only to academics of the day.