[Tycho?]

Lol, good answer. I think he was reffering to the point that unique means one of a kind, and you can't really have something that is more or less one of a kind, it either is or isnt.

But why is that even necessary? Black holes have their matter in the singularity, there is no need for another universe to expell the matter. Since then the mass and hence gravity of the black hole would mysteriously drop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-matter

Only one of the centauri stars is sun like, the other is smaller and colder, and proxima is a red dwarf. If we could see, I would have though we would have looked there already, but I don't know.

When you said you found it highly unlikely, I thought you were still reffering to space combat, sorry about that. 9.8 light minutes is indeed a huge distance to be fighting over. Not necessarly impossible though. Bloodhound outlined earlier a method to guess possible locations of your target, and simply you shoot at as many of them as you can, hope that you get a hit. Your accuracy depends on the quality of your lasers, your telescopes, on distance, and on the size and acceleration potential of the target. To hope to do damage at over 1 AU you would need a huge laser. It would probably be close to impossible. But then, what other options are there? The only one is a missile which you can see coming, plus it would have to have enourmous range to hit the target. Lasers are pretty much the only thing for these huge ranges, despite their limitations. And I do understand, but I still must disagree on some points. Mass need not necessarly spiral out of control. Depends on engine efficiency, what is used for fuel, the crew that is required to run the ship, use of robotics, and other engineerings questions.

Well I finally repeated the experiment, got interesting results. The phone did not ring. So I took it downstairs to a microwave which we dont use anymore, and tried it in there. It didn't ring there either, until I opened the door, when it immediatly started ringing. It makes sense for them not to ring of course. I really do not know why it rang the first few times I attempted it. The only possibility I can think of is that the door wasn't properly closed, even though I know it was.

I get you, I've actually thought of that before. A shot time after the big bang matter was homogenous, it became less so as clumps of matter formed. I dont know if there are any implications in this though.

How big a ship are you talking about here? I did some rough equations on it, I made my ship be moving at 5000m/s, give it a maximum acceleration of 3m/s^2 (forwards or backwards) and 0.25m/s^2 left/right up/down. I think these numbers are quite reasonable, as a ship would have thrusters proportional to its mass. Personally I think they should be higher (for the acceleration)- for interplanetary distances the ship has to be able to move, a hulking giant is of little use in this kind of combat. But anyway, assuming that from when the beam is fired, the ship can either decelerate at 3m/s^2, or accelerate at 3m/s^2, or be anywere in between, and originally moving at 5000m/s, and has 9.8 minutes, the ship could be anywhere in a 1200km line. With the 0.25m/s^2 side to side acceleration, that puts the ship in a cone around 580 000cubic km, assuming I did the math properly (this number seems a bit high, someone should indeed check it). Even if I am wrong, or even if much smaller acceleration values are used, it would still be a volume of space signifigantly larger than any ship would be.

I'm sorry if I gave that impression, but I was always thinking of in-system fighting. And I'm afraid I must disagree with your reasoning. 9.8 minutes (for example) is a very long amount of time for a mobile target. Even assuming you know all the capabilities of a ship, if the ship for example put on the brakes, that alone gives a very long line of possibility over 9.8 minutes, plus any other thrusters would make it 3 dimensional.... While the possibilites would be limited, I think "damn few" is vast underestimate.

And even if you did, so called "permanent" magnets do eventually lose their magnetism. Perpetual motion remains and impossibility I'm afraid.

I dont think about it much 1) why would you need such a particle 2) how in the world would such a particle act Yes, time is a dimension, and it seems happy that way.

I've never heard of a white hole being reffered to as something that may actually exist. How in the world would something like this work, wouldn't it be required to produce matter/energy? Someone enlighten me, wikipedias article on it says basically nothing.

Anti-matter has mass just like any other particle, not anti-mass. I'm pretty sure there is no theoretical basis for anti-gravity, although maybe some form of exotic matter would be able to.

Time for the brother in the spaceship moves more slowly.

Ok, I'm still trying to clarify this. Inertial mass increases as you approach c, meaning the object will have more resistance to acceleration. Does this cause the gravity of the object to increase as well, or does that only depend on the rest mass value?

I thought if a faraday cage could block frequency x, it would be able to block all frequencies lower than x.

As a small experiment, I put my mobile phone in the microwave (microwave is off) and called that phone with my cell phone. The mobile phone worked fine, despite being inside the microwave with the door closed. I am confused about this. I was under the impression that the mettal grid that blocks the microwaves is simply a faraday cage, and hence should block all EM radiation at or below a certain frequency. The mobile phone opperates on 2.4Ghz. Microwaves use 2.45Ghz for cooking, according to wikipedia. My question is how the phone signal was able to get through the microwave.

6th sense? Hahaha. Animals dont crowd around the ocean in vast numbers like humans do. A hare or an elephant can't use the ocean. Plus, most animals avoid human settlements. And these settlements are invariably around the coast. So many people died because they are all crowded in the coastal areas, while the animals avoid human settlements and are spread out.

Larry Niven- Ringworld/Ringworld Engineers Wiliam Gibson- Neuromancer Frank Herbert- Dune Orson Scott Card- Ender's Game Those are my favorite books (in no particular order). Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke was also good, but it just doesn't strike the same chord as these other books. I actually just finished Rama 2, and found it to be horribly dissapointing.

Martin: Titan is indeed tidally locked with saturn all that and more found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28moon%29