Mr Skeptic

Actually, it is the oxidizer that is the most massive component. The oxygen oxidizer for a hydrogen-oxygen engine is 8 times heavier than its hydrogen fuel. There are many ways one can use nuclear energy for space travel. In space, yes the plasma/ion/whatever with a low thrust but high specific impulse would be the best. However those would not function for liftoff. However, nuclear energy can also be used in lieu of chemical energy. Rather than burning hydrogen with oxygen, you can pass it through a nuclear reactor to heat it up. This allows huge thrust and also a reasonable specific impulse. Also, there would be no need for an oxygen tank; this could run on hydrogen only. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Not likely. Earth's mass is continuously increasing from space dust and micrometeorites falling constantly to Earth. We'd have to take some huge amounts of stuff up, or extremely rare materials, to deplete anything. In any case, energy used on Earth is the same as energy used in space; it will be lost anyways.

Have you tried feeding your program an actual poem to see what it spits out? Regardless, this is pretty neat. I think making it make sense would require some seriously advanced AI though.

We also have an internal heat source -- radioactive decay at the earth's core. How significant is this? In any case, CO2 will have the same insulating effect for that.

No inherent problems with my religious nor moral beliefs. (Whether it is impractical or not I assume you don't want in this thread).

Incidentally, there's a school of thought that says that great geniuses aren't really necessary to advance science, and that science will advance on its own after prerequisite discoveries. In this case, Maxwell's Equations is probably the prerequisite. In many cases there are various examples of people getting the same solution in several places all independent of each other. This goes for technology as well. Obviously great geniuses will speed things up, but perhaps not by as much as people think.

Indeed. And if they needed materials, maybe they could draw them from the soil or from the air.

That sounds interesting. It would certainly eliminate pointless and largely irrelevant arguing about minor details. I think it might be necessary to have longer debates for certain topics, although if a limit is agreed upon ahead of time, it should have a similar effect.

Ah yes, oxygen is very useful. Oxygen granted two things: 1) it allows for the ozone layer and therefore terrestrial and near-surface life. 2) it allows carbohydrates to become very energy-dense storage for energy. I think the presence of oxygen gives much more value to predation. I don't think oxygen is a prerequisite for multicellularity, but for us larger animals it is essential as otherwise we wouldn't be able to get enough energy to sustain ourselves.

Well, if you are debating something with one person and it's basically everyone against that guy, that would be a good example of where one-on-one might be more effective.

In prokaryotes, brown algaes, some red algaes, plants, animals, and fungi.

Oh, that would definitely be a useful thing to do. If we could somehow do aerobic metabolism of methane on our gut surface, or absorb the methane and use it elsewhere, this would be an excellent addition to cattle. As it is, cattle fart a lot of methane, turning into greenhouse gas what could otherwise be used for energy.

Well, antimatter wouldn't do this, as was said exotic matter might do it. However, this part wouldn't work anyways, no more than you can pick yourself up by holding real tightly to yourself. If the stuff is attached to your ship, then you are canceling any forces that it applies on your ship. It could still act on Earth, however, and if you are using gravitation, the interaction with Earth would be much much stronger.

Multicellularity has evolved several times independently. The basic thing is specialization, which (like in our society) can increase efficiency. The basic idea is single cell--> small colonial --> large colonial --> multicellular.

Good points re the glowing hot gas. I think that you'd need to shine a very bright light on it to get "its color" separated from "its glow". Mercury vapor might be an exception to this.

I'm going to go with the unconscious spilling into the conscious. Most people have a very high opinion of conscious thought; however most of your thought, and most of your decisions, are made by the unconscious before you are even aware of it. The unconscious is pretty clever. If you try consciously to do something that you are very good at, such as golfing, you can end up doing really poorly.

You attributed to me a definition of extremist, where all I did was give examples of exact extremes. The exact extremes of an allowed range are the most extremist you can get on either side of it, but I did not say that the extremes are the only place that is extremist. Extremist would be close to one of the extremes. I'd agree that near the middle things shouldn't be called extremist, and doing so is somewhat subjective. Given an unbounded set such as the real numbers, would 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 be an extremely large number? The trouble is that this set has no real extremes, and while said number is extremely large compared to numbers we normally use, it doesn't approach the (non-existent) extremes of a range. Likewise, given the range of 0-100, would 50.001 be considered extremist? Being closer to one extreme than another certainly isn't enough. Perhaps a better example is the real numbers larger than zero, another unbounded set. What might be an extremely small number? You can't say zero cause it's out of this set's range, but you can get as close to zero as you like -- arbitrarily close. At some point all people are going to say it's extremely small. One way to go about this is to consider standard deviations. Given that people like to use mostly numbers in the 0-10 range, occasionally going into thousands, and perhaps even trillions when discussing federal budget, but one heptillion is far outside the normal (albeit unbounded) range -- many many standard deviations away. It may be fair to consider this an extremely large number, but the use of standard deviation means this judgement is relative, a comparison to what is "normal". Today's extreme in this case need not be tomorrow's extreme. Now, if we have bounds on our range, we can directly compare the closeness of a position to the bound. This is now a permanent designation, but the limits are still arbitrary. What I frequently see is a division into three sections, one called the middle ground, and the other two the extremes. This can be a perfectly equal division, so that it doesn't change. Consider for example, that for every bounded range you can map it to the range of 0%-100%. Now you can give numerical designations to positions, in an easy to compare way. I'd say that the ranges of 0%-10% and 90% to 100% would definitely be extremes, but others might have a broader definition. This of course is a very mathematical point of view. The way Phi was talking, however, one can use a different definition based on pragmatism: This is the sort of test done by psychologists when determining whether there is a disorder or not; if it is not impractical/detrimental it cannot be considered a disorder. Now I've given three definitions of extremist, fairly well explained, two more mathematical and one more pragmatic. You have plenty of complaints but no better suggestions.

Indeed, that's what we've been saying of your definitions. Anyhow, please explain to me how totalitarian dictatorship (which is a form of government) is socialist, which you are in the quote above claiming it is. Certainly. A totalitarian dictatorship, the police in a police state, toll roads (assuming the toll pays for the road), and basically anything not "owned" by the people. In a democracy almost every service the government provides would be socialist, but we don't call the it a socialist country unless the country uses over half the resources in a socialist manner.

Argument by pretending someone said something they didn't is not cool. The Amish are not the extreme, but they can certainly be close to an extreme. No one said that something has to be absolutely exactly at the most extreme to be extremist. Indeed, many of us are getting quite irritated by your use of your own private definitions for various words (socialism, person, extremist ...). The least you could do is share your own definitions, then at least we can agree on what we are saying if not on the definitions themselves

Making irrelevant points doesn't really help your case though. So then by the same argument, you are claiming that healthcare paid for by the people but administered voluntarily by doctors isn't socialist? Because the doctors aren't conscripted?

I too think dark matter is highly suspect. However, at the very least it can give us data about gravity anomalies until we get a better theory. Of course if they can separate dark matter from regular matter then it would be more believable.

Yes, I've heard of using electron spin for computing. I think they were going to use it for quantum computing though.

If half your collegues are cheating, perhaps if you got them all together to complain you could get something done.

The example of Abraham comes to mind. 100 years old and childless, and God is going to make of him a great nation. Then he gets a kid and God asks him to sacrifice his one and only kid, OK no problem. This is highly praised by the New Testament writers.

If you have firefox, hit control-- (that's a control minus), and that will shrink the size. It is limited, but it gets it very close to logo size.

The above was an entirely secular post. Please consider it from a philosophical or scientific perspective.