Mr Skeptic

Your mind control idea would be better off with just the chip and no viruses. It would in theory be possible with very carefully placed electrodes, but we're nowhere near the necessary level of technology.

Well it would be nice if we behaved such that our ideals were more respected than those of religious fundamentalists. We've done a lot of meddling in the Middle East and it's quite understandable that the people don't like us. That's quite problematic because it would seem we'd be better off not letting the people get their way, but then they just hate us even more. I would think that cultural exchange and democracy would be ideal. But when I consider how much influence one religion has in America with its guarantee of freedom of religion, it's pretty scary to imagine what it might be like in countries with less religious freedom. In short, I really have no idea what would be best.

Sugar also ends up in the citric acid cycle, as does fat. My guess is citric acid would be treated as just another source of calories, much like sugar but much more acidic and without fine regulation at the blood.

Well music doesn't really take up much space, not in musical notation form. An actual performance could be in midi form, still not that much space. We don't remember every single detail of a song.

Wouldn't this also have negative imaginary making it a quadruplet, or would there be a good reason to exclude that possibility? That's pretty good. These can all be composed by multiple binary operations though. Would that necessarily be the case? Is this what results in the triplet of quarks, or of the three "colors" of quarks? I'm kind of curious how that comes about.

For the first question the answer is no. I've heard of some suggestion that part of memory might be stored as patterns of gene expression in cells involving methylation of DNA, but that's just turning some parts of DNA on or off, and more importantly cannot be inherited. There's some epigenetic factors that can be inherited, but they are far too simple to be proper memories (eg important environmental conditions), and while those an be affected and inherited this will not be so through multiple generations. There's no physical reason memories could not be stored and inherited via DNA, but no for any real life earth creatures. Not sure how it might evolve though. You'd probably need to have genetically engineered humans, or aliens, for this to be plausible. From a technological point of view, if we ever do make proper DNA computers we'll get a lot of experience reading and writing DNA and might some day find a way to integrate it into ourselves. For your second question, retroviruses can insert DNA and are used for genetic engineering purposes. These can be used to insert a specific gene into adult cells rather than being dependent on having them at birth. There's a significant risk of causing cancer due to this treatment. Note that we have thousands of genes and at this point trying to completely change the host is going to be a near certain death sentence with our current technology. There's no reason it shouldn't be possible in the (perhaps nearer than you might think) future. I'd say both these are excellent material for science fiction, since they are scientifically viable but for now still fiction, so long as you don't want normal humans to have genetic memory at least.

Hm, what if you make your planet be a moon of a jupiter-sized gas giant, and have the gas giant eclipse the sun every so often?

Sounds dangerous. The atmosphere is much thinner than people might think, such a close encounter would result in friction not just from the atmospheres but more so from tidal/gravitational effects. Passing so close to each other could easily result in one of the planets being ejected from orbit, or perhaps even shredded. I would think the gravitational effects would be much nastier than the mixing of even a rather poisonous atmosphere.

In math there is a lot of things that go in pairs, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, real and imaginary, a function and its inverse, quite a few things that go in pairs. But I can't really think of any math structures that go in triplets. It should be possible since the idea of quark triplets should have a mathematical basis, but I can't think of any.

! Moderator Note moved to speculations

I don't have much experience with different browsers, but firefox with the adblock extension is all I've ever asked for. And this for someone who spends most of his day online.

Also, people who think that everything is individually an isolated system are either dumb or gullible.

As a child you have more free time and less options who to spend it with.

Well without it you die. But your body can make all it needs. Much like cholesterol. Does that make it good for you?

Or the fluid could have made it back to the starting point but was somehow different than before.

Yeah, if DNA were binary you could get away with using 5 binary base pairs instead of 3 base 4 base pairs (so 5 bits instead of 6). There would still be some redundancy. However, the current organization is pretty good at preventing dangerous mutations, and dropping one bit would lose half of that redundancy.

I suspect that the excess of citric acid in citrus fruits might be for flavoring or something, although all plants and animals do have some for metabolism. (it's not the same as vitamin C by the way)

Nod your head up and down and leave it unchallenged, or learn enough to understand what is being said, whichever you prefer. Some things are just plain complicated. If you want to know the actual details of general relativity we'd be talking about tensors and manifolds rather than balloons and high school geometry concepts. We're not some silly English professors using big long words unnecessarily to obfuscate, it is simply a difficult concept.

Since you know the specific university you're going to, you probably should contact their financial aid office. That is after all what they are paid for (for the financial aid aspects). However financial aid and getting into the college are two separate things.

I tried to say it as simply and clearly as possible. I thought I was using layman terminology, after all I learned about Euclidean geometry in high school. If not, then what do laymen call "geometry where the sum of the angles of a triangle need not add up to 180 degrees, parallel lines might intersect, etc"? However, even though I have some idea of the mathematical implications, it still helps me to visualize by comparing to familiar shapes like spheres and saddles, depending on whether we're having the angles add up to more or less than 180 degrees. And once you start talking about such geometries and stretching of them, there is even less room for comparison... hence the popularity of balloon comparisons.

If concentrated oxygen is OK, then an oxygen concentrator would be sufficient, and comparatively cheap and efficient, compared to using pure oxygen. Especially since using pure oxygen would be so expensive and inefficient.

Same reason that people have a fetish for not understanding 4 dimensional non-euclidian geometry.

! Moderator Note Unfair as it may seem, that restriction applies to you too. Thread locked for now.

As an atheist, I lack belief in only one more god than the Christians lack belief in. Isn't it fair to assume that Christianity as a whole has analyzed all the possible gods and rejected them, then I analyzed Christianity and rejected that god too. Not only that, but I've looked at several religions and the gods they reject, and adding together the writings of all religions, it seems the most agreed upon fact is that, for any given god, it does not exist. Thus an atheist is like the sum total of all religions, these gods don't exist plus these gods don't exist plus these gods don't exist = no gods exist, and for every religion proclaiming a given god exists you have ten saying it doesn't. Furthermore, most religions agree that one who lacks faith in their god is better than one who worships the wrong god. Atheism is by far the safest bet when considering all religions. Oh, can God only show himself in the distant past, or wherever no one is looking? Let god show himself at one of the major scientific conferences, that would do far more for most of us non-believers and wrong-god-believers than the silly storybooks from long ago written by people who believed all kinds of myths. As you said, we could record things much better now for the future generations. But if god does not want people to know he exists at least the atheist does not anger him by blowing his cover.

Well I consider that the soul is the essence of a person, which to me means both the information and processing power contained in the brain. Thus someone's soul could be moved, copied, modified, or erased given sufficiently advanced manipulation technology (well for erasing all you need is a bullet and some time). As to why I believe this is because of the evidence, that the brain is responsible both for memory and our ability to think, our personality (most of it anyways), and such, as seen by analyzing multiple cases of brain damage patients.