Mr Skeptic

From the wiki: In the 1970s a group of scientists from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland Ohio, led by Robert J. White, a neurosurgeon and a professor of neurological surgery who was inspired by the work of Vladimir Demikhov, performed a highly controversial operation to transplant the head of one monkey onto another’s body. The procedure was a success to some extent, with the animal being able to smell, taste, hear, and see the world around it. The operation involved cauterizing arteries and veins carefully while the head was being severed to prevent hypovolemia. Because the nerves were left entirely intact, connecting the brain to a blood supply kept it chemically alive. The animal survived for some time after the operation, even at times attempting to bite some of the staff. So I guess its possible then. If you don't mind ending up quadriplegic.

The original goal posts were to counter Lockheed's claim that holding one's breath for a year was impossible (for which he provided no evidence whatsoever). No, my argument was that it is nearly impossible to prove a universal negative. In response to Lockheed's claim that it is impossible to hold one's breath for a year, I gave an example of how it might be possible. Feel free to carry on where he left off and prove that it is impossible to hold one's breath for a year. Also, while freezing improperly will cause massive damage, you won't actually die until you are thawed. You may need to be kept frozen until medical science advances enough. And it has been demonstrated that multicellular animals can be frozen and thawed without damage; we just haven't figured out how to apply it to people. That is probably true re current cryogenics. Frostbite is something else though; very slow freezing while the rest of the body is still alive, and without proper anti-ice crystal chemicals. --- Funny how people react when I tell someone that ad hominem arguments don't belong here and that even if they did, they are inaccurate ad hominems. Lockheed claiming that any universal negatives are, in his words, "self-evident" is just ridiculous and I told him so. Lockheed probably didn't even realize that the video he linked to at least had the good grace of having the correct quantifiers as its central theme (young earth creationists are off by a factor of 1,000,000 compared to the estimated age of the earth) rather than a bunch of stupid things he pulled out of his arse. Eh. You folks are impossible

Well, it seems medical science has advanced to the point where we can keep a man alive without his brain (cortex). To keep a head alive we need: *Blood flow: artificial heart *Blood oxygen: artificial lungs (do those require a real lung?) *Toxin removal: dialysis machine *Temperature regulation: thermostat *Replacement red and white blood cells: blood banks *Blood glucose regulation: ?? seems possible Am I missing something? Perhaps a better question would be, can we cut someone's head off and reattach it to someone else's body?

Did you even read anything that was said before? Telomers are about your cells aging, not you. Because your cells age each time they reproduce, a mutant cell that reproduces uncontrollably will age and die, preventing cancer. A cancer only happens when the cell becomes immortal and reproduces uncontrollably. If all your cells were immortal, every tumor would be a cancer. You might get cancer when you are about 5 years old instead of 75, way before you get to reproductive age. Cell aging just means you need two mutations instead of one to get cancer.

Well, you and the video you posted and are defending. But I just gave you a specific example that you can, in fact, hold your breath for over a year. Frozen people don't need to breathe. That one perhaps, but only if you can prove that the universe is not cyclic, as I also said. That is not in the domain of science. That is math, and can be proven relatively easily. Why should I put science in the pseudoscience sections and you put ad hominems in the science section? Because one is a logical impossibility and the other is a universal negative.

Since when does science prove a universal negative? Can you prove that it is impossible to hold your breath for a year, or that a perpetual motion machine cannot be built? What about cryogenics research (hold your breath for how long?), the cyclical universe theory (machines are part of the universe). You can't actually prove that god didn't create the universe (possibly planting evidence re its age), any more than you can prove any other universal negative, no matter how loudly or how many times you say you can. What you can do is demonstrate that a creator god is unnecessary and irrelevant par Occam's Razor. And the proof for even that is not yet complete. As for your other example, things fall down because down is the direction things fall, and 2+2=4 because of what 2 and 4 mean. These are definitions so you they are among the few things that can be proved. In summary: Don't be an ass. Ad hominem arguments never belong on a science website, and just make you look silly.

All radioactive elements produce heat upon decay.

Is there actually any evidence that this is how things used to be? I've never heard of any species whose primary way of reproducing is to knock the female unconscious then rape her. -- I hear some rapists are using condoms nowadays. Um, yay for DNA testing?

Several theories leave open the possibility of time travel (to the past), under very special circumstances. Now, these are hard to do things, so it is unlikely that we will just find things traveling backward in time. Now, there are three possibilities here: 1) time travel is possible but difficult 2) the specific circumstances allowing for time travel are, in fact, impossible to attain 3) the allowance for time travel is a bug in the theories Now I personally don't believe in time travel, so I think that either 2) or 3) are true. But since I have no evidence that time travel is impossible, I cannot say this for sure. So that is just my opinion. Farsight, do you have evidence to support your position that time travel is impossible? I can point out lots of things that are possible but have never happened. Just because you haven't seen something happen doesn't mean its not possible.

Wow. Thanks, Spyman

Maybe. But I haven't actually seen that anyone has seen or made one. According to the wiki, what they made was "liposomes and microspheres". I did a little further reading, and they seem to like adding enzymes from living things to their concoction too, which is a little dubious. What insults?

Yes, but due to the shear number of Darwin Awards given to those who don't believe in gravity, we have been genetically predisposed to believe it.

Yeah, the whole outshining the rest of the galaxy combined thing is kind of scary. How close could a supernova be for the human race to survive? Is there anything we could do to increase our odds of surviving a supernova? Perhaps build a bunker at the center of the moon? Please tell me the astronomers can give plenty of advance warning if a nearby star was about to go nova.

[bold added by me] Ah, so they are speculation then, just as I suspected. My BS meter is usually pretty reliable. That's a pathetically small wiki article, with just one source. It is full of maybes and possibly's. A search on the web shows only 3000 results, which also seem to be speculation. The metabolism mentioned in the wiki seems to require feeding with adensine diphosphate, hardly a natural food. Much mention about taking enzymes from living cells and putting them in the mix. Cheaters, cheaters, those things are hard to make. In my humble opinion, it is the fact that so many of the proponents of evolution are obviously biased that makes people doubt their claims.

OK, so I don't actually know for sure that telomeres are to prevent cancer, but that is what I usually hear. Got any better ideas why we hit the self-destruct button when we obviously can still benefit from living longer?

If there were a supernova anywhere nearby we would be toasted.

Natural selection may be done with you as an individual after you have kids, but it never was about you. So long as you have an effect on the propagation of your genes, you are still playing the natural selection game. As you mentioned later, taking care of your kids increases your fitness even if you have stopped having kids by then. Why the comparison to the rest of your species? So long as, on average, more than one copy of your genes are passed on, your genes will get passed on and increase in number. Tautologies can make things simple, hmm? Just because you are less fit than the rest of your species doesn't mean your genes go the way of the dinos. In summary, what you do after you are done having kids can still be part of natural selection. The better care you take of your offspring, the longer-lived your species should grow.

Teleomeres are basically just a way for cells to count how many times they have reproduced, and to make sure that they stop reproducing after so many generations. The mechanism is pathetically simple. Telomers are chucked off every time a cell reproduces, and when it runs out of telomers it starts loosing coding DNA. Then it will die out or be noticed a mutant by the immune system or itself. An enzyme called telomerese will regenerate the telomers in some cell lines so your kids don't die of old age at birth. So if a single cell becomes tumerous but does not regenerate telomers, it will start to reproduce uncontrollably, but will lose telomers. The number of telomers it has specifies how many times it can reproduce, and therefore how big it can grow, before it runs out of telomers and dies. If one of these starts regenerating telomers, you get cancer that won't stop growing. As for prokaryotes and eukaryotes, they are built differently. Eukaryotes have some independent organelles, some of which have their own DNA separate from your own DNA. So us eukaryotes are more modular, so it would make sense that they could be easier to modify without killing. Prokaryotes are also tiny and (I think) faster reproducing, so that could have an effect too. Prokaryotes have a huge pressure to reproduce as fast as possible.

That's a hard one. High energy photons can convert into matter. Where the original energy came from is speculative. The photons can form into matter/antimatter pairs, but for some reason matter won out and there is very little antimatter in the universe. Conservation of charge seems more fundamental, so we ended up with overall neutral universe with mostly protons, neutrons, and electrons. Also dark matter and dark energy, whatever those are. In summary, it confuses me so it should confuse you too

Now be fair. The Church has had a much longer time with which to entrench its power. The Roman Empire were no clowns, either. The EU has only been around for 50 years (depending on when you start counting), and is "missing" countries such as the United States, Russia, and China. The US has about 2/3 the economy and population of the whole EU, and let's not talk about military I also get the impression that the US is more unified that the EU But economy is probably a better overall motivator than religion. Religion may have its fanatics, but also people who don't give a damn. On the other hand, everyone cares about economy. So the EU or something like it is likely to gain quite a bit of power.

That's a fairly impressive claim. I would have expected this to be trumpeted from every newspaper and science magazine if it were true, but I've never heard of this. Further, if that were true, I would have also expected to hear about "new life from scratch in a test tube". I thought abiogenesis was still a mostly unsolved problem. Is this empirical or speculation? Any links?

That's pretty much what I'm saying. Obviously, single-celled creatures can't have telomers getting shorter, or their whole line would die out when they ran out of telomers. So they only make sense for multicellular creatures. And their purpose would seem to be to prevent cancer. Maybe they have another purpose too, but I don't know of it.

Yes, that seems to be the mechanism for aging. And the reason we age is to prevent cancer. To have cancer you need two mutations in the same cell: the "immortality mutation" and the "reproduce uncontrollably mutation". The "reproduce uncontrollably mutation" is the one that actually causes the cancer. But if it only had that one, then the telomer mechanism would eventually ensure that the line of cells dies, killing the cancer. The probability of getting both mutations is quite low, hence you are that much less likely to get cancer. If you were to have all your cells without the telomer shortening mechanism, then you wouldn't age in this respect (other damage would accumulate anyhow), and you would be very likely to get cancer (as you need only one mutation rather than two).

Well, looks like swansont and yourdadonapogos cleared up heat for Fred56.

I'm not sure how necessary it really is. I don't know if it does anything other than strengthen bones and teeth. It is really hard to not get the minimum requirement (other than teeth) so it doesn't get much attention or matter much. I think it is just the fluorine that matters. I don't really know. As Darkblade48 said, it's bleach for teeth. Not good. I don't agree with Darkblade48's idea that we should put fluoride in our drinking water just because it won't kill us (immediately). So we'd have to drink 100 times our weight in water to get an LD50 dose. How fast if fluorine removed from the body, though? Obviously, you wouldn't want to get even near a lethal dose, and there are bad effects if you get too much. Ever hear of a case of fluorine deprivation (with the exception of teeth)? There's quite a few cases of overdose.