Mr Skeptic

The oxygen would be more concentrated and plentiful in the air than in the biogas, making biogas worthless as a source of O2, same with N2. Neither of these is a fuel. The CO2 would be nicely concentrated and has various uses (not as fuel though). H2S would have fuel value, but mostly stinks to high heavens and is toxic, needs to be made to disappear, and also the SO2 that would be produced by burning it probably can't be released into the atmosphere (acid rain). Both H2 and CH4 have significant fuel value, but for now H2 might find more use in chemical processes such as manufacture of ammonia and in any case is still very inconvenient to store for fueling a mobile vehicle. CH4 is much more well-behaved.

I suspect that you could alter your hormones at least somewhat by thinking, although I'm not sure that would be enough to lead to a noticeably earlier puberty.

And yet it seems much more likely than the notion that the same shape would not have been functional before humans made the first airplanes, wouldn't you say? It's functionality has nothing to do with design, humans, nor intelligence -- although its actual existence might. We discovered a shape suited for flight, which has always been suited for flight and always will be, and we went about actually building it. It is not our design that makes it work, but the physical principles that have always exited. That we just so happen to design things to work given our knowledge of the physical principles, doesn't make it our design rather than the physical principles that make it work.

False. In every case we have observed something to be fine-tuned, and the cause is known, the cause is physical principles. The sideways stability of an airplane, for example, is due simply to the angle of its wings, combined with the physical principles of aerodynamics and geometry/mechanics of solid objects. That all the airplanes we know about are designed by humans does not change the fact that the "fine tuned" stability of their shape has always existed and always will, and is due to physical principles that have existed since time immemorial -- not from anything humans or any known intelligent agent may have done.

What school did you teach at?

I'm perfectly fine with the death penalty, so long as it is for "serious" crimes only and applied consistently. Especially since here in the US the death penalty entitles the defendant to extra protections which are absent for any other sentence (which is why life imprisonment is "cheaper" and easier than death penalty and therefore more often sought instead). However on a practical note, it means innocents will be executed and gives the government the power to permanently silence someone. So it may wind up not being worth it.

Our airway toggles between breathing and swallowing. Can't do both at once, and if food gets stuck while swallowing, you can't breathe. Once you swallow something it goes to your stomach, and no longer can make you choke, no matter its size. Then the question is whether it comes out the other end or not. Plastic is "bad" but not poisonous, or at least not particularly poisonous. Mostly it's just indigestible, much like cellulose. A big piece might get stuck along the way though, then it would be a problem.

Specifically, the atmosphere scatters the shorter wavelengths of light more easily than others. That's why the sky is blue and the sun yellow, in the day. At sunrise/sunset, the light has to pass through a lot more atmosphere, and the effect is amplified, which accounts for the redder colors.

You're pretty much right: people don't need to be told to do pleasant things, so for the most part they're told to do the unpleasant things. Same applies to government, parents, bosses, etc. As for informing things of both positive and negative aspects of something, this sort of advice is mostly disregarded. People won't do a cost-benefit analysis, they will use any potential benefits as an excuse and disregard the drawbacks. And then there's the fact that when it comes to certain things like tobacco, research in that field can't really be trusted since tobacco companies have made a lot of it up. To do a proper cost-benefit analysis would require people to sum up all the probabilities that the effects are in fact correct, the degree to which the effect occurs, and the probability that they would suffer/benefit from the effect, and do this without their personal preference biasing their judgment. Not many could do that. Consider the above a cost-benefit of providing a more accurate versus a more unified suggestion.

Because heat loss relates to surface area, and heat generated by radioactivity relates to volume, and surface area increases as r^2 while volume increases as r^3, any amount of radioactivity (if sustained) will be enough to raise the temperature to any arbitrary temperature, simply by making the planet bigger. If you multiply the weight of the earth by even a tiny amount of radioactivity per mass you get a huge amount of radioactivity overall. http://www.physorg.com/news62952904.html Radioactivity is present not only in the mantle, but in the rocks of Earth's crust. For example, Marone explains, a 1-kilogram block of granite on the surface emanates a tiny but measurable amount of heat (about as much as a .000000001 watt light bulb) through radioactive decay. That may not seem like much. But considering the vastness of the mantle, it adds up, Marone says. There's also other things that can heat the Earth, such as tidal forces.

No... a probability of 1 is 100% and you can't get any higher than that. If you have n equally likely outcomes and they are mutually exclusive (there can be no outcome other than those), then the probability for each of them is 1/n and the probability that at least one of them is true is 1 (certainty). However, if you were to guess which outcome would in fact happen, your probability of guessing correctly would be 1/n. This results in one of the best arguments against religion, ie how do you know your religion is the only right one out of millions. Putting an exact number to it would be difficult, since not all of them contradict each other and the correctness of one would increase the likelihood of some of being correct (they are not independent). Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged And if you consider that to be equally likely, than it is almost certainly false as well, equally likely to any of the religions or made up nonsense anyone might think of. I think you might consider reading up on Occam's Razor.

And what would be the source for the energy and molecules necessary for this? Plants are nice because they use solar power, plus they self-repair and self-replicate.

You do know that you are radioactive, right?

I would suggest not breathing chlorine since it can and will kill you.

Basically what he said was that if you were to sum together an infinite amount of numbers, they could still sum up to a finite amount, so long as they numbers get successively smaller at a fast enough pace. For example, 1+1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16+... = 2.

What Cap'n said. Infinity doesn't really make any sense, and if infinity appears anywhere I naturally think of it as the limit as a number grows unboundedly large. So 1/infinity = 0 in the same sense as infinity + 1 = infinity, or any other manipulations that can be done with infinity. The only way for this sort of equation to have meaning is to take a limit. Alternately, saying all arithmetic with infinity is invalid since infinity is not a number also works.

What keeps the magma molten is the heat generated by nuclear decay at the core of the earth. This heats the surrounding magma, which expands (almost everything expands when heated). Buoyancy then forces the hot magma to rise (this is how convection currents work). Since the magma is hotter than the surface of the earth, some amount of heat flow must exist from the magma to the surface (and then out to space). All this means that the magma, and convection currents in general, have the ability to do work. Feel free to experiment with this by heating a fluid on your stove and watching for movement.

1/infinity = 0 however, if there are infinite chances for this to occur you get infinity * 1/infinity which is undefined (both 0*infinity and infinity/infinity are undefined). If this were not the case than you could do some funny math.

Well, looting and pillaging (or "war reparations" if you want to be more diplomatic about it), could be good for the economy. It would boil down to war being the costs to produce tribute. Other than that though, war is like making a bunch of stuff, breaking it, and killing a bunch of mostly young people in the prime of their lives. However, if the war encourages people to work a lot harder, than that is going to boost the economy. I suspect it can be done without war though, but you'd need a reason for the peoples to get off their lazy butts and get back to work. Another thing is wars tend to cause deficit spending (ie borrowing money which goes into the economy, even if it is to be blasted to smithereens shortly afterward).

You forgot d) the bible was erroneously written to contradict a) and b) above.

Well, in 1984 they couldn't read people's minds either, but still had thoughtcrime.

Of course, just because the couple remain together for the rest of their lives, doesn't mean that they don't mate with others.

So I recently finished reading 1984 by George Orwell. Very interesting book, and slightly scary too. Anyhow, it occurred to me that his idea of thoughtcrime isn't new (which of course is part of the scary aspect -- that the stuff in the book might possibly happen). Jesus is the earliest person I know of to have considered thoughts to be crime (a sin is a crime against God). I doubt he was the first though. Anyhow, for those who read the book, what's the most Orwellian society you know of (present or historical)? What about the first instance of various of the components of the book (thoughtcrime, doublethink, Thought Police, Newspeak,..)?

In my opinion if you had a lab you would have a much better understanding of exactly how difficult what you are proposing is.

Wood has a structure to it, which essentially requires multicellularity to accomplish. In any case, trees have the advantage of doing photosynthesis themselves, so that they function as solar powered wood factories. I do like your idea of improving the shapes (well for our purposes anyways). If bacteria were used, I think there is a stronger structure that could be made instead of wood. Consider that wood once had to function for water transport, so might not be the very best at structural support.