Delta1212

Knocking down even one lie can have something of a domino effect if you can get the person to actually listen. I knew a guy on another forum I frequented who was a creationist (the forum was for a game but it had a debate section and evolution came up a lot). He'd grown up being taught a lot of outright lies about science in general and evolution in particular (at school, no less). One of those was that science couldn't find the "missing link" between humans and apes. Well, one day somebody linked him to an image showing a progression of skulls from clearly non-human to clearly human and it blew his mind. A few years on and he's now an atheist because that convinced him to start digging, and he uncovered just how many things that he's been taught were outright lies. He wound up dumping the entire belief system as a result and was still pretty bitter about it last we spoke. So while I don't think that evolution actually represents a set of facts that are incompatible with theism, for people who have had anti-evolution and anti-science teachings bound up in their religious doctrine, it is something of a problem. If they admit that their religious teachers are wrong (or worse, lying) when it comes to evolution, then what else might they be wrong and/or lying about. A religion based on faith requires trust in those who taught it to you. If you find that those individuals are untrustworthy, it undermines the basis of your entire worldview, and not just the one little bit about whether some aspect of science is compatible with the rest of it or not.

Are you saying that photons eventually turn into neutrons? And what is the speed of life?

Wouldn't 10 strain resources even less and create even less pollution? Does that mean a global population of 100,000 is "overpopulated" because a smaller population would have less of an impact?

The best design to operate in a particular environment is not necessarily equivalent to that environment being the best for the operation of that design. You can, for instance, design the best car for driving in the desert, but it will still probably last longer driving around an indoor track where it doesn't have to worry about heat and sand messing with the mechanics. It may not have to worry about those issues as much as other cars, but that doesn't mean they aren't issues. Likewise, humanity evolved to be able to survive in an environment without a great deal of technology, but technology was developed in the first place because it made it easier to survive. We adapted to our environment and then began adapting our environment to us. Our optimal environment is someplace that hovers around 70 degrees, has some shade to protect against the sun and doesn't overly expose us to precipitation. We've artificially created little micro-environments that replicate our natural optimum better than nature and which we can transplant even into otherwise inhospitable places. Just because we built the environment instead of stumbling upon it by accident doesn't make it less healthy.

That's really, really not how it works. The universe is cooling in the sense that the energy density is decreasing as the universe expands. There's a set amount of energy in the universe, but as the universe expands, the amount of energy per some set volume of space decreases. Individual particles aren't slowing down and photons are certainly not cooling into massive particles.

Most people who support creationism over evolution do not really understand how evolution works. It's very unlikely that most of them will "get the joke" in most instances. If, for instances, I make fun of creationists relying on medical science grounded in evolutionary understanding of biology for their healthcare needs, well, A: what does monkeys turning into people have to do with going to the doctor and B: vaccines are bad for you anyway. Creationism is free to play to people's misconceptions and ignorance. Science is not. There are an infinite number of ways to be wrong and only one way to be right, so already creationists have a broader field of material to work with than you do. If you mock them, they will mock you back, and most likely in a way that their audience is predisposed to favor. You then have the choice of either mocking them back, which puts the two viewpoints on an even playing field that they really shouldn't be on, or you explain factually why what they just said is stupid, which you should have just done in the first place because now you've wasted time and ceded the ability to be the one who provides serious answers and information instead of stupid jokes, because you made dumb jokes, too. It's fun but completely unproductive.

The only impact that moving an entangled particle will have on its partner is that it will very likely break the entanglement. Under no circumstances will the other particle move because you moved its entangled partner. That's a misconception perpetuated by very bad pop science and poorly researched science fiction. It's not even remotely how entanglement actually works. You cannot, under any circumstances, affect one particle of an entangled pair by doing things to the other one. All you can do is determine the state one is in by checking the other, but once you've checked, you lose the ability to do even that unless you entangle the particles again.

Ok, here's the point you seem to be missing: We can use science to determine the reproductive rate of people who identify as homosexual in comparison to the reproductive rate of heterosexuals. We can use science to determine that reproduction inevitably leads to evolution and that failure to reproduce inevitably leads to extinction. We cannot use science to determine whether evolving is a good thing, whether extinction is a bad thing or whether reproducing more is an overall positive or negative thing. Those are goal-oriented values. Science can help us determine optimum strategies for reaching our goals, but it cannot tell us what our goals should be. In the absence of providing goals or values, science cannot tell you whether something is right or wrong, only whether it does or does not work. So, for instance, if your goal in having sex is to produce a child, then yes, science tells us homosexual sex is the wrong way to go about achieving that goal. If your goal is to feel good or establish an emotional bond with another person, science tells us that homosexual sex works just as well as heterosexual sex. Whether you should have sex to make babies or for recreational purposes is not something science can tell us, and as such, no form of sex can be labelled as universally "wrong as per science" because being wrong implies a value judgment that you can't use science to make.

Whoops. Got a little careless with my zeroes.

The response to which is "It's what separates us from the animals." If someone is thoroughly convinced of the truth of something, everything is evidence supporting it.

Since the majority Blues apparently see their skin color as "default" then yes, racism exists in that society.

Or, another way of looking at it, if everyone turned 100% male overnight, I think that would be worse for humanity's long term survival than if everyone turned gay overnight. Does that make males bad for the long term survival of the species? Obviously not.

Your new account is literally the initials of your old account. You responded to all of your own topics in the exact same way that you've been posting (storm of smileys and calling people 'bro'). You were known for making polls about everything and you've now made a new poll about your own ban. It's very clearly you.

Rajnish, this is probably not the best way to open a dialogue with the moderators.

"Do we say 3000 Watts or 3 GigaWatts?""Well, Giga sounds awesome, but it doesn't sound as impressive if he says his suit only generates 3 GigaWatts. Three's not a very big number." "What if we change it to GigaJoules, and then he can say it generates 3 GigaJoules every second?" "Great idea!" How I assume those conversations go.

What does science have to do with this determination exactly? Whether something is right or wrong is a value judgement. Science tells you how things work, not whether they are good or bad. You can scientifically determine what the impact of homosexuality on population growth is, but you can't scientifically determine whether that impact is a good thing or a bad thing. The only way something can be wrong "as per science" is if it is empirically counter-factual. Since homosexuality is not demonstrably untrue, it is not wrong "as per science." So I'm going to have to go with "no" as the answer to your question.

What rules in particular don't you like?

I'm getting tripped up by the "because" part of that. If "nonzero power is impossible" then the only possible power is zero. So understanding how zero power is possible wouldn't contradict nonzero power being impossible. Unless you mean that because of the way you understand zero power being possible, it seems like you should be able to get more than zero power?

Ahyaa, are you reading the question correctly, or am I misunderstanding your confusion? It looks like you're confused about why "zero power" is impossible, but the question and explanation state that nonzero power is impossible. Or, put another way, the power must be zero and anything else is impossible.

If a person saved a life in the past, they don't get a pass to commit murder in the future. If someone has both saved a life and committed murder in the past, they don't get a pass. If someone committed murder in the past and giving them a pass would allow them to save a life in the future, I might consider it depending on the circumstances. If someone is planning to commit murder and capable of saving a life in the future, they don't get a pass on the murder in exchange for saving the life. So personally, I'm going to have to come down against letting her continue. Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, sure, keeping her alive results in a net three living people more than would have been alive each week, but condoning her actions sets a precedent that saving lives gives you the right to kill other people, as long as you consistently kill fewer than you've saved. That is setting up a situation that I can't help but feel is going to negatively impact society on a far greater scale than three lives a week is worth.

That doesn't make the Standard Model complete, though.

Another thing to keep in mind that is important when considering this subject: The distinction between life and non-life is significantly more arbitrary than most people realize. Life is a self-replicating chemical process. Every self-replicating chemical process/pattern is not classified as life, however. Abiogenesis generally assumes that what we classify as life developed from simpler self-replicating molecules, whereas spontaneous generation generally refers to life going *poof* and appearing from nowhere.

I have a cybernation. Used to spend a lot of time on that game.

Bacteria grow and then divide. Viruses replicate by inserting their genetic material into a host cell and essentially turning that cell into a little virus factory.

The material isn't continuing to come from there. As far as we can tell, all of the matter currently in the observable universe has always been in the observable universe. Matter isn't expanding out from any location, space is expanding between clumps of matter. The entire universe, not the matter in the universe but the space that matter occupies, used to be much smaller. The universe was very dense because there was less space to fit all of the matter that existed in it. Space began to expand, leaving more room for the matter to spread out and decreasing the overall density of the universe. The Big Bang is not the expansion of matter from a central point into empty space, so it doesn't fit with the idea of a wormhole continuing to spew matter into the universe.