Delta1212

Saying "It's physically impossible for x to happen" is generally a good way to be wrong. That said, I can't think of any way in which a creature could induce mutations in its own DNA at will and have those mutations rapidly express as major morphological changes to the creature. Bacteria can swap DNA to gain traits from each other in some circumstances, but that's about as far as it goes. "Immensely hard to achieve" is a severe understatement. I don't know whether what you describe is physically possible. If it is, I don't think something like it is ever likely to evolve naturally. And if one did, I don't think humans could build one from scratch in a lab even with a living one to model it after.

Are you basing any of this on something you can point to as evidence or are you just making it up as you go?

Excuse me, you are correct. That is an important distinction that I should have made.

I fed my dog just fine before I knew how the digestive system functioned.

The current state of research on using entanglement for communication is that it's theoretically impossible because entanglement can't be used to transfer information.

If an object has a frictional force applied to it by the ground, the object will apply an equal and opposite frictional force to the ground. If the object is slowed to a stop by friction, its momentum will have been transferred to the ground.

Momentum always comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. It never simply appears or disappears. However, if you are studying the collision of two objects and don't control everything else, there are places that momentum can enter or leave the collision other than the two objects in question. If you take whatever else is having an effect on the system into account, momentum will be conserved.

Pressure would be enough to liquefy the interior, but with the amount of heat generated, the interior of the Earth would have cooled a very, very long time ago if there wasn't a second heat source. That second heat source is the radioactive material within the Earth.

The moral of this story is less that debating religion leads to murder, and more that teasing someone who is drunk and high on coke about his religion and dead father with a weapon present is very stupid.

You get diminishing returns for adding energy as you approach the speed of light. You could put in all of the energy that it took to reach 99.999 percent of the speed of light a second time in a giant burst and all it'll just add a few more 9s on to the end. It would literally take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a massive particle to the speed of light.

You can think of it as space being created between points. Stuff isn't expanding out from a central point; distances are just getting bigger. There is also no center of the universe any more than there is a center of the surface of the Earth. Anywhere you stand on Earth could look like the center and anywhere you stand in the universe will look like it's the center. The difference being that the 2D surface of the Earth will make it appear that you're standing at the center of a giant circle, while the 3D nature of space will make it appear that you're in the middle of a giant sphere. Stuff was closer together at the start of the Big Bang simply because there was less space to move around in. As space expanded, there was more room available and stuff started spreading out. We're not inside a giant container that is holding space and that has a center though. This can be, unfortunately, rather hard to wrap your head around as we're not really equipped by our daily experiences to conceptualize things like that very well.

First off, a lot of commercially available technology is the smaller, lighter, faster, more economically viable version of something that existed 20 years ago in some form. But not everything and even then you're comparing apples to oranges. Just because new technology isn't sitting in your house right now, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There is a lot of new stuff out there that is in the same position much household tech today was in 10 or 20 years ago: Big, slow, clunky and not economically viable as a commercial product. There have still been major advances in robotics, nano-technology, metamaterials, and brain-computer interfaces to name a very small subset of advancing fields of technology that have developed greatly in just the last few years, let alone decades, that I happen to be interested in and thus aware of. In the last week, a pair of researchers successfully managed to test a system that allowed one of them to think about moving his finger and cause the finger of the other researcher in another building to move. Please tell me that the technology to do this existed 20 years ago.

Cladking, I have to ask just to get it out of the way so that I know what kind of conversation this is: Do you have any thoughts on Atlantis or similar lost ancient civilizations?

Perhaps not. I may have read too quickly and conflated the "Dark Glove" moniker with some other points of confusion. It seems Simone is proposing that black holes are made of some sort of "nothing" and that matter entering a black hole vanishes. The proposal is then that the universe is surrounded by the same "nothing" substance that black holes are made of, and that this substance sucking matter towards it is what causes galaxies that are farther away to be moving faster; they being closer to the edges of the universe.

See: debate about whether viruses qualify as life

When matter meets a black hole, it falls in. In the same when that when matter meets Earth, it falls to the ground. A black hole is just a lot of matter in a small space with a comparably strong gravitational pull. It's not made of some strange dark substance and despite "black" and "dark" conjuring similar images, black holes are not made of dark matter.

Law of large numbers. I may not be able to predict an individual coin flip, but if you flip a million coins, the chance that you're going to deviate from the average far enough to even get a 40/60 split is so low that calling it indistinguishable from zero grossly overstates its size.

How many of those seven qualities a thing needs to fulfill to be considered alive, and indeed, whether those criteria represent a universally useful description of life is far from being a settled question. I'm aware of the biological definition of life just as I'm aware of the fact that the criteria area essentially arbitrary descriptions of qualities commonly found in living things. When you are creating a definition by looking at a group of things that you already consider to be part of a category and then finding commonalities, excluding future discoveries from the group because they lack a couple of those categories is problematic. The two schools of boil down to "the category is established, anything that doesn't fall within it doesn't qualify" and "this looks like it belongs in the category to me, and since the initial set of criteria were essentially subjective based on available information at the time, there's no particular reason to exclude something that is only slightly different." And even setting aside viruses, there is disagreement over whether a number of things qualify as being alive: are parts of a living organism that do not themselves make up a complete organism qualify as being alive? Variously while they are part of that organism or detached from it? Does being made up of living component qualify something as being alive in its own right? Does sterility disqualify something from nesting all criteria for life? If a body that is brain dead fails to respond to stimuli, is it alive or dead? Categorical definitions in biology tend to be very blurry because they are often attempts to create strict deliberations between categories that don't have a strict objective reality and the cutoff points are generally logical but ultimately arbitrary. Categorizing life itself is no exception.

Life is an ill-defined concept. We can't even agree on whether a virus is alive or not. Some people would consider that machine to be alive. Others would not.

Nah, I've got some old physical copy books with fun errors in them. I think it's less that fewer people are careful about typos, and more that the barrier to releasing words out into the world is so low that even the people who don't put as much effort in can pull it off.

Are you sure that's a mistake?

I'm sure they did their best, but we're talking tens of thousands of generations, here. Photocopy a document 10,000 times and I'd be shocked if it was still legible, and that's making an exact duplicate. Maintaining perfect oral tradition, especially while trying to continually add to it since history keeps happening, is very difficult. The first person might teach 20 years of history to their child. The next 40 years. The next 60 years. A thousand generations down, you're trying to teach 20,000 years of history. That's a lot of information that is going to wind up getting a lot more compressed than the initial 20 year story was. The more thins get compressed, the more detail gets left out, and the farther back something is, the more times it will have undergone compression until you're covering thousands of years of history in a few sentences, which isn't really enough to convey anything meaningful. And that's without data loss just from mistakes and embellishments which also happen. People are better at remembering the details of recent history than ancient history.

If you're asking what happened to our cultural memory, I'm going to refer back to the telephone analogy I made before. Have you ever played a game of telephone? You tell something to the person next to you and they pass it along to the next and so on. Once it's gone through a dozen or so people, there will be some noticeable differences between what you said and what the final person heard. It comes from a combination of accidental mishearing, misremembering and intentional manipulation on the part of various individual over the course of the chain. When relying on oral tradition especially, history is like a long game of telephone. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, you have so many details that get left out, misremembered, added, forgotten or changed from one generation to the next that whatever people believed at the start has gotten lost. Even if any element remained, it would be practically impossible to dostinguish from what was added or changed in the intervening period and the context would be quite different. As far as being able to put two and two together with fossils, our ancestors were no better or worse equipped to accomplish that 100,000 years ago than 10,000, 5,000 or 1,000 years ago. Without some understanding of natural selection and Mendellian inheritance as well as information regarding geological time scales, connecting those dots is much harder.

What you're actually observing is photons which are directly interacting with cells in my eye. I am not directly interacting with the screen in front of me, and thus am not directly observing it. My brain, however, can extrapolate information about the screen in front of me from the interaction of my eyes with the photons that the screen emitted/reflected (in the past, as you say) and use that information to form a picture. Anything you aren't in direct contact with is not something you are technically observing directly, though. You're observing something else that provides you with enough information for your brain to make a solid guess about that thing.

No, your brain creates the illusion of observing multiple objects in three dimensions based on an interaction with a bunch of photons along a flat surface in the eye. You cannot directly observe anything that is distant from you, just like you cannot observe anything removed in time from you. But the brain can use information from things that are immediately present and that you can interact with because they are not distant to extrapolate information about things that are farther away, just as it can record previous information to be able to extrapolation information about things that are removed from you in the past, and detects and builds models of patterns in order to extrapolate information about things in the future. Your brain treats time differently from space because it is always moving through it in a single direction, but your perception of both time and space is not a reflection of the quality of their physical existence, just how your brain is equipped to deal with them. They're all in your head by equal amounts.