robheus

Anti-matter has POSITIVE mass, just that it has OPPOSITE electric charge. Negative mass matter does not exist, if it would exist, it would have weird properties (acceleration of object would be in the opposiite direction of the force, etc.) The universe is not closed in the sense that it has a boundary.

The universe can be both finite and infinite. Now that looks like a ridiculous contradiction. But let me explain. Imagine a straight line, having no begin and end. Now place two points anywhere on the line, and you are free to choose it anywhere on the line. Now we can ask, does the distance between these two points, form a finite or an infinite distance. Let me first show that it is finite. Place the points on the line (anywhere you want) and start measuring the distance using some unit. Will it finish? Yes. We find a finite value. Now let us ask a second question. Can we think of any value (any value at all) for which the measurement of the distance is clearly a limit it can not exceed, so that all measurent values of the distance between any two points on the line does not surpass this distance? Well, we can just take that distance, measure it on the line and place our points there, and then we can show that any such finite value can always be exceeded by placing the points further apart. Which then shows us that there is no limit to the distance between the two points, and that must mean that it is infinite (having no limit). Now these conclusions are in contradiction with each other. How to resolve that?

Big bang theory does not say there was an absolute beginning. The singularity only pops up when general relativity is used, but then for a full description of reality, also quantum mechanics must be taken into account, esp. near such a dense, hot and small region. Then, most likely, the singularity disappears. But as of yet we do not have a full description of quantum gravity, so this is only provisional.

What makes you think so? Being, as referred to here, is just pure being, which is pretty abstract and indeterminate, and all in all not anything more as nothing. As this analyses is part of the Hegelian dialectics, I would think the answer is no, cause the idea of God in that context would be more the Absolute Idea.

The idea that there is some sort of God underlying reaity, is just the point of view of Idealism, that in primary sense, reality is based on consciousness. Even if one supposedly can not directly disproof this idea, it does not mean that it has any basis in reality. If Idealism in general were true and one could not disproof it, and would accept it as a genuine basis of reasoning, how are we then to conclude that the point of view of solipsism (reality is totally contained within one's own mind) is an absurd world view? The best argument I know why in general Idealism (both subjective Idealism - which is in fact solipsism, and objective Idealism) is untrue, that it is impossible to base reality on consciousness, because the basic feature of any consciousness would be processing information, and how could there be information and information processing without the material?

There is no southpole without a northpole. Every coin has two sides, and the one belongs necessary to the other. If there is no being then neither can there be absence of being.

Assume you have two identical cups, filled with identical water and identical amount of water. The only difference being that the water in the second cup is hot, the other room temperature. After placing them in a refridgerator, which one of the cups of water will freeze first, the room temperature cup or the hot cup? It seems logical to say that the cup with hot water has first to cool down (although it cools down quicker because of a higher temperature gradient as the room temperature water) to room temperature, and then it would take the same amount of time for it to freeze as the room temperature water, so it would last longer for it to freeze. Simple logic, isn it? But please try this yourself, and investigate the answer. The answer might surprise you! Here is an article on this phenomena.

First question: what is the need for humanity to get into space? 1. Because of existential external threat (astroid impact, sun going red giant, other)? 2. Because we exhaust the planet, and need living space or resources elsewhere? 3. Because we can, we must? I would answer: 1. The existential external threat is better dealt with by a. Investigating all the astroids or comets that could have a huge impact b. Find a way of having those candidate huge rocks from space that could impact change the orbit so they don't impact or have them destroyed so that the debris will have no impact. 2. We better find a way first to have a sustainable economy and limit population growth (the best way for that is social justice and economic well-being for all, that will cut population growth) 3. There are a lot of things that can, but are they anyhow usefull, and economicaly viable? Who should pay for fullfilling these dreams only a few (the eilte) foster?

But a very persistent illusion

As my position is towards the AGW issue I agree with the majority of scientists that this is the case as far as science can tell, and I don't side with those who either think that the science is a complot or a fraud, since none of that has been proven, and why should climate scientists be any different in that respect as other scientists? However: I AM sceptic about the political/economical aspect, that even when AGW shows that human are the prime cause of AGW, the changes necessarily and economically show to be near unsolvable. The proof of that is the current global financial and economic crisis, which more or less proofs, we can not even control the economy in the short terms, let alone plan for long terms. Short term profits dominate the financial investment markets, and keep us tied up into short term thinking, and wasting of valuable time, while we should be planning for the future. The energy crisis necitates us for planning for the long term future. Currently though, too little money is being invested in development and deployment of renewable techniques, because they always find short term investment goals which appear to be more profitable, but in doing so, destroy our future and cause the financial crisis and meltdown which we face now. However, we should plan for our future. And for two urgent reasons: - natural energy deposits are being depleted and the possibiliy of scarcity in immediate or further future already means that countries compete for resources, oil wars are being fought, etc. - we need to transition from depleting resources to renewable resources, because they are the only sustainable future we can think of. (so, I don think of AGW as a prime reason for this transition to be necessary, but then, since this transition will cause a shift from fossil to renewable, it will of course be part of the solution needed to prevent as far as possible any more AGW.) A lot of renewable opportunities are still underdeveloped, are not anywhere near their theoretical limit of efficiency (except maybe for wind energy) and can become a lot cheaper as currently is the case. It is thought though that renewables will become competetive, and after that more money flows into the development of renewables, in due time. However, I am not sure if that is early enough to escape the problem of resource depletion or peak oil scenario and global warming effects. Since we do know or at least can calculate that some of these techniques will become cheaper in the future, there is reason to think we can speed the development up, for instance by allowing deployment of renewable resources to have some subsidy, and stop subsidizing fossils fuels. Germany did that, and I think they have in the future a better economy, since when the investments are paid off, prices of renewable energy will sink while energy prices keep rising. We can invest lots of money in this kind of development, take for instance pension funds, they don't need to have a return on investment in a short time, it is sufficient that the pension money that is invested makes a good return when the people retire, so there is room there for long term investments, and other parts of the markets too I suppose.

I guess this was done to have a stable output of power and buffer the energy ??

Assuming the cosmos in the far future is ripped apart as the expansion of space speeds up, yes, then all life will go extinct and the universe goes extinct. What comes after that we do not know.

No. The concept of pure Being is indeterminate. That is the crux. We are here not concerned with the distinct properties or determination of any particular being, but with being itself in general. Note that the concept of Being is the first concept that one arrives at without introducing any other concept. They appear at a later stage of the development of the logic. The concept of determinate being is dealt with only when we have arrived at the concept of quality. You have to think of this logic as a kind of logic that bootstraps itself, it is developed from literally nothing at all at the start, and arrives then at the first immediate concept one can think of that does not make use of any concept you can think of, and during analyzation of each concept, new concepts are derived from it. That is as clear as I can explain, if I fail I'm sorry. You could try to read the doctrine of being in the science of logic yourself.

Apart from all sort of technical challenges that must be face, I think it is not possible (yet) to put people on Mars and have them live there indefinately, provided that we can not spend indefinate amount of money to sustain them. The goal of the project is of course to reach a reasoable amount of self-sustainance (create own water, oxygen as first pre-reuisities, and also some food stuff and new living space). Let me try to argue this as follows. The initial conditions are that everything that the people on Mars need (food, water, shelter, etc.) is provided by earth. The amount necessary, let us say in units of amount of flights to Mars is equal to: Flights(t) = k * Humans(t) So, the number of flights is linearly dependend on the number of humans living on mars at any time t. They can of course make their own water, their own oxygen, grow their own food, produce their own energy, etc. But all that is produced at the basis of techniques and robots and equipment, they can not (yet) reproduce on Mars. Technicall and theoretically it might be possible to do that, but then, please figure out what kind of industry you would need to have installed on Mars, from mineralogy and mining to chemics and engineerding, to re-produce anything you are dependend on for living, and that recursively: if the tool you need is a hammer, then you also need to have the tool to reproduce the hammer, and the tool to reproduce the tool to reproduce the hammer, and so forth. Well it will ultimately settle down to some fixed amount of techniques and tools you need, but can be quite substantial large. Long before you have that installed on Mars, including all the people that are needed, you have outrun any reasonable budget limit that can be provided in practice. Since that won't be reach in any reasonable amount of time then, humans on mars keep being dependend on resources from earth. But living costs for people on Mars yearly are unreasonable higher then living on any place on earth (I calculated that it is about a factor of 1000 above average GDP per person for humans on earth). So, why do we need to go to Mars anyway? It does NOT provide us with any addition material or energy resource (would be quite impractical to get any significant amount of material from Mars) , so the only real target would be to get scientific knowledge. But acquiring scientific knowledge has it's cost price, I think it costs to much to station people on Mars indefinately, and there is no reasonable goal to spend so much money on that. Besides, it would be better wating till we have a base on the Moon, and find an economic reason to keep humans there (mining He-3?) and have the technology needed for such long stay project on another celestial body.

You are right of course, but that holds true for logical stuff. As we can also proof a square circle does not exist (assuming normal metrics/geomotry). You can not proof for instance that there isn't a pink teapot flying round in the universe, or that unicorns don't exist and stuff like that.