aguy2

Auk and Martin; for what it is worth, in W.Texas, "If you are feeling frogy then jump" are still fighting words. aguy2

In our typical hubris we call ourselves the 'wise men' or Homo sapiens. I am torn between the more realistic cognomens of 'ungreat ape' or 'ingrate ape' as more proper genus species names. aguy2

We had degressed to discussing whether the debate is endless. Tycho? may be right; I may have been expressing my prejudice that 'that which has a beginning must also have an end'. aguy2

Do you mean a 'night crawling, egg sucking rat' like our common ancestor? aguy2

Were "people" debating the point in 11,834,221 BCE? If the debate had a beginning it could not be "endless". aguy2

Maybe, but the astroid belts would be more profitable. aguy2

Lucid Dreamer I owe you an apolgy. I was looking over old posts wondering why I was getting such few lucid responses, I looked at the the post you responded to and discovered that I typed the word 'primate' instead of 'primitive'. I was trying to imply that your pc and the net it is connected to represented a primative form of the next stage of the process. aguy2

The fact that rational and extensive examination of ourselves and the world around us shows no need for an 'intervening' creator, to my mind, is a tribute to the intelligence of the creator. Why would the creator design an environment that needed constant and consistant 'tinkering' with, when the priority point of creating a universe is to create something that is capable of being 'self-creating' due entirely to its own 'internal dynamics'? aguy2

It is quite likely that there are at least two 'engines' driving evolution. The engine that Darwin tried to explain was that of 'function'. I believe there is another driving force behind evolution that can be called 'form' or 'aesthetics'. All that would have been necessary was for the females of the species in question to take a liking to bare, flat, tailless behinds. aguy2

I would have been happier with the 3rd option if had been in the present tense, but chose it anyway. aguy2

Considering the context I was rather surprised to see nearly 50% expressing a belief in creation of some sort. As I hope you can see from my 'signature', I am a strong theist who sees such things as biological evolution as being simultaneously reflective of and anticipatory to the core reason for such a thing as a universe to exist. aguy2

Has anyone checked out the NASA link in post #17, in the 'Coke in Space' thread, in the Astronomy forum? Shuttle experiments have shown that yeast cells adapt to near zero G environment by becoming stronger and 3 times more productive. aguy2

Thanks for the link Swansont. As a bit of a lark I started a thread in the exobiology forum that examines the possibility that the 'grays' that the UFO people are so fond of are the result of yeast and other spores that immigrated to the Oort cloud, evolved independently, and then have re-immigrated back to Terra. It was very interesting to see that yeast cells adapted to near zero G by becoming stronger and 3 times as productive. aguy2

For what its worth I found the concept of 'Panspermia' while researching the possibility of my 're-immigration' speculation having any merit. If I have done any 'hijacking', the concept of 'ideal black bodies' would be a more likely candidate. Aguy2

I really don't think that the idea that life could survive and even flourish in the 'Kuiper' and 'Oort' clouds is that farfetched. Observation has shown that comets appear to have a sooty carbonous outer shell, and soot is about as close as you can get to an ideal 'black body'. An ideal black body is a theoretical object that absorbs radiant energy without emitting any energy until it's internal temperature reaches a set point. With soot I believe that the internal temperature would have to be about 300 degrees Kelvin or about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Comets have had billions of years to absorb enough energy to support internal temperatures above the freezing point of water. The biggest problem I can see is that due to their small gravitational effects, comets would start venting gases at relatively low temperatures. Aguy2

Have you ever heard of a concept called 'panspermia' http://mv.lycaeum.org/mu/_panspermia.html ? Basically it is saying that there is a good possibility that life propagates itself throughout the universe by means of spores. There seems to be an unvoiced assumption that 'Terra' is solely an importer of these spores and takes little notice of Terra as an exporter of spores. There is avery high probability that Terra's life forms have been capable of propagating at least bacterial spores for up to three billion years. The universe may be only twelve or so billion years old, and it takes at least a second generation star to support the heavy elements necessary for biological systems. It is relatively unlikely that spore producing organisms could have existed at a significantly earlier time anywhere in the universe. I think that there is a reasonable possibility that the sort of 'yeasty/mushroomy' critters the UFO people call 'Greys' might represent a re-immigration of terrestrial life that may have been evolving independently within the competition free environs of the comet filled outer reaches of our solar system. Aguy2

martin, Thanks much for the information and links on LQC. I especially like that they are trying to develop the math to discribe a BB event that is not necessarily displaying homogeneity and isotropy. Classical relativity and quantum cosmology apparently must impose such symmeties to make any sense. The point I am trying to make with my proposed model is that these imposed constaints are not necessarily reflective of the actual case. As for Ashtekar et al finding exploding black holes and observing that they are acting like large scale hydrogen atoms finding their rest mass, I am not exactly going to be holding my breath, but I wish them luck. Making and finding any kind of cosmological prediction would be a breath of fresh air. Lately it seems that new cosmological evidence is automaticly followed by pulling a new 'black' something or other out of a hat. aguy2 PS: I hope that my imagination is not quite as crude as my renderings!

My model sees the visible 'matter' universe as if it where a conical section of an isometrically expanding universe. If sufficiently large the conical section produced by a jet erupting from a rotating pre-inflationary universe would look the same as a universe produced from a isometric expansion from a non-rotating BB event. My model is assuming that they could be presently moving toward each other. As far as whether they are moving in 'real space' or not would depend on what you are calling 'real space'. If you are simply defining 'real space' as that which is bounded by the parameters of length, breadth, and width, then the proper answer would be "yes". If you are calling 'real space' a structured background composed of an as of yet unknown structure, then the answer would have to wait till we have a much better idea of what the actual structure of 'real space' is. Are you talking about 'projections' like Mercator map projections? aguy2

Gilded, If the universe is somewhere in the vicinity of 15 billion years old and is already accelerating toward a 'big crunch', the history of the total oscillation would probably be considerably less than 35 billion years. aguy2

Sayonara3, Thank you. I have edited the post. My background is in the social not the hard sciences and I guess it shows. Other than instantly recognizing that I am something of a dilettante, do you think my model has any possible merit? aguy2

Dov, I have initiated a thread that uses the 'fractal' approach to imply that the cosmological 'big bang' event might be somewhat similar to the 'hypernova' events that may be the source of the 'gamma ray bursts' that mystied scientists for so many years. The thread is called "Could the Universe be Collapsing?" I hope you check the thread out and contribute to it. aguy2

Current observable evidence seems to be indicating that the universe is not only continuing to expand, its expansion is accelerating. (see http://www.er.doe.gov/Sub/Accomplishments/Decades_Discovery/43.html ) My basic philosophical paradigm (see my signature) is much easier to see if the universe were oscillating between expanding and contracting phases. Thus I found that the current evidence that this might not be the case to be somewhat disconcerting. After considerable thought and research, I have developed a cosmological model that takes this and other current observational evidence into account while still being consistent with my basic view of the nature of the universe. The only problem is that the model predicts that although the universe may be growing larger (expanding), it could at the same time be collapsing (contracting). Almost all cosmological models make a common presumption that the expansion of the universe is isometric. They presume that the universe is akin to a balloon being blown up, with the galactic clusters being like spots on the balloon growing further apart. This could very well not be the case. The closest phenomenon to the Big Bang in the current universe are being called 'hypernovas'. They seem to be the source of what was up to a year or two ago the great mystery of random gamma ray bursts. They are rapidly rotating giant stars that in the process of collapse eject mass in the form of high energy 'jets'. My model assumes that shortly after the BB event the universe was akin to these hypernovas in that it was rapidly rotating. Unlike these stars it was much too hot to permit the existence of even subatomic particles. When it had expanded and cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of subatomic particles, they took the form of paricles and anti-particles in the ratio of 1:1. The vast majority of the particles and anti-particles annihilated one another and erupted from the proto-universe in two gigantic jets. The eruption of these jets could be seen as being comparable to the proposed 'inflationary epoch' of the early universe, without the need of such possible contrivances as a momentary reversal of gravitational effects. (see http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology/inflation.html ) In one of the jets a small proportion of particles survived the annihilation, and in the other an equal number of anti-particles survived. My model assumes that the jet that contained the surviving particles has become what we call the visible universe, and due in part to the possibility that the visible universe has an anti-matter copartner, if left to its own devises the two halves of the universe shall eventually collapse (or re-collapse) to where the BB originated. In the accompanying attachments I have made a couple of representations of possible histories of the model. © represents the universe at its point of maximum expansion from the BB. (D) represents the possible state of the current universe, where the visible universe could be increasing in size at an accelerating rate while at the same time be collapsing toward the BB point. The second attachment shows the matter jet from a different perspective and indicates that the conditions of rapid expansion could start well before the point of maximum expansion vis-a-vis the BB point. NASA has produced a graphic animation of what they think a 'hypernova' would look like. It is at http://www.imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_1l/bursts.html under the subheading "Race to Gamma Ray Burst Reveals Gigantic Explosion, Death & Birth". I began investigating the possibility of this cosmological model because the evidence of an accelerating expansion did not seem to sit well with my most basic philosophical pov, but the model not only increases the probability that my basic paradigm is the actual case it also seems to answer several questions of why our universe is the way it is. 1. An 'inflationary epoch' without the need for a temporary reversal of gravitational effects. 2. A viable explanation for why the visable universe isn't half matter and half anti-matter. 3. A possible source of the observed conservation of angular momentum within the universe. aguy2