Mokele

Serious, Ephedrine *alone* has been linked to numerous deaths. It is not safe. Keep taking this and you will have serious, possibly life-threatening, medical complications, I guarantee it.

Are you really so desperate to be special that you need to pretend a defect in your eye is a superpower?

You're nearsighted and you can read a physics book. Whoop de freaking do.

My bad, the Incas and Aztecs were wiped out by it. My point still stands. Have you ever read a history book? The "enlightened ancients" waged almost unceasing war with each other. Really? So, you approve of slavery? It was practiced widely throughout the "primitive" world - European slavers only industrialized a practice which already existed within Africa and in just about every other ancient society. You like rape? Most ancient societies viewed it as totally acceptable, as can be seen from their legal writings. Honor-killings? Again, common through the ancient world, on all continents. Provide even one actual citation, one fact, that supports your claims of this idylic past.

My bet would be that we also see selection for cancer resistance and immune function against viri (since antibiotics have, for the moment, severely attenuated the selective power of bacteria).

Yes, but a beginner can do just fine with an anthill to clean the meat off and Hydrogen Peroxide to clean. Unlike bleach, H2O2 won't damage the bones and render them chalky and brittle.

Kid, you're nearsighted, not superman. Let it go.

You are aware that national polls show 70%+ public support not only for the bill, but for a public option, right? So why should we give 30% of the public 50% of the say?

Then why did they all die of smallpox? Seriously, the past was not some mystical magical natural fairy-tale. We were *never* like the Navi. Pre-civilization humans were and still are constantly wracked by disease and frequently engage in wars. Seriously, go actually *visit* some modern "primitive" tribes. They aren't singing Kumbaya all day while communing with nature and sucking ambrosia from flowers. They're working *hard* to grow crops and hunt food, they lose most of their kids to illness before they even grow up, and they'd stab their own gods in the testicles for a year's supply of anti-malaria drugs. Ever hear of sickle-cell disease? It's a genetic disorder prevalent among those of African descent, but it's mild form grants immunity to malaria. Stop and think about that for a second. Having a gene that means 25% of your kids *automatically* die, resulted in *more reproduction* than having no defense against malaria. Kind of puts things into perspective. Seriously, come off the whole "noble savage" "ways of the ancients" shit. It's been proven wrong, can be seen as wrong by anyone who cares to visit these tribes, and is really annoying. These people wage constant wars, treat rape as a general fact of life, and rarely live past 40. The leading cause of death in many extant primitive tribes is either war/murder or disease. That's not based on shitty movies, it's based on actual people actually going there and actually counting who died of what. There's no magical peace or amazing spiritual meaning in the "old ways", just lots and lots of diseases, mostly diarrhea-based.

You mean the whole "dying of cholera" way of life? Thanks but no thanks.

Completely wrong. Draino will seriously damage the bones, as will bleach.

Why would you bring someone into negotiations when they're demonstrated time and again that they have no intention of negotiating in good faith?

It's just a natural side-effect of your near-sightedness.

However, when we can stick electrodes into the brain and evoke that function directly, that's pretty conclusive.

Capilaries don't contract - they have no smooth muscle lining.

Carbon fiber isn't "special" or "magical". On its own, it's pretty useless. What makes it special is when it's embedded in a resinous matrix to form a composite material - the matrix resists compressive forces, the fibers resist tensile forces, giving you "the best of both worlds". Bone is *already* a composite material, a mix of the mineral hydroxyapatite (for compressive strength) and collagen fibers (for tensile strength), created at a molecular level and constantly adapting and repairing. A carbon-fiber bone would have at best modest improvements, certainly nothing truly awe-inspiring.

Actually, that's not the case - permeability is pretty much nil outside of the capilaries, which includes the arteries with muscular walls. Basically, if there's smooth muscle inside that can contract, it's walls are too thick for it to act as anything other than a pipe.

I think a big part of the left's opposition is reaction to the right's expectations - it's like we're afraid that if we support legalization, we'll be branded as the bunch of loser hippies they always claimed (with more grown-up worries about this resulting in political setbacks, loss of power, etc.) I'm not sure how it really does pose a problem for the progressive POV - the lack of serious addictive potential means that it doesn't have the negative repercussions of more addictive drugs like cocaine or alcohol, and it's chemical effects make one less likely to interact violently with others. IMHO, it's all about harm, either to the person or those around them, and pot doesn't make the grade on that. Hell, alcohol is far worse by those standards.

But if you *don't* use Earth life as a basis, you're just making shit up to fit the theory. I can have lifeforms living out in the void of space full-time if I'm allowed to just make up anything I want about them. That's science-fiction, not science. The big problem of life in space is the lack of fuel. You can get sunlight and heat and such if you're an autotroph, but without the raw materials to polymerize and store that energy in chemical bonds, you're screwed. Not to mention that all living things wear out and break, so you'll always need to replace damaged chemical structures with outside raw materials. Yes and no - it's not just the hits, it's the misses. We've got 8 planets and a crapton of moons, but only one has any known life. Mars may not be much, but it's certainly more habitable than deep space or an asteroid. So either seeding is incredibly rare, or only can take hold on worlds where the conditions would lead to life anyway. There's a huge gap between "maybe that could happen" and "viable, scientific theory". Panspermia has never closed that gap, instead relying upon nothing more than special pleading and just being "cool" enough to capture attention. It's a parasitic meme.

Why does the government get to regulate what sort of experiences you can have? The salient issue is harm, either to the person or to society in general. If something causes minimal or no harm, does the government have a legitimate interest in regulating it. For instance, imagine a hypothetical hallucinogen which has no negative health impacts, no addictive potential, and which also causes enough lethargy that users won't bother driving. Should the government ban it just for being a hallucinogen?

Most of which have been floating out there for millions of years, far longer than any life could possibly have survived. Never mind that it's never been shown that any life form of any sort could survive re-entry without being fried. Even a stony asteroid would heat up pretty fiercely, possibly enough to cook any hitchhikers in the center and *definitely* enough to cook any on the surface. This, of course, ignores whether or not any life could survive the initial impact event that was needed to *create* these meteorites in the first place, which I'm also skeptical of. Neither water bears nor any other multicellular organism can withstand sustained exposure to outer space for the time necessary to make such a trip and remain viable - too cold, too long, with too much radiation. Also, something to bear in mind - not every bacteria can survive in space - hell, most can't even survive in culture flasks. What are the odds that any random clump of dirt will happen to have the perfect colonizing extremeophile. And what would it eat? This goes for autotrophs, too, which need particular environments to gather energy. It sounds pretty and all, but at the end of the day, there's zero evidence, no plausible way to test it, literally astronomical odds, and incredible biological difficulty. The only support for it is, basically, nothing but special pleading: "What if exactly the right microbe was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time when exactly the right asteroid hit and sent it on exactly the right trajectory for exactly the right time to exactly the right place on exactly the right planet?" It is logically inconsistent to dismiss Bigfoot, Nessie, Alien Abduction, and astrology as devoid of evidence, but to cling to panspermia as if it was a viable theory. Bring me a body of the Abominable Snowman or an alien with DNA exactly like ours and we'll talk, until then, both deserve equal levels of scientific scrutiny.

Except that: a) it's completely untestable b) there are no comets from other star systems c) there's no way for life to even get ON a comet or asteroid that wouldn't be lethal d) it shows a gross lack of understanding of the sheer odds of anything hitting anything. Say there's a world with life on it, hardy little bacteria. How does that life get off that world? Since bacteria don't make tiny little models of the USS Enterprise, you'd need some sort of massive impact to dislodge chunks of that planet. Even if we assume that the massive impact forces and temperatures *don't* kill everything, you now have some chunks of rock flying through space in random directions. Even between the two nearest planets in our solar system at their closest, that's like hitting a 1 inch marble with random debris from an impact over 500 feet away. Between solar systems, hitting an actual planet? That's like throwing a dart at a 1 inch target 7,000,000 miles away, if not worse. Never mind that it would take over 7 thousand years to get there, by which time any life form would be long dead - bacterial spores can remain dormant, but not that long, even in the benign environment of earth. It's roughly the same odds as taking any rock from the ground, putting it in the deep freeze for 7000 years, then sucessfully throwing it a target the size of a grain of sand moving 300 mph located 80000 miles away. How does Anyone take something with such ridiculous odds seriously?

From an aquatic ancestor that lacked graviceptive root structures, like algae. You know, the exact same organisms that we know plants evolved from.

If we were planted here by aliens, we'd be fundamentally different from all other life. We aren't. And frankly, panspermia is nothing but pseudoscience - untestable, wildly improbable, and with no real explanatory power.

Ditto, though "enough" can be "one" in my case - if there's next to nobody working on something (in my case, arboreality in something other than primates and anoles), you quickly wind up on reviewer lists for that topic.