Ophiolite

No apology necessary. I was trying to be too clever for my own good.

Earlier versions of continental drift envisaged the light continents (sial) flaoting on the denser oeceanic material (sima) thought to envelope the entire Earth. The continents moved over the ocean basins in this hypothesis. Plate tectonics is quite different in that it postulates elements of either continental, oceanic, or mixed character moving discretely. The implications for the mechanisms and resulting tectonic, igneous and metamorphic patterns are radically different.

The point here is that I was using a lighthearted structure to make a serious observation that implicitly contains the point you made. I apologise, slightly, for being obscure. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but perhaps you prefer the wit be clothed in flesh and bone. That's fine. Again' date=' my intent was to convey and confirm the notion that no one - no matter the independence of their thought - is likely to produce a truly valuable idea that does not derive from a thousand earlier notions. Newton's 'If I have seen further it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants', comes to mind. I have used [i']copy [/i]as an analogue for study as a means of ridiculing the OPs message. I suppose if one has to explain ones attempts at succinct commentary with long winded, verbose passages, one has failed to communicate. That's fine too. (Just thoroughly depressing.)

When you copy from one person it is plagiarism. When you copy from several people it is research. If you copy from no one it is madness.

Please note that plate tectonics is a spceific (in some regards a a very specific) variation of continental drift. Several of your 'proofs' support continental drift, but are neutral towards plate tectonics.

.....in a 1g environment. What if the alien cockroaches come from a 0.1g environment?

You know we aren't meant to talk about that. You shall be visited.

You win the prize. I marked up your post with a nice positive. See also the post from Janus.

Disney World Welcomes Wimps.

I cannot envisage how you could get an earthquake without a fault line. ....... No, I tried again and it just doesn't work. Certainly the British quakes all occur along fault lines.

Why would you think it is? (Special prizes are available for the first poster who knows why random's question was a valid one. )

One of the more obvious means of doing this would be the judicious application of terrorism. Isn't irony wonderful?

Could you repeat this statement in such a way that its semantic content is greater than zero? Interesting. I was unaware of this. Can you provide a citation please. and again, please. which equation? Assume I am really slow and not very bright and you won't be far wrong.

You have a knack for avoiding answering questions. I'll make it explicit. do you now understand that your claim that a nuclear bomb would not work in space was flawed? If not what will it take to convince you?

So the aliens and their technology are impervious to radiation. I didn't know that.

Which is why you open a restaurant serving juicy human steaks and sauteed livers to the aliens. If you can't beat them, join them. Adaptability is our hallmark - let it be our saviour.

Open a restaurant.

Anything much over five miles and you'd have to bend down to breath.

I think the Spartan military didn't condone homosexuality, they insisted on it.

Very nice illustrations. Unfortunately the linked website provides no indication of which model has been used as the basis for the dimensions of each zone. I note that the radii of Jupiter's core is shown to be approximately 1/3 more than the Earth. Even at Earth densities this would allow for a mass about 2 1/2 times that of the Earth.

I offered that speculation at your request. You asked for an example of interstellar travel that involved neither intelligence or technology. I gave one. I did not volunteer it. I hesitated a considerable time before delivering it and only did so in order to be polite. It is inappropriate for you now to implicitly criticise me for meeting your request. I pointed out what I believed to be shrotcomings in each of his statements. He responded by challenging each of mine. I have no problem with his challenges to my statements. Why do you have a problem with my challenges to his. (If you don't have a problem with it, why are you even bringing it up.) That would be preferable. I'm hardly going to read my own posts. I repeat, there is a world of difference between SF movies (most of them) and SF stories (the high quality, hard SF variety). There is also a world of differnce in the context in the two cases. Let me know how that turns out for you.

I agree it seems reasonable. The difficulty is that we have knowledge of only a single biosphere. This necessarily gives us a biased view of what life is like. Until we have encountered other lifeforms this bias will remain in place. I also imagine that visiting aliens will have intelligence and technology, but that may be a limitation of my imagination. Well, as I noted above, I have a limited imagination, but here are some thoughts. Envisage a lifeform that has multiple forms in its life cycle, like pupae-caterpillar-butterfly. This life form begins as a 'seed' which grows into a tree like organism. When full grown the 'tree' divides into a number of mobile organisms we might just about recognise as 'animals'. These seek out other 'trees' which they inseminate. (There's that Terracentric bias showing.) The 'tree' then disperses new 'seed' by explosively launching itself into the air and coming down a considerable distance away. (Larry Niven proposed exactly such a tree in one of his SF novels.) The further the 'tree' can travel the better chance it has of exposing its seed to new ground. Evolution leads to some 'trees' being able reach escape velocity. Now they are in space, the seeds lie dormant for hundreds of thousands of years until they arrive on Earth. Farfetched? Of course it is, but that's mainly because we are not used to thinking in such terms. We don't understand what alien really means. No. I predict it based upon the probability that they truly are alien. I didn't mention SF movies. Why did you? I mentioned SF stories. Hard SF is often written by active scientists, or authros with scientific training who do extensive research before makeing their proposals. Of course they remain stories, but some of the proposed life forms are wholly credible. I am not trying to shut him down. I am trying to expand his horizons. I am trying to help him see that his scenario may be restricted in scope. I have no power to shut him down (and no desire to do so). MRLogic is perfectly free to place me on ignore if he finds my posts unwelcome. (I might ask why are your trying to shut down my efforts to expand MRLogic's horizon? You see how silly the question is?) It's a discussion forum. I am not obligated to agree with the premises of each poster. I'm sorry you fail to see the restrictive nature of MRLogic's proposed scenario. I regret you do not wish to join me in expanding the scope of the scenario. Despite these disappointments I do not intend to invite you to move on.

The pressurisation is set to the equivalent of about 7,000'. If ground level air pressure were maintained it would place additional stresses on the aircraft.

You have it the wrong way round. The Earth, because of its considerably greater mass, protects the moon from asteroids. As you can see it doesn't do a very good job and the job the moon does for the Earth is even less effective.

Because they are aliens. Bees are capable of constructing beautifully precise honeycombs whose walls meet at the optimal angle for maximum use of space. They are not generally thought to be intelligent. Many species across our planet achieve things that we can only mimic with technology. If you presume intelligence and technology are necessary for interstellar travel then you have not understood the meaning of alien. They might consider this clear proof that we are not intelligent. You are viewing this from a human standpoint. You think the aliens will think like us, make judgements like us, value what we value. They won't. They are alien. There are plenty on this planent who view government as evidence that we are not intelligent! But more to the point you are assuming that the aliens will exercise control over their population and make group decisions in the same way we do. Indeed you assume that they will exercise control at all, make decisions at all, which they may not - because they are alien. They may be a species that has evolved to live in space. There are plenty of SF stories with half plausible explanations of how that might be possible. You have failed to recognise that aliens would do things in a different way. They are alien. Oh, really! Have you thought about this at all? Their metabolisms may depend upon these materials. You are assuming a bunch of creatures living in 1g environment, in an oxygen rich atmosphere, terrestrial beasts - you probably even think they are likely to be bipedal. None of this will probably apply. They are frigging alien. But your example scenario makes so many assumptions as to the characteristics and motivations of the aliens that you have created a scene of immensely high improbability. You just seem to keep forgetting these are aliens.