Moontanman

I am considering setting it up on my carport, (concrete slab floor) since I am planning on imitating a local biotope (boiling springs) all the animals and plants in it will be able to live in the mild winter conditions here. If I decide to go marine it will be with local sharks and rays so the same will be true. I'm still brainstorming, it will probably be next spring before i finish repairing it.

What Elvis wasn't with them?

I have often wondered what or who would dominate given equal opportunity, it's not just who would win, a t-rex or an elephant, that would really be meaningless to the bigger picture. But if you could somehow (magic here) say divide a mega mammal ecosystem alongside a dinosaur ecosystem so the two would diffuse into each other it would be interesting to see which ecosystem would have more survivors in place after a few millenia...

Care to elaborate?

Religion has not met its burden of proof any more than bigfoot, in the absence of positive evidence the null hypothesis is there are no gods or there are no bigfoot (feet?) Being a skeptic doesn't mean you don't have an open mind, it just means you don't let just any idea climb in and take a dump. Until testable evidence is given for the existence of a god or anything else it makes sense to assume it doesn't exist, if you don't make that assumption you must face the fact that almost anything must be believed as real until disproven, that is a fool's errand. No more than you can't prove I don't have an invisible dragon in my basement means you have to believe I do. I am an apistevist first, skeptic second, and atheist third...

Right now I am flooded by extreme rainfall, my house is sitting in the middle of a pond at this moment and the crawl space is flooded as well, the last week we have measured rain in feet per day not inches. I will get under the house and take some measurements as soon as things dry out a little.

The footprint of the tank is about one square meter, so that would be 1360.7 Kilograms per square meter. 225 gallons = 851.7 liters...The weight of the tank and sand and the stand have to be figured in a well. I am trying to figure the cubic feet of sand it will take but I keep getting nonsensical numbers, to early in the morning and I can't find my calculator to check my figures but I am getting about 4 cubic feet which is about .113 cubic meters... I think.. I have been up all night writing, time to catch a nap, my figures may be off by an order of magnitude as sleepy as I am..

Cool, thanks!

I have been given a 225 gallon aquarium and I would like to set it up in my (rental) house. I figure it will weigh about 300 pounds per square foot with a 10 square foot base. Anyone care to speculate on how much weight a floor in a house with a crawl space, not a concrete slab, might hold?

I was under the impression that branes were gravitationally attracted to each other and after they collide the energy of collision drives them apart until gravity takes back over and drags them back together... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic_universe

I think perhaps is the operative word in that sentence, since dinosaurs were evolving toward less weapons and grasping hands not to mention larger brains I don't see how the idea of dinosaur intelligence can be dismissed out of hand. See above answer I think you need to support this assertion that mammals had an overriding reason for larger brains and the insinuation that dinosaurs did not. Can you back that up with anything but speculation? The evolution of a large brain in mammals could be the result of mammalian brains not being as efficient as dinosaur brains, see corvids as an example, but it is fair to say that toward the end of the dinosaurs reign some of them were developing less weapons, grasping hands and bigger brains, if this trend had been allowed to continue then I see no reason to assume there would not have been intelligent dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_intelligence I'd like to see some citations for these assertions. Again some citation for this would be nice and mormyrids have a higher brain to body size than humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormyridae Barring some form of FTL communication we are unaware of communication with other planetary system intelligences seems to be a one way ticket at best...

Yes i have heard them many times, sounds a lot like a large wave collapsing on shore, sometimes the ground shakes. I have seen the water in my aquariums suddenly start jumping around in peaks when a "gun" went off. I guess I've heard or thought I did at least a dozen times in the past 45 years.

We have a phenomena called the Seneca Guns that is often attributed to small offshore quakes, not sure if it is. http://www.starnewsonline.com/section/topic9909

I'm more worried about the collapse of the Canary Islands (I think that right) if they do and it would raise a several hundred foot tidal wave on the east coast, that would be my ass for sure... I spend a lot of time on the beach, beach bum, everytime i see a huge wave in a set I think of what I would do if i saw the ocean suddenly start to recede far beyond the normal wave pattern... We have a shallow sea here to several miles offshore, it would be an impressive sight... Evidently not as well supported a threat as I thought. http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2013/12/13/canary-islands-tsunami/

We have been broadcasting but the signals we send as "radio" leakage are absorbed within a couple of light years at most, high powered military radar might be detected and in fact similar signals have been detected in short bursts but as you would assume the signals, while detectable, would have to maintain a lock on our particular location to be repeatable and none have done so at this point. Another problem is the existence of nearby civilization, What is the time spent on broadcasting likely to produce results? Assuming a 100 ly radius of signal "leakage" it starts to look like a project that would be on the government chopping block in short order, the ancient Egyptians managed to send a signal over thousands of years but their civilization no longer exists I wonder what kind of disturbance in time and space we could make that would be detectable across 4000 years. Like one of the egyptian mummies sitting up and saying hello. This of course lead to the question of "where are they" if life is common enough to be reasonably likely to be detected then then they should be here, if not who cares about a signal 4000 years old?

I am all about miniature woolly mammoths!

Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat, nothing up my sleeve... presto! Raor... I got to get another hat...

There is currently no evidence for a god, to answer your question predisposes the existence of something called a god, i do not predispose there is a god...

Ok, I think I see your point now, thanks Swansont.

If you lased a solar cell it would produce waste heat, if you collected that head and used it instead of letting it radiate away would that diminish the efficacy of the solar cell? I have given this a lot of thought and I can't see how harvesting waste heat would require the tire to work harder... Like harvesting the wasted energy of a braking vehicle, as long as all you are doing is harvesting waste heat how could it make the vehicle work harder.

This is why you should never take your wife to the state fair. My wife and I went to the state fair and one of the first exhibits we stopped at was the breeding bulls. We went up to the first pen and there was a sign attached that said, 'THIS BULL MATED 50 TIMES LAST YEAR'. My wife playfully nudged me in the ribs, smiled and said, 'He mated 50 times last year.' We walked to the second pen which had a sign attached that said, 'THIS BULL MATED 150 TIMES LAST YEAR'. My wife gave me a healthy jab and said, 'WOW! That's more than twice a week! You could learn a lot from him.' We walked to the third pen and it had a sign attached that said, 'THIS BULL MATED 365 TIMES LAST YEAR'. My wife was so excited that her elbow nearly broke my ribs, and said, 'That's once a day. You could REALLY learn something from this one.' I looked at her and said, "Go over and ask him if it was with the same old cow." My condition has been upgraded from critical to stable and I should eventually make a full recovery.

I thought it was interesting, I know better than to get excited but you never know. If these objects are indeed inside our galaxy their importance will go up for sure. As for FTL lets not get ahead of the game, speculations are fun but in this case it would appear serious science is involved, I wouldn't want to try and steal the thunder before we can be sure the lightning is real... If history is any measure of our success then we should have an open mind to new science and just because we are sure that man can't fly doesn't mean that supersonic jets aren't in our future...

It's ALIENS! https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630153-600-is-this-et-mystery-of-strange-radio-bursts-from-space/