Moontanman

I thought all the poor people were going to eat the rich on that day... I wish these guys would figure it out and stick to a plan...

Oops... my bad...

A film with a great many dishonest quote mines just in it's trailer is beginning to make waves. The film due out soon espouses a geocentric universe and suggests everyone else is wrong... <iframe src="http://videos.rawstory.com/video/The-Principle-Documentary-Trail/player?layout=&read_more=1" width="416" height="321" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Evolution Scattered across the sky, points of light to the naked eye Fiery orbs of red to blue, storms of violence unimagined to the mind Magnetic flames caress companions held in gravity’s bond Creating colors of heat-less flame in the sky Curtains of light shimmer and race Evidence of magnetic defense from the companion’s heart Allowing a strange twist of entropy to multiply, exist and expand Defiance! Of the law that binds time and space Order and arrangement, chemical reactions grow more complex In spite of the necessity to become simple and scattered Things that move and should not exist, Mostly their form is no more than specks Competition spawns in entropy’s mirror Cooperation magnifies the mirror’s effect Forming masses of pulsating beings with no sense of time Neoteny allows the young to steal from the old, that which is superior Complexity drives the defiance of law Soon awareness of surrounding space Drives the increasing awareness of self and others The more aware leads the less to their maw While others escape to new spaces the aggressive can’t pursue Other less mobile forms raise antennae to absorb All the energy of the glowing light from the sky Competition is fierce between the motile and those that look to the blue Competition and cooperation step up the pace What will grow, multiply, dominate, or die Soon the liquid that dissolves the chemicals from others No longer surrounds those that have moved to the surface The surface is dry most of the time Requires sex cells to become motile When the rain comes, unknown and unseen, sex covers the wet earth Sex cells swim up the trunks of trees allowing growth to dizzying heights The ones that move will not be left behind in this assault on the land Hatched in the water but able to walk and slither Animals join the plants in conquest of the land Eating not only the tall forms that feed on light but each other as well Eons pass neoteny makes the grade again and again Animals revert to their larval forms again to hasten change Soon warm beings rule the cool dry land First four legs then two strut out of the forest and across the land On of these tall neotenic beings walks into the morning sun His mate and child walk with him Large brains, opposable thumbs, reach for the ground Pulling up a flower yellow as the sun The man holds the yellow sex organ of the plant and sees beauty His mate smiles, they turn to continue on towards domination of the world Michael Hissom

This one is listed as the biggest... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinosaurus

These people are building hive with high tech sensors to keep track of what it going on inside the hive and at in a small way looking to find out more about colony collapse disorder... http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229644.700-wire-up-hives-to-keep-bees-happy-and-healthy.html?

In a recent post I admitted to a life long struggle with this, it's funny once you realize it's not real, until then it's terrifyingly real.. My sense of humor is a bit dark as well.. .

I have considerable experience in captive breeding of crustaceans, the planktonic larvae is a bit of a challenge but not that difficult to overcome, I see a bright future in giant land crab ranching... The crab pictured in the OP is a gravid female...

I understand you would have to nudge it, Larry Nivin's ringworld had to be nudged as well. How difficult would it be for a ring around an asteroid or comet type body maybe 10 miles in diameter?

I want one of these as a pet, it would be like the land hermit crabs, start out with a small one, train it as it grows, it would be a great way to look into arthropod intelligence...

I had a thought... in the attempt at SETI have the idea of mega structures been discussed anyplace? I know i haven't read much about it if anything. There are some possible mega structures that could be seen across interstellar distances. There is an orbit called a rosette where 5 masses can orbit around a large one if they are all the same distance from each other. last about 5 seconds with out some energy input intelligently directed at keeping them that way, or the idea of a sphere surrounding a star to collect all of it's energy. I have seen some images of proposed space structures humans could make, the recent asteroid that was found to have a ring made me think of a ring structure orbiting a small asteroid, this could have some advantages over just a torus free floating in space. The asteroid could be source of materials to build the ring and keep it supplied with various materials like volatile's. I guess what I am asking is has such a search for mega structures been undertaken? The sphere around a star would emit IR and could be seen by an IR telescope. I am torn between thinking that such mega structures should be common if sentience is common in the universe or maybe we wouldn't recognize what mega structures aliens might make...

Immortal jellyfish... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

It would be more like a giant Titan, than Earth, hydrocarbon seas, frozen water instead of silicates, I wonder if the water ice, hard as granite would be as impure as silicates on the earth are and what would those impurities be. Veins of sodium metal? Or salts? It's interesting to think of far the comparison can be taken...

I am in the middle of a little discussion on face book about this very thing, evidently I simply do not believe hard enough... Moving planets around in the wink of an eye with out disturbing the rest of the solar system might make me give it some thought... Let's see, exchanging Venus and Mars would be impressive... The fact remains that which God did it would be the next question, hard to get religious people to even acknowledge that there could be a god other than the one they like...

No, I was talking about the problems of cross cultural and cross language communication.

This thread is rather interesting to me due to the obvious language barrier but we are also trying to reach across a cultural barrier as well. The OP is making several assumptions that are, i would expect, based in his or her culture. The more progressive culture of the west (I know a generalization here) starts with a completely different set of assumptions. Except for our right wing religious subculture (yeah I am biased) which seems to strongly mirror the OP and his stance on various social issues. I wonder how much of the disconnect is language and how much is cultural? I am sure the OP is an intelligent articulate individual so some cultural influence has to be here as well. Of course I am sure he thinks our general stance on this issue is strange as well, reminds me very much of the disconnect between the culture of the 1940s and 50s and the culture of the 60s and 70s i grew up in..

Unless you can demonstrate it to someone else and show them it happened all you have is personal experience and we have millions of people who have personally experienced alien abduction but cannot show anyone else the validity of it. Is it more likely they dreamed or hallucinated it or that aliens can abduct people from apartment buildings in the middle of major cities with no one else ever seeing anything even the people sleeping in bed with them? Another way to look at this, and this is a loosely copied piece by Aron Ra to which I give full credit. Lets say you walk outside your house a see a gigantic sauropod dinosaur walking down your street, it's the middle of the night and no one else is up. You run up to it and you can smell it hear it see it and touch it. You could even climb up and ride it if you wanted. You run back in your house to get your camcorder but when you come back out side the animal is gone. No trace of it exists, no huge piles of dung, no foot prints, no destruction such a huge beast would surely cause in a major urban center. Some other guy claims to have seen a dinosaur but it was obviously a theropod and not the same one you saw, after weeks of no sight of the animal even you would have to agree that maybe it wasn't real.... You saw it and smelled it and touched it but no one but you saw it and it vanished the minute you went into your house. You can still claim you saw it but could you honestly claim it was real?

She blocked me and stopped answering my e-mails so to be honest i don't think anything I say will convince her. She follows the Ken Ham type crowd that would rather think reality is a scientific conspiracy, makes my head explode...

That all depends on where you live doesn't it?

I am thinking seriously of rereading harry Turtledove's series World War, where aliens attack in the middle of WW2, it's one of the book series i consider a classic... I have it in my hand, hard back, nice binding, the rustle of the paper... Yeah you know who you are...

I know this is supposed to be new and never before seen on public medium but I have seen this footage several years ago on a tv program. It's still impressive and I would be willing to bet things have progressed further by now, I have seen some footage of Navel lasers that were impressive as well, makes you wonder what they have currently when you see this stuff for sure..

It perplexed me, that's why i posted it to the lounge instead of a more serious thread but I did think of something that might have done it. A dust devil, at twilight, static electricity... seems reasonable, they just reported it on national news as well, ABC World News Tonight... More from NASA http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=46974

Now if only they would allow others the same simple courtesy much conflict could be avoided...