Moontanman

Cool, I didn't know they were that docile, I've let tarantulas crawl on me before but I was never keen on the whole picking them up part, looked like an easy way to piss them off. Lots of spiders if not most will crawl on you with out biting, black widows will crawl on you with out biting, wolf spiders, which we have around here will passively crawl onto your hand but attempt to pick one up by latching onto it and you'll get bit, not the end of the world but painful... From your link...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130820083654.htm

A couple of interesting links pertaining to this subject... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130820083649.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120510100217.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120417113652.htm

You're too late, the Evangelical Mega Churches have beaten you to it...

Um... exactly where is the hand of god... exactly?

ii I think it's very interesting that a rogue planet could have a hydrogen atmosphere and water oceans due to internal heat and greenhouse effect of hydrogen... makes for some interesting bio chemistry speculation... VENUS IS A SLUT...

yes, I am sure some people do...

I would say they are only mistaken if they take someone else's word for it, if they see Jesus themselves or feel the hand of god or an alien anal probe they are delusional or lying...

Define mistaken... I can be mistaken that I think my car can drive across a rain swollen stream but if i said I think my car could fly across... It looks to me like lie or delusion is the only two possibilities. I know it's anecdotal but I know quite a large number of people who appear to completely rational in every way except for religion, if you were at a party with them you would have no problem liking them, see no reason to think of them as anything but sane people but when the god delusion begins to climb out I'm betting you would be looking to make sure you knew where the exits were...

I would be willing to bet the farm on it... You do make a good point about delusional not being equal to crazy, a great many delusional people who are obviously delusional can and do manage to operate successfully in our society, in fact convincing others that your delusion is real has made a great many people fabulously wealthy but they are still delusional...

"Two men say they're Jesus, one must be wrong..." Dire Straights... I Yes or he is delusional... If I were to say aliens came into my bedroom last night and preformed an anal probe, am I lying or delusional or do aliens appear and preform anal probes? Which is more likely?

If they had video I might consider it...

So we finally get back to what i posted in post #2?

Don't apologize to those star wars apologists... Star Trek is much better.... This thread started out as pure horse feathers and went down hill from there as for half full vs half empty, I'm a realist...

The main reason we don't use them is that they don't produce bomb grade plutonium... The first reactors were used to make bombs, the technology was developed because we thought we wanted huge amounts of plutonium, now we have lots of plutonium but no one to blow up with it...

Trust me, you still don't want to pick it up....

I see where the disconnect is coming from Sam, you think life is just a matter of mixing the right chemicals in a test tube and Viola a microbe... Not even close, the chemicals were the entire earth, the test tube was all of earths oceans, the time frame was millions of years billions of chemical reactions per second and the first life forms or protobionts were just the first in a long line of steps to microbes.,..

You were mistaken... Again, how do you know it did not? We have no idea how the biochemistry of those algae worked and gene transfer at the time did indeed negate common decent. There are three domains of life, current thought proposes a fourth but the consensus is that life, before common decent began, was a mishmash of life forms trading genes, out of an unknown number of life forms three basic domains of life emerged all of which more or less shared the same nucleotides the possible forth is RNA based but is parasitical on other life forms. Conditions currently on the Earth are not conductive to abiogenesis and there is good reason not to expect new life to spring up due to current life forms occupying all the places life can form. There is also the possibility that we simply haven't looked the right way as well. Current life detection methods are limited to life as we know it, a shadow biosphere has been proposed but all we ever check for are known nucleotides how can we check for something we do not know what it is? How would a non dna life form look like? How would we know if a bacterium used different chemistry? All we currently look for is life as we know it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere

Um so you've gone from it only happened once to it doesn't happen very often? How do you know it didn't?

I absolutely love this picture, i wish i knew if there was a book connected with it... No, in fact this is not true, the conditions on the earth today do not allow for the formation of new life, not only is oxygen a problem for the formation of life any complex organics are immediately eaten by current life forms... Yes they are pretty common here in fact it's all we have because that's what evolved here, I think it's likely similar biochemistry has evolved elsewhere but to think that what evolved here is the only way is possible for life to have evolved is a bit more than unsupportable...

I don't think the improbability argument is valid Sam, with only one data point we really don't know how improbable abiogenesis really is but I do know that spontaneous formation of DNA base pairs is not the current scientific consensus of how life originated on our planet. Also the idea of the Earth life as we know it being perfectly suited for life is bass ackwards, life evolved to fit the Earth and it is quite easy to speculate about how the Earth or another planet might very well be better suited for life as we know it. Quite a bit of the Earth is not well suited for life as we know it, in fact places like deserts and ice sheets are no where nearly as well suited for life as a rain forest for instance. An Earth like planet with rain forest type conditions all over it's surface might very well be better suited for life as we know it. (just to suggest an easy exception) Of course I'd be remiss if i didn't give a shout out for life not as we know it (personally I have more and more of a problem with this idea) but lets not discount silanes dissolved in liquid methane or boron life, Nitrogen Phosphorous, or other increasingly weird life forms just because we haven't seen them. We have found life as we know it in some pretty unlikely environments just here on the Earth, in fact complex surface life can be said to be the extremophiles here on Earth with a huge ecosystem under ground based on chemical energy rather than EM radiation, this ecosystem has been estimated to be much larger than all complex surface life combined... Any place we find complex chemicals and an energy source is justifiably under suspicion of harboring some sort of self replicating molecular systems... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrobiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry http://www.astrobiology.com/ http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/nitrogen-based_life.html

Yes, in fact they have been... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet

Krash, DNA is information only because we label it as such and that label allows us to understand it better, in fact DNA is a chemical, it reacts in specific ways with other chemicals that react in specific ways with others and so on, in of it's self DNA is no more information that shells sifted by the surf is information.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu3HqSB4Its Umm why are my youtube links not showing up?

There are also degrees of faith and belief, if iNow told me he saw a shooting stat last night I'd believe him, if he said he saw a bolide I might question him a bit about it but I wasn't there he was and in the grand scheme of things it makes little difference if he is telling the truth or not. But if he told me he saw an alien space craft and these aliens told him to go out and change the world to their tastes and that i had to believe or the aliens were gonna get me I'd want a few photos at least...

Sad to see zorro go but since I hate for people to think I bailed out in the middle of a discussion the real world held a bit more attraction last night and now I have a head ache and I slept late... but sometimes it is better to allow someone who is digging a hole to realize the sky is getting smaller by themselves than keep pointing it out to them. I can indeed answer zos question, in fact it is quite simple, I have a video that destroys the information argument as effectively as a nuclear bomb but in the hope that zo will read this after he forgives me for having a life I'll attempt to paraphrase the argument as I understand it... This is really three questions: there is no gap and no first reproductive pair... I am not going to be a smart ass, I will answer this bizarrely formed question bearing in mind there was no first reproductive pair, humans, and yes I know you are asking about humans really, evolved over many thousands if not millions of generations from what we would call, if the were alive today, APES, not a pair of apes but a population of apes that slowly over time and many generations acquired the characteristics we would call human. If you traced your ancestors back through time there would be no point at which an ape would give birth to a human, at no point could you point to an individual and say he or she was human but his parents were apes. Just in case you were not specifically speaking of humans I will say you could follow your ancestry back through to the first Eukaryota in just this way to the same effect, further back than that and common ancestry was not occurring due to gene transfer between bacteria. This is a bit more difficult to answer, like asking when humans first evolved eyes, all re-productively alive and healthy animals have a set of genes they received from their ancestors, I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at but if you are suggesting that the information of those genes had a source then you are mistaken since genes are chemicals not information...