Moontanman

The problem would depend on different factors, which religion you follow, how strictly you follow it would seem to be two important parameters that would affect the "cognitive load" of belief vs science...

Simply amazing PeterJ, you cannot even come close to refuting anything I have asked, you ignored reasonable questions and make unreasonable assertions and dismiss me like i am an idiot child... You really shouldn't try to bullshit a bullshiter... arguing whether or not reality is real is as meaningless as arguing how many aliens it takes to change a lightbulb if they are wearing purple hats. Generally speaking i use the word bullshit sparingly, when addressing the absurd I like to use the word horsefeathers. Care to guess why bullshit is not my word of choice? You can make baseless assertions until the universe dies of heat death but without some means of falsification they remain speculations. YdoaPs gave me an example I could understand, my main problem with it was his assertion that it would always be that way. You on the other hand ignore questions, ridicule, insult, and make grandiose claims that you apparently cannot back up. I asked you to tell me one example of a theory you have refuted, all I got was insult and ridicule. The absurdity of your position gives it the name of horsefeathers, it doesn't deserve to be called bullshit, bullshit is real and can be used, horsefeathers describes your arguments perfectly... absurd impossibility... As for the brain in a box meme you keep alluding to, yes I do understand it, it's an interesting idea but ultimately meaningless unless you can test it, no one seems to want to take the test.

you shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun, if this is a dream then you are ok, if not then well you no longer exist...

Your take on Dawkins is interesting, i find him to be pretty much exactly the opposite but then I see him as mostly jousting with the religious extremists so I find his approach to be pretty much spot on.

Actually the environment inside the womb can be influenced by many factors, not all of them genetic, some are environmental, lack of trace elements and vitamins, pathogens, injury, it's a long list...

The main problem as i see it is that we don't exactly have a huge stockpile of missiles capable of leaving Earth orbit.

So baseless speculation is what we are talking about? The shotgun test falsifies this but it is quite permanent...

If Hawking is correct a MBH of the mass of phobos would be like a traveling nuclear explosion, radiating away enormous amounts of energy, the smaller the black hole the faster they evaporate so the size is important but in an inverse way... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

Actually yes but it goes deeper than that. dreams make no sense, have no constants or rules. If I step in front of a bus while dreaming i wake up uninjured, if i dream of falling I wake up whole and not pancaked on the ground, it seems to be a reasonable test...

Obviously you didn't read my link and Krauss does indeed suggest ex nilhilo creation which is what creationists would have us believe as well. The Ekpyrotic universe sidesteps this problem by proposing a multi dimensional metaverse of which our Brane is just a small part. I think the shotgun test pretty much establishes the rather high probability of materialism being true. We never observe anything that would contradict materialism, in face of a total lack of evidence to support anything but materialism the default position would be materialism.

If there really is a problem with exploding water towers the most likely route would seem to be methane dissolved in the water out gassing into the tank. It's not unusual for ground water to contain methane, in some areas water from the tap will appear to ignite if exposed to a flame. A water tank containing a significant amount of methane gas could ignite, I can see it exploding under the right conditions...

btw, are you suggesting that a magnetic field can block electromagnetic radiation?

No, I can be sure i am not in a dream at the moment because I can permanently injure myself, in a dream any such problems disappear when i wake up... seriously you can't tell a dream from reality? btw, I am not a big fan of the something from nothing idea, just because we can't at this time know what came before doesn't mean it's nothing. A Brief Introduction to the Ekpyrotic Universe http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/ This idea is the one that feels right to me but of course that is meaningless. But it does explain what came before...

I eat red meat occasionally, i eat eggs and drink milk but mostly I eat seafood, finfish and shellfish, living near the ocean makes this easier, and I do like chicken, I mostly buy free range chicken when i can. having grown up on a farm and seeing animals treated with kindness and respect... before we killed them... the cruelty of factory farming disturbs me. One the best ways to get an asswhipping when i was a kid was to be caught being cruel to the animals, we never killed an animal in front of other animals and the killing was as quick and painless as possible. As for wild game, we are animals and so are they, we are both part of the biosphere and killing game animals for meat is not a problem for me. Killing for sport is a problem so I don't do it... I do fish quite a bit, but i release any i am not going to eat. I am somewhat of a vegetable gormond, I do love vegetables and garden as much as i can, I could eat only vegetables if i wanted but i like meat...

Ophiolite I used to have a link to a site that allowed that calculation to be made just by plugging in the parameters of molecular weight of the gasses and the gravity but it is long gone. I was basing my estimate on what i remembered from that site. Earths Moon, by that sites figures, could hold onto an atmosphere in the range of 50,000 years for a half life, Mars was considerably longer and it's half life was in the hundreds of thousands of years. But I no longer have that info and I have no idea how accurate the site was... The idea of changing the rotation of mars is interesting, would such a change have a chance of restoring a magnetic field? maybe speeding the planet up a little? if we are going to slow it down lets go for a 36 hour day, no need to stop at 28. I used to work 12 hour shifts, 12 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep and 16 hours of play, sounds good to me...

I suggest you read "something from nothing" by Lawrence Krauss.... To be fair it's the only possibility we have empirical evidence for...

Again I'll try to clue you in, the earths magnetic field is not the main shielding, the magnetic field helps and it prevents loss of the atmosphere but a thick atmosphere is more than enough shielding to allow us to walk around on the surface. Charged particles from the sun are directed to the poles by the magnetic field and it's safe to walk around there... Actually the ISS is inside the earths magnetic field, it's material shielding is minimal...

Think again... how long do you think it would take Mars to lose it's atmosphere? One comet would of course be a drop in the bucket, but just for shits and giggles lets say we could magically transfer an atmosphere equal to Earths instantly to Mars. First of all it would take Mars hundreds of thousands of years to lose such an atmosphere, maybe millions. Secondly such an atmosphere is considerable protection from solar radiation, in fact more than enough to allow humans to live on the surface, the Earths poles is where solar particle radiation is deposited on the Earth, doesn't seem to keep humans or animals from living there but it makes for a beautiful aurora display...

No, you don't get to proclaim that without some evidence, in fact there are other schools of thought that say hormonal imbalances in the womb are a major cause of homosexuality. Again, you have made a positive assertion and by the rules you need to back this up by evidence not by simply asserting it as truth. Any poll you might make with the general population is indeed biased by cultural demands and in our western world those demands are generally based in religion. You keep making these assertions about what other heterosexual or homosexual people feel but you provide no evidence to back it up. In fact I really don't understand your position on this and why you are so emotional about it.

TAR2, we have discussed the natural origin of morals and social behavior here so many times and you want to give the idea of a god credit for those things that occur naturally in social animals like humans? I have to ask why?

That neg point was a mistake bignose, someone please give him a pos rep to cancel it out. Hitting Mars with comets is a way to add volatiles to the planet which is one thing it lacks and makes it inhospitable to earth life. Additional CO2, water, ammonia, and methane ices are one way to terraform Mars.

A great deal of land is not suitable for growing plants humans can eat, grazing animals raised on this land are a reasonable way to use that land. No matter where you live rats and mice must be controlled to prevent ruining a great deal of grain or other plant foods. I don't see how these things can be disputed and organic farming is not as efficient at producing food as you seem to think, I grew up on a farm, pests are a real problem and must be controlled even on organic farms by natural insecticides. Not using any insecticides is a good way to have zero crops...

A possible new type of dark matter, sounds more than a bit like Mirror Matter to me. http://www.space.com/21508-dark-matter-atoms-disks.html?cmpid=514630 Mirror Matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_matter I've communicated several times with a leading proponent of Mirror Matter, Robert Foot, about ways to collect Mirror Matter that has fallen to Earth, the ease of detection depends on parameters that have yet to established but it is possible that Mirror Matter space dust falls to earth and could be found under certain circumstances.

http://theconversation.com/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-theres-more-animal-blood-on-your-hands-4659 Eating vegetarian could result in more blood on your hands than being the omnivores humans naturally are. Eating vegan can result in far more sentient animals deaths than our current practices of eating red meat.