Moontanman

Some place in the bible it specifically says that the smell of burning flesh is pleasing to the Lord...

Mormyrid fishes have a higher EQ than mammals or even humans the system loses it's significance when used on non mammals. That is not an apt comparison...the biomass of algae is billions of times more than all the clothing ever made much less stone age clothing... What animals are you talking about?

No it doesn't, crows have brains smaller than opossums and they use tools and language and transmit culture to their young. I'm not sure what you are getting at here. No i am saying they left no direct descendants, birds are not the direct descendants of troodons, in fact birds existed well before troodonts. Again, what are you saying? After 65,000,000 years there would be clothing left behind from stone age humans? What man made living domain are you talking about?

I agree. I don't see how you can assert that... They left no descendants and a few million years is the time it took for humans to go from slightly more capable apes to to landing on the moon, the fossil record is not that precise...

Yes but the brains of birds do not follow the same EQ as the brains of mammals so it is not a fair comparison... Not to mention the incompleteness of the fossil record...

The only real evidence we see in the fossil record is the same evidence we are currently leaving... Mass extinction, the current human caused mass extinction is comparable to the one at the K/T boundary.. there is some reason to date the chicxulub crater as well before the K/T boundary BTW... No it suggests that dinosaurs could have been more capable than we give them credit for, if humans had never made it past the stone age, considering how rare human fossils are, I doubt it's a forgone conclusion we would see fossils of obviously advanced dinosaurs. In fact troodonts seemed to be quite close. http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/typesofdinosaurs/tp/smartestdinos.htm

Humans are pack animals, wolves are not bipedal and do not have hands your analogy doesn't hold up yes but you implied they could not have discovered that stones could be made sharp EQ is the term not IQ Encephalization Quotient, not Intelligence Quotient and the question remains would we see it if we did discover it or would it be dismissed out of hand as most OMPA's generally are especially when they are found in strata as old as dinosaurs... Fossilization is rare, no doubt that most animals are completely missing from the fossil record...

Admittedly such speculation is far fetched but there were bipedal dinosaurs with hand like appendages and the brains of birds who are dinosaurs suggest that dinosaur brains need not be as big as mammal brains or human brains and the EQ that is applied to mammals is not applicable. Some Dinosaurs are thought to have been pack animals which implies communication skills. Humans accomplished quite a bit before we discovered metals and the ability to smelt them and we did it with out coal or oil. Stone tools should not be discounted, obsidian can be used to make ultra sharp tools, far sharper than metal tools and in fact obsidian is still used to today to operate on humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian Since absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence the question remains what would we see in the fossil record and would we recognize it if we did see it? Are Ompa's being found and automatically discounted? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact

yes but we are almost certainly missing millions of them, I think it's reasonable to assume that space age technology is off the table,

This is not true, fossilization is quite rare, we see only a small fraction of what was in fossils...

Why is the stuff he made up any more important than the stuff made up by anyone else?

Actually dolphins have been observed using tools as well but the question is not what dinosaurs could have accomplished in 65 million years. The subject is could we see evidence of dinosaurian technology in the fossil record, would we recognize it as such? .

All this really means is we really don't know, our mathematical concepts break down before T=0. Anything else is simply speculation...

I think the video says they have solved the instability problems but the radiation would be a bit of a bummer. This drive would be good for sub light travel, it would pretty much open up the solar system and put the nearest stars within relatively reasonable time frames...

I think it interesting that the amount of energy necessary has gone from the mass of Jupiter to the energy out put of the US in one year... of course it is still exotic energy...

We are talking about technology, neither apes or dolphins build anything, apes do use tools but they consists of sticks...

Your views on this are fascinating from the stand point of differing cultural views, you are obviously quite a bit better off than me and have more choices in how you live bit most importantly is your culture. I love to watch English television shows, Prime Evil is one of my favorites, even if it had been set in the US and none of the actors had an english accent it would be obvious it wasn't an American show. My point about the blow to the head predisposed no alarm system after you asserted you had an alarm and could escape out a side door if necessary I have never been in a house that the bedroom had a separate exit from the rest of the house. You state it like it is a common state of affairs. if you lived in my house and armed intruders came in, even with the alarms you would be toast while I could hold them at gun point until the police arrived or if they tried to harm me anyway i could blow them into the next room... My cultural values say this is an acceptable outcome while yours evidently do not... interesting...

The energy come from fission, not combustion... Oppps swansonT cross post...

So the best case scenario is stone age, flint tools?

No I didn't mean chemical burning, that is why I put "burn" in italics, the radioactive waste is altered on a nuclear scale and energy is released in the process...

I agree, but uranium reactors produce huge amounts of very long lived radioactive waste. Thorium reactors not only produce much less waste is it much shorter lived and Thorium reactors can be used to "burn" the waste we currently have...

Thorium reactors are fundamentally different...

Again Chernobyl was a very poor design and it was designed to use uranium and produce plutonium as was the Tokyo reactor. Even if the reactors were meant to only produce energy they were still of the design that uses uranium to produce plutonium, energy is just a by product even if it is the sole reason the reactors were built.

Or the outcome will show that god ignores everyone equally...

I'm not sure if this is relevant but it is possible to build nuclear reactors that cannot melt down, current reactors were designed with production of plutonium for bombs in mind. this has been handed down in the design since the first reactors....