Moontanman

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....

Possibly you are correct, my current gun cost less than $400 US, but it has the advantage of not being negated by other technology or power failures and when i move it comes with me. I don't consider myself to be a gun nut, i don't think I'll ever have to fight the government nor do I think I could. Home protection is the sole purpose of my gun, it's designed with that option in mind and nothing else... Dogs are my first line of defense, an early warning that something is wrong but they cannot defend me. No, the only realistic way is to convince people they have no need for a gun, want doesn't figure into it for me, a gun is a huge responsibility, a gun is death waiting to be unleashed, no sane person wants to kill someone. I consider my gun to be a deterrent, a last resort, not something to be used to attack but to prevent such an attack. At least I can hold a criminal until the police arrive to take over... A criminal would have to be doubly insane to go up against a 12 gauge shotgun designed to be used in close quarters almost as easily as a pistol. You seem to have an unrealistic fear of guns... possibly i have unrealistic expectations of guns... but I do not fear them, I have lived my entire life with guns, I consider them a useful tool nothing more. BTW, i don't know how houses are designed where you live but I would have to make it past any intruder to get away, this has been true for every house I have ever lived in... Insurance, that is the word I was looking for to describe my gun...

Doesn't that suggest that virtually all children are being abused? This is at the crux of the issue i think...

John, do you realize how elitist this is? Few people I know can have to high tech protection you enjoy, most home invasions are sudden and catastrophic, I keep dogs to lessen this effect but even a guy who sneaks into your home is most likely done it before, he knows what to do and since few people have the alarms you talk of your first hint of an intruder could very be the blow of a ball bat. Recently in my town there was a rash of home invasions, for the most part they didn't even steal anything the goal was to rape the woman and humiliate the man by making him watch. Home invasion has many motives many of which are inscrutable to men like us and that makes them even more dangerous. I wish I lived in a world where intruders had to navigate a series of high tech barriers before they got to me, i wish i lived in a world where the police arrived in time to do much more than gather evidence of the crime. I don't live in that world, I live in a world where meth heads walk past my house 24/7, where any source of money is a temptation and harming someone to get money is a reasonable course of action for some people. The fact remains that if it were possible to remove all guns from my society I would gladly give mine up, having a gun is a huge responsibility, anyone who feels other wise is not playing with a full deck and shouldn't have a gun to start with... Of course that is yet another conversation...

If someone is raised by adults who say that unicorns are real but invisible and that they watch over you all the time and that questioning them is wrong and after you die a unicorn will arrive to carry you to never never land. Everyone you love and respect believes this and asserts it as real from an early age you would believe it, would that make you delusional? or simply misinformed?

What definition of delusional are you using iNow?

John it is so easy to stand off at a distance and make these assertions but how do you take away all the guns? Your own country has not done so and gun violence still happens. Your assertion that you personally are in less danger of being shot is not valid. You simply cannot defend your self from someone with gun or a ball bat, you are at the mercy of any intruder that comes into your home. It might not happen where you live but if it did you would have to rely on the good intentions of someone who is a criminal and has nothing but his own well being on his mind. Not leaving witnesses could be on his agenda and you would be eliminated out of hand.

The assertion of god has never led to any new information, god never knows more than you do. I am an empirical rationalist, to believe something is true I need evidence of it. I think it's demonstrably true that religion exists but the existence of the god they worship remains a question that has yet to be answered... Yes but there are no writings attributed to god that pass the reality test, if there was a god you would expect at least some of them to be verifiable... For those of you who do not understand why this is so significant i suggest watching this series of videos, it is time well spent...

That is not a valid comparison, if a God wrote a paper on dark energy you would expect, and rightly so, that it be absolutely correct in every detail. if someone asserted that god wrote that paper and then you found evidence to the contrary it would put the divine source of that information into serious dispute...

Well none of the writings attributed to or inspired by any god reveled anything of substance beyond what the people who wrote them knew. The Holy Books to me are evidence to the contrary...

I think I've said it already but guns in school has been the norm here for 40 years, armed guards... no one raises an eyebrow...

The fact this happened to children has significance to those who would sensationalize this event. "won't someone please think of the children" has been used against everything from comic books to atheism. Emotional content not only sells it convinces people of things that are insanely unlikely. The whole thing about child abuse and stranger danger is meaningless if you look at the real world, most abuse is by family members... Sensationalism rules... reality drools...

Except for oil, oil is the fly in the ointment for any intelligent species on the rise. Conditions deep in the earth are thought to be oxidizing so any carbon comes back as CO2 and not hydrocarbons...

This idea that either everyone should be armed or no one should be has to have some sort of median that is between the two extremes. I would suggest that most killings are done by illegal guns not by legal gun owners. If you take away guns from honest civilians then only criminals will have guns is not the point either. Mass shootings still occur in countries with the most stringent gun laws. We as a society have to decide whether or not we will allow for the possibility of illegal gun violence. If the answer is no, then what do we do to stop it? Arm everyone who wants to be armed or violate every ones rights as free men and do a house to house search of our entire society, such a search would result in a great many deaths but it would weed out the nutters. A huge number of guns are completely unregistered so only a house to house search of everyone could take away all guns. a ban on assault weapons is like banning high powered cars to stop auto accidents. Half measures will not result in half responses and far more children die of starvation than gun violence, several orders of magnitude btw. We have to decide what we are willing to do, it's a sure bet that taking guns away from the population will not result in no gun deaths unless we get them all... I don't see a way for this to happen, I really don't. But what then? if some asswipe kills several people with a knife do we suddenly start banning knives? How about hammers? Teeth? No one can guarantee the safety of everyone in all situations, we have to decide what risks we are willing to take and then stick to it, in the US so far we have decided to let people own guns, the barn door is open and the horse has already run away.... the egg has broken, putting it back together is easy to talk about very difficult to do...

That's not entirely accurate, if the correct exotic energy is discovered warp speed is possible, it does not violate relativity but it does take lots of negative energy.

Did you actually read that link? it says nothing about gods... yours or anyone else's ..

Oh yeah? Give it whirl, you got nothing and your continued claims of scientific evidence are nothing but horse feathers, I for one say you should put up or shut up...

I will agree that your scenario is workable. I would have to agree with this assessment for the most part I think we can agree with this as well. This assumption is one of the likely scenarios to explain the great silence but there are other more likely scenarios as well, the fact that radio signals are absorbed by the interstellar medium to the extent that even the nearest star is unlikely to be able to pick up random radio signals from us unless we beam a tight signal directly at them. O2 is not a prerequisite for life. Again O2 is not a prerequisite for life. This is something we share.

I wonder what a real paleontologist would do if she found an arrow head among dinosaur bones? Of course the nutters lay claim to such things being found. Anachronisms are touted by many people... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-bizarre-archeological-discoveries.php