Moontanman

I agree, i think this is more likely to happen in our future than biological evolution of such traits... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZvfW4sFp3M

I am not sure, the article negated to lay out a possible method of this occurring. Some sort of Virus transfer is the first thing that comes to my mind....

My monetary outlay will probably have to be less than $500, most probably less than 300 so it looks like the pawn shop for me... I am concerned with privacy when it comes to a wireless router vs ethernet type connection, I'm some what of a luddite and don't really like wireless phones either... I'm not a privacy nut but I do not like the idea of anyone listening in on my data stream for general principles.... using a computer pretty much negates any real privacy, i realize that but is a wireless router any more vulnerable than a physical connection?

What do you do about the population of prey animals? As Iggy pointed out the type of hunting you are talking about is not popular here and is seldom done. Most, but sadly not all, hunters here would consider such hunting to be unsportsmanlike like if not cruel. Dogs are often used to hunt in some places but the kill is carried out by guns not by allowing cherished dogs to risk harm.

The bolded part is simply not true. Your own guess? Despite what Sarah Palin said when she was running for vice president no we americans do not go around shooting endangered species or anything else for that matter, you do not have a good grip on american culture. Again you have no clue as to what you are talking about, half baked assumptions do not reality make... How would you suggest we rectify that? I agree that in America (and possibly other places as well) snakes are often killed out of hand, I told when I was a kid it was because god commanded that humans kill snakes... Just bullshit of course, I love snakes and never kill them, i prefer to move them, but while your cultural attitude toward guns is oppressive toward people who would like to not wait 10 minutes for the police to arrive after the crime has been committed, my cultural attitude is to be able to defend my self instead of being forced to watch and me and mine are abused by criminals. my stance is that gun ownership should be at least as difficult as driving a car but to eliminate them completely is simply not going to happen here and to make it happen would put far to many people in peril. I am glad you live in a place where you don't have to worry about crime affecting you or, more what I get from your post, you are passive enough to allow any crime to happen to you or another person and hope you'll have the opportunity to call the police after it happens. people here do not shoot everything in sight, in fact there are laws against discharging a weapon within 100 meters of an inhabited building, even if it's a snake. you have little or no understanding of what goes on here and your assumption that we can shoot everything we do not like is simply wrong...

And yet you continue to demonstrate a total lack of knowledge about what is going on. None of these things support option number 2 over option number 1, in fact option number 2 is impossible if you contend it is caused by magnetic field shifts. An enormous about of bullshit is prophesied by everyone from religious leaders to the crazy guy next door. Even a blind pig finds an occasional acorn. Prophecy is not any better than blind guesses, I prophecize there will be a major earth quake in the next month resulting in the loss of human lives.... want to bet I'll be wrong? There is no known mechanism that would cause the earth to shift it's poles in a short amount of time, the moon in fact prevents this from happening. magnetic poles can and do shift, there is a record of this happening but no record of the disaster that would ensue if the rotational poles were to switch... now which one seems more likely to happen?

Hunting is cruel? The laws were passed due to people thinking that hunting is cruel? Who or what then limits the population of animals who no longer have predators? Is your government actively restocking lions and bears to do the dirty work of culling the herds? Where I live animals like deer have actually become dangerous due to having no limits on their reproduction. In some areas where there is a limited number of people predators still roam but even in small towns populations of prey animals have become nuisances sometimes actually dangerous if for no other reason as vectors of rabies. Your views on hunting is not based in the reality of the situation. in most cases a hunter kills an animal quite cleanly with little or no suffering to the animal. In fact a "clean" kill is the order of the day for most hunters. (Yes i agree that allowing hounds to tear apart a cornered fox is cruel) Most predators in fact do not bother to cleanly kill and often start to eat an animal well before it slowly dies of blood loss as it is being eaten alive. Humans killed by predators experience this and it has been captured on audio tape, a human being held down by a bear and slowly eaten alive is a powerful message that animals care not for cruelty or lack there of... Top predators are necessary, prey animals can and will live among humans but few people want bears living in the patch of woods next door....

Horizontal gene transfer between higher animals has been thought to be rare, i remember reading someplace many years ago about turtle and rabbit genes being mixed by gene transfer, the kicker was of course the tale of the race between the tortoise and the hare. This article would at least seem to indicate that such gene transfer is not quite as rare as first assumed. i thought the transfer between cow and snake genomes was particularly interesting since one of the tales i grew up with involved snakes milking cows. http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/33829/title/DNA-Jumps-Between-Vertebrates/

A circulation reversal doesn't mean the moon reversed direction Semjase. The atmosphere of a planet like Titan, or the Earth, is but a tiny fraction of it's mass and could not have the effect you claim...

Semjase, the key word here is "if" if such a thing were found then yes an intelligent creator would have to be looked for. If we found a arrow head on Mars then yes we would want to look for it's creator. This would not be reason to assume a God as the creator... if science cannot explain something then god is not the default position, I have said this many times but I will repeat it here. At one time lightning was completely mysterious, no doubt it was a supernatural phenomena, everyone agreed it was the wrath of god, positive proof of god or at least a supernatural being of some sort... Now we know about how lightning is formed and how to stop it from hitting our property, just because something is not understood doesn't mean goddidit....

The original intent of this thread was to discuss the possibility that human like intelligence would mold the shape of the creatures that possess such intelligence. If it does does mold the shape of such creatures would it have the same or similar effect that water does on the creatures that live there, like the similar shapes of dolphins, ichthyosaurs, sharks, swordfish, even ocean going squids can assume that "shape" when swimming fast. Would the general shape of creatures with human like intelligence be similar? This would "not" mean they would fall in love and have children any more than a shark and a dolphin would do so but would their overall shapes be similar? Edited for clarity: "Not" added to sentence...

Immortal... do you actually read these "religious" texts or do you just assume they can't say the things you don't believe in. God, in all of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic mythos religious texts, often the demands the death of various people is not a misinterpretation, such acts are demanded by god quite often...

Check out Buck Wild On MTV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckwild_(TV_series) This is literally where I grew up, I recognized some of the houses in the previews, planned as a redneck version of Jersey shore it should be interesting....

I am trying to decide if I should get a lap top or a desk top PC. I can get a used lap top from the pawn shop for about $280, it has windows 7. I plan to write down the specs of the computers I am thinking of getting so I can get more precise advice but I would like to know the advantages and disadvantages of the two. I recently read that PC's are going the way of the dinosaur and lap tops are in decline as well in favor of things like tablets. If I get the lap top it will probably not have a physical connecting to my ISP like my PC does but will operate more like my net flix box on a wireless signal. what are the disadvantages and advantages of the two types of hook ups? All i do with a computer is use it as a word processor, surf the net, watch you tube and various forums. I have given some thought to making videos about various things but it is not a priority. Gaming is not my thing but my computer can't play them to begin with due to it's slow cpu speed and limited ram, with a computer that could play them I might like to try out gaming. Can anyone share their thoughts/experiences on this?

Since this is a science forum your belief is meaningless... So far so good on the explanation part, our entire first world civilization is based on our explanations of everything so far. Citation needed for this... I tend to agree with this but it's not part of the thread...

Evidently not everyone in England is thrilled with not being able to own a gun.

Evidence please, your assertion has not been shown to be true...

Damn that's disappointing....

If you have information that disagrees with potholer54 you should indeed inform him of that, it would not be the first time he has accepted new information and he is always gracious when corrected. I have completely lost tract of what you want to discuss here. How about in as few words as possible tell us what you want to assert here. Your title seems to indicate you want to say that life can and only form early in a planets existence. I would agree with that assertion. If you want to discuss how life formed then we both have many degrees of freedom to wave our arms since there is very little empirical data. Personally i think life forms quite easily, it's formation so soon after water became stable on the earth's surface would seem to indicate that. I do understand there are other schools of though on this but I was unaware that only Wächtershäuser's theory was valid. You start out saying you want to discuss possibilities, I assert that synergistic effects of many processes resulted in life as we know it, metabolism first... You appear to only want to support Wächtershäuser's theory, which I do think is very interesting and almost certainly is an important part of how life formed, or perhaps even why. The following video is a bit less simple than potholer54's video was, relevant data starts at about 02:40 I would genuinely like to discuss the possibilities with some one who's agenda is not proving evolution to be wrong, this is a very deep subject, I did not intend for potholer54's video to be the whole story or even most of it but simply to indicate that there are many possibilities which worked together to form life as we know it. I have no doubt there many intermediate steps some of which are no longer part of life. I "think" that the early earth was not only awash with complex organics, details of their possible origin would no doubt fill many books, but these molecules were locked in complex cycles that made other cycles possible and may have even inhibited others. I have read of so many different possible ways that these chemical cycles imitated the basic chemical processes that occur in cells today, no doubt chemosynthesis and photosynthesis were already present well before the first cell formed. My own personal opinion is that a process similar in some says to symbiosis resulted in these chemical cycles establishing themselves in close proximity to each other feeding off the results of each from building larger molecules out of smaller ones to taking these molecules and making complex organic polymers that interacted with others in or near an energy gradient that drove the entire process. No doubt there were several of these interdependent processes that were included in the first aggregates of chemical cycles that eventually formed structures that could be called simple self replicating self regulating self sustaining "cells" I am not sure they would be recognized as life as we know it now but they would have been the beginning of life. In the interest of honesty I have to inform you that i do not meet the requirements you set forth to be qualified to discuss this. If you will forgive my the obvious leaning of my explanations toward trying to explain this to Creationist types, i will attempt remember that I am not debating if it happened but how it happened... Again, this is a simplified description of a few of the processes that might have been involved, relevant data starts at about 02:40 Again i will say that my assertion trimmed to it's most basic level is that prebiotic chemistry went through several if not many steps that most resembled the evolutionary process of symbiosis rather than a great many different avenues to life that competed with each other directly for resources... Even evolution can be said to have been driven by symbiosis, eukaryotic cells, the basis of all known complex life attest to this...

that is because no such reversal took place nor could it...

You have assumed that decay rates in plasma have any connection to radiometric dating. Several different types of radiometric data support each other along with the geological column and the fossil record. Nothing supports creationism. Decay rates in plasma have nothing to do with radiometric dating because plasma is not dated. For radiometric dating to be suspect you would have to show how radioactive decay can be affected in solid rock, there is no evidence to support this... It is easy to show that modern animals did not come into existence as they are now, You will find no bunny rabbits in the Cambrian era, so creationism is false... Can you show some evidence of that? Again no evidence of this is or has been seen, if such an effect was happening it would be easy to detect.... and no such effect has been detected...

I can see the movie trailer now.... Terminator X Aerial Drones take over the world.... "All my God, it's an aerial drone nest... look down there, millions of aerial drone nests.... They're replicating!!!! "

Try this video

Mostly because what we spend on NASA is a drop in the ocean compared to what we spend on other things. Your OP insinuation that NASA's budget would somehow make a significant difference in feeding the poor is misleading. In fact jobs based in the technology developed by research into space travel does far more to alleviate the plight of the poor than giving the money directly to the poor.

Yes, even if radiometric dating was wrong evolution would still be mostly right and creationism would still be demonstrably false...