Moontanman

Actually I am quite prepared to defend that one word. Sex, DNA, replicating chemicals, even though some individuals might not be having sex or even desire sex virtually everything we do is connected to sex in some way. That and hydrogenation of Carbon Dioxide....

One word.... Sex.

Most people don't understand the ideas behind it enough to really know one way or another. I would think a scientist who didn't believe in human caused global weather change would be suspect, if my limited understanding of it is even close to correct... I have read some interesting "ideas" that human caused weather change could be preventing us from sliding into another glacial age. Something about the current arrangement of continents favor intermittent ice ages and we are over due or something like that. Anyway you look at it polar bears are toast....

If a person, as many believers do, claim that the bible is true then yes. Many people of faith delicately ignore the psychopath parts, and only hold to the parts they personally agree with. But they still use parts of the really bad stuff to persecute others, gays specifically but people of other "beliefs" as well. They use parts of it to justify almost anything and when that doesn't work they make up new parts. Now I do understand that there are people who simply believe in a higher power of some kind but the people who believe in the Abrahamic god either ignore the parts they don't like or the priests simply never give those parts as reading material for the week but they are there and if you use the bible as your guide to god then yes you have to believe that or lie to yourself. In the USA these religions are mainstream, the fringes are far more scary... To really believe in the Abrahamic god requires that you be broken in some way.... the other ones are no better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pKaTzf7HBI

Brain transplants, will it ever be possible to do it? Probably, but you are your brain, if you want your brain transplanted into a new body it would be you. not the person the body came from. If you wanted a new brain and transplanted it into your body it would no longer be you, it would be who ever the brain came from, you are your brain! Why is this so difficult? For a really odd take on this read this book by Robert Heinlein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil

I have stayed out of this discussion since It was asserted that I was off topic but I have been reading all the posts and I have come to a conclusion. God is real, he exists and is a raving psychopathic monster, a deceiver, if you believe in the Abrahamic god this is absolutely true. You can quibble over the details of how to properly worship him but if you use the evidence at hand then he is a monster. I don't understand why godflys don't understand this. As for the other gods, i am not as well versed in their supposed actions but from what I see they are at best insane as well. The most probable thing is that men wrote about what they thought god was and the men at that time thought things like genocide, rape, pillage, slavery, and child molestation was ok so they wrote that god thought it was too. Belief is one of those words like the word theory, there are beliefs and then there are BELIEFS. If someone told me there was an alligator in my yard down by the ditch I would probably go look to make sure but it would be a reasonable assertion. Alligators are common here. If someone told me a huge bird swooped down in my yard and carried off one of my dogs, the dog being missing would not be proof enough, my dogs all weight around 60 pounds. It's unlikely... If someone told me he saw a fairy sitting on a mushroom fairy ring in my yard I would want to see it my self at least. The fairy ring would not be enough. If someone told me that Angelina Joelie was in love with him and sending him telepathic messages of her undying love I would suggest he be looked at closely and probably medicated. If some one says an angel appeared in the church sanctuary during services, around here it might be dangerous not to nod and agree. You could at best be ostracized from the neighborhood at worst get your ass severely kicked... Religion does get a special pass, the religious, especially fundamentalists can claim revealed truth about anything. The earth is 6006 years old, of course. Dinosaurs were all vegetarians until the fall? Oh yes, absolutely true, the entire earth was covered by water, yes no doubt. The fountains of the deep sprayed water into space and formed all the craters on the moon and other celestial bodies as well as all the comets... yes it's reveled truth. Yes anyone who believes this bullshit with no reservations has mental problems of some kind, no doubt... it doesn't have to be belief in god it just has to be belief in something that has no evidence... god just happens to be one of those things...

I seem to remember a post by "someone" explaining how 11 dimensions can be visualized... I'd post a link but I can't seem to find it...

The short answer is no. No other planet or moon in our solar system is capable of supporting human life with out some artificial support. There is no reason to think humans cannot evolve, over long periods of time and isolation I think it would be inevitable that humans would evolve to fit their environment. But there are limits, if the habitat on another planet is instant death to a human then no we wouldn't be able to evolve to live there with out some environmental support.

If we are i want my money back, this ride sucks...

Dingle berries...

Please show me where I have said i hate anyone because of their religious beliefs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens His opposite numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Comfort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_Cameron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham These series of videos point out exactly why fundamentalists are broken, I know you won't watch them rigney because to you the messenger is far more important than the message but here they are if you can climb out of the box you are hiding in.

Rigney, creationism is a lie, it's easy to show that there was no Noah's Ark, that genesis is wrong, both versions, Creationists use lies to try and denigrate science. I spent most of my life trying to worship god, in the end it's a hollow lie. I have tried to show you why this is true but to you the person giving the argument is more important than their argument. If you don't like the person the evidence is given by then the evidence must be false? Does veracity mean nothing? Does sympathy for the person making the argument mean more than the veracity of his argument? Don't insult me by saying I have never looked into the counter argument, have you ever read the bible? Really read the monstrous atrocities in it, the absolute lies? Saying i have not looked at both sides is personally insulting, besides the fact that you cannot possibly know what i have looked at or when.

Rigney, for every person you can show like Hitchens I can show you 10 fundamentalist theists who never got their hands dirty (unless you count snorting coke off a gay prostitutes ass just before giving a big sermon about the evils of being gay) and yet they seem to have popularity even though their arguments are almost to a letter lies. Hitchens made a point in his career not to lie and if got the data wrong he was the first to stand up and say so. Creationists must lie to support their beliefs. Their favorite thing is to lie and misrepresent science, in fact they cannot exist with out lying. They claim things they know are not true and want to indoctrinate these lies into our children. If for no other reason science wins over creationism because lies and faith are not allowed in science and in creationism and ID lies are required to support their stance.

This actually depends on how you encounter the quicksand, such "sand" is common where I live. If the quick sand is shallow and you are able to walk out into it you will not drown if you don't panic but if the quicksand is very deep and you step out onto it your momentum will cause you to go under much like stepping out onto water so you go under even though you can float, the problem with quick sand is that it impedes your rising back to the surface. You can go under but not come back up. Around here in many places is a thick layer of organic silt, it looks solid, plants can root and grow in it but it is not much more dense that water and is often very deep, step out onto it and you disappear but it's viscosity is enough to prevent you from coming back up. Sometimes this solid layer will be covered over by fine sand. the sand appears to be solid when you step out onto it but as you walk it starts to shake like jello and down through the layer of sand you go into the silt. Coming back up is more difficult than going under, going under you have gravity pulling you down, coming up your buoyancy is not enough to propel you back up.

I knew there was a reason I liked Phi for All, he's my hero...

No not easy peasy, in a voyage like this, the mothership would be going so fast the possibility of the supply ships being useful is nil. Think of it this way, you have a huge airliner, it's massive, taking off requires a huge amount fuel so to lighten the load you fly smaller support craft up to refuel the plane, food, water, what ever it needs. You even off load passengers like this the plane must fly as much as possible, it's always going faster and faster, each hook up very expensive in terms of energy expended. Can you imaging the failure rate of the off loads of "supplies" would be? The utter devastation if even one messed up? But the most important part is the deta V of the mothership and supply ship, any going ahead, coming back or catching up, would require huge amounts of energy, far more than would be gained by the effort.

Boys boys boys, sadly you are all wrong... Just kidding but i would like to point out a couple things on this. First why do you think sending supplies out ahead will help anyone? If the mother ship is traveling faster than the supply ships then you have that nasty delta vee to worry about. No matter if the supply ships could accelerate to catch up to the speed of the mothership, if they could so that they will take exactly, more or less, the same amount of energy launch as simply storing the supplies in the mother ship. Why not let them go along side the mother ship if they don't fit inside? Another thing, if you are going to be gone 19,000 years you need a enclosed ecosystem, whether you created a near natural biosphere, or a completely artificial one involving genetically engineered organisms to compact the system. You would want a self contained ecosystem nothing else will do. so why not just take extra water located in mega gallon tanks (very useful as heat sinks) along the rim of the torus. extra CO2, extra CH4 and let the chemistry of life do the dirty work? When you get to the other solar system you can "refuel" at any ice moon. I realized I had not mentioned the added mass to accelerate, the hulls of the supply ships, storing the needed chemicals inside the mothership would take less energy to launch them.

I figured you'd like that one, it's been along time since I heard the old shit from shinola thing but to be honest my grandpa actually said shit from apple butter...

A biosphere recycles nutrients using various natural chemical processes, the energy to create an object like this could come from solar or nuclear power. The materials it would be made of are already in space, the Lagrange points of Jupiter contain enough material to make millions of torus habitats. As I said the main problem I can see is how to provide enough light in the interior to allow significant photosynthesis. Yes, a full blown biosphere but in the book the torus was in of it's self a living creature, it absorbed the energy of light and other particle energies that exist around Saturn to power it's biosphere. it was at best a fanciful rendition of what i am talking about. but there is no reason why a large enough torus couldn't be a reasonably stable environment. It wouldn't be entirely self contained and would require inputs of both mass and energy but that is not beyond possible technologies.

here ya go rigney, just like my grandpa used to say....

Nutrients would be recycled just like they are on earth. The biggest obstacle I can see is lighting the interior, over large periods of time mass would be lost to space so it would have to be replaced but this could be slowed to time frames of hundreds of thousands of years if you were careful and the habitat was large. John Varley wrote a science fiction book with the premise of a huge rotating torus found in orbit of Saturn, it was 1300 kilometers in diameter, and was a an artificial life form engineered to spread it's creators to the stars. The torus would release small eggs from it's rim that had velocity enough to escape the solar system and find small moons or Kuiper belt type objects around other stars to use to grow on and become another torus. The eggs held the genetic information to built the torus and the life forms that lived inside. The books are named Titan, Wizard, and Demon... It was fiction but it was also quite eye opening...

Athena, i wish i could understand what you are saying, or asserting, but in all honesty i have tried now for several years and I am no closer to understanding this X-factor you keep talking about. In fact your ideas seem, to me at least, to be under mining the very concept of liberty. I don't mind admitting I would be very hesitant to move to a society where your ideas were expressed as law. For me the idea of some mysterious something that rules everyone but is unfathomable could be used to justify anything, pretty much the same way god has been used through out history to justify anything the ruling class deemed as correct in the eyes of god...

I'm not sure why you would postulate an atmosphere of pure helium, any planet large enough or massive enough to hold onto helium would almost certainly have lots of neon, hydrogen, methane, CO and CO2, nitrogen and or nitrogen compounds as well, oxygen if it has life that is photosynthetic.