Moontanman

njaohnt... pot... kettle... black...

prove it... And the bible says lots of things that are easily shown to be false, like Noah's Ark and genesis but there are many more and all the murder, genocide, rape, child molestation, seriously evil if god is real... Seriously, if i were you I'd stick to the fuel cell despite the obvious fallacy of wanting to make and use something that science created, the very science that proves your holy book is bunk...

I agree with you, advanced civilizations probably have no need for planets and massive stars almost certainly do not have life bearing planets, they simply don't live long enough for it to develop if nothing else and the radiation problems are real. My question is more of a ethical question as opposed to would it be possible, if we knew the star system would be destroyed in a couple million years would it be ethical to terra form and colonize those planets? I can see the argument if complex life already exists then we should leave it alone, I am not so sure bacteria should be protected, I'll check out your link to see if I can add anything to it.

It's highly doubtful that any large mobile complex organism could be an autotroph. They just don't have enough surface area to feed an active metabolism. There is a reason why trees don't move around like tree bread in lord of the rings, photosynthesis just can't provide the energy to allow that to happen. Why would they have to be green? why not purple, red, or brown? we have purple, red, brown yellow and bluegreen autotrophs on the earth already...

Homo erectus became extinct but they left descendants, two of which are Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens still exists today but Homo neanderthalensis is also extinct...

Now this is what i meant when I asked you about reason.... It's really an odd attitude, looking at reality through the filter of absolute religious faith...

Just let everyone see the pink slime fast food restaurants use as meat, pink chicken slime and pink beef slime....

WHAT! There is no Santa Claus????

Maybe there were intelligent dinosaurs?

If at some future date we found a giant star with one or maybe even several planets in it's life zone, large stars have a very broad life zone, would it be ethical to terraform these planets and colonize them knowing the star will blow up in a couple million years?

As long as you don't a positive assertion that what you are saying is true and stick with it's what you believe... then... it's what you believe... I can only point out it's just a belief... So you are going with "God of the gaps" Are you really going to retreat down that rat hole? The idea of god of the gaps is nothing but intellectual dishonesty. Or there was no big bang.. the question is still open... but requiring god as the cause is simply baseless speculation.. Again, because science hasn't explained everything god can hide in the tiny spaces between knowledge? Knowledge, is something very specific science has proven track record of providing knowledge, our entire first world civilization is based on the knowledge science has provided. Scientific speculation can discussed but we can also provide evidence as to why the speculation is true or false. Metaphysical speculation can indeed claim anything and has no way to show it is true or false, so far metaphysics has provided no knowledge to our civilization ... none what so ever... It only makes assertions that cannot be checked as to there veracity in any way, it's mental masturbation, how many angels can dance on the tip of an invisible unicorn's horn? What purpose would that information serve? You can speculate all you want but when you make a positive assertion then you have to have evidence, if you assert real knowledge then you have to back that up with real evidence, it's quite simple... Intellectual honesty would be a good reason not to assert such an unfounded idea... it's a chance it's a miracle hardly constitutes anything but what you want it to be... it's a chance the universe is the flatulence of some creature that is totally unaware it's farts turn into universes...

Actually no, first of all a planets core is composed of mostly iron due to it's density and other chemical reactions as well, magnesium would not find it's way into the core and cobalt is so rare it wouldn't be abundant enough to be significant even if chemical processes allowed it to sink to the core. Also magnetic fields would not be that strong, even a neutron star or magnetar would have to be quite close to have that much magnetic effect and it's gravity would far out weigh any magnetic effects. Again decide on what you want the back drop to be, don't worry about absolute scientific accuracy, it's a back story to a video game. Just make it internally consistent and concentrate on the story's Characters and plot...

Immortal, until you can give some evidence for god your constant assertions of his power are lame and not worthy of a science site...

Tell me which definition of god you are using, then we can debate this... The Abrahamic God, at least for Muslims and Christians, does indeed specify one punishment for all crimes, heaven or hell. no other choice is suggested....

No, one punishment for all crimes is unjust, suggesting it isn't because of some unknown possibility is simply speculation with no supporting evidence what so ever...

The idea of eternal punishment pretty much shows god is, if nothing else, totally unjust.. the rest is window dressing, if god is unjust then he is not worthy of worship even if he does exist... How can you tell what an unjust god really wants, if he lies then how can you trust him, it's all silly horse feathers.... I am sure that quote was meant for the US not the world, or I may have misquoted it and it meant that 95% of scientists are theist of some kind, china and india both have a large theistic population. I was out of town today and i just got back a while a go but I will look for the quote and see exactly what it said... Thinking on it I am pretty sure it wasn't 95% are christian but 95% are religious in some way... I apologize for the confusion

You do realize that 95% of Scientists are theists... right? Most are Christian, One of the most famous and respected paleontologists in the world is a Pentecostal Preacher. The idea that scientists by definition are atheists is simply not true. This is a lie made up by theists who cannot break away from the idea that the Bible has to be the inerrant word of god or god is a liar and all religions are false...

I understand that but I honestly think these two threads were really more of a troll than a real request for home work help. The questions were loaded, and reveled the OP's, or the person who put them up to it, personal biases. The only reason i answered i and i think many others as well, was the off chance that the two people might actually take a step back and look at what they are being taught. These Christian schools turn out people with degrees that are about as real as "I have a PHD in Truthology from Christian tech" it's sad, any person with an iota of a realistic world view or self respect or even respect for others would refuse to even admit to such a silly degree. One of these "christian colleges" (this is not an isolated case, there are many of these christian diploma mills) is really a small building in the middle of nowhere where preachers and pastors send off for their PHD's which are based on what they believe about the Bible not any real knowledge. Then they use these fake PHD's to exploit the gullible and less than knowledgeable people for their own gain. It gets next to me, knowledge is often hard won, it takes real effort, the people who actually work to obtain this knowledge deserve respect for that fact alone. It's difficult to not be insulted by the shenanigans of these people, possibly that is a character flaw on my part...

Darwinism and a few others explained http://www.youtube.com/user/AronRa#p/c/126AFB53A6F002CC/11/2TkY7HrJOhc

I think it might be reasonable to say the night sky of such a planet, considering the particle radiation Sirius would emit, would be alive with auroras from pole to pole, it would be like the sky was on fire...

No electromagnetic radiation is not affected by magnetic fields. No problem, any time.... just ask. A planet around Sirius, if it had a magnetic field, should have awesome auroras...

It's doubtful anything from Earth could grow at all in the UV flux of Sirius, but ignore that, you can propose and unusually thick ozone layer or something if it becomes important. I do understand the symbolism and it's cool, ignore the facts about Sirius, go with bluer light than our sun and no one will notice if the game is good. I've read weirder books that were great, try Larry Niven's "The Integral Trees" for a real mind blower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees

I'd be interested in seeing it but I am not anyone of any authority so i am not any better to judge than you are. As for dead forests, how did they grow to start with? it's interesting to note that Sirius B is a white dwarf orbiting at about the distance of Uranus in our system. In relatively recent past, as cosmic times goes, it was a star even more massive than Sirius so it would have been even hotter and bluer. When it went off the main sequence it would have no doubt destroyed any planets of either star but it raises another possibility. It ejected many giga tons of metals back into space, it makes Sirius 7.5 times as metal rich as our sun, metals, in astronomy anything heavier than helium is a metal but in this case it means actual heavy elements but the dying star would have no doubt driven away lighter elements so you might get a planet from the debris that was huge, dense, with high gravity and still have a reasonably thin atmosphere, a planet the size of Uranus or Neptune but with maybe a few dozen bar atmosphere of mostly hydrogen many times the gravity of earth, oceans, hydrogen atmosphere, it might make for some interesting bio chemistry... ignoring of course how young the planet would be but hey it's your universe, if you want it.. it can happen...

So i am guessing you didn't bother to read either of the links? Sirius is the one that sends out the UV... Sirius isn't old enough to have evolved complex life forms, it's less than a half billion years old but in fantasy you can do anything. It's really the back story that counts, the details are just a back drop for the story, even in a video game... but red absorbs blue light, it's why red algae is red, sunlight filtered by sea water is blue shifted, go deep enough and blood looks green because there is no red light to reflect to your eyes... Don't worry about being scientifically accurate, just be consistent, moving Atlantis to a planet around Sirius pretty much blows science out of the water so go with what you want, just don't be contradictory and you get my respect...

The formation of Israel was conquer and claim, not a battle for independence...