Moontanman

http://www.solstation.com/stars/sirius2.htm http://www.exoplaneten.de/sirius/english.html The pigment chlorophyll is so basic to complex plants it's difficult to really speculate on this, the probability is almost certainly close to zero this could change in any reasonable amount of time, secondary pigments would be more likely and the bluer light of Sirius would probably select for the color red not purple... even for this 6,000 years is improbable... it's doubtful any earth plant could survive the UV flux at the surface of any planet orbiting Sirius close enough to have liquid water.

Ok, I like my science fiction to at least be consistent if not accurate... I would love to hear how that is justified with science. No, not in 4000 years... No place, not enough time for something as basic as the pigment for photosynthesis to change significantly. No problemo... One thing to remember, if i remember correctly, Sirius radiates a huge amount of UV radiation, more than it does visible light...

Again, what exactly do you mean by that? We can agree on most of this, sadly it's not the general consensus among the theistic population, mostly i think because of the influence of the Christian evangelical movement and the mega churches which preach the infallible word of god as though it is obviously true and everyone who doesn't believe in the word of god is crazy or evil or both... polls show that atheists are less well thought of than any other category of people in the US... and not by some tiny margin either... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m1NfhZ8Uc0 And I agreed with you on religion for the most part but I am a bit more militant that you evidently... These things are subject to opinion? Wiping slavery out of text books because it slanders the founding fathers? Civil rights heroes? Treatment of Native Americans? Global warming? Striking mention of certain founding fathers because they are too liberal? Editing history to conform to Conservative facts? Give me a break....

Logically, North America would go back to the Native Americans, not the bloody British, French, Spaniards or anyone else from Europe but 500 years is a bit long to be retroactive. I wasn't suggesting this was a logical course of action but taking away land or a country just because you are a bigger bastard than the other guy is not the way I personally would like to see the world go. It's most certainly not the way i want to see the US go and the USA has at least shown that to be the way we assert our political influence (sometimes), we helped kick Germany out of the rest of Europe, we helped kick Japan out of the rest of the Pacific we kicked Iraq out of Kuwait, although i think it is disingenuous to say it was totally because we wanted to help them but be that as it may either people have real personal rights or they don't and might makes right, which is it? If might makes right then it's time to haul out the big penis shaped missiles and start waving them at each other again.... Which is it? Does it depend on who the aggressor is? If it's one of our back door buddies then they get to do what ever they want but if it's someone we don't like then we jump in and defend the little guy? One or the damn other, we need to be consistent, far too long we supported the governments who did what we wanted and screw the people but we claim that people should have rights, does it only apply to Americans or is it a goal for the whole world to respect human rights? It's time to take a side i think.... The nearly blind support Israel has received over the years has been insane, hell they attacked on of our ships and we let it go, they killed American sailors and no it was not an accident, do you think if Iran sank one of our ships we would let it go even if it was an accident? I am not looking for Israel to be destroyed or anything silly like that but the idea they can do no wrong is plain bullshit and the idea that they have the right to Palestine due to the word of god is an insult to humanity... On the other hand Palestinians are no prize either, suicide bombers, constant missile strikes, the inflexibility of stupidly thinking that Allah will destroy Israel, both sides act like a bunch of unruly children pointing and crying the other side is the bad guys, they both have deep faults and it's time we recognized that... It's time they recognized that or just get it over with and let the biggest bastard kill everyone.... hell maybe it is preordained that part of the world will be the catalyst for global war one more time but as Einstein said WW4 will be fought with sticks...

I have never said that, it's religion in america that feels that way and is working toward that goal not the US government, but they do influence the US government. Did you not read the link i gave? Do i have to google more, the supreme court had to rule on this at least once, local courts have dealt with this many times I'm just stunned by your naivete' the teaching of creationism is not just opposed by atheists... You hope our public schools remain unbiased about those kind of issues, what exactly do you mean by that?

I have to say that i have heard the term Darwinists being used to describe anyone who believes in evolution quite a bit of late and not by just opponents of creationism, professional creationists like Ray Comfort, Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, and their ilk use the term regularly. But to be honest, being dishonest and misleading and misrepresenting science is how these guys make their living...

I think you are correct your comment was on topic as far as it goes but think of this, the land now called Israel was not empty, People lived there, real flesh and blood people who were kicked out of their homes and off their land because they were not Jews. You use the term "force their way in" that is just wrong, they were already there! Their homes were bulldozed and people were killed. If it was not due to religion then why were these people made to leave when the Israel took over the land, what was it if not due to religion? At first Israel kicked Christians out too until they realized their survival depended on the support Christian nations like the good old US of A... It's mostly American Christian fundamentalists who claim Israel has claim to be there there by the word of god.... I often wonder how these jack asses who think Israel has the right to exist because god said so would feel if people of my ancestry made claim that the Great Spirit gives us title to the continental United States.... and we started kicking them out of their homes... hell the bastards used biological warfare against us... but we weren't really human, we were just godless savages....

How does someone else holding these extreme beliefs make it ok for others to do so? Do you live in the USA? Local governments have been fighting tooth and toenail to teach creationism as real science in schools for as long as I've been aware of what going to school means, I can still remember having to stand in a corner because i refused to accept Noah's ark as real, in public school! The latest big case, the ID supporters were so sure it would pass court scrutiny because the Judge was a conservative Christian but they had there asses handed to them because in the words of the judge they were dishonest and lied. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District But this stuff goes on in a small scale all over the place, locally where i live it's a constant battle to keep this creation crap out of the schools... The big creationist gurus actually give classes in how to argue this stuff in front of school boards and generally the school board members don't have a clue as to what real science is and apes giving birth to humans or cats having puppies is something they aren't prepared to argue... And then there is this....

I can see what you are saying and i readily admit to a pretty extreme bias but in my defense i do live in the middle of the bible belt, i see this stuff every day. i am bombarded everywhere I go by people who when meeting you the first thing they want to know i where you go to church and if you don't they you are fair game to them, you need to hear the great news....

Not significantly in relation to the Earth... It does, I'm not sure why you would think it does not...

You are correct, it is indeed a part of many fundamentalist movements in Islam, Hinduism, Seiks, the list is long and depressing.... But in the US it is a movement with some real power, all you have to do is look at the winners the republicans have trotted out for president... I see it as more of an effort to inject religious fundamentalism into our schools curriculum...

Creationist also commonly assert that Darwin is the Prophet of Evolutionism and that we Evolutionists worship him the same way they claim to worship Jesus... Sometimes they also call us Darwinists... Talk about projection.... it's all used to paint the theory of evolution in a bad light because they just can't believe a dog can give birth to cats or that an ape gave birth to a human which is what they assert Evolutionists claim...

I disagree, words have meaning and the meaning is all about context, in the context of creationism the term evolutionist is demeaning, it is an assertion that evolution is a religion, a belief system that relies on faith. Taken out of context evolutionist is just a word, it could, in the right context be used to describe someone who thinks that the evidence for biological diversity is best explained by the theory of evolution. Creationists use the term Evolutionism to describe all of science from the big bang to stellar processes that create stars and galaxies, the synthesis of heavy atoms, to the origin of life to the complex life we see around us today. Evolutionism, a faith based belief system that has no evidence to back it up what so ever, they describe people who hold this belief to be evolutionists, in this context it is an insult. If someone I know well calls me Indian I understand it can be a term of endearment, and while not entirely accurate it can also just be a descriptive term, only someone who knows me well could possibly know why it can be used on me and the word is not demeaning. But if some one uses it as an insult the word becomes an insult, in the context of racism Indian can be an insult. In the context of the OP evolutionist is indeed an insult....

Not officially but the religious right, the really fundamentalist ones, like a great many of the popular evangelicals do espouse those views some secretly some more openly but the under lying message is very common in fundamentalist churches. This movement is not new, it has been around a very long time in one incarnation or another, the latest group has it's origins in the early to mid 20th century but it has existed in various forms since very early in the history of Christianity. The 700 club is a very good example of how this message is subtly and sometimes not so subtly delivered to people This makes it sound less than sensational http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism But this type of thing is very common and popular. http://www.endtime.com/ The sites that assert this crap on the internet are innumerable, TV and internet it's self has been a big factor in allowing it to gain far more prominence in the society of the religious in the US... If I had a dollar for every church service that has asserted this crap I would be the wealthiest man on the planet. Some members of my family are deeply into this and one of my sons was deeply troubled a long time because his grandmother took him to her church to hear this stuff. It's disturbing and has to be experienced to be believed by most rational people even many Christians deny it is even happening but the movement with this stuff at it's core is what creationism is all about. Most churches only assert this stuff during church services and seldom assert it in the public domain, it is scary and was a big part of why i just can't give religion in general any credence. Even the more main stream churches often refuse to refute this stuff, preferring to ignore it due to embarrassment as though it will go away if they just pretend it is is not real.

The religious fundementalists are on the run, they know they are loosing ground and they..... love it! They have a persecution complex, they want to be persecuted, they think it's what they should expect in the evil end times The feeling of the evil atheist humanists and false religions persecuting them is what the bible teaches them to expect (at least in their interpretation of it) and they believe their fight to oppose it is a holy thing demanded by god and that they alone will escape the horrible end when the rapture gathers them up directly into heaven just as the final conflict between god and the devil takes place. The rest of us get to be killed in horrible ways as the atomic Holocaust is orchestrated by the Devil, in fact the reason they are so supportive of the existence of Israel is intimately connected with the belief that the anti Christ will only come into power after Israel destroys the Muslim mosque that sits on the old Jewish Temple which will bring about the reign of the anti Christ and Armageddon... These people are far more dangerous than most other Christians can conceive of and tolerated because they are after all... you guessed it... Christians Manipulative power hungry politicians like Santorum are using this to take advantage of these people for his own political gains. They are all despicable human beings taking advantage of ignorance instead of trying to do something about it, in fact they rely on the ignorance of these people to survive... All of the republican candidates at least pay lip service to this crock of Horse Feathers, either they are lairs, willfully ignorant or stupid...

I agree but in my case that is not what happened, the DuPont company did not go bust and neither did it's Dacron polyester market, until is started up polyester plants in other countries on the cheap under under different names with the help of our government... At Dupont, it was always far too many chiefs and not enough Indians....

I have to admit some understanding at least of what this guy is talking about, I worked for 25 years for the DuPont corporation, I worked closely with engineers to develop new products new technology and new processes. We were always told to never discuss our work with anyone due to industrial espionage and that we needed to keep our technology secret to protect us from foreign competition. Some fo the stuff I helped develop was so secret the areas were walled off by huge curtains so only certain people had access to them. Once we perfected a great many unique technologies and products that had a high sales potential and wide spread uses DuPont immediately turned around and started up polyester sites in India and China, and sold our plant to a Mexican company. Most people lost their jobs and all of us were left with that greasy anus feeling. Now I commonly see the products i helped develop flooding in from other countries where people work for peanuts and most of the people I worked with spent their lives learning to do things that are no longer needed here but emulated everywhere labor is cheap and ten people can be hired to do the job one of us struggled to do. It ruined my health and left me with that greasy feeling for life... Why did they do it? cheap labor and tax breaks offered by our government.... yeah... that greasy feeling never quite goes away.... and yes, the products i see are often very inferior imitations of what we developed...

What part of "things don't expand as they loose energy" didn't you understand?

Not if your hypothesis is shown to be false, even if you don't get that removing energy from the earth would make it shrink not expand it can be absolutely shown the earth is not expanding, we can measure the size of the earth to very small tolerances and there is no sign of expansion. other testable theories can and do explain the way the continents move and plate tectonics is real and happens, your "idea" cannot be supported by any evidence and is easily shown to be false, in fact as i have pointed out you proceed from an absolutely false notion then build up ever higher piles of false notions to support the original false notion, it's an epic fail....

Rich, you are absolutely wrong, taking energy away from anything makes it shrink not expand your analogy fails from the very start, everything that follows is false as well. Watch this video for clarification or don't and remain ignorant... http://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54#p/u/37/epwg6Od49e8

No, in the United States of America we do not have two ceremonies, you can have a civil ceremony if you want but if you wed in a church there is no civil ceremony. Also I would like to point out that some churches do indeed sanction gay marriage, i have been to several and catered two of them, but the state does not recognize them as legal...

This is not true, in fact the USA grow far more food than we need and we export a great deal to other countries, so this statement is false.

Google is your friend... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_exploration_in_the_Arctic

Rich, did you not bother to read the posts people have spent their time posting to answer your questions? Continents are granite, it is lighter than the basalt of the ocean floors, this basalt is not only under the oceans it is under the continents as well. basalt wells up along mid ocean ridges and spread out as this basalt come to a continent is goes under the granite because it is heavier, this tends to move the continents around. What part of this specifically do you not understand? If you look at a map of the ocean floors you can see the mid oceanic rides where the ocean floor spreads out. As was indicated sometimes the ocean floors do subduct under another part of the ocean floor but most subduction occurs at continental margins mostly due to granite floating on the sea of basalt below. It is not a random process, a map of the sea floor shows this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-ocean_ridge see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics