Moontanman

Dekan, I truly hope you are just trolling, I've waited to respond to this due to the emotional response it invoked in me. I've had dogs most of my life and several cats as well. Several times I've seen dogs exhibit behavior that indicated a high degree of intelligence by doing things they had never been taught in situations that were completely new and by making the correct decision in that situation. One dog went to get help for me when as a kid I was caught in a sink hole. The little dog, who everyone thought was dumb as a stump, actually traveled a distance of a mile or so and actually herded a stranger to the place I was at so she could help me. Now you can call that a belly with four legs if you want but I see it as actual intelligence. Another dog came and got me when the hot water heater had malfunctioned and was spewing natural gas and steam into the house. If he hadn't come and got me and literally dragged me to the problem the entire house might have exploded. This last dog was... a basset hound, the dogs most people think of as totally stupid. On top of coming and getting me he had to resist the urge to flee from a very loud and strange situation that even most humans would have simply run from, the hot water heater spewing steam and and natural gas must have been terrifying to him but he came and got me and did his best to drag me away from the danger. ( I know it sounds like an episode of Lassie ) Dogs, and cats as well, have tremendous amounts of real intelligence even when measured by our own prejudiced standards..... I still have the the dog who went against all his natural instincts to brave the noise, steam, and natural gas to come and get me, he is very smart, if a bit self centered in most things but he is not a belly on four legs..... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgjyhKN_35g

So you were simply proselytizing? You failed to offer any evidence for the existence of any gods much less any specific god then you assume we were are looking for god?

The idea that the big bang came from nothing is really a straw man often constructed to show how science is no better than religion at "knowing" where everything came from but in reality science doesn't say the universe came into being ex nihilo, science just says what happened after the expansion of space and time, we do not really know what happened before, it's possible we will never know for sure, still doesn't mean god did it....I'd like to add i have nothing against someone believing, in what ever god or philosophy he wants as long as it doesn't require he interfere with other people rights, sadly as we know religion isn't exactly the main champion of humans rights. I believe that even moderate religions bear some of the blame for the extremists, on some level the moderates lack of any self policing leads to extremism, there are always going to be people who need belief in their lives but what you believe to be true should never be asserted as actually being demonstrably true. belief does not equal knowledge... But yeah i understand about the absolutes....

Ummm No.... Why is god the simplest answer? Yes, "there are no gods" is both eloquent, the simplest, the most honest answer, it is also the default position, any other position on the existence of god requires observable evidence and for the positive assertion of the idea of any god much less any specific god there is none... How so? There is no evidence for any spiritual existence and science explains the existence of morals with out god quite well....

Nothing can not exist....

My mistake then, i apologize for the miscommunication. I saw someplace the idea of liquid neon being a solvent for extreme life. I've been going through books like crazy to find it again, I thought it was in "Rare Earth" but evidently not.

Again, somehow, we are not connecting, water will dissolve silica, quartz, silicon dioxide, this material's melting point is far higher than water's melting point , even higher by a considerable margin, than the temperature difference between ice and liquid neon. You may have a point about the chemical inertness of neon but I don't see how the the temperature difference in the liquid neon and liquid water is relevant.

Animals other than humans change their environment to suit them instead of the other way around. Beavers, ants, and termites come to mind.... oh yeah, elephants...

I think the second part of your argument is invalid, first of all I did not say "melt water ice" secondly water, especially super critical water, but really any water, will dissolve silica, and the "melting point of silica is far higher than the temps of liquid water but still it dissolves...

Total speculation here but i see no reason it would be any different than hitting 2 miles of water as far as ejecta is concerned.

I agree that this is probably the most likely of all the other extremely unlikely speculations on time travel, personally I'll be amazed if time is possible, logically it's impossible to deal with unless you postulate something else that's outside our reality like extra dimensions. I once read another possible way to look at it, if i remember correctly it's like this, first of all time travel is limited to the era that the time machine exists, from the time it is turned on to the time it ceases to exist you can communicate back and forth through time (actual time travel is precluded because you would have to pass through a singularity or a place very close to it and no physical thing can pass this barrier, ok, I have to admit there was a good reason for that but I can't remember it, but anyway say an asteroid hits the Earth after the time machine is turned on, the future can warn the present to evacuate the area, millions of lives could be saved, the asteroid might still hit the earth but the heads up saved the people who would have been killed. So in the future these people would be saved but the machine would allow the "saved" future to give the warning so the people could be saved, the asteroid strikes no matter what we do. I think the communication is one way as well, and it's why we aren't run over by time traveling tourists... it's been a long time since I read it sorry....

Actually there was a huge ape that come close to matching bigfoot but there is no evidence for it to have persisted into modern times. This would probably be true if bigfoot was found but so far as I said in my earlier post in this thread no evidence what so ever has been found that could not have easily been faked, and much of that evidence has been shown to have been faked. I have found the remains of deer in the woods and a bear skull, I've even found dead squirrels and raccoon but most small animals are eaten very quickly by scavengers, a large animal like a bigfoot should have left behind some evidence of it's existence...

I am curious about the properties of neon in it's liquid state. More precisely does it dissolve other elements and chemicals? Specifically I was wondering about liquid neon at about 10 bar and would it dissolve water? I know what water is an ice at liquid neon temps even at 10 bar but many solids dissolve in liquids, would neon dissolve water ice and if it would how easy would this happen, also would the pressure significantly influence it's ability to dissolve other chemicals? Or is neon unlikely to dissolve anything due to being a noble element?

Say what?

I agree with what you say but I am not comfortable with these ideas being called theory in the scientific sense, more like hypothesis...

Um no.... http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp

At this point in time no one knows what existed before the big bang and some say no one ever will know, think of it as trying to measure what is south of the south pole on the Earth....

First of all there is no such thing as an EVOLUTIONIST..... Secondly I have never heard a scientist say that evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics... The reason for it? This is just my opinion but I would think that disordered states are more likely to occur than ordered states. Evolution does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, cyclic universes have nothing to with biological evolution and cyclic universes are not part of currently accepted theory... In an Internal combustion engine you have many loses of efficiency due to friction and waste heat, these loses are unavoidable and cannot be completely eliminated.

Some creatures have more junk DNA than others, an amoeba has not only more genes than a human but lots more junk DNA and a pufferfish has no junk DNA. I think the jury is still out as to whether or not junk DNA is useless....

IMHO the problem with defining intelligence has to do with who is defining it. We define intelligence by our own measure but that measure is flawed because we can't really be the judge in a contest in which we are participants, conflict of interest... By our own standards we are intelligent and no other creature we know of can even define intelligence. If we could indeed communicate with other animals we might be surprised to learn their judgement on our intelligence. I wonder what a Sperm whale thinks... their brains are very complex and huge compared to ours, do they just naturally know things we cannot even conceive of? Or possibly they think we are not intelligent enough to know just how unintelligent we are... Intelligence, much like beauty, is in the eye or brain of the beholder....

Questionposer, think of it like this, pop science is often written or edited by people who are either ignorant of the science involved or who are less than interested in it's veracity and more interested in it being POPULAR! When several sources disagree with a pop science book, magazine or flick, I'd go with the actual science... Compromise.. with facts... surely you jest?

Agreed, the willfully ignorant can be frustrating...

Great post Psycho..... talk about being pwned....

Genecks, you are starting to sound like John Titor....

Questionposer, till now I have been very tolerant of you trying to deny reality, did you bother to read any of the links that have been provided? I mean really read them? If you really think that anyone has been unreasonable or rude with you on this i suggest you report it to the moderators.. anything else is just bla bla bla bla bla....