Moontanman

Seriously dude, you need to look someplace besides popular science shows on television....

No, your link has been misquoted or is mistaken... it reported the worms living at 10X it's real tolerance, although I was mistaken in the 50C quote it does not live in super critical water. Tardigrades or water bears are famous for their fortitude but they do not live at high temps, they go into a form of hibernation requiring desiccation and do not grow again or live in anyway until they are hydrated at lower, much lower temperatures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvinella_pompejana That article has much misinterpreted data...

Wow! Yet another zombie topic, lots of good info and lots of assumptions... so let me make a few. Aliens... How can you make any assumptions about aliens? They are aliens but if they space travel they have to have technology, it might be god like to us but it would still be technology, that about the only thing I think of to assume about them, they could even be a machine intelligence... Colonize the Earth? I have some severe doubts about that, alien life may not even be based on nucleic acids as we know them, even if we assume a carbon/water based life form something as simple as allergies to biological particles, ie pollen, on the earth could make the earth totally uninhabitable to them, crossing light years to deal with a planet that will probably not sustain them is unlikely. In fact I doubt a truly advanced species would even need or want planets at all. Freely orbiting space colonies spun to create artificial gravity makes much more sense, and makes far more stars inviting to colonization, isn't Vega thought to have a huge Cloud of asteroid and dust type material around it much more massive than all the planets in our solar system? Such stars would be far more favored for colonization than stars with planets... Can ET listen in on our radio broadcasts? No, probably not, the radio noise of the earth is probably not detectable very far past one light year in distance due to interstellar noise and ions, directed beams of radio waves can be detected across the cosmos but radio noise leakage not so much, their could be a civilization around the stars of the Alpha Centaury system and we would not know it unless they directed a radio beam at us.. which has been detected coming from other stars, the signals were described as being similar to military radar that just happened to cross our detectors, although they were coming from much closer to the center of our galaxy and did not repeat but if it was just a chance detection of military radar and not a real attempt contact anyone then that is expected... I think it is quite possible that aliens are already here, mining the ort cloud and maybe the asteroids, they could communicate in ways we cannot detect, neutrino beams?, Just because we can't detect advanced aliens doesn't mean they don't exist....

I'm not sure exactly what is being suggested here, UV does indeed penetrate clear sea water, mostly UVA, the deeper you go in sea water the bluer the light becomes, at certain depths all that is left is violet and UVA, coral at that depth use special pigments to use UV light, it's very dim but in clear sea water like where coral reefs grow UVA does indeed penetrate and even shallow water corals use pigments that fluoresce to allow them to use UV light, are we just talking degrees here? If we are talking absolutes then UV does penetrate and at levels that allow it to be used by symbiotic algae...

Hmmm, complex life at above 100 degrees C? No, only simple bacteria, usually (but not limited to) archaea can with stand temps higher than 100C, no complex life form has been known that can withstand constant temps above around 50C. The animals that live around deep sea vents do not live in the super critical water, nor can they withstand any real exposure to it. 121C is the current highest temp cultured archaea organism, but there is some speculation that some archaea may actually live inside the vents but actually culturing anything at those temps and pressures is not an easy task. But no matter what the limit is for these archaea, the complex animals that live around these vents do not and cannot withstand temps even well below the 121C reported. And BTW, the animals at these vents are not completely divorced from the sun as is often suggested, they do gain food from culturing bacteria in their bodies that chemo-synthesize using the chemicals that come from the vent or by directly filtering out these archaea from water after it has cooled but all of the complex animals there need oxygen, oxygen that is produced by photosynthesis...

The aluminum could be a source of instability since it is dia-magnetic, the idea of the strings is a good one, you could glue the strings to the end of the magnet with super glue maybe?

There are life forms that live in what is for all intents and purposes battery acid, usually these extremophiles are bacteria but I have found fish living at a pH so low the water burned my skin pH was less than 5, I couldn't measure it accurately any lower with my test kits, in fact one isolated pond had only two species of fish due to it's low pH, the normal fauna of this area should have included at least 6 species usually more. I'm not completely sure but high pH may be more of a problem but I'm not familiar with high pH fauna. Sea water normally has a pH higher than 8, open sea is usually 8.4 or so, a pH of 7 is neutral Each number is 10X more than the one below and 10X less than the one above...

My free will was to not read this tread but you had to put sex in it and take away my free will.....

Ok, I have to ask, which god? I mean seriously, there are a lot of them, I tend to like Zeus, he uses lightning to punish evil people, buildings, trees, hill tops, anything tall..... being tall is obviously evil...

Ok, again, I'll bite on this one, not because i think sex with children is ok, but i ask why is does sex seem to be so specially horrific? We can do almost anything to and with our children but have sexual contact with them. We can engage them into dangerous behavior, dress them up like hookers and parade them on stage, teach them to perform like trained animals, even if the training is dangerous or false, we can freely damage them mentally and even physically to a point but sexual contact? I do not agree that sex is harmless but why can we teach them to hate to believe in almost anything and to participate in antisocial behavior with almost no question but something as enjoyable as sex is somehow horrific beyond any possible justification? While i do not support sex with minors i have to question why sex is so special. Is it because our culture looks at sex as evil? But we allow and ignore people like the West burro Baptist church and what they teach their children? We can teach them to worship who ever their parents want and rend their flesh to placate some imaginary deity (as long as it is a currently popular one) but off with an adults head if they participate in any sexual contact with a child, this seems disingenuous to me. If we are really going to protect our children then why don't we really protect them and not just give lip service to the idea of protecting them unless it has to do with sex? Then there are the cults that make women into nothing but wombs, slaves to men and start the girls out having babies as soon as they are physically able and teach them to practically worship men and to ignore any reality but the tiny one as defined by the men who control them but since it's religion it's ok? this is an explosive topic but it should be discussed i think....

I vaguely remember a article by Issac Asimov about the highest possible temperature, something about the molecules vibrating at very close to light speed... now I'll have to dig that old book out....

WHAT? WOMEN ARE SUPPOSED TO WORSHIP MEN! WHY DIDN'T I GET THIS MEMO!?

here in the US waits in emergency rooms is often quite long but your symptoms are serious enough to justify a wait or wait and get in line at the morgue....

I agree, abortion should, ideally, be a last resort type thing but why do the people who oppose abortion also seem to be the very people who want to outlaw birth control and limit access to information about birth control in the very people most likely to need it to prevent an abortion? makes no sense...

Brainteaserfan, I have no doubt that some home schoolers are motivated by academic excellence, but many are motivated by religious belief and or bigotry. What does it matter if one small part is different from what is widely accepted? Evolution, is the foundation of modern biology, while it is called a theory most who say that have no understanding what a theory is but the real situation is that evolution is a fact, evolution is the best supported theory in modern science. There is no doubt that evolution is responsible for the biodiversity we see today, nothing about biology makes sense with out evolution and if you deny evolution in favor of creationism you have to deny cosmology, geology, astronomy, biochemistry, physics and in fact pretty much all of the science that has given us this first world civilization we enjoy so much. The simple idea of humans coexisting with dinosaurs ignores pretty much all of science. How can you say someone is getting a real education if they ignore the very things that have brought us to this world we call civilization?

Uh oh, (reaches for his troll gun)

In my area home schooling usually means "white people" teaching their kids creationism, and keeping their kids away from black kids but far and away it's the religion part than has driven the home school craze. We do have a couple of private schools here who tout they give a good christian education to their students I don't know what a christian education is but when i was in grade school, public school, they actually taught that Noah's ark was real and i was punished for not swallowing the fairy tales of the bible but that was 50 years ago....

Isn't hydrogen and fluorine, when reacted together, the most power reaction for chemical rocket engines?

"double face palm"

Plasma is ionized gas, I'm not sure what you are suggesting by plasma is information in a light ray...

I would like to add one thing, while not a professional I have raised two boys into really good young men (some of that has to reflect on me ) I would like to say, and this echos what some one else said, i think it's getting up in the night when everyone else is asleep that is really the point of her nightly forays. Getting up when everyone else is asleep is quite exciting for a child, gives them a sense of power or possibly even scares them a little bit but they know such fear is harmless since mom and dad are really just a shout away. One of my boys would get up in the middle of the night at around that age and play with his toys, very quietly, or sometimes sneak a snack or turn on the TV but we lived in a small house and i am a light sleeper so i knew about his wanderings most of the time and I would always get up and take him back to bed although a few times he would get up and come into our room and he would wake me up to come and see something he had built with legos. It seemed to be mostly be waking up and being bored with laying in bed that motivated him. Of course as teen he tried to sneak out of the house a few times and he found dad was difficult to sneak past but that was a short lived phenomena as well.

Ummm, did we forget a link to what ever you are talking about?

Is that a fact? I suggest you open another thead and we'll discuss the idea "it can't be answered"....

mississippichem, I'm betting he does or will at some point.... In the USA the main problem is that some people want to out law abortion and keep the knowledge of birth control from the very people who are having unwanted pregnancies, it's a catch 22 with profound repercussions, if you want to end the need for abortions then you need to teach something other than don't do "it" because believe it or not sex is fun and even if it weren't fun we are still programmed genetically to have sex, once past puberty our hormones scream SEX SEX SEX but society says NO NO NO, this is not helping anyone....