Moontanman

If they are bringing their entire culture with them, note that does not mean they bring everyone in their culture, why would FTL communication be necessary? If their reason to come here is to utilize the resources of the solar system to make more colony/ships and to spread to other stars and do the same why would they have to have FTL communication? When Europeans come to the western hemisphere messages to the home countries took years to make it back. Why would that be a bad thing for space travelers?

Earth's Atmosphere May Be More Efficient at Releasing Energy to Space Than Climate Models Indicate, Satellite Data Suggest ScienceDaily (July 29, 2011) — Data from NASA's Terra satellite suggests that when the climate warms, Earth's atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change may indicate. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110729031754.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_environment+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+News+--+Top+Environment%29

Again, where did I suggest that mammals evolved from dinosaurs? Both archosaurs and mammals evolved from reptiles, a similar crude phylogeny could be made with mammals and reptiles.

If aliens are visiting our solar system it's likely they have been here a long time, and IMHO have no use for planets other than asteroids and kuiper belt type objects, no need for FTL and the point would be what ever the aliens wanted it to be but the possibility exists. (guessing the motivations of aliens is yet another can of worms) I doubt they would help humans build anything and i have seen no evidence of this help, I am sure if you watch the show with some skepticism you will not see any either. The Drake equation is meaningless if aliens do colonize other star systems. Using technology not much more advanced than we already have humans could, if they wanted, colonize the entire galaxy in a million years or so. (I've read estimates of 250,000 years to 25,000,000 years but either extreme is a blink of the cosmic "eye") We could do this and never set foot on an object big enough to be round by it's own gravity. Maybe they already have or do and keep quiet to not attract competition and simply do not use planets, especially planets with life that is potentially a harmful source of disease and parasites. Gravity wells are hard to transport things out of and all the materials needed to build colonies, which could double as slow boat type ships, are already in orbit around the stars, the ort cloud and kuiper belt are a vast source of everything any life forms could possibly want. Why they would hide from us is a legitimate question and the best idea i have is that they are not hiding from us but use communication techniques designed to hide themselves from other civilizations that might compete with them in some way we have no concept of, noisy aliens might not survive as well as quiet ones. The only reason i can see for such aliens to have contact with us is to influence us in some way that is beneficial to them, i think quite possibly inspiring religion in us and using these differing religions to control and confuse us and to keep us fighting among our selves so we take a very long time to achieve enough cooperation between ourselves to begin to explore our own solar system and to colonize it the same way they are doing is a reasonable assumption. I guess i went a little too far OT, sorry. But if you want we can continue on another thread, there are several similar ones already here or start a new one, i vote a new one but for sure watch the show, i am sure if you use a little bit of skepticism you'll see the alien part is mostly hype much like my assessment of aliens being here already. (but still a lot of fun to speculate about )

Possibly being assigned to office could be random but at the end of the term a vote, to either retire you in luxury or shoot you, could be taken? That might be a bit of an incentive to do a good job, now it's just a popularity contest to get elected so you get the perks after whether you are a total disaster or not.

Exactly where did i suggest mammals evolved from dinosaurs?

Thank you mooey for that link, it saddened me very much to think that i am always under scrutiny as a potential rapist due to the actions of others. While I would never even consider propositioning a woman in an elevator to begin with I honestly never considered how vulnerable women must feel under those circumstances.

Hello Catherine

I'm not sure if it has been tried but it shouldn't be difficult to do, we have already done the opposite in wild populations of everything from fish to mammals. We have also reversed the process in wild populations and resulted in larger animals instead of smaller. all you have to do to make individuals in populations smaller is to eliminate the larger animals regularly. This is done routinely in wild fish populations by requiring that only larger sized fish can be harvested and smaller fish are thrown back. This results in smaller fish breeding and larger fish not being able to breed because they are dead, over all, the size of individuals decreases. The opposite effect can be seen by only taking smaller fish and leaving larger sized fish, this results in the over all size of individuals in a given population being larger, if you slowly increase the size of individuals allowed to be taken while still taking small individuals then the over all size of individuals will increase.

Damn, maybe John Titor was real.....

It's actually not proper to say Dinosaurs were reptiles any more than it is proper to say mammals are reptiles. Both animal groups evolved from reptiles through various intermediate forms. Dinosaurs and mammals split from the reptiles at approxamately the same time, dinosaurs pretty much domionated mammals and through this domination/competition the mammals we see today evolved. Many ancient animals that are commonly thought of as dinosaurs were not and were more closely related to mammals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimetrodon If not for the dinosaurs mammals would have no doubt never evolved into the forms we see today and might have more closely resembled the dimetrodon.

This tale keeps popping up, Tokay gekos are weird looking lizards but weird looking doesn't equal a cure for anything, i bet the gekos are taking a beating from people looking to get rich quick.

There are various ways to look at this, there was a age of wood, when the things we made were basically sticks, often modified in various ways but wood none the less, then came stone, for weapons and building, then metals, bronze and iron, and now we are entering the age of carbon, carbon fibers and nanotubes, carbon is replacing metals and soon we will be in the age of carbon.

If a man is fooled by a female who is under the age of consent (which i think is so totally arbitrary as to really be meaningless) and that man has consensual sex with that female calling him a rapist is just wrong. (calling him a child molester is criminally slanderous) On the other hand taking advantage of a woman who is drunk or other wise incapacitated is wrong if she is 12 or 112. The idea that a woman is somehow responsible for being raped just because she is dressed immodestly or she is alone or vulnerable in some other way is despicable. I have been a nudist much of my life, there is no reason what so ever to assert that anyone is to blame for having sex forced on them due to being immodestly dressed, this idea of uncontrolled sexual urges is bullshit, it is at the very least a sign of mental illness, sociopath or psychopath would be my guess in some cases but being a part of a society that tells you that is an excuse for rape is also part of the problem, I think this makes that society mentally ill as well. Being sexually attracted to someone is not an excuse for rape, anyone, man or woman who cannot control their sexual urges well enough that simply being in contact with a nude or vulnerable fellow human being is an excuse for forcing sex on them is simply unacceptable. There is no excuse for forcing sex on anyone under any circumstances.

The Sunny Side of Smut For most people, pornography use has no negative effects—and it may even deter sexual violence By Melinda Wenner Moyer | July 22, 2011 | It used to be tough to get porn. Renting an X-rated movie required sneaking into a roped-off room in the back of a video store, and eyeing a centerfold meant facing down a store clerk to buy a pornographic magazine. Now pornography is just one Google search away, and much of it is free. Age restrictions have become meaningless, too, with the advent of social media—one teenager in five has sent or posted naked pictures of themselves online, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sunny-side-of-smut&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20110722

Rigney, don't back down off this, it is very true that more people die from other causes every year, probably more people die slipping on soap in the bath tub but terrorism is an attempt to disrupt our entire first world civilization. Terrorism affects every one. Fear of terrorism has far reaching consequences to all of us. literally billions of dollars are spent to try and ensure that terrorists do not succeed in disrupting the every day comings and goings of our society. Terrorists and the fear they spread costs us billions and living in fear touches the lives of nearly every one. Terrorism disrupts not only business and the money trade creates that provides for all of us to live our lives it also disrupts entire governments and causes war and subjugates entire populations and incites them to do horrendous things that they normally would not do. Terrorists of the fundamentalist religious types incite the subjugation of women, influences governments to go to war, terrorist stifles the advance of our entire first world civilization. This effect probably kills more people in third world countries by keeping first world countries from helping than anything else. You are correct Rigeny, terrorism is a huge evil that needs to be stopped if for no other reason it keeps us from fixing things that kill far more people.

This is just a tad off topic but during the American revolution hundreds possibly thousands of barrels of pine resin, 5 to 50 gallon wooden barrels, were dumped into the Cape Fear River and now are buried under many feet of sediment in tens of feet of water in what is technically a river but it really a deep peat swamp. Would this resin have had time to turn to amber by now?

Yes, Fox will survive, it has no heart to drive a wooden stake through...

Umm, who said anything about hay fever being an infection? Beaver fever is a parasitic infection you get from drinking water from those clear mountain streams

What have we lost from those clear mountain streams? How about beaver fever? A not very pleasant infection among many not to mention the actual various flukes and worms we can get from un-purified water. What do we loose? In some people it would seem that a reasonable parasite load tends to make you less allergic to things. Not sure by what you mean what have we added that's not good, a tiny bit of chlorine is not harmful ( your stomach acids already contain chlorine) and ozone dissipates fairly quickly, especially when exposed to light, I think I'd risk a little ozone to avoid cholera.

How can sex be used as a weapon? I'd really like to know, (edit, I should have said how can a woman use with holding sex as a weapon, clearly a rapist is using sex as a weapon of terror and this terror is what he wants and needs, my apologies) And how would everyone being promiscuous stop rapists? Sex as common as a hand shake, I still can't past that one, hello how are today, hike your skirt up and bend over for a sec there girly, I can't even imagine kissing in place of a hand shake, swapping slobbers with a stranger? Rape is violent, I am sure many rapists try to justify their actions with the idea of women withholding something or being stingy or selfish but that is a pubescent boy attitude, not a mature adult or even a half way mature teenager. It really makes no sense to defend the rapist in any way, if someone really thinks that rape is justified by anything, I MEAN ANYTHING, they need to be proactive and see a shrunk before they end up doing some one harm and ending up in jail. BTW, she might be pretty but in jail so are you Did you think i was disagreeing with you there green?

The Terror belongs to the terrorists, they bear complete responsibility for it, no one else is responsible for it.

Ok, I don't understand the basic premise here that woman are with holding sex, what planet do you come from? You really think that sex could be no more emotional than a handshake? How often do you think sex is "required"? Since my late teens i never lacked for sexual partners, while I didn't have sex several times a day (well at least not with someone else) I always had girl friends and if you treat them with some respect and dignity and are careful to date girls who are mature enough to want to have sex and if you are mature enough to actually be in a relationship instead of a expecting a quicky out side a bar when ever you want with no emotional investment and if you don't require every woman you have a relationship with to be a playboy center fold prospect it shouldn't be a problem to find someone who will make love to you regularly. I honestly do not see women with holding sex in any realistic way. I think you should establish just what you mean by with holding sex, do you mean you think you should get a quicky from any girl you meet any time you want? If so then I can see why sex is being with held is part of your world view. I also can't see how not having a sexual partner leads to rape, while sex is important you are not going to die or experience any pain if you don't "get it" and unless you have some philosophical reason not to masturbate any over whelming sex urges should be taken care of in the privacy of your own domicile. And if your philosophical leanings do forbid masturbation I would look into modifying them a tiny bit at least. I can honestly say that most if not all women I've known well enough to be aware of their sexuality seem to like sex at least as much as I do and many made me very envious of their ability to "enjoy" sex... Fat bottomed girls, You make the rockin' world go round. YEAH!

Most of the really mysterious SHC cases were in the rather long past when forensics was pretty much "Yeah, he's dead" Typical case http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/02/28/spontaneous-human-combustion-and-the-wick-effect/ While not all of the details of every SHC case are the same and a few have been shown to be murder SHC is not as mysterious as anecdotal accounts would have you believe. The shrinking skull thing is often told as a sign of SHC but I could find only two cases cited where that occurred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_I._Mott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Reeser http://www.ukskeptics.com/article.php?dir=articles&article=spontaneous_human_combustion.php

Thanks, I was looking the wrong way evidently, Boron polymers area good start for sure.