Moontanman

No, hollow wise sounding bite type analogies only serve to impress those who are not experienced enough to know it's nothing but physco babble. From my point of view your analogy is nothing more than a lie to cover up yet another lie, the lie being the existence of god to begin with. Don't try to baffle me with BS, I've heard it all in dozens of small fundamentalist Christian churches to large more secular churches, your analogy falls flat. Tell it like it is, don't try to cover up a lack of real knowledge by babbling sound bites that sound wise simply because they are unclear and confusing. Of course he didn't get fired, how could he fire himself? DrDNA I've heard those confusing analogies all my life, i stopped being impressed by them way before puberty. if you truly have something to say that is indeed wise don't try to cover it up by being obscure and trying to confuse the issue with false superiority. if you think you have wisdom i think we are all capable to judging that sans the obfuscation.

I've often thought the idea of Sapiens and Neanderthal mating was interesting, i see no reason to think that Neanderthals were inferior to us mentally but they were definitely different, their culture shows almost no sign of trading or commerce between distant places and Sapiens was all about trading for resources between distant places. This trading by it's self would have given Sapiens a leg up simply due to being able to get the materials for tools in trade rather than having to find sources of tool making materials close by to survive. I think this idea of commerce is what separated us and them and led to their decline and extinction. King you like to look to the Bible for historical data, I can't recall the scripture but at once point the a man had two sons, one was hairy and was a great hunter the other was not so hairy and was a farmer. the father favored the hairy wild son but his farmer son connived to take the harry brothers blessing from his dying father. it resulted in the farmer brother taking the birth right of the hairy wild brother. This has always reminded me of the Sapiens vs Neanderthal and how they first encountered each other in the land now call Palestine. Could this story have been an explanation of how Sapiens stole the birth right of the Neanderthals? Also Esau was covered in red hair and Neanderthals were though to be redheaded to some extent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esau

Sure no problemo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek

I think it's a positive step leader coming from the ground that has been cut off from both the ground and the clouds. In other words a ball of positive plasma. Or remote control alien drones...

No I would not agree, a forest is wild and the trees are all unique, if all the trees are alike it's a tree farm. Lots of them around here. No moss, it's not a forest to start with, as i said a forest is a wild ecosystem with out all it's parts it's just a group of trees. Your questions make no sense to me in the context we are discussing.

המשיח הוא פשוט דרך אחרת לדת לשלוט ההמונים עבור אנשים שרוצים לשלוט I can use google translate too.

I have been told, by seriously religious people, that the bible is absolute truth, every word, and that to question is in any way is blasphemy, the same as calling god a lier. The idea that Gods word could be translated wrong, as in God would not allow this, is also blasphemy. If the texts differ it is because God wanted them to differ and wants the translation to be the way it is. To me this is crazy but to these people who truly believe it's the word of god exactly as God wants it to be. These seriously religious people take this concept very seriously. God cannot be wrong so if old documents are changed or destroyed it's because god wanted it that way. it's why only the Gospels we have now survived to be included as parts of the new testament and why we should not even try to look back and see what was because what is in the bible now is what god wants. Scary stuff for sure.

כן, אבל מה האמת היא שיש בדת

I have to agree with King here, at least to a small extent. I think it is indeed a mistake to dismiss out of hand the idea that something in the sky or about the sky has indeed inspired us to do lots of things. it could very well be that the ancient writings is inspired by no more than the planets and stars. No one can discount the effect the heavens has on humans. Similarly discounting what modern humans have seen is also in error. Billy Joe Jim Bob the redneck out drinking beer and smoking dope while he seduces his cousin in the back of his pick up truck is not the only person (or type of person) to have have ever seen a UFO that was simply beyond our understanding of what we like to call reality. Many trained observers have witnessed clear sightings of real metallic objects that defy the laws of what we think of as flight. objects that cannot have an earthly origin. men flying nuclear bomb carrying bombers have seen these things both visually and on radar. Verified by other ground radar and similarly trained observers on the ground who saw the UFO hovering over intercontinental ballistic missiles at a hundred feet above the ground and the UFO affected the electronic communication of the bomber, civilian aircraft that also saw the object and the object affected nuclear missiles in their silos. All in the same sighting! Now we can explain away the above sighting the same way the military did, every one saw the planet Jupiter or we can look into the evidence and give at least a realistic possibility and often something beyond our understanding of what we see on the earth is a possibility and not a distant one! On the other hand i cannot see taking the word of ancient scribes at their word because quite frankly they saw these things in the sky as supernatural, everything that occurred in the sky was supernatural. On the other hand Meteors and Comets were supernatural entities as well but they recorded them quite accurately. Why do we dismiss anything else they saw but not all of it? It's because we have been able to pin down meteors and comets as natural phenomena but UFOs remain unclassified. I think this is due to the way UFOs were investigated by the military and the way the military instilled the idea of UFOs being seen by people who were not quite right in the head or were poor observers. Remember that at one time "officially" rocks did not fall from the sky either. To suggest it could bring you into deep shit. It didn't keep rocks from falling from the sky, it just kept people from believing they did unless they saw one drop. Ridicule and dismissal of the idea of rocks falling from the sky kept people from the truth for a long time. I'd rather believe a Yankee professor would lie than believe rocks could fall from the sky! Any one want to debate the three main theories of the orgin of the UFO? ETI theory, EDI theory, and M&M theory (The best candy in the world comes from Mars)

Me, the whole oceans falling off the edge thing got to be a drag, the giant turtles kept drowning! Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Some arthropod breathing organs are better than others but i can agree with this, I pretty much said it in my post. Agreed Nope, you are ignoring the cube square law, land arthropods are not large because an external skeleton gets too heavy to support large animals. This is true but an intelligent creature capable of doing what we do has to have binocular vision to judge depth, Depth perception is part of the bag of tricks that allow us to effective use our intelligence for technology. We are talking about technological aliens here, fire is a prerequisite for technology like ours, aliens must spend at least part of their lives on land, and light is the easiest and best way to see on land. Crows are very smart, they use tools, even make tools out of other less suitable objects but they are severely limited by having to use their feet to grasp limbs and their beak has no opposable thumbs to multiply their grip. Birds as we know them would be at a big disadvantage in the "hands" department. Could a bird use a spear or flake rocks to make a knife? A bow an arrow? I'll have to admit it's a unlikely but still possible scenario. Again, under water, no fire, no space ships. Even if gravity was low enough to allow an octopus to achieve technology the air being thick enough to allow life forms under such low gravity seems unlikely. No they are not as I've pointed out. A head on a torso, binocular vision, two arms and two or more legs to support the body is humanoid. Even four arms and four legs would still be in the shape ball park. Yeah, it's one of my favorites but the crab is exaggerated in size quite a bit, the trash can is not a normal 30 gallon can, more like a five gallon bucket. Still a big crab but they are rare and cannot compete with introduced mammals in their environment. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged King, i really have some sympathy for your arguments here but so far as others have said you give no evidence at all and the idea that because we all shared a similar creation story really doesn't hold up. The idea of beings from heaven is not universal nor is the creation story of the bible, even though the bibles story is repeated in other cultures so are many other things in the bible. It might mean human brains are alike enough that we form similar stories when we try to go beyond what we know but some creation stories are simply not even close to what we westerners seem to think is universal. I think it's even possible that the idea of aliens comes from this universal need to appeal to a higher authority. In ancient times they saw gods or demons, now we see aliens. I think some of the evidence does point in the direction of nuts and bolts aliens, ETI, EDI or some other manifestation of some intelligence other than us but I cannot prove it yet. Your idea does dovetail quite nicely with mine but i don't think "they" are super beings we cannot conceive of in any way other than the supernatural and i really see nothing to even suggest "they" created us. I hope one day these things will be investegated seriously and maybe some good can come of it but for now we are speculating big time. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedBTW I hate this whole merged posts deal!

In the last few days a tropical depression formed just a few miles off shore where I live. Rather early for that to have happened, I live in a place where hurricanes for just off shore often. most time you think of hurricanes forming in the tropics but here in NC they can form just off shore and do so regularly. we get northeasters as bad as cat 1 hurricanes in the winter as well. We usually average a major storm every three years but we haven't had one in 7 years now, only tropical storms and cat one storms since then. I've been through a cat 3 several cat 1 and several cat 2 as well. Does anyone else live where hurricanes are regular occurrences? From a purely anecdotal perspective I'd say major storms are not as common in recent years but smaller storms are more common, any one agree or disagree? Any hurricane stories to tell? I have one... A family that lived close to me during hurricane Floyd reported that during the hurricane they heard a loud banging on their back door, it went on and on so they peaked out to see what was banging on the door. an alligator about 8 feet long was trying to get in the door! I guess the storm was too much for him and he wanted shelter!

I used to live in the city and the tap water if left in the sun would turn emerald green in a few days. It was great for raising Daphnia magna for fish food for my fish breeding business. i drank the water for 34 years and it never bothered me. Where live now i have well water it goes through a softener and it can stand in the sun for weeks and remain clear as a crystal but it tastes terrible and has hydrogen sulfide in it. if you by pass the softener the water turns red immediately on contact with the air and leaves a muddy bottom of iron sulfide when it settles out, it is very hard and stinks too. I'd rather have the water with algae in it...

Stars in the middle of our galaxy can be shown moving so fast a movie of their movements has been made. they are moving too fast to be in orbit around anything but a black hole. Stellar mass black holes have been detected by gravity lensing and by their effects on other objects. Theory suggests black holes should be fairly common. I am pretty sure a quasar and a galaxy are the same thing, a quasar is a galaxy that has an actively feeding black hole and what we consider a normal Galaxy doesn't.

Big change for such a small period of time. Must have been a huge amount of energy involved.

I've been reading this thread and I have to admit I'm not sure exactly what the argument is. part of it seems to be we have choices in Internet service providers. From what I understand the choices are more like levels of participation. You have dial up, yes people still have dial up, i do, and it's AOL, as far as I know I've never been restricted as to what i can view on the net by AOL, i can choose to be restricted and I've had some run ins with some sort of nationwide service that has told me how much they want to protect me from porn or unfamily friendly content but i told them to f**k off and they went away. I'm not sure where they came from or how they got access to AOL but i think it was someone who was trying to scare people off certain sites, in this case a pagan site i was talking to. Where I live there are many dial up providers, they are all equally slow and full of adds. Then they have somewhat higher speed providers, at&t being the only one i know of right off hand in my area but i am sure there are others. You also have people like dish-network but that's a different story, I'd have to set up a dish on the side of my house and it is grossly effected by weather and so on. Then you have broad band, in my area only Road Runner provides broadband.. Since i prefer to have a hard line instead of a wireless my options are limited. I used to have RR who has a deal with AOL or is owned by AOL or RR owns AOL or something like that so when i had to go back to dial up AOL still had all my stuff saved from RR. i probably got screwed by misinformation but dial up is pretty much dial up so WTF. It seems to me that in my area at least there is so little choice that saying you have options is putting the cart ahead of the horse. My options are limited from what I see, if I'm wrong them please school me on the subject but how can you allow providers to edit the content of the web if you can't get anyone else to provide the service? Is money the real factor here for freedom of access to the net? Do only people who can afford it in affluent areas where there are many servers have real choice?

I think you'll find this is the very reason the idea that aliens would want our planet is unlikely. For bugs to be big enough to be "us" on another planet would take conditions of less gravity greater pressure and more oxygen. Vertebrates didn't take the land from invertebrates because of chance. Vertebrates are simply better at exploiting dry land in large size than animals with exoskeletons. Vertebrates are better at low oxygen less support or higher gravity environments than invertebrates, the evolutionary record clearly shows that when oxygen levels fell at the end of the Carboniferous age body size of insects fell while vertebrate body size went up. But even if you disagree with that why couldn't "bugs" be humanoid? Why wouldn't an alien have a body with the forward appendages free to manipulate objects, a head with two eyes set so they are close to the brain so there is less delay times between them and the senses of the brain. when I say humanoid I am using the term loosely. At least as loosely as taking the idea of streamlining an animal for hi speed water travel. Even deep sea animals are streamlined in a similar way if they expect to swim fast long distances, even birds are streamlined but they more closely resemble rays than fish. If you had an intelligent preying mantis it would technically be humanoid by this definition. Actually centauriod but even insects conform to the rules of head brains and eyes and hands. Only on Star Trek are humanoids sexually atractive... well except for CMDR Riker and Captain Kirk, them boys have no standards They could catch crabs!

Why did I think of AC/DC when I read the title to this question? Negative and positive charges probably had more to do with vast clouds coming together than magnetism, larger atoms formed from stars not particles in clouds coming together, good luck with selling the idea of magnetism and gravity being the same thing.

Zolar, Michael, see my post above for reasons why aliens might be interested in us. BTW zolar why do they have to be a super civilization? Why couldn't they just be a nuts and bolts civilization much like us? More advanced technology but still within the realm of what we understand to be real and factual. I think the idea of God like beings has been beat to death with no real basis for it except people thinking there is no end to technology and all barriers we currently think of as being laws will be broken. Why would be assume FTL is possible and aliens would be so far advanced from us we would be ant like? Have any ants launched rockets lately? Ants have been around for more than 100 million years, no rockets yet, no fire at all. How ever we can communicate on some level with chimps who have rudimentary technology. I don't think we can expect aliens to be super beings by any definition of the word. Our kind of technology would require beings much like us and unless they wanted to fool us I see no reason why we would see them as super beings. I posted this in another thread but maybe it belongs here.

No telling where aliens might keep thier brains Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged There is a school of thought that says that intelligent technological beings would be humanoid at least. Much like tuna sharks, dolphins and Ichthyosaurs shared traits brought about by their environment the ability to use tools the way we do might result in aliens that are much like us, not star trek like us but similar body shapes, limb placement and such. Personally i think centaur like creatures are more likely.

I think the Miss Universe pageant is more appropriate You got my vote mooey! I've alwasy found intellegence to be beautiful. Wow look at the brains on that girl!

We need to go to the moon and mine that helium 3, aneutronic fusion is the future! Has to be true, being able to generate clean power with out part of it being difficult is just too good to be true

What would we see if we were to detect aliens inside our solar system? WISE is looking at infrared but would it really detect an alien base or colony? How much power would aliens really have to be leaking to be seen by WISE or is WISE even capable of detecting aliens unless they set off a nuclear device of some sort? How far away could we detect a nuclear explosion of say one megaton? Would we have to be lucky and looking in the right direction? How far away could the mark one eyeball see a such an explosion? How much thermal energy does one of our own nuclear power plants give off as waste heat? How far away could we detect one of our own nuclear power plants? I guess what i am asking is what would we need to be looking for? And could we detect them by accident or would it take a search that specifically looked for certain things that could not be natural, we do not expect to see, and we normally simply do not look for?

Racism is an ugly thing, based more in classism that any reality of skin color, skin color is just easier to recognize than trailer park trash. I grew up in the deep south, I've heard every argument for and against racism than anyone could possibly know who didn't grow up here. In my 55 short years what I think it's all boiled down to is the real human need to feel like you are fundamentally better than some one else, anyone else. What this guy is doing is trying to tap into that feeling of "I have to be better than some one else in a fundamental way" I think it's a cheap shot against what libertarians stand for and it appeals to the worst in us all. I can't honestly side with any particular political ideology due to having a brain that understands that nothing is black and white, right or left, or even right or wrong from all points of view. In a working society there has to be both limits and freedoms, all sides have to be viewed and the best parts of each used until society changes so that they are no longer necessary. I would say a great many "white" people are glad they no longer need to live the lie of racism/choice. I know people of color are glad the lie is no longer fashionable at the very least. Society seems to churn out these people of absolutes on a consistent basis, luckily for "us" and I mean everyone of all ideologies it has been increasingly difficult for this type of person to form their cult of personality. However, while I honestly believe in freedom of the individual over the power of the government I know that the freedom of the individual cannot be allowed to become the power of the government. There has to be limits on the power of both individuals and the government, this guy is capitalizing on the reality that most people don't understand what their own personal idea of freedom would result in if given free reign. (I'd probably be stoned and naked most of the time ) He has shown he not only doesn't have a true belief but that he is unwilling to face the results of having his purported belief. As for gun control i am an avid pro gun person but on the other hand i would not even think of carrying a gun into a restaurant where the owner objected to me carrying one. personal choice also comes with personal responsibility, something the whole of our society doesn't seem to understand unless it conforms to their personal world view.

Kudos to JohnB for a excellent lay out of the problem. Time traveling Frisbees is a bit much, they don't even look like Frisbees. I agree that something has been going on for millennia, what no one knows, but dismissing it frivolously seems insulting to the people involved at the very least It is also evident that pictures are not required to make a sighting significant in regard to the sighting being unconventional.

I have to agree, having been on the "highly skeptical" side of this debate many times that one is very difficult to explain away.