Moontanman

I think it needs to be said that until about 40 to 50 thousand years ago humans didn't excel much beyond simple tool making. During the preceding 150,000 years human made the same tools with very little advancement. 50,000 years ago and quite suddenly humans began to make things better, art, tools became more complex in design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity after this "Great Leap Forward" progress was at a ever faster rate. Until this time progress was much slower. exactly what occurred then is open to debate.

There is fungus that us melanin to convert gamma rays to fuel their metablolism. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8564/title/Dark_Power_Pigment_seems_to_put_radiation_to_good_use http://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2007/05/29/major-biological-discoveryinside-the-chernobyl-reactor/

Am impact of the size he is talking about would have been an order of magnitude worse than the impact that contributed to the demise of the Dinosaurs. Such an impact would have devastated the surface of the entire planet, possibly been an extinction event on a scale never before seen.

Black plant life would indicate the plants are using all wave lengths of light, for other colors you can go to marine algae. Red algae use green/blue light, brown algae use blue to violet light. It's really not that straight forward but it does show tendencies. I have grown algae with artificial light and the waves lengths preferred do indeed correspond to some extent on the color of the pigments in the algae.

If I may I would like to say that there is another school of thought, oil, coal and other hydrocarbons found int the earth are not biology reworked by geology but are actually geology reworked by biology. Hydrocarbons were deposited with the earth as it formed from material similar to hydrocarbon rich meteorites called carboniferous chonderites, this hydrocarbon material is reworked by biology into Oil natural gas and coal, The observed phenomenon of oil reservoirs refilling after being emptied is just one part of a large body of evidence for this process. Unfortunately this idea has met considerable problems because some people have hit upon this to try and say that oil is not running out and this blatant lie has given the whole idea of abiotic oil a bad name. Actually the refilling of oil fields is far to slow to be a significant factor in the world wide oil crisis. The Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold is a recent advocate of this process but the idea stretches back more than a hundred years and was the first explanation for the origin of oil. The Soviets also promoted this and of course western science rejected it out of hand due to this. See these links for more info. http://www.scribd.com/doc/4847873/Dismissal-of-the-Claims-of-a-Biological-Connection-for-Natural-Petroleum-JF-Kenney http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin http://asecondhandconjecture.com/index.php/2008/04/21/abiogenic-oil/ http://www.rense.com/general58/biot.htm sadly this idea is being hijacked by people who think it means oil is in unlimited supply and the people who say oil is limited are very reluctant to even consider the possibility of abiotic oil.

Maximum Possible temperature? 10 to the 32nd power degrees? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/hot.html

In World War Z interviews of the veterans and other people who fought the zombies said that the older zombies were the more decrepit they became. Although they killed and ate humans and other animals the flesh wasn't digested and simply came out their rectum as rotten meat. If a zombie was disemboweled it wasn't harmed but any meat it ate just fell out through the hole in in it's torso. zombies have a limited life span, they slowly deteriorate over time. Lower temps slow this process, that why zombies on the bottom in deep ocean were a threat, they were preserved at those low temps but still able to slowly make their way to shallow water and land. This means that even though zombies on land die off in a reasonable time frame (very long time frame) those in cold or cool conditions do not. Zombies frozen in cold regions reanimate when thawed out.

Try ground Popeye mullet and pogy. If it doesn't work out you can use frozen chunks as chum to catch sharks!

I know that BB theory is the accepted theory and that BB makes no attempt to say what became before. On the other hand there are some hypothesis that do attempt to give some ideas about what came before. Brane theory does give some ideas about what came before. Colliding Branes contained in a multidimensional Bulk does give us some ideas about the possibilities. While we have no tests that would currently show evidence for this there is no evidence that would contradict this either. Since this is posted in P&S I don't have a problem bringing it up.

I'm not sure if zombies have any effect of plants or not but one way to tell if a group of people have zombie infected among them is to nerve gas them, the regular people die but the people who are developing into zombies do not!

Any animal that tries to eat a zombie dies, the flesh is very poisonous.

They could only be crushed if they had hollow spaces inside their bodies. Solid things do not crush, one of the main clean up problems after World War Z was using small deep water submersibles to kill the zombie hoards hiding in deep ocean waters. Any ship at anchor was vulnerable to zombies climbing the anchor chain at night and gaining access to the ship. fishing trawlers had to be prepared to kill zombies they netted off the bottom of the oceans. Only freezing temps stopped them and then when they thawed out they would start walking around again!

Maybe they will intercept our TV broad casts and think Star Trek is real and want to avoid our hi-tech militaristic space forces? Will they think we can do things that are impossible to them after seing our "history broadcasts" of Star Trek and other scifi TV shows?

Not if the subs cooling water intakes get clogged with zombies. read World War Z , the things walk/crawl across the bottoms of oceans, islands are death traps. The only thing to do is to methodically blow all of their heads off. all 5 billion of them! The safest place to be would be Antarctica, zombies freeze in cold weather.

Finally a thread that actually makes sense!

Basically for the same reason none of the other planets fall into the sun, their orbital velocity.

I would have to vote probably not on that one, but I would be amazed to find out we are wrong. If you postulate a civilization a 1000 years in advance of us or 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 years in advance of us it would be foolish to try and say what they could and could not do.

There were animals on Xena, Warrior princess? That's a very simplistic and disingenuous conclusion, There are plenty of UFO reports that do not consist of lights in the sky at night. many of them are quite detailed by people whose testimony could put you in the electric chair and are inexplicable to say the least. There doesn't have to be FTL for their to be aliens here, with slower than light technology not much more advanced than what we already have we could occupy the entire Galaxy in a few hundred thousand years. When you are talking about technology hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than ours it's a fools errand to predict what they could or could not do. On the other hand I have to agree, humans did not need nor did they have any help from aliens, gods, or anyone else. They used their own native intelligence, trial and error and their own powers of observation and cooperation to accomplish these things, no alien intelligence required!

Damn, I sit here wondering how to pay my rent and these guys are selling universes. I knew being honest would be a bummer eventually.

What do you mean by this? No one was suggesting dedicated marine fish can live in freshwater or that dedicated freshwater fish can live in the ocean. All surface water on the earth contains some salts, some more than others and fish can and do live in waters of varying salinity. Freshwater fish are probably more tolerant than marine fish to variations in salt content. Sodium hydroxide is a powerful base, high pH is usually not well tolerated by freshwater fish, fish exposed to a high pH would be vulnerable to a rise in ammonia at the very least. The key here is to lower the pH slowly, most fish cannot tolerate a rapid change in pH. Salt is not the issue, pH is the issue. Combining HCl with NaOH will not result in a large amount of salt, if that much of either chemical was present the fish would be long dead.

What he means is that a pH swing is far more dangerous than a slight increase in salt content. When I collect fish i often add salt to the collection buckets to protect teh fish from injury even though the fish are coming from soft acidic water. If I added an alkaline substance to the water it would be more likely to kill the fish. At the very least ammonia is far more poisonous at high pH than it is at low pH. pH is more important to fish than dissolved solid content.

what color eyes is it possible for a human to have? I've seen blue, green, gray, (mine are blue/gray) and brown. Anything I've left out for people other than shades of the ones I listed? I've seen people who had the whites of their eyes tattooed a blue color.

Is triploidy what you guys are talking about? Most normal cells/organisms are dipliod. but triploidy does occur.

Oh now are you are going to say you can make love more than one time a night, braggart! Sex lasting for a few seconds, everyone knows it's just a half second or so I have long suspected the idea of Homosexuality or Heterosexuality as opposed to simply sexuality is a human construct that is meaningless everywhere but with humans. I would guess that in a totally natural state human sexuality comes much closer to what we see in Benobo chimps than what we see in Geese or even gorillas. In Benobo chimps even the children are included in sex play, I would guess that human desire to limit and or control sex play is part of the desire to control others. Controlling others by limiting pleasurable behavior would seem to be the first step in consolidating power. Limiting sex to those people who have agreed to allow others to control their behavior would seem to be a powerful way to influence the group and the social evolution of that group. Power and control takes many forms but control of sex would seem to be pretty basic.