MOTP

No, what I had meant was that If you are talking about the volume of the ball, and not just its surface area, then the air inside it isn't going to be blue, but clear. Even if you call it "black" as in it would appear black were your eyes within it, it still would not be blue. Volume-wise, the ball isn't going to be blue for more than a fraction of its colors. Since the hollowness is what causes this irregularity, it's safe to assume that it is more spherical than blue. Exactly. Because of the nature of our eyes, and light in general, we see whatever the ball doesn't keep for itself and don't see what is actually being taken by the ball. We are effectively proving that "One man's trash is another man's treasure". By the act of perceiving a certain color, it means that that is exactly what the ball is not Much as the dictionary might say otherwise, the ball is the opposite of whatever color is perceived at any given moment. The ball is perceived to be blue, but is the opposite. If we somehow had some kind of instrument to identify what color the ball is, and not what it's given off (which we do, it's called reversing the color scheme and it makes for a very strange world indeed) then we would see it is more any other color than blue, even if it has some blue here and there (reflecting red and green) Furthermore, other factors have to be taken in, because a ball isn't simply "blue" and "hollow". Otherwise, we would have to consider the weighted average of all the major possibilities, and that would degrade the "blueness" and "spherical-(ness?)" quite a bit.

I think it actually has to do with how closed off the ball is from external sources of light. "blue" can only be perceived in the presence of light, so if it is very closed off, no light can enter it. Therefore, 99% of its volume is not blue, but black. However, this also depends on whether you are talking about the ball as a whole, or just the "skin" that is pressurized by external and internal air pressure. If it's just the skin, and it's not very thick, it's still reasonably safe to assume that a lot of it is black, although in this case it would be mostly blue. Something else to consider is that what you are looking at is a ball from the past, ie a ball that photons have hit. What you are viewing is not the present state of the ball itself, but a reasonable estimate because not much could have changed in the small amount of time that it took the light to reach your eyes. Heisenburg at its finest. So therefore another probability factor. Also, the ball itself is not really blue, but the opposite, due to it absorbing all visible wavelengths besides blue. With so much uncertainty, the ball still at least looks spherical. That's why I'd choose spherical over blue.

If Psychics can ever be proven, we might be able to harvest it somehow.

Supposing we did receive a radio broadcast from a planet 1 billion light years away. We would be thrilled that there is other life in the universe. Unfortunetly, Their entire race could have easily been wiped out in 1 billion years. It's a form of time pollution. You gain things from 1000 years ago, 1 million, 1 billion, and so on.

I'm interested in why it involves clouds.

How do we know the universe had a beginning?

I haven't read more than the first post, so I may be repeating what someone else has said. Life can be defined as a complicated chemical reaction where chemicals are created to bind other chemicals together in an organized, repeating pattern. This pattern can also be shifted in the environment to adapt to the environment, ie keep a pattern going longer. Life must draw on outside resources because energy is always lost. Thus, it makes sense that if life has to survive, it must be able to "be aware" of its external environment. Intelligence, of course, comes from higher levels of awareness. It's curious to note that biologists will tell you that chemistry is the "structure of life", whereas chemists will tell you that biology is a coincidental consequence of atoms interacting. There are more than 100 elements, and a ridiculous number of possible compounds. What we have witnessed, DNA, amino acids and the rest are a remote possibility that itself has many different possibilities. If life exists elsewhere, we must bypass our rules of thumb, and instead look at the overall chemical picture. In this way it is possible that all of terrestrial life itself is a unified species.

Even if the universe does curve around, it doesn't mean that it's finite. It could just be one circle within other circles. A theoretical physicist once postulated that spacetime was made up in units, similar to units of the electromagnetic spectrum (photons). If this is so, the possibility of a finite universe is in how many of these packets there are. Since matter has to occupy them, if there is a finite number of spacetime packets, the universe is finite. The only problem with this is that there could be other forms of matter that do not occupy spacetime, or resist spacetime like current matter "jumps over" the lack of spacetime. We couldn't detect this matter unless it made itself apparent in spacetime.