Leader Bee

Going back to Ydoaps' initial question about whether a human being replaced with mechanical parts is still the same person I would say yes, as long as the conciousness acts in the same way it did when it was biological. Is it still human? No. It may have "evolved" from humans but aside from it's mind everything is different. What you have created here is a being that is stronger, faster, hardier, lasts longer, more than likely has no need to eat or sleep and is generally in every way superior to Homo Sapiens. They will be free from biological diseases and old age (at least how we would classify old age now) and when parts begin to wear down they could be replaced easily. Over the course of generations more and more humans would convert and because of the low mortality rate in the new android species they would begin to outnumber us within time. While their brains are still the conciousness of a human and considering that the androids are not just storage devices for a conciousness and can still learn, it's very likeley they'll realise they're tougher and better than us. That would lead to all sorts of problems,economical: "people" that don't need to eat or sleep would make great workers no? Social: People that dont need to eat or sleep get all our jobs and so are are prejudiced and looked down upon by society. Historically, seperate races seek independence and I don't think too many of these androids would think differently despite their original minds originating from a particular race, they'll all have something in common. Before I start rambling on too much my conclusion is that they will still be the same person conciously but in all other aspects they are not a member of the human race any longer due to massive differences in their strengths and weaknesses compared to Humans and how they reproduce (if at all).

Perhaps you do not need those criteria to consider it a person but it will need to be classified somehow. If it is not classified then how would you differentiate it from a sufficiently advanced A.I ? If both were to have sentience and sapience, had the same level of intelligence and infact the only difference is that one was entirely conceived by humans and our the other, our cyborgs, are merely vessels for a naturally occuring mind would they both be people? Will there be a time thousands of years in the future when us, Homosapiens are considered the common anscestor of silicon brained androids and our cyborg offspring?

Given the following definitions then, it would be debateable whether or not an android is indeed alive or not, especially in regards to point 7. Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive, where life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following phenomena: 1) Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature. 2)Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life. 3)Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life. 4) Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter. 5) Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present. 6) Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis. 7) Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.

So how do we reproduce if we all end up as androids?

It's gonna be awkward to communicate with aliens if we ever find any, the distances are just too vast and getting larger thanks to cosmic expansion. On the other hand I suppose that makes it harder for them if they decide to invade us, reinforcements will take some time to arrive.

I didnt realise the island was a series, I was talking about the film with Ewan Mcgregor where they grow peoples clones to harvest organs.

Where is your source? The Mike shot of operation Ivy was over 10 megatons and is one of only many multi megaton weapons atmospherically tested before the Start & Salt treaties. I don't see any global problem from those detonations. From Wikipedia: However, 77% of the final yield came from fast fission of the uranium tamper, which meant that the device produced large amounts of fallout. The fireball was approximately 3.25 miles (5.2 km) wide, and the mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 57,000 feet (17.0 km) in less than 90 seconds. One minute later it had reached 108,000 feet (33.0 km), before stabilizing at 136,000 feet (25 miles or 37.0 km) with the top eventually spreading out to a diameter of 100 miles (161 km) with a stem 20 miles (32 km) wide.

There have been over 2000 nuclear tests; atmospheric, underground and undersea since the advent of the trinity device. Britain alone has a stockpile of ~25,000 nuclear weapons (including radiological bombs) of varying designs and yields - we are one of the nations with the smaller stockpiles. The biggest device to be detonated to date was a 100 megaton thermonuclear bomb scaled down to 50 because of the risks associated with fallout debris, this was detonated in Nova Zmelya in remote Siberia; The fallout is obviously a massive concern then from nuclear weapons if there are minimal people living in such a remote location that they decided it would be a risk to other countries. All out nuclear war would scare me and if the bombs dont get me then the fallout will if all of those weapons are used, the mushroom cloud rises well into the stratosphere and spreads around the globe using the wind currents with radioactive particles settling absolutely anywhere (all that from just one!?) To say that nuclear weapons are indiscriminate is an understatement and are clearly the most available type of WMD by their sheer numbers. I do think possession of them is a perfectly viable political bargaining tool but their use should be very limited. Chemical and Biological weapons wont destroy buildings or even kill off food sources they are not designed to, nukes however will make people homeless, starve to death, die from radiation poisoning if they survive and eat animals or plants that have been exposed so the soil is unfarmable for generations. Overall i believe Bio and chem weapons are not as destructive to the whole of the human race (pockets of survivors could relocate to remote locations the weapon wasnt used) as nuclear weapons are but can be just as disruptive and so we should not take like for like as a policy, it still doesnt mean i'm against having those nukes there as a bargaining chip even if they're never used.

I'm aware of this but I thought the context merited it being attributed to him.

Mars is not entirely red. At most the iron oxide dust is 2-3 metres deep and lays on what is probably a solid layer of bassalt from volcanic activity deep in the planets past.

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" - Oppenheimer. "Man fears the darkness and so scrapes away at the edges with fire" - Rei Ayanami.

Someone has been watching too much "the island".

You would need some system for recapturing and recycling the water to grow those plants though, i'm sure this would be as simple as keeping the plants inside a plastic tent to condense any evaporated water?

My understanding is that the light is not bent at all, but the gravity from the singularity bends spacetime - the medium which light travels through instead -Thus changing the velocity of the photons as they must follow the curvature of spacetime.

Don't be silly, the earth is flat. If you walk to the edge of it you can throw your evil coke bottle over the side.

What are the chances of there being life on Titan? All be it evolved to survive in a differently mixed atmosphere.

You guys make it sound so simple. OK I admit that i'm certainly no expert on this but isn't the reason we have very little knowledge of the deep ocean due to the fact we have only a handful of submarines that can withstand the pressure? Even if we were to build in shallower waters, a structure large enough to function as a permanent residence would still need to be able to withstand an incredible amount of pressure; How do we just "drop" something like that from the ocean surface and wouldn't it need to be anchored? In space the pressure problem is reversed as atmosphere inside the structure is only pushing on a small surface area to get out (rather than being sucked out) and I imagine isn't as much of a problem to get around as having a 1000 or so atmospheres crushing down on a large surface area. I know there is technology to somehow extract oxygen from surrounding water (not sure if it uses electrolysis or not, I don't think so but the name of the technology evades me right now) and would be suited to providing an underwater outpost with oxygen, but aren't there such things as Co2 scrubbers already in the ISS and space shuttle?

Building and maintaining a permanently manned base on the moon, or the same for a permanently manned base on the ocean floor? What would be the benefits of having either?

I guess it was too many cats :-\

I suppose this statement inherently means that photons have no mass? If so, then what are they? I'd heard light being refered to as a wave, which would be fine for the statement above but also as a particle which is the bit that confuses me... How can it be a particle if there is no mass to it? The word particle implies there is something there and zero mass implies that there shouldn't be.

It looks more like a bluey green to me. I don't like the fact that within a few generations it isn't going to be big enough for us unless we start making places like the sahara habitable.

The problem with that, i'm assuming is the fact that current fusion technology can at best make breakeven and so either takes just as much energy to create those elements or more energy than we get out. It is not sustainable for anything more than a minute or so.

I disapprove of the lack of LongCat.

Why do Red Giants output more energy than a main sequence star when the reason they have become red giants in the first place is because their nuclear fuel is running low?

If you go outside on a perfectly clear night and as long as there is no light pollution at all you should be able to see one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way very clearly. Truly a sight to behold.