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Yes, that's what I had in mind.

I also believe everyone should be allowed to believe what they want or to be total jerks. But let's say we have a leader of a country who expresses an opinion in a round about way that he doesn't particularly care for certain minorities or immigrants. He doesn't 'tell' anyone to bring violence or verbal abuse on those people, he is just expressing his opinion on what he thinks of those groups. But people being people, some of the jerks start abusing members of these groups, either verbal abuse, refusal of service, or in some cases violence. Would you still tolerate that world leader's expression of his opinions?

Would you tolerate it if by voicing their opinion they incite others to, say discriminatory practices, or even violence?

Now I see your confusion. You are under the impression that we think stopping one bully somehow causes all bullies in the world to suddenly turn over a new leaf. We are under no such illusion, and I'm surprised you'd suggest such a thing And you seem to be suggesting that if we'd tolerated Mr. Hitler we would have avoided Stalin. I'm unsure why you'd think that.

I agree. For most people 'tolerating' a bully means you deteriorate physically or mentally over time. Very few people can just let it keep happening with no ill effects. When I was a sophomore in high school there was a senior bully who picked on me and two of my friends. We finally started acting as one and when he got physical with one of us, he suddenly found himself fighting three kids. He quickly backed off.

While I don't disagree that the non-violent, legal approaches are always your first option, sometimes a physical response works best. Bullies for example cannot always be controlled and standing up to them, even to the point of violence, can solve the problem. I don't see much benefit in "getting back", but taking action to stop continued bad behavior sometimes requires violence.

Perhaps your daughter can show us the math.

I'm a novice too, but if a theory makes a testable prediction the theory is falsifiable. SR predicts time dilation (among others) and this is shown to be correct every time you use Google Maps to find your way home.

Per your usual, you have created a word problem that cannot be solved due to its ambiguity, and would accomplish nothing if it could be solved.

We are ignoring the details because there are no details to discuss. The only things we can talk about at this point are generalities. We're 10,000 years (or whatever) from making an attempt at moving outside the solar system and you're shooting down the concept because of an only partially successful test done 25 years ago. Again, we all know this. If you are waiting for me to provide a proof of concept the wait is over; it's not coming. But unless you can provide something better than "it's going to be really hard" I see no reason to assume it cannot be done.

Yes, we all know that we have not yet created a self sufficient system. That is why it's being discussed here. So food, warmth, energy sources and reaction mass require a magic wand? We made it to the moon. Do you think a trip to Mars is out of the question? How about the moons of Jupiter? At what point do we have to abandon physics, technology and engineering, and resort to the magic wand? All you are suggesting is that since we don't know the answers now, it will be impossible without magic.

Yes, it was only an analogy. The point was that self sufficient systems exist in nature and so should not be dismissed out of hand. And I was hoping for more than a hand-waving dismissal of the possibility. Simply saying 'we've never been able to do it before' is hardly a damning rebuke. What constraints do we face that are likely to never be overcome? Does slow expansion violate any laws of physics? Is building a self-sustaining system unlikely to ever be achieved due to some demonstrated constraint?

What is the endpoint of our trip on Earth? We are effectively on a spaceship right now going nowhere. People on islands are moving across the ocean at much less than 1 km per year. While creating a self-sufficient spacecraft is not something we will achieve anytime soon, it hardly seems out of the question.

There is a simple solution for that. Time. Really? We haven't gone back to the moon because it is too far away? Well thought out and presented argument. Circular logic. I agree, it is probably pointless to discuss this with you.

We already have a spacecraft that has left the solar system. No need to wait for the distant future, we could have already sent dead people on their way to another star. Please be specific with some issue preventing us from traveling to another star that we will never overcome. Wow. Not even sure how to respond to this one.

I suspect that if our star was going to no longer be an energy source for us in the relatively near future that we would begin work on an inter-stellar ship for people. I don't see current physics stopping us.

Your continued misuse of the English language is another factor making it difficult to have meaningful discussions with you.

You asserted... You don't really need to prove "that volume of an object equals the volume of space it is occupying." I don't see how 'the volume of an object' is relevant to your assertion

You are speaking of "nothing" as if it were "something". i.e. ""nothing" occupies five feet of space". "Nothing" does not 'occupy'. You can no more assign a size to "nothing" then you can assign a color to it. Saying there is "nothing" in a particular five cubic feet of space is not the same as saying there is a "nothing" over there with a size of five cubic feet.

Can you fill in a few more details please? I'm not sure how you got from one to the other.

You didn't.

Science at its best!

LOL!

I suppose science has already disproved life on other planets and planets in other galaxies since we've failed to find any evidence for them. Perhaps one day you can post something other than 'life sucks'.

Interesting. When people claim that religion contributes to things like radicalism, homophobia, terrorism, etc., you tend to dismiss their claims by suggesting that people have those tendencies anyway, and if they didn't blow things up in the name of religion they would blow things up for other reasons. It would follow then that perhaps religion is not the cause of humanitarianism, but that those people would be humanitarians whether religion existed or not. To repeat Phi's request, do you have any evidence that it is "religion" that is making the contribution, and that without it, those humanitarian acts would not have occurred?