JohnF

I would expect that the plane would make a normal approach. The landing gear would be waiting at the end of the runway and start to accelerate as the plane came in. The pilot would land as though he had normal undercarriage. He can't see the wheels anyway. From the pilots point of view he's just landing on the runway. From an engineering point of view it makes sense because it is more efficient. However, could such an undercarriage be made to both achieve the speed required and maintain position with the aircraft, plus all the other problems that would need to be overcome? If, on the other hand, passengers would find such an arrangement unacceptable then it's no good to start with.

I would expect the pilot to land the aircraft as he does now. The undercarriage would just accelerate up to, and maintain speed and position with the aircraft as it touched down. As for emergency landings. You just don't tell the undercarriage it's an emergency so it doesn't panic

Clearly it would cost more. But if there was a method of leaving the aircraft at the gate or in a hangar without the undercarriage staying with the aircraft then each airport should only need 3 or 4 units for each aircraft type; plus any emergency requirement that was deemed necessary. Initially you would introduce it for a new type of plane, carrying lots more passengers on very selected routes. The undercarriage would have to be free moving rather than using rails etc. so that the runway didn't need to be changed. If you had 8 aircraft flying between two airports then you may only need 6 undercarriage units, provided by the aircraft manufacturer or airline. Eventually as new aircraft were designed to use the system they would either make use of existing undercarriage designs or introduce a new one. You could end up with just 6 undercarriage sizes that would accommodate all aircraft designed to make use of them. It would have to be an evolutionary process however it came about. The thing is, does the aircraft need landing gear at any other time. If it's going to make an emergency landing in a field for example, where there would be no undercarriage waiting, would it really make any difference that it had to land on its belly? How would passengers feel about such aircraft?

I've done stuff like that before. It's very time consuming though. As for the arm of the man on the left in glasses. I would have cloned his sleeve, then for his arm I would have cloned an area of his neck then re-scalled it. This should provide a properly illuminated arm. If that proved too difficult I'd use part of the arm from the man on the right for cloning. Everything else, moving people, removing people and adjusting the background is quite straight forward.

How feasible would it be to make an aircraft that had no undercarriage? For landing and takeoff it would make use of an undercarriage assembly that ran along the runway independent of any permanent connection to the aircraft. When the plane took off the undercarriage would be left behind ready for the next plane to land and make use of it. The undercarriage would then take the plane to the gate for passengers to disembark etc. It would save quite a bit of weight in an aircraft.

I agree, jobs are a privilege. If you have the power to offer someone employment then it's for you to bestow that right. Nobody has a right to anything. Rights are given and can be taken away or just not given in the first place.

I thought that everything we did, without exception, was for a selfish reason. I assume selfishness to be a survival instinct.

Perhaps he's asking if lucid dreaming could be another reality, just as valid as the one we are in. For me it isn't another reality. I know it's a dream and I know I can do whatever I want without consequence. I prefer ordinary dreams now. Has anyone read The Number Of The Beast by Heinlein? In that story he proposes that stories come from the author glimpsing an alternate reality/universe where the fiction is a reality. He has a machine that can take you to these universes where he meets people from other stories.

Whoever is in a position to control access to Mars will decide if and how it is to be shared. It may start with multiple nations colonising parts of Mars and they may choose to work together and allow others to use Mars. But if any of them have the power, and choose to exercise it, then they will decide the sharing out of Mars. It could even be a private enterprise that eventually controls Mars. A nation exercising what others considered undue control might cause problems for the nation on Earth and force them to some sort of compromise. A group of private individuals on the other hand may simply relocate to Mars and be in a position to defend their claim without having to concern themselves about pressure back on Earth. There are certainly no fundamental rights to Mars just as there are no fundamental rights for anything. Rights are given by the more powerful to the less powerful and can just as easily be taken away. Perhaps the original question would be better as "How should we share Mars" because 'do' is the present tense and therefore irrelevant since we are not yet in a position to share it anyway.

I suppose you would need to answer the question "When does life begin?" to decide on what happened. It seems that people have different ideas on when life begins. What about people that believe there is a soul. I don't happen to believe in such a thing so have no idea when it becomes a part of you; I assume the answer is part of the belief. If I was asked to choose a moment when it occurred then I could only pick the moment of conception. I don't care whether I'm right or wrong, it's just a choice I made. But following on from that choice I may then choose to believe the soul will stay attached to the material removed from the foetus once the remainder of the foetus had died. Any clone that was produced from that foetus would have the original soul. Regardless of the truth of the matter it may be important to me; it may be what I believe. Yes I know it's all a bit daft but like I said before the whole subject is very emotive. Without accepted definitions of what life is and when it begins the medical community has to take in to account peoples beliefs regardless of how obscure or illogical they may be. Isn't that what ethics is all about; wrestling with the emotion.

This is the answer I am after Take the Hafele-Keating experiment as an example. The experiment proves that speed slows down time, or does it. The clocks were out of sync at the conclussion of the experiment so either... 1. Time was distorted. 2. The clocks just worked, counted events, at a different rate. Even though the time dilation was predicted, which tends to confirm the validity of the experiment, is it possible that the same equations could in some way be applied to the atomic structure of the cesium atom? Or if not applied to the cesium atom then to some other underlying particle that has yet to be discovered or fully understood. Is there an observable change independant of time? If the clocks had been travelling much faster, and assuming their atomic stucture was slowed down rather than time, would they have got colder? Even if they would get colder could such an observation be of any use?

I agree with you. I only put that in as a way of keeping as close as possible to the original child. Each of the subjects, abortion and cloning, are very emotive and so my objective was just to find a way of providing a possible sollution to the original idea that might be more acceptable than just doing it because it was possible. For someone that believes that life is created at the moment of conception I thought it would be important to them that the child they had created was not entirely lost. I know that there are plenty of other factors that mean the clone will not be the same as the original, had the original been born, but these would only ever be known if you could compare the two, side by side. How children are is something that unfolds through time for us. We can imagine the original and the clone will be different, and both logic and reason support that, but we would never really know.

I seem to have contradicting answers now from swansont and fredrik But with regards to this can only be the scaling of the parts that are known about. What about the god particle for example; does it not yet have to be discovered? All I'm suggesting is that apparent changes in time might be changes in all structure at some level that has been miss-interpreted as a change in time. Assume for a moment that I'm correct. Would it mean that time has lost it's value or is it just as good as it's always been to help us understand how things work. If time keeps its value anyway then it doesn't matter whether time really slows down or not; does it?

Are you saying that relative to your starting point you could accelerate to the speed of light? But for you as a traveller the speed of light will still be ≈300000 m/s faster than you? EDIT: I always thought it was the mass of the vehicle increased requiring even more force to push it. That does bring up another question though... If you are carrying the fuel, won't it's mass increase and so give out more energy and more force to equal the increase in mass of the vehicle?

Suppose the woman had cancer. Without treatment she will not live long enough for the child to survive. Treatment will damage or kill the foetus. She and her partner want to have a child and conception occurred before diagnosis of the cancer. After treatment she will be unable to carry a foetus. A surrogate will then be able to carry the clone through to birth. This sounds OK to me. It won't be the same child but it will be genetically the child they created originally. If they were to remove an egg before treatment and fertilise in-vitro later then the gene combination would not be the same this time around.

What's the IP address of the new server? Just in case someone wants to put an entry in their hosts file whilst DNS resolves.

Hello everyone. These forums are great. It's taken a while to post here but you know what it's like when you get a new toy; you just want to play with it, not fill in the registration card. Anyway, here's mine duly completed. I live in Chorley, Lancashire in England. Got two sons and a daughter. Done all sorts of things since leaving school but I suppose software has been my main thing for the past 30 years.

If some 32 foot tall man was waving at me in a dangerous manner I would kick his 5 inch high toe. I might try for the shin but at four or more feet up I'd probably do myself a serious injury. But a wave of water. I would try a lot of small explosions to disperse it a bit at a time. Wouldn't one big explosion create another wave just as big?

Perhaps there is no past or future to visit; just the present. If you could move to the past or future you would find that you are the only thing that exists there. You can't kill your father in the past because he doesn't exist there; unless he went with you from the present to the past. An analogy might be two dimensional beings living on the floor of a lift. The lift is constantly moving up through a dimension they only see in passing. One of them uses energy to lift himself off the lift floor, to the the future, and in doing so finds he's alone. Using energy to move down, to the the past, he would find himself alone again. He has to keep using energy to maintain his position above or below the floor but once the energy is exhausted he just returns to the lift floor; the present.

Done. Hope your course goes well. Good Luck.

I think all drugs should be legal. If you are going to have laws that are for the purpose of protecting people from themselves then it would have to be illegal to do anything dangerous, like mountaineering, skiing, riding motorbikes, etc. Just think of all the tax that could be raised from legitimate sale of drugs.

Would nuclear decay occur at the same rate when tavelling fast from the point of view of someone travelling with the material? If the answer is yes then either time has slowed and the nuclear decay has slowed with time so that it appears to decay at the normal rate. Or, the nuclear decay has slowed together with any event counter that is used to measure the rate of decay. How could you possibly know which of the two was true? Just because I don't know of a mecanism that slows down nuclear decay in relation to speed doesn't mean there isn't one.

But does a stick not occupy multiple places in space simultaneously? To be aware of the stick I may need events but the stick doesn't need events to exist. Therefore the stick is not an event unless you are saying the stick does not exist until it is witnessed. I agree that the least complex answer is better. So I see it as less complex to say that processes, events, etc. slow down with speed rather than saying time slows down. There seems to be an implication that if time can be varied then time can be controlled. But if it's just events that can be varied then time could be a constant and beyond control.

It's the stick I was particularly interested in as I'm thinking along the lines that three dimensional space, the stick, is a constant; but time is a variable. But considering your 'current state' perhaps you should have some of the pills I've just taken after reading the post by fredrik. Fredrik: I really wish I understood what you are saying. I'm a software engineer not a mathematician though. It probably goes against me too, because I prefer to view the world in 'black and white' if you know what I mean. I've read it a couple of times and I'll try again later but I'm not too hopeful.

So you're saying that an outside observer would see the stick get shorter? Would that would mean the inside observer would see the outside get bigger?