Moontanman

Solar energy is essentially limitless, at least compared to the absolutely minuscule quantities of energy we use.

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

 

 

In space the sun always shines, and shines good and bright. Constant, high power energy.

 

On earth, it shines less than half the time. The atmosphere eats all the highly energetic UV rays, and the intensity varies as the time of day. And then there's night. Even with significant losses, space solar has a big advantage in overall power, and then add to that the fact that you don't need to store it for night time. Storing a night's worth of energy will cause significant losses and even more significant costs.

Skeptic, what does this have to do with beaming power from the moon? i know it could be done, it's the doing of out that will be difficult. beaming power from the moon is considerably different than beaming power from geo orbit .

 

Are you sure? We are predators only in the sense that we hunted, but most hunter-gatherer societies got most of their food from the gathering part. Hunting was often unsuccessful, dangerous, and very time consuming in general (of course, when they did get something, it was very useful). And in "civilized" times, only the elite were able to eat a significant amount of meat. The availability of meat to the general populace is a very recent phenomenon, made possible only by industrial agriculture.

I am quite sure, the eating of meat fueled our large brians

http://www.paulcooijmans.com/evolution/eating_meat.html

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/6-14-1999a.html

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/04/eating-meat-led-to-smaller-stomachs-bigger-brains/

And if eating meat did contribute to our large brains, then why aren't the rest of the predators out there become as smart as we did?

They don't have hands or use tools, their predatory nature has little to do with intelligence and everything to do with having big teeth and claws.

How much do you sleep on average?

If I'm lucky with sleeping pills 2 hours a night.

Merged post follows:

[quote name=Tau Meson;544442Take a look at the diet of our nearest biological species' date=' the primates: http://web.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/posters/nconklin/conklin.html

As you can see, they eat very little to meat whatsoever. [/quote]

Chimps kill and eat monkeys, but they do not have big brians like ours, I think the links i provided tell the tale.

I would think that beaming large amounts of power to the earth would have negative consequences, beams from the moon would not be focused very small and would no doubt be spread all over the entire earth. To make them concentrated enough to be useful would require beaming many times the power needed to make up for beam loss. I honestly cannot see this being a viable alternative.

I don't see how that follows. Human beings require way less sleep and have had a largely vegetarian diet for most of their existence (prior to the 20th century, that is), and we evolved to be the smartest animals on Earth. Elephants and whales are very smart too and they are all herbivores.

 

 

Humans did not follow a largely vegetarian diet, humans have been predators, eating meat is how we grew large brains. Whales are not herbivores by any definition.

 

If anything, greater intelligence is inversely correlated with sleep. Some of the greatest geniuses of all time usually went by on very little sleep, like Nikola Tesla for example (he averaged about 4 hours a night).

 

 

I sleep even less, does that mean I am intelligent, i don't see the correlation here.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that it's a long way to beam energy, losses from the beams would be enormous.

wouldn't infinite density make a black hole? Even a single atom at infinite density would be a black hole.

So far some pretty good ideas have been presented, no one has tried to give reasons they are not true, do we win?

Ok, if we are going to tease the tiger how about this one.

Humans may have prevented super ice age

 

Our impact on Earth's climate might be even more profound than we realise. Before we started pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet was on the brink of entering a semi-permanent ice age, two researchers have proposed.

 

Had we not radically altered the atmosphere, say Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and William Hyde of the University of Toronto in Canada, the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials would have given way in the not-too-distant future to an ice age lasting millions of years.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16026-humans-may-have-prevented-super-ice-age.html

pangloss, jackson, i find myself in the unenviable position of having to come in on the side of the opposition here, while I have no respect for Fox News i have just as little respect for people who do the opposite. BS supporting the party line is just as bad as BS detracting the party line.

If the news cannot deal in the truth i loose interest in it quite quickly. you are both correct that CNN using less than scientific reporting is just as bad as Fox doing it. It makes nether one correct and makes news organizations in general look bad to me.

I don't want to be told what I want to hear, i want to hear all is well in the world, no terrorists, no disasters, no economic problems, full employment, no hunger, no poverty, no disease. But hearing these things does not make them true. i need to hear the truth, unvarnished by politics or the desire for ratings.

I am honestly not sure where to get the truth these days so i search, high and low, it's not easy. But to be lied to by people who claim to be telling the truth just pisses me off no matter what side they are on, ultimately there are no sides, sides is an illusion and it will destroy us all if we keep clinging to the concept of being loyal to a side.

Blood_pardon, (real slick user name, wow i couldn't figure that one out) is just trying to full fill his Christian duty to convert us heathens. i am sure the goddess will forgive him.

The real problem with religion is not whether or not god exists it's how does god contribute to science, can you snip a piece of god off and test it? is there any evidence what so ever that god is real? God cannot contribute to scientific inquiry simply because she/he is defined by belief and or faith not evidence. If god ever decides to come down and show her/him self I am sure the evidence will be conclusive but until then there is no point in invoking god to solve any real world problems in science.

Yes it does, for example In the game of tic tac doe,No one wins ,no matter

how long you play, As far as Our universe goes the are 2 possibillitys,

(1) either our univerce has an abrupt end,or (2) It just keeps going, I believe that there is something supernatural,maybe God< involved here. If anyone here disagreese with me ,then tell me I want to know

I see no need for the supernatural, invoking the supernatural is always a mistake, it's like saying i cannot possibly know that so it must be God, so far every time that has been said it eventually becomes apparent god is not the answer. There are lots of answers to how and why the universe is how it is that do not need anything but math and the human mind to explain it. Of course you are welcome to believe anything you like.

If their ass was news Fox couldn't find it the dark with both hands and flashlight:doh:

This reminds me..I thought I asked this before on a previous thread, but I don't think I ever got a good response: Is there any reason to believe the laws of physics as we know them in our universe would remain the same or change at some point throughout the process of a big crunch?

 

Being a layman, I would expect to see a more compact universe.

That is a good question, my understanding is that in the colliding brane scenario both branes are the same laws each time but that doesn't explain why they are the way they are. I guess it's possible each collision rests the laws at random but this seems counter intuitive to me at least.

Depending on how far up the dimensional ladder the bulk goes our whole universe would indeed seem to be very compact in comparison, at least that how I see higher dimensions in my mind.

Another way to look at it is the Bulk can easily contain an infinite number of branes of any and all configurations, some branes might not be anything we would recognize as universes at all.

I like the idea of colliding branes as compared to sheets hanging on a clothes line, the sheets are branes in a 5 or more dimensional bulk. Gravity between the two branes attracts them to each other as they collide you get a universe wide big bang. The energy released causes them to spread apart, energy condenses back to matter the same way as what we think of as the big bang.

Wrinkles in the branes might cause pin point "big bangs" all through our space/time but the result of the collision would still be the same and gravity eventually draws the branes back together for a repeat performance.

From our point of view the universe is expanding from each collision but most of the colliding branes are forever out side our experience because of the infinite size of the branes in our view of space time but from the stand point of the bulk they would still be finite.

I have to admit that in the scenario of a Rage type virus or other real threat to my personal safety any of the "infected" coming after me would find me completely comfortable fairly low on the hill of moral high ground. Now if I could easily get away I see no reason not to climb as high as possible but when it comes to defending your own or some else's life I see no reason to allow anyone to take me out because someone else says it's wrong to kill. (think about that if you ever decide to rob my house:doh:)

Now going out and hunting them down is not a part of what I am saying, but self defense is well within my moral limits.

We are supposed to get snow tonight, it's been more than a decade since we got any real snow, 30 years ago with a very similar weather pattern we got 24" nothing like an ocean effect blizzard in the deep south at the beach! lightning and thunder and gale force winds and 24" inches of snow and they didn't predict it all , it was a complete surprise, at least this time they are tentatively saying it will snow.

supersoaker, plus petrol, plus lighter.

 

not easy to buy premade, but damn easy to cobble together in short order. and lets face it, most weapons will be improvised at some point during the crisis.

A super soaker? I think I'll let you man that gun, but you are of course correct, the human ability to cobble a weapon together from objects at hand will come out to most people.

it doesn't have to be rabies. just a disease that produces symptoms similar to those seen in zombie flicks. look up 28days later, that sort of thing.

Assuming that, then a flame thrower would indeed be a good defense, but they are difficult to buy in a hurry. I've never seen one in pawn shops but lots of shotguns and pistols.

We have how ever completely gone off the original topic, sorry Yodaps. The morality involved is tricky. do you shoot someone you suspect of having a super flu? How far you could go and be on the moral high ground has a lot to do with how low you are comfortable on that particular hill.

Do you refuse food and water to anyone and stay inside your house (or bunker) and let the rest of the population suffer or do you try to help and risk infection? Would you kill to keep someone with obvious symptoms away or do you shoot anyone who simply shows up because they might be infected?

Zombies may not feel pain, but they do burn. Regardless, we're not talking about mythical zombies, we're talking about a theoretical pandemic the likes of a mutated Rabies virus with no known cure. Rabies victims, iirc, DO feel pain.

This is true but contrary to popular belief rabies victims do not chase down people and try to bite them. Dogs with rabies do become irritable but they do not chase you down to bite you, they become fearful of light and sounds, irritable and prone to bite if messed with but they do not roam looking for more victims to infect.

Good point about the shotgun but flame throwers are ineffectual, zombies don't feel pain or care about flames. A man with a flame thrower would be quickly overwhelmed.

Read The Zombie survival Guide or something like that, by Max Brooks.

 

Great waste of time...

 

Learn alot of Machetes though..

World War Z is a follow up book by the same guy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z

What if it is some terrible mutation of rabies?

Oh! You mean like in the book World War Z? Damn things were difficult to get rid of, they almost took down a nuclear sub underwater! Great book if you're into zombies, I would prefer to avoid them if possible but a good twelve gauge pump with sabots and a nine mil with a 14 shot clip should do the trick. I'd want the bands that go around your shoulders and hold shells for the shot gun (I can't remember what they are called), two one of each shoulder and a back pack full of cartridges for the nine mil but avoiding them is the best defense as you find out in the book.

I would think "the vignette zone" would be a place of constant storms as the air from the cold and hot sides mixed, possibly permanent hurricane like storms, lots of tornadoes, rain snow, heat and cold as the two completely different air masses mixed.

Both conservatives and liberals us NASA as their whipping boy anytime they want to pretend to be saving money. The budget of NASA is a drop in the bucket when compared to the rest of the money the gov spends.

We wasted enough money on the Iraq war to colonies the moon or Mars or even build real space colonies in orbit around the sun. We bailed out greedy bankers to the tune of many times the budget of NASA. Go ahead and pretend that NASA is a significant part of the budget.

NASA has done some amazing things with so little money. Space is not the final frontier or some pie in the sky thing that doesn't matter, space is the high ground of the next war, the source of many new technologies that will boost our economy (if we are the ones developing it)

So much of our civilization depends on space, so much in the way of natural resources, unique manufacturing possibilities, it's criminal to not fund NASA or some type of space exploration and or exploitation of space.

Some one mentioned shutting down NASA to feed sub-Saharan Africa, that is just so much bullshit, completely eliminating NASA would make no difference what so ever in feeding Haiti or Africa or anyone else but it would have a huge negative impact on the world at large and on the USA.

We could increase NASA spending many times over with no impact on government spending. It's like me refusing buy three boxes of girl scout cookies and going back to two boxes to save enough money to pay the interest on my house.

Cutting back NASA is just politics for the thinking impaired, a way for politicians to show their constituents they are serious about cutting back spending and then spending many times that much on bullshit.

Exploitation of space is the next step in our civilization, so far we keep trying to crawl up the steps with our limbs hog tied. It's time to untie our civilization and walk up the steps, no one knows what is at the top of the steps but we know what is at the bottom and there just isn't enough for everyone there.

Blood_pardon, what would you expect to see as a transitional fossil species? Exactly what would a transitional fossil or transitional species look like. I think it's fair to ask what you would see as evidence of a transitional species.