Moontanman

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.

Ooops, maybe my athiesm is a bit off centered on this, I seem to have jumped before I looked!

Atheist:

 

have you for but a moment considered that you have adopted a position

against 98% of the human race, both past and present?

 

do you think you are RIGHT and they are all WRONG?

Many billions of flies eat shit, they always have they always will, doesn't make me want to, The numbers of people who believe in something has no bearing on it's basic truth or lack there of. Such a sad individual so full of self hatred and hatred for all who disagree with him, but of course his God is love...

Don't ask don't tell is a cruel joke, my oldest son who is gay but not the least bit infeminant like most people think gays are was kicked out of Air force ROTC because he refused to sign a document swearing he was not gay. Later his buddies some how found out and beat him to a pulp. Homophobes are criminals, my son was on what they called a fast track to being a pilot, he was not enfeminant, he didn't troll for sex among his fellow class mates but due to his honesty and me telling him his whole life that real men do not lie he lost his scholarship, his dignity and almost his life at the hands of homophobes who due to the current gestalt of thinking about gays thought him less than human. I am sure that many of his class mates weren't really threatened by his sexuality but they followed the crowd that said gays are less than human. Anyone who thinks gays should be treated as less than human should spend a few days in their shoes, it will open your eyes to how unfair this really is.

Nostradamus is bull butter, just one more way to delude the gullible.

Ask your teacher,Why dont plants grow upside down? Does gravity play a roll

or does UV light which causes photosynthisis the reason? Good luck

Plants do grow upside down, i grow tomato plants upside down every summer

Do they have a type of X and Y chromosome like humans

No, this form of sexual genetics is largely limited to mammals, other animals and plants have other widely varied ways to determine sex. Even in mammals it can be less than accurate and X Y chromosomes can be indeterminate for sexual identity.

To those who mentioned that I am going about my question in a quite wrong way, like I am a moron, I say this:

My question is meant to trigger a discussion on current debatable views of the scientific community, it is not meant to be perfect or to be free of misconceptions. It is meant to make people discuss these VERY misconceptions. There is therefore no need to demean me like I am an idiot who doesn't know what he is talking about.

 

I think people here need to be careful how they formulate their reply, as it sometimes comes across as patronising, arrogant and rude. A bit more respect, please! We debate, we discuss, we don't judge.

 

Thanks.

In no way did I say or mean you are a moron, your question is difficult to answer since it proposes that life is a way that it is not. life on earth did not originate from one thing, it was almost certainly an amalgam of several things that were by themselves very different than what your question proposes was the origin of life. No one organism was the ancestor, many different bits and pieces came together to form life as we know it, so many crosses and merging and splittings it is not accurate to say one thing suddenly woke up and became life as we know it. Even today microbes laterally transfer genes commonly and the more primitive they are the more lateral gene transfers takes place. The idea that life originated from one cell is a strawman argument often used by creationist types to try to disprove evolution. I assumed you were not one of those and were seriously asking an intelligent question and I answered it appropriately.

So, if I'm telekinetic could I not cause instant flame by violently vibrating the atoms and molecules of a spot on a 2 x 4?

 

There's money on this...

Yes, if you vibrate atoms (same as heating) the substabce will burst into flames. You can take a hot iron and place it on a board, the board will burst into flames.

You seem to be under the assumption (as Davies is) that all biologists are looking for DNA. That is not so. In fact this is just a relatively recent technique. An organism, regarding whether it does possess DNA or not should do something measurable. However, each and every organism we were able to identify does possess DNA. If they are a significant number of alternative lifeforms around, we should be able to see even one single example of it by now.

You say significant, what number would be significant? .0001% ? if one out 10,000,000 microbes is non DNA life then that means there are non DNA life forms on our planet. Even one species of non DNA life form is significant. another question is why would you think that Non DNA life forms would be obvious by their metabolism by products? Can you look at the biosphere of the Earth and extrapolate backward that everything we see is the result of DNA life? You seem to be assuming that a non DNA life form would be producing something so strange it would stick out. I think that non DNA life forms , to survive, would have to be part of the natural cycle of life we see already and so would not stand out as different just from their by products. I suggest any life forms on the Earth would have to be a part of the same cycles we already see simply because they would have to adapt to life with DNA life forms or die out. Unless they inhabit some odd place where DNA life cannot exist and we never look there. Would we see silicone microbes being brought up by lava in volcano's? I agree that they don't have to exist but I think it cannot be ruled out completely. Nessie has been ruled out completely, sea serpents are almost certainly sighting of known organisms. The Kraken was thought to be imaginary as Nessie until we realized giant squid existed and accounted for the sightings. Looking is a good idea, it's the assuming that is bad, assuming there is non DNA life is bad, assuming it cannot be is just as bad.

If we assume they are present and even plentiful, but we are just no able to see them, well what is the difference to the invisible unicorn, or Nessy?

You do make a good point but I think non DNA microbes are less likely to have an obvious effect than invisible unicorns, invisible unicorns have to eat, they would leave physical traces on the Earth and if they existed they could be detected, looking for Nessie has shown it not to be real. I see no reason to just assume there cannot be any non DNA life on the earth.

Merged post follows:

My question is:

"If life formed so early in the history of the Earth, thereby implying that it was a more likely event than we think, how come we see only evidence of 1 type of life on the Earth? Why does the tree of life only trace life's history only to one primordial life form? Why aren't there more trees of life?"

I think you are looking at this wrong, it's thought by many that life did indeed start in many different places and some of these did indeed die out but it is also thought that many of them merged in one way or anther to form the ancestors of life. If you must use the tree analogy think of them as the roots of the tree merging to become the trunk. RNA viruses are thought by some to be evidence of this, they are shadow, a remnant of at least one of those linages. It has been postulated their might still be RNA life forms on the earth other than RNA viruses and just not being seen as what they are or more likely being very rare or existing in places where we don't look or don't think to look. it's a complex idea and as charonY has pointed out there are lots of competing ideas and little evidence of anything but DNA life.

I don't think standard fusion is the panacea everyone seems to think it is. Fusion releases energy in the form of neutrons. These neutrons make surrounding materials radioactive. Stopping these neutrons is difficult and makes the material that stops them radioactive. there is a possibility of aneutronic fusion which could be used to turn electromagnetic radiation directly into electricity with no neutrons and the accompanying radioactivity but we will have to master regular fusion first. The fuel for aneutronic fusion is very rare on the earth as well, further compounding the problem.

I think we will merge with machines and become cyborgs, able to use a computer to augment your mind directly. Possibly directing many things remotely as easily as we now use our fingers and hands.This will lead to mass consciousness and human who can out preform what we now thin k of as genius many times over. Possibly this will lead to a single human wielding the resources of a modern country or (and I hope this is closer to the truth) result in a human needing far less in resources because you can to so much remotely and even live in a virtual world.

Hmmm, shrooms? Seriously, dreams seldom have any real meaning that is discernible. Certain parts of the brain can give you what seems some real symbolism and it feels like it has real meaning but the effect is just your brain responding g to it's own stimuli. I used to have waking visions of flaming red symbols floating in the air and I knew they had deep meaning. It turned out i had peculiar type of migraine and the correct blood pressure medicine made them go away completely even though i stopped taking the medication. Even though the feeling of meaning was super strong I knew it was an illusion. Dreams do not have to mean anything, sometimes they are just weird neural firings.

OOOO Ruby, I want to party with you!

If you had a sealed tank of super heavy water that decayed completly you would have a tank of oxygen and helium3. Nuclear decay would break the chemical bonds.

CharonY, I see your point but I think you are assuming we are looking a lot harder than we really are. You assume all metabolic products are products of existing metabolisms, seen or unseen, or that strange metabolisms would produce some odd chemicals we don't see. There is no reason that radically different organisms have to be obvious to our tests. As far as i know all we test for is DNA, there is no way to look at a microbe, naked eye or microscope, and know if it is DNA life. I see no way to tell if there is life other than DNA life on the earth below the level of complex life, no reason to think it might not be part of the ecosystem to the extent it's metabolic by products are considered natural or part of the whole we do see. .

Merged post follows:

The point is not that we did not find a specific species as in your example, but we have no evidence of a single organism like that.

No the point is we don't have any way to know if there is one or an entire complex of organisms like that. No way to know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Actually we don't know if other life forms share our planet with us. it's pretty obvious that complex life can all be traced to a common ancestor but something very few people know is that when we search for life forms on the earth as in bacteria we only search for life like us. The tests we use cannot detect life that is not like us.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/aliens-among-us

So water in terms for us is life. Without it we'd die. But it could be poisonous to something else?

Yes, for instance to any life forms on Titan water would be the same as molten lava is to life on earth. Earth life developed in water because the temps favored water being present over other possible solvents. See the following link for alternate life forms

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/alternative_forms_of_life.html