Moontanman

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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. 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: Consecutive posts merged 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: Consecutive posts merged 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

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

I noticed the post predicted that in one week the whole world would know but the post was first dated almost a month ago.

Mokele, there is evidence that rocks from near by planets like mars have indeed been found on the Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_meteorite It is also thought possible that microbes could be transfered that way, even multicellular organisms could be transfered that way Water bears are a good example or possibly brine shrimp eggs.

No, matter and antimatter would not repel each other according to current theories.

Opps, I misunderstood the question

Well if they legalize it in California then it should be legal here in NC in, oh say, 1000 years....

Dr. Forward is a real person, I've have several discussions with him about detecting mirror matter, mirror matter should not be time reversed (I'm not sure it's established that antimatter is time reversed) but mirror matter has it's own antimatter counterpart neither of which strongly interacts with matter or antimatter.

What are you talking about lucky? You asked a question, i did my best to give you a lead in a direction that might give you some answers, why the hostility?

WTF are you talking about lucky?

Lucky, see mirror matter to see a concept of matter our senses cannot detect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_matter

Gravity prevents any push back, either you get a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. Once a certain density is reached there is no push back.