Moontanman

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.

Hre is an interesting take on human induced global climate change. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16026-humans-may-have-prevented-super-ice-age.html

I think it's interesting that my cell phone messes up my computer monitor when it rings, every time with out fail, even if the phone is 18" away from the monitor. Occasionally my computer monitor reacts the same way even if the phone doesn't ring as though a random signal is moving past. Sorry if this is off topic.

A zipper and fold flat furniture is more of case of using current technology in different ways than advanced technology. I don't think an advanced zipper is going to allow up to reverse engineer something we cannot comprehend any more than it could have helped the romans build a integrated circuit. But I do agree that after a couple hundred years we might get some things as we recognized our new technologies as the beginnings of some of theirs. So I think it's reasonable to say that a space craft that crashed 50 or 60 years ago would not have allowed us to develop very much from it's technology.

I think it's safe to say that any interstellar space craft that crashed on the Earth would have very little technology we could reverse engineer and come up with some wild break through that everyone would look at and say "WOW! THAT MUST BE ALIEN TECHNOLOGY" Any thing really different or advanced would be almost impossible for us. Even if you took a laptop back just 100 years how much of it could be reverse engineered? Just figuring out how to charge the thing would be a huge challenge. Alien technology, short of new fangled zippers (whoa! Velcro?) 100's or 1,000's of years ahead of us would be as opaque to our technology as a laptop in 1492.

I don't understand, what would bounce and off of what? No, the black hole is formed by the infalling matter, beyond a certian density it never stops falling inward, time slows as it becomes a black hole but the infall or collapse never stops.

No it is not, a critical mass can form with out the extreme pressures of a bomb. The pressure makes the bomb more efficient resulting in a more complete fission of the uranium or plutonium. What happens depends on the mass of the star, a sun like star just collapses into a white dwarf. No, not quite, the initial collapse both explodes the outer layers and and compresses the inner layers at the same time into a neutron star or black hole depending on the mass. Sometimes the initial explosion does blow away enough mass to prevent a black hole. Sometimes you get a white dwarf or a neutron star or a quark star, a black hole can only form if the original star is above a certain mass when they process starts, IE it depends on how much mass you start out with. There is no continuous chain of explosions because there is no energy source for them, fusion is over by this time, all reactions past iron consume energy they do not produce it. Gravity overcomes any rebound type energy.

My fav JP song