Moontanman

Ok, you have made this claim. This is simply Bullshit, a 1000 gallon aquarium of any type much less a reef tank is not self contained. The oceans of the earth are not self contained over geological time spans. A .5 gallon reef tank is simply not capable of being self contained in any realistic definition of the term. There are no processes that could be contained in such a small container that could allow it to be "self contained" Now having said that there are coral like animals (I say coral like because you seem to want to use the word to describe any of the many and often unrelated organisms that people see and call coral) That are pretty tough, I have collected via scuba diving a great many colonial organisms, when I first started out there were no "coral like organisms" available any other way. I've collected them from under bridges near sewage outflows and even in freshwater. Yes there are freshwater colonial organisms. I think your post is disingenuous because you have failed to point out that the organisms you are culturing are not exactly the classic coral reef organisms most people think of when they think coral reef. Please stop saying I don't know because I haven't tried, I was having live coral heads shipped from Hawaii to me 40 years ago, I personally pioneered both live rock and metal halide lighting on reef tanks. I've kept reef organisms in glass globes and even and old 1500 watt light bulb. One real rule is the smaller that container the more outside support you need and the shorter the lifespan of the container. I think i could probably set up an aquarium with an eight square foot bottom area that would be stable for decades with enough outside support. But there are things that build up that cannot be recycled in the scale of personal aquaria that would mean that eventually the tank would have to be taken down and redone. your tiny tanks would require such a tear down every few weeks at least at my best estimate. next the very idea of using frozen food to feed such a small container is fatally flawed. Frozen food means the inner contents of the cells of the organism is being bled out into the water, rising takes away much of it but not all. Only live food is suitable for tiny containers. rotifiers are my choice for polyps, copepods for larger animals and yes i do culture all of them. Take away your assertion these containers are easy or do not require huge amounts of maintenance and outside support and I'll quit twisting your nipples but if you keep on I'll twist them off Displaying a tank full of Coraline algae and star polyps is not proof of or even reason to believe you can set up a self contained .5 gallon reef aquarium. All of the tanks you show could be and most probably are simply tiny displays that were once connected to a larger system and if not reconnected will die just like a huge coral head would die off in a small aquarium. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on most of it but the assertion this is a self contained reef tank sis just not in the realm of possibility and that not because i haven't tried it. There are so many problems here, the heat from your lights would drive up the temps in such a tiny container, aeration would result in problems both with and with out it. I am still active in reefs and just because someone makes claims on the net doesn't make it true. The pic of the tiny tank in your car is so strange, was it air tight? why isn't it pressing down in the seat like something was full of water should? i see so many things that scream illusion. If you can really keep a "pico" reef that is self contained and stable long term then you my friend have really done something, I have some friends at NASA that would be interested in seeing your processes I am sure.

Ok, what do you feed them? What is your light source? What are the chemical parameters? What trace elements to do you add Exactly what species are being kept in each of the different sizes of bowls

I want to believe you i really do but i can just look at your pics and see many things that prove to me you are being misleading. 40 years of experience being on the cutting edge of both aquarium husbandry and coral propagation gives you deep instincts and what you are claiming looks to me like what it looks like for someone to claim faster than light information transfer does to a real physicist. You need to show why what you claim works, just showing the tanks and making claims really doesn't provide evidence of anything and I can see scenarios of who to do what you are claiming but not the way you claim. Getting view counts on something that is misleading is disturbing

How big is the sump associated with these "tanks" how big is the refugium" How much water is being held outside the tank and recirculated into it? When a coral extends threads to digest the coral next to it all the skimming in the world will not prevent it. Your tanks are too small to actually support the populations they show with a huge outside support system. I could grow coral In a test tube if I had a huge outside support system.

Yeah, for about 15 minutes, in most of the containers you've shown the individual polyps are too close to not kill each other, if you knew even a minimal amount about coral you would know this. The bio load on these tiny tanks is far to small for them to last more than a few weeks, in most days would be a stretch. I've been doing this for about 40 years, yes I'm made temporary displays much like you show but they are not long term habitats nor do they honestly represent what can be done with out a tremendous amount of outside resources being available. Be honest show what it really takes to maintain such a tiny environment.

I knew it had to be some sort of illusion, a 15 gallon tank has a similar length to height ratio as a 75 gallon tank as well. The 70/75 gallon tank is one of my favorites to grow coral in due to it's surface area to depth ratio. The 48" by 24" by 24" 120 is a good tank too. BTW I really wish people wouldn't do BS like this. It gives people who want to set up aquaria a very false idea of what is possible or even desirable.

I grow live coral, I've been doing so for more than 30 years. That pic is total BS, photo shop at the very least. Yes there are what are known as Nano reefs but they generally hold at least 2.5 gallons of water contain only couple species of coral, usually soft coral. The container pictured could not possibly hold more than 1/2 gallon as depicted. Every polyp depicted in the photo is way out of proportion to their actual sizes. If I had to guess I would say that is a photoshoped pic of at least a 15 gallon container.

Alpha particles are not very penetrating, they are large slow moving particles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Very well thank you!

No, in this universe there is another you who did the dishes. There are not enough different possibilities for everything to happen. Some things are more likely, the most likely things happen over and over. If the universe is truly infinite then everything that happens happens elsewhere exactly the same an infinite number of times.

Hmmm, is it because really fat people can hide their genitals with no clothes or that ugly is so subjective?

Does cannabis permanently effect the brain? Maybe we are looking at this from the wrong perspective. Does anything we come contact with not effect us in some permanent way? The real question here asks does cannabis effect us in some way that is worse than some other thing or so bad it will significantly inhibit us in some manner. The list of things that effect us in some "bad" way is so long to really get a grip all things must be compared to each other for the questions to make sense.

see these links for info on vacuum energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

They both use energy released from the nucleus of the atom. Often they they use the same radioactive elements to make power. Nuclear power plants can use thorium and other isotopes of elements that nuclear weapons cannot but they essentially make power the same way, from the splitting of atoms.

If only the worst thing a child ever saw was a naked adult how much easier it would be to raise a child. I honestly do not see why seeing a naked adult is a bad thing. Blood and gore is a nightly thing on the news not to mention supposedly entertainment TV shows. I would much rather my children see nudity and sex than death and destruction. At the very least they will eventually see and deal with sex and nudity but death and destruction they could live with out, I know i could.

They may as well come and get me now! I seldom if ever wear clothes inside my house. I hate wearing clothes! I have a privacy fence around my yard and I often go outside nude. I go to nude beaches and have been known to go to nudist camps and clubs. No one, no matter what their age, is going to be scared for life due to seeing someone naked (well disgusted maybe in my case but not scared) the whole idea of nudity being some sort of horrendous thing to protect the innocent from is worse than any possible actual exposure to nudity! We see death, blood, and gore all the time on TV but seeing someone naked is going to some how destroy someones mind? Give me a break!

For the content of this post assume intelligence on a human scale at least but not necessarily the same or even similar technology. Sh3rlock, let me know when you get the links read. With all the folding, subduction, and erosion of the last 65 million years, to assume the hydrocarbons we are using now were just sitting around waiting for us to find them 65 million years ago is a stretch even if we didn't see oil seeping the surface all over the planet. I don't think that the oil we see now is a good reason to assume no inteligent dinosaurs. I am sure there are plenty of other good reasons but this dog won't hunt.

I'm not sure that is exactly obvious, has oil just been sitting underground since having been made at some arbitrary time? Geological processes have destroyed much oil and created even more. The same would have to be true for coal as well. Even if they are abiotic you would have to assume that geological processes destroy far more oil and gas than we have used in the past few hundred years. Oil bubbles to the surface naturally all over the globe and is consumed by bacteria. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090219101658.htm http://blog.taragana.com/n/ocean-bubbling-up-half-its-oil-reserves-from-seafloor-11495/ Since these processes have been going on far longer than we have been around you would have to assume that much of the worlds oil over time has just seeped to the surface and been consumed by bacteria. Over many millions of years this would have consumed far more oil than we have consumed. Coal is also exposed the surface naturally and is swept away by erosion. To think that hydrocarbons were totally sequestered until humans found them is an unreasonable assumption.

they have an explanation for everything! I remember that episode now, a day late and a dollar short of course. I am not trying to prove ID here I just wanted to show how ID would make a universe much different than the one we see. One of the claims of ID is that the universe was created for us, for our use, but from our stand point the universes is not very user friendly. If you compare the universe we see to universes really created by intelligent design IE Star Trek, Star Wars, BSG, Star Gate, or any one of dozens of intelligently designed virtual universes ours is obviously either not ID'ed or the ID'er is not particularly fond of us.

I'm not sure what your point is in saying this.

Actually fossils in coal are quite rare. Many reasons have been proposed, one idea is that fossils are destroyed by the heat and pressure precesses that make coal. One thing pointed out by Gold (I personally found it very difficult to think of coal as abiotic) were cases where logs were fossilized by coal and the log would continue above the coal seam as a fossil made of other minerals. He proposed that the coal was originally a thick liquid and the logs and or other fossils were in place before the coal was deposited and the coal hydrocarbons replaced the fossilized tissue much like other fossils are made when carbonate rocks (or other types of minerals) replace the bone when other fossils are formed. One thing that supported the idea of coal as a thick liquid is that there is often coal deposits above oil reservoirs where the oil has transformed into coal.

No, the way the hypothesis of abiotic oil became totally distorted by the people who wanted desperately to prove that there was no way we could run out of oil is a crock. Thomas Gold came out with a book suggesting that hydrocarbon deposits are geology reworked by biology instead of biology reworked by geology and the crazies went nuts. People who wanted to prove oil was an unlimited resource hijacked the idea so thoroughly every one assumed it meant oil was being created at a pace we could never use up. Nothing could be further from the truth but as in most displays of emotion the truth has little place among the fantasies. So much ideology, emotion, and money rode on an idea that did not support the idea of unlimited oil to begin it was never really investigated properly. Any attempt to investigate the idea of geology reworked by biology is met with such venom that no one wants to risk even suggesting it might have some merit.

Spinning a coin would allow you to know your were not in a gravity field. A spinning coin acts as a gyroscope and would not spin properly inside a rotating cylinder. It would fall over immediately.

So far this has been a great thread, many of the points made are addressed in the link I put in the first post. What amazed me was the number of places this idea was taken at least semi seriously. All sorts of caveats can be made to explain lack of evidence, like maybe they cremated their dead or the population was less dense than our or they lived clustered around geologically unstable areas. The idea of Gas and oil is I think a good point except that new gas and oil deposits are being created all the time and destroyed all the time by nature. Even if you don't believe the abiogenic oil you have to admit that oil is refilling old fields (at a rate far too slow to affect the oil crisis) at a slow rate and even though we might very well have sucked the planet dry, in several millions of years new oil fields may very well come into being near the surface again. Iron deposits are another matter and may very well be a deal breaker. For me the only way it could be true is if the population was small, not world wide, and their impact on the Earth was minimal, but of course this negates the basic premise of them having some thing to do with the demise of the dinosaurs to begin with. This is an interesting idea: All in all the idea makes for some good Science Fiction ideas but even if intelligent dinosaurs happened I have to agree with the consensus that they did not cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. Thanks for the great discussion dudes and dudettes, here are some more links to this idea http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/03/dinosauroids_2008.php http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/dinosaurintell.html http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/1444/smartasaurus

I agree, when do you intend to start? Caving in to creationist bullies is counter productive to the truth as well. How many times does it have to be spoon fed to you? You have to show respect to get it CTD, just being a bully is not good enough. I suggest you go to a Christian fundamentalist forum CTD, you'll get all the sunshine pumped up your skirt you can handle.