Moontanman

Size and mass are not interchangeable. It is possible for a object the size of an apple to be more massive than the mountain. It's my understanding that the mass increase is quite real. The object does have the extra mass, it come from the energy you put into accelerating the object to near light speed. The only visual effect would be the object or space craft being shortened along the axis of acceleration.

Ok you are correct, from the stand point of human time frames the mantle is not molten. It is like a very dense putty or hot plastic but in the time frame of geology it does indeed act as though it were molten and the continents do float on top of the denser mantel.

No problem, at one time all the land area of the earth was on Continent. A hot spot formed under this land mass caused by eh insulating properties of this land mass. all the animals at this time could walk anywhere (in theory) and mix with each other. As the hot spot spread the continents apart these animals lost contact with each other but still show signs of being related. Also land bridges do occasionally come up to connect continents, like central America connecting north and south America and the land bride that existed from Siberia to North America at one time. The is no reason what so ever to propose an expanding earth to explain animals all around the world being related. There is one thing that I can also address and that is the world wide ridge where the earth's crust spreads apart. On the coast of the Atlantic the continents are being spread away from the ridge at the center of the Atlantic. on the west coast the crust that was formed in the middle of the Pacific is being subducted under the north and south American plates. The Rocky Mountains and the Andes Mountains are evidence of this. As this oceanic crust is subducted some of the continental crust is folded up and the subducted Pacific ocean crust also comes up through active volcanoes. Eventually either the Pacific plate will reverse the motion of the north and south American plates or those plates will be pushed into Asia. The plates move because what we see as solid rock actually acts more like very stiff putty over the eons of times these plates need to move around. A good place to see this effect on a solid surface is arctic pack ice, this ice while solid to the touch acts like a thick putty over large areas in real time. This particular movement of the plates from all jammed up into one Continent into several is the second or maybe even third time this has happened. the one before Pangaea was called Gondwanaland. It preceded the current land mass by more than 300 million years or so. Your little picture is cute but it doesn't even come close to describing reality. The continents are more like Ice floating in the ocean. Most of the continent is below with just a small amount of the lighter continental crust showing. Like an ice berg the continents are much thicker in the middle than they are at the edges. The continents are light rocks floating in an ocean of denser rock. the Earths crust is very thin compared to the molten mantle the continents float on. As the crust spreads and is subducted the lighter parts of the molten mantle that come up and spread from the mid ocean ridges are separated out as they are subducted. So in a very real way the Continental crust is getting larger and the oceanic crust is not really going any where any more than a rotating belt is going any where even though it's surface moves. the continental crust is moving on the belts of mantle material , they move and run into each other and get bigger as they collect lighter rocks from the mantle. At one time almost all if not all of the earth was covered by ocean but the process of lighter rock coming to the surface of the heavier mantle has slowly produced continents. Over the last 4.5 billion years the continents have grown. No expanding Earth, just a moving active dynamic crust floating on a sea of molten mantle.

Thanks, i wasn't aware of rolling in those contexts. I knew about the snake that supposedly turns it's self into a hoop and rolls but that is just a myth with no truth to it.

I grew up living in houses that used coal fire places. We would adjust the damper in the chimney to keep the fire from burning too fast and throw more heat into the room. I do miss a fire place, we cooked on a wood stove as well, always burned sycamore wood in the cook stove, it burns the cleanest. Oh yeah, we also had fire places that were made of thick blocks of stone, the stone would get hot and radiate heat all night long, way after the fire had gone out.

What will man become? Extinct if we don't stop waffling and go and do it. Nuclear power is what we need, everything else is either pie in the sky or to expensive or too long range. If we use nuclear power to take us into space all these things can be well on their way by the turn of the next century.

Not at all, you are trying to obfuscate the situation. How long do you think it will take to start a significant process of exploitation of Space resources? If we really to this problem to heart it could be in decades. How long before we are unable to really mine necessary materials on the Earth? Nuclear powered space craft like the proposed "Nuclear Light bulb rocket" could speed up the exploitation of space resources considerably but even if we don't use nuclear power in that way the resources of space will not be thousands of years away or even hundreds of years. Decades at worst and maybe just a few years at best depending on how much of our resources we commit to the challenge. Why not? Are the alien over lords going to come and stop us? There are no unsurmountable problems to keep us from exploiting these resources. Only if we ***** foot around for a hundred years or so before we begin to exploit these space resources. Much of the infrastructure of mining space resources will be made in space from those very resources. It's not like we will have to continually mine the earth to go into space to get the stuff we are mining on the earth. Once we establish the beginning of the operations they can become self sustaining and use those very resources to build on. . No, you are not thinking ahead, it will not be necessary to put a complete infrastructure in space. The infrastructure can be built in space from native materials. As this grows more and more can be bled off to the Earth or used to build self contained orbiting colonies in space. We will not have build an entire infrastructure in space from materials mined on the earth to mine these resources There are already many proposals for mining in space, we need to get there to test out some of the more obvious ones. As i said there is no reason to think any unsurmountable engineering problems exist that will prevent us from mining the resources in space. No someone will succeed, all we have to is have the will to try and not get bogged down in negative thinking.

Actually Jackson, this sort of thing happens all the time, there are many ways gays can be hurt by laws that support inequality. One of the worst would be if your gay partner died, anyone who was a blood relation could come in and take away anything he had owned up to and including the house you lived in. Even in the best case scenario you would have to pay taxes on the house if it was left to you by your gay lover no matter how long you have together. Can you imagine being with your lover for 30 years and then he dies and you are kicked out the house you paid for together because you can't pay the taxes on it or because his relatives want half or all of it? If you had a gay child wouldn't you want him or her to have the same rights as everyone else?

Exploiting the resources of space ie the asteroids would give us an almost unlimited amount of resources. Yes they can be brought to the Earth easily, it's taking back into space that is difficult. Why is everyone assuming the Earth is our only source of raw materials? The solar system is at our disposal, the asteroids contain huge amounts of minerals most of which are reasonably easy to extract and even bring to the earth. Yes if we confine our efforts to the earth there will come a day when many elements will be too difficult to extract but way before we get to that point we should be exploiting the resources of the entire solar system.

You should have asked How do people drive worms out of the ground with electricity or why does electricity drive worms out of the ground, the Why is to use them in some way, you didn't ask for the reason behind the worms coming out of the ground.

You left out worm fritters:doh:

Hey, all this talk about anal sex and if it is easier to transmit STD's you guys left out the best one, oral sex, it is better worse or indifferent to STD's

I hate to have to ask but I never heard of that one, can you provide a link?

Imagine the lake is full of dissolved silanes and silanes with hydrocarbons bonded to the silicon chains, at out temperatures such molecules would break up immediately but at the temps of titan they would be just stable enough to exist and build up over time, could life be in this lake?

I'll do it for $10 but ten thousand people need to send me the $10 each. If there's not any more interest than that then let it come, global warming should really be going good by then and a nuclear type winter might do us some good......

If you think about it enough you can come up with a theoretical way to do almost anything, it's actual practice that is difficult. If you wanted to "ignite" Jupiter and could do anything but needed to keep it close to the same mass then drop in a large ball of neutronium, maybe a ball of neutronium a few meters in diameter should be enough to start fusion at the surface of the sphere once it's at the core of Jupiter (maybe not, it might take a lot more but the principle should work) of course this would make Jupiter more massive. In the book/movie 2001 a Space Odyssey part of the mass of Jupiter was turned into neutronium or something similar to ignite fusion at it's core. It probably wouldn't support fusion for more than a few million years but it would shine for a while.

Well since the pot is being stirred very hard already I will have to add something to the mix, Mirror Matter could be a small part of what we thing of as the missing mass. It would in all probability be about equal to the mass of regular matter in the universe. currently the percentages are around these figures 73% Dark Energy 23% Dark Matter 3.6% Intergalactic gas 0.4% Stars, Planets, ect..... Mirror matter could change this to 7.2% Intergalactic gas 0.8% Stars, planets, ect.... 19% Dark Matter 73% Dark Energy Not much of a change but it would preserve mirror symmetry in matter.

Damn, I think my brain just boiled, and I thought aneutronic fusion was pie in the sky

Did you not read my post or are you just being obtuse? I didn't say our ancestors were cave men 10,000 years ago, i said people ten to think our ancestors were stupid and living under rock over hangs. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you want cave men go back a few more tens of thousands of years..... Now that's the smartest thing I've heard so far

Hold a magnet near a AC transformer, you can feel the magnet vibrate.

People tend to think of our ancestors as dumb naked people living on the edge of rock over hangs eating raw meat and picking their noses for fun. Ancient people were very bit as smart as we are and in some ways maybe even smarter. They might not have had the great technology we do but they had their brains and they used them, probably much more than we do. When you have huge population of people willing to do almost anything for the people in power almost anything is achievable. Roll blocks of stone up dirt ramps that are later removed, build a pyramid, similar techniques can be used to build large objects, even huge stones apparently suspended in impossible places. Given time and labor I wouldn't fault them for anything.

Yes there are organisms that use hydrogen to combine with carbon to make hydrocarbons and I still don't see your point. Just because we don't have an example of life with out water doesn't make water special or even necessary to any life but our own and that is easily explained by life evolving in water. Of course water has had an effect on life, if the solvent was HF it too would have an effect on the evolution of life. I'm not trying to be obtuse i just don't see the point of pointing out the painfully obvious.

True, dark matter doesn't clump but if there is Mirror matter in the universe it should be an amount equal to the amount of matter. this would mean that most of the matter in the Universe would still be something we still do not know. I can't remember off hand what the actual percentage is but if matter comprises 5% of the universe then mirror matter should also make up 5% of the universe. Which would of course be 10% leaving the rest to dark matter and dark energy.

Exactly! That is where we get the idea of Dark Matter, there is plenty of evidence of mass we cannot see, hence the question could at least some of it be Mirror Matter?

One of the more interesting things about Mirror matter (if it's real) is there would be not only mirror matter but also mirror anti-matter. Depending on how strong the interaction between matter and mirror matter is, a container of mirror matter could contain antimatter or conversely a container of matter could contain mirror matter and another could contain mirror anti-matter. These two matter containers full of mirror matter and mirror anti-matter could be used to power a space craft, depending of course on how strong the interaction between matter and mirror matter proves to be. More than likely any interaction between the two will be too weak to use in this manner but interaction between the two types of matter could be used in various ways depending of course on how strong this interaction really is. If mirror matter exists it would at least be as abundant as matter in the universe. Which could mean mirror matter planets, stars and even galaxies.