The Science Thread

@chazz85: I'd love it to be a dyson sphere but I'm holding my horses at the moment, it could be an alien civilisation but there are other things that it could possibly be too.

See my reply in post #546.

Well, if it weren't for cool astronomy documentaries my dad and I would watch when I was a kid, I'd probably still be a Christian and definitely wouldn't be getting my BA in physics right now.

Nice! What school are you going to... if you dont mind saying?

FSU :P

Why does science work? Why is it so successful? Well, science is a process, and a very important part of that process is explained below in this video. Check it out.

If you want to know how the Mars rovers collect rock specimens to analyze while they're up there... check this out.

One thing that pisses me off is how often science is held back, and I'm not even taking just about religion (Catholic Dark Ages). Hero of Alexandria built a basic steam engine, but it never saw use because slavery was way more practical at the time, if it had, we might have hoverboards.

One can only wonder what we'd be doing now if the entire Dark Ages hadnt happened. Imagine us now plus 1000 years of advancement. We could be colonizing the galaxy by now.

@willpayton: And I would have a hoverboard. Gotta prioritize man.

;P

You can have your hoverboard if I can have my jetpack.

I just love science so much, I love learning about things, I love learning about space in particular, it's such a wide expansive universe that I really wanna learn about. I love black holes, I love planets, stars, galaxies, the universe itself, the fabric of space, and how it all works. It's absolutely amazing to learn about.

@willpayton: Damn straight

Why havent we found aliens yet?

Here's some thoughts on the matter.

This thread is full of smart people

@willpayton: Why look for aliens in space if we already have some of them here?

I believe Aliens are exist somewhere, we have a very very big universe, there must be someone else out there

Antarctica is actually gaining ice

The funny thing about "Dark Ages" is that they weren't dark at all, that's just a missinformation in popular culture. It's true that there is a distinct lack of written material after the fall of the Roman empire, but the manuscripts that we have have mostly been preserved by the Church-that's why the pejorative use of the term Dark Ages fits mostly places that weren't under catholic influence back then. Then there's also the fact that the fall of Roman empire was a setback for most of Europe, but meanwhile other places in the world (like the Arab empire) were steadily progressing both culturally and scientifically.

Number of replies in this topic v.s. the religion thread. Hilarious.

While what you say is true, I think in many ways it's still rather apt. For one after the fall of the Roman Empire a lot of technologies that were in common use were mostly lost from use in the western world. As far as that part of the world, those 1000 years or so really saw very little in the way of technical advancements.

Glad you liked it! That's why I post this stuff here.

Tell me about it.

Evolutionary Stasis

We usually hear about how creatures in the fossil record have changed over time. But it’s also interesting to take a look at creatures who have hardly changed since their earliest fossil discovery. I have presented blue green algae and the sponge here so far. Now.....

The earliest known oxygen-breathing bacteria that lived on land

New University of Alberta research shows the first evidence that the first oxygen-breathing bacteria occupied and lived on land 100 million years earlier than previously thought. The researchers show that the most primitive form of aerobic-respiring life on land came into existence 2.48 billion years ago.

Here we see acidic waste water from a modern mining site.

This waste water supports the same oxygen using bacterial life that appeared on Earth 2.48 billion years ago.

And....

Sulphur bacteria, microorganisms

Scientists examined sulfur bacteria, microorganisms that are too small to see with the unaided eye, that are 1.8 billion years old and were preserved in rocks from Western Australia's coastal waters. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the bacteria look the sameas bacteria of the same region from 2.3 billion years ago -- and that both sets of ancient bacteria are indistinguishable from modern sulfur bacteria found in mud off of the coast of Chile.

Evolutionary Stasis

I have presented blue green algae bacteria, the sponge, the first known oxygen-breathing bacteria and sulfur bacteria here so far. Now.....

Jellyfish

Scientists discovered a 580-600 million-year-old fossil jelly, an eight-armed swirl which they named Eoandromeda after the galaxy Andromeda probably because it used a light display. Jellyfish are of course around today. Scientific American presents an article that mentions the ephyra/, the free-swimming, larvae of the moon jellyfish, which resemble tiny starbursts, each with eight arms radiating out of a disk-shaped body.

Comb Jellies

Despite their soft, gelatinous bodies, fossils thought to represent ctenophores, apparently with no tentacles but many more comb-rows than modern forms, thrive as far back as the early Cambrian, about 515 – 550 million years ago.

Today Comb jellies paddle through the sea with iridescent cilia and snare prey with sticky tentacles. They are much more complex than sponges — they have nerves, muscles, tissue layers and light sensors, all of which the sponges lack yet the following team of scientists have reason to believe that comb jellies existed before sponges.

“It’s just wild to imagine” that comb jellies evolved before sponges, says Billie Swalla, a developmental biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and a leading member of the team sequencing the genome of the comb jelly Pleurobrachia bachei. But the team is suggesting just that, in results they presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, held on 3–7 January in San Francisco, California.

Sean Carroll, astrophysicist, talks about Naturalism and why it's important in science.

@willpayton:

Yes I've been mulling this one over myself over the last week.

I came to the conclusion that even though materialism/naturalism is unfalsifiable, it's all science has to work with.

Anything we believe, anything, at some level relies on a set of assumptions. As such you could say that materialism, or any belief system, is unfalsifiable. To me that's not a very useful observation because it puts the burden outside the realm of what's meaningful. It's like saying that I cant prove anything to 100% certainty. True, I cant, but neither can anyone for anything, so it's not a meaningful or useful standard of proof.

The main benefit of materialism and science is that they try to make the smallest set of assumptions possible. This alone makes them superior to other belief systems and much, much more likely to be accurate in the deductions you make from them.

Man I have science lol. I'm a freshman and im taking physics 1, and I hate it xD

In other news, the Theory of Relativity has been around now for 100 years! Relativity is not just one of the best known scientific theories ever, but one of the most well tested and verified as well.

Read more about it here:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/general-relativity-100-years-of-the-most-beautiful-theory-ever-created/

science isnt real

Are you trying to say that there is no such thing as knowledge or that there is not a reliable method in which to acquire some of it?

@willpayton said:

In other news, the Theory of Relativity has been around now for 100 years! Relativity is not just one of the best known scientific theories ever, but one of the most well tested and verified as well.

Read more about it here:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/general-relativity-100-years-of-the-most-beautiful-theory-ever-created/

When Einy stated that Space was a FABRIC!, how exactly did he experimentally test and verify that buffoonery? I thought Space was a Vacuum? Which is it?

What kind of fabric? Cotton, Leather, Silk perhaps?

Are you guys subscribed to Thunderfoot

@mollydanger2210: Please troll somewhere else.

I'm actually subscribed to his channel. BTW if you want a really great science YT channel to subscribe to, I recommend PBS SpaceTime.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g

I hear that there is some nanotechnology and geoengineering afoot.

@willpayton: When it comes to trolling Will, I've got nothing on saint Einy.

Why don't the boys and girls on the ISS grab a pair of scissors and cut themselves a piece of Space fabric? How valuable will that be here on earth folks?

Imagine space fabric on the catwalks and in the shopping malls folks! Golly gee! Oh and what about time powers?! According to Einy time is magically contained within space fabric! How profound so time is physical too!

I can't wait for the future when we'll be wearing space and time! Hell, why wait why don't we just get the boys and girls at Nasa to fold us some space-time like a sheet of a-4 paper and tear us open a worm-hole so we can travel to the future!

We may have finally discovered gravitational waves, first theorized by Einstein 100 years ago!

http://www.space.com/31900-gravitational-waves-discovery-ligo.html?cmpid=514630_20160211_58178456&adbid=10153302873126466&adbpl=fb&adbpr=17610706465

They already knew that gravitational waves were there. This is nothing but an attempt at getting more of our tax money for their worthless projects.

Earth revolves around the sun, the moon revolves around the earth, our bodies gravitate towards the earth. Electromagnetic fields govern everything from the interactions of atomic bonds, to the gravity of planets and stars, to things exploding.

You guys are not getting my money. And don't bother sending people to mars. the forces of the universe can be studied anywhere at anytime. No one wants or needs the planet mars.

And climate change is not the most important issues of our times. I am not a sucker! Go sell your garbage to someone else!

Another video explaining the gravitational wave discovery. Enjoy.

What are peoples thoughts on transhumanism?

@jonny_anonymous: Super-soldier stuff?

@lukespeedblitz: Using technology and science to enhance the human body beyond it's limits as well eliminating the bodies natural life span.

My opinion is that it's inevitable, whether some think it's immoral or dangerous or whatever, it will happen. Personally I think it will be a net positive. What it will look like, I dont know. I have a feeling that something like Ghost in the Shell is very likely. The future will be an interesting place to live, not just because of cybernetics, but also because soon we will be able to genetically change the human genome to come up with totally new species of humans. When that happens, it will be a major event in human evolution. No one knows what will happen after that.