Ebola in Dallas

[heyelander]

I can be a bit of a spiteful prick, so I see this reaction in myself a lot of the time. I don't think I do it along political lines so much but I do see myself doing it in other areas a lot. I push back a lot when people frame advocacy in any sort of us vs. them format. I react well to religious thoughts that tell me how religion has benefited someone personally, I react poorly to someone telling me how it will better me. Same thing with dietary ideas (vegetarian, veganism). I usually start off open minded but eventually become defensive.

[nullnor]

Flying saucers. Which are really? Yeah you got it. Time machines. I think a lot about this kind of stuff. I do my best thinking on the bus. That how come I don't drive, see?

in the remake of The Time Machine the uber-morlock says: you built your time machine because of emma's death. if she had lived, it would never have existed. so how could you use your machine to go back in time and save her?

I remember he said she lived, but never existed. I never really understood the exact meaning trying to be conveyed. was it science saying the time machine was built after the event you were trying to go back to? or was he being philosophical and citing the grandfather clause? I reckon they are almost the same.

there are plenty of natural time machines that have probably existed forever, or at least since the existence of time. but it would appear the majority of them only go into the future. so if gravity points to the future, then anti-gravity can point to the past; being that time and space is all linked and shit.

so where are they? maybe time travelers get frustrated with only being able to observe the past and they head off into the future instead. that's why I like that movie. favorite movie, favorite actor because of it. guy pearce did what any time traveler would do. keep going forward.

it's the proverbial one step forward and two steps back. by going into the future you acquire the technology to go back. so we set up a human accelerator. right here on earth. but there's a problem. we can't accelerate a living thing to reach a decent percentage of the speed of light within that living things lifetime without killing it from the g-forces. so it would have to be a continuous experiment of some self sustaining community while the people running the experiment from outside would reach old age and continually need to be replaced.

I wish ppl would realize how young the universe is. we are the time travelers. that's why no one is here yet.

[nullnor]

have you guys ever heard about the story of the hippo and the turtle? it's famous. you see there's this hippopotamus that accidently keeps traveling in time. he's very wise so he keeps doing good deeds. one of his favorite things is to make friends with turtles. http://www.amazon.com/The-Turtle-Hip.../dp/0374378851

a turtle won’t swim across the river because she is afraid of the hippopotamus standing in the middle of it. She asks a bird, a grasshopper, some ants, and a possum what to do, but she still can’t find the courage to cross to the other side of the lake until she makes a new friend.

for some reason this hippo loves to transport turtles to the safety of the other side of the water and it's given a good name to all hippos because. also in the move Elysium, there's the hippo and meerkat tale.

so yeah, I think either ppl misunderstand how awesome hippopotamuses are, or there is one time traveling, doing good deeds, creating a myth. they are the kings of the jungle. rarely do you ever see a hippo being taken down by a lion. which is why they take the time to help the other animals.

[chancellor]

I think my brain just melted.

Thanks, nully....

[TranaGreg]

I wish ppl would realize how young the universe is. we are the time travelers. that's why no one is here yet.

I've had this thought from a different perspective - looking at where we are in the milky way, our solar system is relatively near the end of one of the spirals ... assuming that this has played a role in giving our solar system the time to stabilize & the planets to cool and life to form, we could be one of the earlier solar systems to reach a place (ot a time?) which can support life.

[nullnor]

I've had this thought from a different perspective - looking at where we are in the milky way, our solar system is relatively near the end of one of the spirals ... assuming that this has played a role in giving our solar system the time to stabilize & the planets to cool and life to form, we could be one of the earlier solar systems to reach a place (ot a time?) which can support life.

that could be part of the rare earth hypothesis. tho early planetary collisions within the goldilocks zone certainly helped create an iron core and a protective magnetic shield. and a really big moon sometimes. im not sure the idea has been expanded from solar systems to galaxies. but to be sure, more galaxies have collided than not. and it presents a conundrum. technological life isn't supposed to develop until later, until after all the collisions have happened. yet with the universes expansion accelerating, which would seem to be an anti-collision buffer, most of the technological life that survived would be at a serious disadvantage finding each other. I don't really know what happens when galaxies merge. they make it sound like stars start exploding, like Christmas lights. if both of the galaxies are really big they will have massive central black holes anchoring them that will eventually merge. so it's a gradual galactic disruption over billions of years. and the gravity waves pretty much screws everything up.

so what does it mean to be in one of the galaxies arms? well, we know where we are. we know how we got here, sort of I guess. we are a big galaxy so we've definitely merged with other ones before. when did we merge and who did we merge with? that's not an answer anyone has I think. but we know the next one is happening in 3 billion years with Andromeda. it's a good question tho. do solar systems on the edge survive collisions better than ones closer to the middle? or do ones on the edge reassemble quicker?

everyday I think about reasons we are rare. and there's so many. but you get that feeling, like any good researcher does, that what you're trying to disprove you end up proving otherwise. you ever notice the ppl that discover something, were originally looking for the opposite answer.

I like to think the milkyway was lucky. I like to think we're exceptional. it's not a word that means we are better. it simply means we are different. we're rare. but ppl don't always look at the whole picture. micro biologists will look at the mitochondria and organelles of a cell, but they don't look at the whole cell. they see what it's parts are doing but not what the whole cell is doing. we look at the solar system not sure what the galaxy is doing. we look at the galaxy not sure what the universe is. we can look and think about the stars, but we don't give much thought that everyone else is too. even plant life will turn to the sun. there's not many creatures that don't orientate themselves that way. thermodynamics, sure, even molecules do it. it's why you formed into a cell in the first place. molecules take that energy and organize into more complex ones. it's the starting basis for life. it's not a theory that's been proven yet.

there's a reason why we haven't found anyone else out there yet. and it scares me that the reason is because we aren't supposed to, as opposed to not being able to. I want ppl to think about reasons that the universe was made to be idiot proof. you can't blow it up. you can't find other ppl and blow them up. at least not easily. and any civilization that could contact another one would be so far advanced that we wouldn't have anything they need. but even if they did, it's just like war of the worlds, they would never even survive even the smallest micro-organisms. so those things like viruses that created us, they also serve to protect us. even if you sent machines to do it, those little organisms would contaminate everything. so there seems to be two things preventing contact, distance and local threat. that worries me that we are meant to be alone.

and where there is a planet teeming with life, like earth, why would only one emerge technologically? that's every species on this planet doing something different than you are. how many planets out there have this many different species? you know the Copernicus theory is making a comeback. so whats holding them up? why can't I tell an elephant or a dolphin about other planets? because even as smart as they are, a dolphin lives under a liquid, which is an ingredient to start life. and as many neurons an elephant has in it's brain, and it has like twice as many as we do, which is amazing, most of them are used for locomotion.

I think the reason we are alone is because all the answers we'll ever need are right here on this planet. it's idiot proof. technological intelligent life can only happen on a planet full of life, out of the reach of everything else, of all the planetary and galactic collisions.

but I wanted to write this after I noticed citing the movie the time machine, how in the movie you had one species living underground and one above. and then you got the turtles straining their necks on the hippo. that's a lot of turtles. how did they decide to all climb on the hippo at once? the ones on bow look like explorers looking for land. I think the hippopotamus has figured out what the sun is and is using the turtles for sunscreen. everything has the sun in common. the answers to the deepest questions in life are to be found in it's tiniest examples. like the structure of the atom watching horses run around on a racetrack. or while sitting under a tree and having an apple fall on you're head. that's why we have so much trouble finding the revolution, there's too much dependence on noise now.

I still say if you want to make your presence known in the universe, you've got to go around blowing up stars. you create a pattern of stars blowing up, and someone will notice that.

[nullnor]

yeah, I think most of the damage done to galaxies when merging is when the central black holes interact. quasars and stuff. so if your on the edge, those gravity waves and gamma rays might be more calmer or inaccurate. perhaps the size of the black hole in relation to the galaxy makes a difference. like a big black hole in a small galaxy (which might be the exception but it could happen), or a big galaxy with a small black hole. I've heard them refer to our galaxy's black hole as small. and then all galaxies start out small. so we've been lucky. we haven't run into a bigger galaxy yet. so when you take into account galaxy mergers, that makes us even younger. or older, I guess, depending on how you look at it.