What are your paranormal beliefs?

[Samwise]

Do you really want to have that conversation?

[WindupAtheist]

It's just like "What if I got so good at programming that my applications didn't need any code?"

[Llava]

Tell me, what change takes place in the genetic structure of a newly conceived organism which causes it to no longer have genes, or any other phyiscal structure at all?

An awesome one.

[geldonyetich]

The same change that formed the genetic structure out of nothing in the first place, but in reverse.

[tazelbain]

Wouldn't that mean they turned into goo, not light?

[Valmorian]

*sigh* I'm sounding like whatshisdick who defended Richard Dawkins' book in that other thread.

Classy.

[Riggswolfe]

*sigh* I'm sounding like whatshisdick who defended Richard Dawkins' book in that other thread.

Classy.

If I was aiming for class I never would get involved in these debates in the first place.

Edit: In any case, I am going to attempt to stay out of this thread from here on out. WUA is blatantly just trying to stir shit up without even an attempt at meaningful dialogue.

[geldonyetich]

Wouldn't that mean they turned into goo, not light?

Hey, if Goo can do that, that's not so bad.

[WindupAtheist]

If you take the process of the formation of DNA and run it in reverse, you get complex chemicals turning into simpler ones.  Not magical ghosts.  And Riggs, it's okay to have read the stupidest book ever.  The problem comes when you get pissy at my calling it stupid, yet have no answer to the fact that it's screamingly ignorant about it's own subject matter.

[Ironwood]

This thread turned into a wanky personality contest.   Who'd have thought it ?

[Riggswolfe]

If you take the process of the formation of DNA and run it in reverse, you get complex chemicals turning into simpler ones.  Not magical ghosts.  And Riggs, it's okay to have read the stupidest book ever.  The problem comes when you get pissy at my calling it stupid, yet have no answer to the fact that it's screamingly ignorant about it's own subject matter.

WUA, in order to remain consistent you need to immediately delete your posts from the Star Trek thread about liking any Trek at all. Trek butchers physics every single time a starship goes to warp. Don't get me started on the time Kirk ordered phasers fired while in warp. Or how much energy a transporter takes. Or how internally inconsistent it is with itself from episode to episode.

You must also immediately withdraw any liking you have for Star Wars. The Force is ESP wrapped in technobabble. Midichlorians shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of biology that it is laughable. How in the hell does a lightsaber keep a "blade" of energy that produces no heat and is produced by an object that fits in the palm of your hand?

You also need to stop watching Dr. Who if you do. Relativity shows that his escapades are truly impossible.

Dune? Right out as well. A man turning into a sandworm because of some drugs? Mental powers? I could go on and on about Dune.

Battlestar Galactica almost passes, except they too go faster than light. (implied at least.) Oh, and "downloading" a consciousness across a distance of light years? And robots that are identical to humans? And have a God? Laughable. Toss that out too.

Oh, and Heinlein, get this, that old geezer wrote about people who became effectively immortal, through selective breeding over a few generations. Crazy huh? Never read anymore Heinlein again.

Aasimov? Sentient robots? Clearly impossible with any technology known to man. A hack.

Arthur C. Clarke? Come on? Giant metal rectangles that communicate and somehow helped early man to use tools? That tried to foster a new race on Jupiter? A sentient computer that essentially goes insane?

Ray Bradbury? Have you read his stories? Life on Mars for instance? Clearly the man has no understanding at all of science.

So, be consistent, or shut the fuck up is my point.

[bhodi]

Boy, you bit. You bit hard.

[WindupAtheist]

Warp drive is made up, and we all know it's made up.  Evolution is an actual concept, and if you have to hideously mutilate it in order for your story to work, then any relevance you were seeking to gain by using an actual concept is thrown out the window.  It's the difference between writing a book where Abe Lincoln is kidnapped by martians, and writing a book where Abe Lincoln is born a fillipino woman in 1976 Chicago.  One is a lame/implausibe story about Lincoln, the other makes one wonder what it has to do with Lincoln at all.

edit:  Trek loves that "evolving into energy" crap too, and it pisses me off there as well.  Star Wars at least has the sense not to even pretend it has anything to do with science.

[Aranel]

Hmm... I'd have to say various cryptids.

Cryptogeology is interesting as well.

[Llava]

Warp drive is made up, and we all know it's made up.  Evolution is an actual concept

Space travel is an actual concept, too.  They mutilate it by bringing warp drive into it.

[stray]

It's quite sad that there probably won't be anything like warpdrive.

I might be wrong, but the fastest matter being observed are gases propelled by blazar jets, producing speeds close to the speed of light. Other than that, there are observations of stars being pulled at speeds around 1,000 km a second (over 3,000,000 km an hour) by (presumably) supermassive blackholes. That's fast as all hell, enough to the point to disspate entire worlds, and that's less than 1% of the speed of light. Even if we could harness that (which would still be amazing for space travel), there's still the question of producing a hull that could take the "abuse" (for lack of a better word).

Then again, this is all along the lines of force and propulsion. Which has nothing to do with warp drives.

But anyways, it's a fun concept. As is anything speculative in Star Trek. Fun. TV Show. No reason to be pissed off.

[geldonyetich]

This thread, once one of entertaining the idea of the paranormal, has apparently backlashed into one of excessive skepticism.  It's hard to anticipate exactly what science will achieve in the future, so reading the last few messages saying how various aspects of science fiction is absolutely ridiculous may be assuming too much.  I'm not saying that everything that ever dripped off a science fiction writer's quill will come true to the smallest details - the odds are pretty small.  However, one cannot yet rule out that similar effects cannot be achieved through entirely different, yet-to-be discovered techniques and phenomena. 

Some counterexamples of what I've seen here on the last few posts:

If indeed we cannot exceed the speed of light, as particle physics suggests, then perhaps we might find a way to exceed the speed of light through some method of circumvention.  Impossible, you say?  Well, there were some very learned people who thought the sound barrier was impassible just 50ish years ago.

We may actually develop robots that, if not sentient, are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from the real thing.  Can go they go insane?  What's acceptable sanity?  I'd say my computer goes insane every time it crashes - though this would be a kind of sanity that doesn't require sentience, as my existing computer has shown no evidence of self-awareness.

Given our mapping of the human genome, and our work to put together the puzzle of how we are assembled, there is introduced the possibility to make improvements.  Subtle at first, but in time, there really no limitation to the extent that what we recognize as the human organism to be modified... some would say, perverted, but that's really a matter of moral difference.  Germ line (prior to birth) genetic therapy is not the only possibility, as somatic (post-birth) gene therapy is a real life developing field that shows great potential even though they haven't quite nailed the details yet.  If we're lucky, it'll become an affordable reality before we kick the bucket, as here is your quickest potential for immortality.

Sometimes, the line between insane optimism and reality is shattered by tomorrow's discovery.

[stray]

I'm not trying to reject the general idea of what you're saying, but comparing the skepticism towards exceeding the speed of light and skepticism in the past with the speed of sound is apples and oranges. The first is measured by a fair bit of provisional truths -- the latter were measured by completed shortsightedness and stupidity.

Disbelieving that one could travel faster than speed of sound didn't have any overarching laws of physics to support it (like Einstein's Theory of Relativity for Light Speed). It was just mindless skepticism. Einstein is not mindless skepticism.

Not saying that he's absolutely right either -- but he is the best we have for the time being.

[Samwise]

Even if we could harness that (which would still be amazing for space travel), there's still the question of producing a hull that could take the "abuse" (for lack of a better word).

That's what structural integrity fields are for.  Duh.

[Sky]

[Llava]

I now believe in leprechauns.

Turns out I work with one.

This guy is about 5'2" and let me tell you, before I was even really thinking about it, I thought he looked like a leprechaun.  He has the bushy eyebrows, the wrinkled grinning face, squinty eyes... everything about him just says leprechaun.  But today I put together more evidence.  Firstly, his last name is Kahn.  Pronounced like (lepre)chaun.  Second, he's a total lech.  Third, he's greedy and selfish.  Fourth, he likes to screw with people.  Fifth, and this is the kicker for me, he's obsessed with using the Sacagawea golden dollar instead of the paper dollar.  That's a gold coin! He's obsessed with gold coins!

I swear, I'm finding a pure iron bell and taking it to work and ringing it in front of him.  If he freaks out, I'm tackling him and getting that pot o' gold.  I'll keep you all updated.




.... This may not be funny if you don't know the guy.  Oh well, sucks to be you all.

[Merusk]

It will be funny the moment you post the results of the iron bell ringing.  Until then it's just amusing.


As for ftl travel, buring a hole through space-time seems to be the better solution than even attempting 'real' speed.  However, not knowing much about physics beyond what the physicists on NOVA talk about, I'll let everyone else worry about how that'll happen.

[NowhereMan]

Faster than light travel. Easy.

[Endie]

Add a "none" option and I'll vote.

Edit: at the moment, if 17% of those who reply say they believe in the mediums/ghosts option, then all you know is that 17% of the "scientifically illiterate or otherwise gullible" subset of F13's readership believe in the happy medium.

[WayAbvPar]

Holy 8 year old thread!

I still follow the Bigfoot phenomena. The overwhelming majority of it is pretty easily explainable as mis-identifications or overactive imaginations, but then something like this comes along (warning- lengthy PDF). I subscribe to The Bigfoot Show podcast, and one of the NAWAC higher ups runs it, so I have heard most of these stories before. Seeing it all together in a report is pretty compelling, however. Either this entire group is lying or there is something real out there.

Real or not, it is a pretty interesting read. And might make you a little jumpy at night in the woods 

[Yegolev]

Almost stopped reading when I got to "North American Wood Ape Conservancy".

You nut.

[Rasix]

[01101010]

229 page PDF? Never have I needed a TLDR; more so than now. 

[Rendakor]

I'm glad my "don't click on PDFs" policy served me well this time.

[pxib]

Either this entire group is lying or there is something real out there.

There is something real out there. Probably several somethings lumped together by longing and expectation. No deception required. It's also not really apes. Large mammals present all over an entire, extensively explored continent (as Bigfoot is claimed to be) simply do not avoid leaving bones, fur, feces, and photographs for four hundred years of naturalist explorations. This isn't some variant buffalo which might go undetected via miscategorization of specimen age. The entire primate order has been absent from North America's fossil record (much less its primeval forests) for fifty million years. Megafauna simply do not hide in plain sight.

If we want to believe, if our goal is sufficiently vague, and if our standards of evidence are sufficiently weak then we can find anything. Our brain is especially well tuned to identifying human shapes, human faces, and human motivations... where they exist and where they do not. Giant intelligent apes meet this criteria quite well.

I would love to live in a world where all these marvelous things exist. The entire disciplines of biology, taxonomy, and paleontology would be thrilled to find a North American Ape. They still require falsifiable, testable evidence before they believe that we do. Anything we could do a DNA test on would be great.

(sorry rasix)

[schild]

I like the X-Files.

[lamaros]

There are a heap of near extinct animals that are far more interesting as things that exist than a 'Bigfoot'. Spend your energy on them.

[WayAbvPar]

Read the report. I know it is long, but just dismissing it without even looking at it and making snide comments is the easy way out. Or ignore it, whatever.

[schild]

I didn't click it, but it says 200 pages.

Why would anyone read that?

Comeon.

[Samwise]

I took a quick skim through, focusing in on the parts that sounded most promising (like "Blood and Hair").  Here's the tl;dr version: a very excitable group of guys went camping and saw lots of things they think are Bigfeet.  Mysteriously, all of the evidence they were able to bring back fails to corroborate their fantasies.  Due to a vast conspiracy orchestrated by the Bigfeet, no doubt.