Posts Made By: Daryl Crowley

You are incredibly ignorant and immature. It's too bad people like you get to vote.

I did watch the video and it sounded like someone put on the spot for quick speech for which you had no time to prepare.

Let's stick a television camera on you in the middle of your busy day and have you do an impromptu speech and see how eloquent you sound. But perhaps you are the worlds greatest orator.

And I'm sure you are quite an expert on all the presidents over the past 200 years. Give me a break.

And to suggest that GWB destroyed the WTC proves you have nothing credible to say except that which is idiotic.

Grow up.

What if you were a quantum particle, such as a photon?

Then the past and present are one in the same. The information has accumulated instantaneously and the energy has not dissipated because the beginning and now are one in the same time. The past is the present because then and now are one.

I feel the answer to quantum action at a distance involves this lack of time. We wonder if quantum particles can communicate backwards in time. Why should they have to when then is the same as now, even in the future? How does a photon perceive the order in which events take place when there is no passage of "time". For a photon time does not seem to "stop everything from happening at once."

(And yes this is a refreshing thread. I love to discuss quantum mechanics and relativity because none of my friends are into it and they all think I'm nuts.)

Daryl

I agree that I would like to see the sky look like some really cool space art but there is a problem.

Take the view from the end of one of the Star Wars movies when they are looking at this huge galaxy hanging outside the space ship. There is the problem. As soon as you get far enough away from something to take it all in, it becomes too faint to see. If you were positioned on the outside of the galaxy or the other side of globular, A nearby galaxy like M31 would still be a smudge. As soon as you got far enough away from something cool, so you could take it all in, it would start to fade out on you because of the distance. Now if we were orbiting Saturn... now that would be cool!

Daryl

I've read all the same theories, and theoretically the math works out. But, given that on average the nearest stars are probably a bad bet for life or other useful purposes and that on average it would be much farther to "inhabited or useful worlds". Given the time to establish viable communities and the fact that very few planets would be ready to inhabit with the exact same composition of breathable gases, calling for extensive life support or terraforming.

You can talk about bioengineering to inhabit other worlds but using our civilization, as a model the kind of change you are talking about would not happen in 1000 years. Look at the fear of cloning and stem cell research in our own civilization.

I tend to be a little more conservative and pessimistic about the rate of expansion. I am also pessimistic about a civilizations ability to keep it all together, especially as new colonies are created and loose touch with the values of the mother world.

There are a lot of factors besides the theoretical rate of technology expansion. That and the space and time constraints. I think your scenario would be a lot more viable if the majority of star systems were inhabitable. But while there may be thousands of ideal worlds, even those inhabited by intelligence in our own galaxy, the average distance between them may be very great indeed.

How many people are going to commit to an 18 or 50-year one-way journey? A few for sure, but that kind of commitment is going to slower than the theoretical expansion rate. Also given we have not been asked to join the galactic union in a 10 billion year old galaxy might suggest that it's not a common galactic occurrence.

Daryl

Steve,

You're out my league. I have a Orion 5 inch Mak and an Orion filter. My little light bucket can't afford the loss of any photons. Things like M1 are a little better, M57 is toss-up. M42 is good with the filter. I lose so much light that I have to find the object and then put the filter on or I can't see my reference stars to find anything. A bigger scope is definitely in my near future plans.

Daryl

If the wind is not up, try west of town along the lake shore. There are some spots that have some drop from the highway that would shield you from the lights of cars on M-28. There are also some hills right on the southwest side of town, if you could find a spot up there you could see just about the whole universe! Good luck.

Daryl

It's been on my calendar for a week. I've read the book and it is the best I've read on strings.

Let's just hope they don't "dumb-it-down" too much. Nova is notorious for that.

Daryl

I can only describe this as ridiculous.

As far as miracles go, even if there is a creator I don't think he intervenes. It makes no sense to save selected individuals here and there and let things like the holocaust and 911 go ahead as planned. I don't even want to argue that kind of logic.

But, I don't think a lack of divine miracles lessens the possibility of a creator. I think that if God created the laws of physics then those same laws may also bind him. Can God create laws that He must obey? Can he make a rock so heavy He can't lift it? I truly believe that could be the case.

Daryl

I have the book and it does provide some new targets. My problem is that you really need a 12-inch scope for a lot of his objects. That puts a lot of it out of my range and the range of a lot of other less fortunate astronomers with more modest sized scopes.

Daryl

I find the atheists as closed minded as the believers. Each thinks they know the answer and neither have any more proof than the other.

The believer is closed to his religious doctrine and that is THE way it is.

The atheists know there could not POSSIBLY be a God.

Then there are the lonely people in the middle like me who think that religions are based on human imagination and that atheists have not taken a hard look at the magic of the physics that drives the Universe.

Both extremes are hard to debate with because they are not willing to look at the options. They think they know, but they have no idea and cannot admit it.

Daryl