Closed Week #6 2017-06-12

[DeletedUser110195]

Hot Wheels you mean, but I agree, putting hot sauce on them won't make them edible

 

[DeletedUser108047]

mine must have been made in China...

 

[DeletedUser110195]

Ahhh yes, the infamous Chinese ripping off of established IPs....if you did indeed see die cast cars being sold under the name Hot Wings...then yeah that probably was from China. Oh those silly Chinese, always doing one goofy thing or another.

 

[Prinza the Hunter]

Didn't Icarus do rather badly from having hot wings?

 

[DeletedUser110131]

Everything is better with a good sauce, @Dane thorson. Not necessarily good, but always better.
@Augustavian, since you think drawn out, torturous death is depressing, I'll respect your squeamishness, and constrain myself to non-lethal torture and quick deaths. Let no one say that I'm not considerate!

 

[Prinza the Hunter]

Life is merely the existential essence of being. It is only a transitory phase of a collection of plasmatic materials encountered by carbon-based beings who have the temerity to believe they are existing.

(Sorry, that gibberish actually might make sense.)

 

[DeletedUser9168]

how do you insert those hyperlinks to player names, Einrikr?

 

[Prinza the Hunter]

You just put an @ sign, @jampots, followed by the name. Actually, as you type a name, you should be prompted with matching names.

 

[DeletedUser110195]

But we do exist, this unique structure of molecules is capable of knowing itself and taking deliberate actions, when it is gone there will never be another such being precisely like it.

 

[Prinza the Hunter]

Never is a very long time in an infinite universe. Indeed, if the universe is infinite, it is likely we have already existed and shall exist. Given that time is just a construct and everything happens now, it might even be accurate to say that there are an infinite number of us right now, reading this psuedo-scientific junk I am writing.

 

[DeletedUser110195]

I wouldn't call it pseudo-science, imagining new possibilities to pursue, like multiverse theory. Considering matter cannot be created or destroyed, I think it's not far fetched to conceive that the universe goes through cycles of expansion and contraction, with each new expansion creating something wholly different.

 

[DeletedUser110131]

@Augustavian, current measurements indicate a high probability that the universe will continue to expand at an increasing rate, rather than slow down to a halt and then contract. We still have a "Big Bang", but there will be no "Big Crunch" to create a new "Big Bang". That also means that whatever caused our universe, it was not the crunch of a previous universe.

@Prinza the Hunter, an infinite universe is a very big "if". The general consensus is that the universe has a constant mass and energy. If fact, if we could just measure it properly, we could answer the question of whether there will be a "Big Crunch" or a "Big Silence".

Life is merely the existential essence of being. It is only a transitory phase of a collection of plasmatic materials encountered by carbon-based beings who have the temerity to believe they are existing.

One problem with that, as pointed out by Descartes: If we don't exist, there's no reason to assume that anything else exists, based purely on the fact that it has been encountered by us. Of course, they ("things") may still exist, exactly as we've experienced them, but that correlation will then be pure coincidence, unconnected to our observations. The likelihood of that coincidence is, for all useful purposes, so small as to be non-existent. Dismiss us, and you also dismiss "transitions", "phases", "plasma", "materials", "encounters", "carbon", along with everything else in the universe.

Of course, in spite of this, there are still a lot of talented people trying to make the case that our minds are illusions. You're in good company. Wrong, but good.

 

[DeletedUser103370]

@Einrikr actually there are hundreds of theories out there, some expect the supermassive blackholes to merge in the end, but the current state of exponential expansion could be only temporary too. It's better to say, we don't have the slightest clue )

 

[DeletedUser109510]

Here is a tool to help you search

 

[DeletedUser110195]

Time to head out of the mansion and start investigating....

 

[DeletedUser110131]

@z78sabjan, the fact that "there are hundreds of theories out there" does not mean that "we don't have the slightest clue". Based on what we know, some things are virtually certain, some things are likely, some things are possible, and some things are impossible. It's considered very likely, virtually certain, that the universe has a set mass and energy. It's considered likely, but far from certain, that the universe will continue to expand.

The attraction of some of the unlikely, but possible, hypotheses, is that they can offer explanations that we have no other hypotheses, much less theories, for. That is, however, provided that they can be fleshed out. Some of these hypotheses have the potential to turn things on their head, and upset existing theories. However, they all have a much higher probability of failing. Even in success, the "upset" is likely to be more aptly described in common parlance as "a minor adjustment". Which, of course, is more than enough to upset a theoretical physicist.

Those small probabilities of minor adjustments must not be allowed to obfuscate the scientific knowledge that we do have. Evolution is real, even if there has been and will be adjustments to the theory. Human caused climate change is real, even if climate science is still in its beginning. Unlike so many other people, organizations, and movements, the scientific community has the integrity to admit that it's absolutely impossible to be absolutely certain, which leaves a very theoretical, infinitesimally small possibility that it's completely wrong. It's still more certain than any other known method of comprehending the world, and that tiny possibility is getting far more attention than it deserves, these days.

Until we have identified black matter and black energy, the uncertainty is significant on the issue of expansion / contraction / equilibrium / other, but we do "have a clue". On the infinity of the universe, we have much more than a clue: It is, almost certainly, not infinite.

 

[DeletedUser110131]

Time to head out of the mansion and start investigating....

Very true! More space exploration, now!

Ideally with somewhat more powerful instruments than a magnifying glass, though...

 

[DeletedUser103370]

@z78sabjan, the fact that "there are hundreds of theories out there" does not mean that "we don't have the slightest clue". Based on what we know, some things are virtually certain, some things are likely, some things are possible, and some things are impossible. It's considered very likely, virtually certain, that the universe has a set mass and energy. It's considered likely, but far from certain, that the universe will continue to expand.

The attraction of some of the unlikely, but possible, hypotheses, is that they can offer explanations that we have no other hypotheses, much less theories, for. That is, however, provided that they can be fleshed out. Some of these hypotheses have the potential to turn things on their head, and upset existing theories. However, they all have a much higher probability of failing. Even in success, the "upset" is likely to be more aptly described in common parlance as "a minor adjustment". Which, of course, is more than enough to upset a theoretical physicist.

Those small probabilities of minor adjustments must not be allowed to obfuscate the scientific knowledge that we do have. Evolution is real, even if there has been and will be adjustments to the theory. Human caused climate change is real, even if climate science is still in its beginning. Unlike so many other people, organizations, and movements, the scientific community has the integrity to admit that it's absolutely impossible to be absolutely certain, which leaves a very theoretical, infinitesimally small possibility that it's completely wrong. It's still more certain than any other known method of comprehending the world, and that tiny possibility is getting far more attention than it deserves, these days.

Until we have identified black matter and black energy, the uncertainty is significant on the issue of expansion / contraction / equilibrium / other, but we do "have a clue". On the infinity of the universe, we have much more than a clue: It is, almost certainly, not infinite.

I agree to disagree. Likely means nothing in science. Likely only means that more things are supporting a theory than not. So I'll stick with my earlier statement, that we don't have the slightest clue.

And there are much much more we have to understand besides dark energy and dark matter, just a "small" example is the quantum world.

And again, about infinity there are arguments till very this moment, if there is such a thing or not. Respected mathematicians and other scientists have all different opinions, and no, we cannot prove either...

It's just like our medical knowledge. Depends on where you stand, you could say that we are very advanced and can do amazing things, from another viewpoint we still know nothing. Both can be true.

ps. your statement about dark energy and dark matter exactly proves my point, let's take dark matter as the example. We know that stars further away from the center of a galaxy move at the same rate as the closer ones. Yes, that's what WE KNOW. But we don't have the SLIGHTEST CLUE why they behave like this, so we gave the phenomenon a name, and now call it dark matter.

Dark energy is the same, we KNOW that everything moves faster and faster away from each other, but we don't have the SLIGHTEST CLUE why so, we call the phenomenon dark energy.

Based on this knowledge we make theories, and of course these theories must abide to the principles we already know. But because we know so little, nearly everything is possible atm., even the most radical ideas could be true, just take one of Hawking's theories, which says we live in a simulated virtual reality... And surprisingly even the mathematical models we know now doesn't counter his theory, in fact they support it more, thus make it likely, but it doesn't mean it's true, it means nothing. It's only a possibility from the countless swarm of ideas.

You can believe whatever you like, you can support an idea or not, but belief doesn't make anything true. In science the only things matter what has been proven, either in practice or by math models, and until we do that we can only say "sorry, I don't know"
Moreover there's nothing wrong with that, that's the beauty of science, it doesn't have to explain itself again and again like religions and such.

 

[Prinza the Hunter]

Oh dear, people are taking this thread seriously!

 

[DeletedUser103370]

Well, why not? I didn't do any real brainstorming for a long time, sometimes it helps to release some pressure

Just remembered now, so let me continue a little bit more

So @Einrikr , if we had this conversation just 20 years ago!!! You would have said, that it is LIKELY that the expansion of the universe is slowing down! It was "virtually certain" with your words. Why? Because all our knowledge and data we had pointed to that direction!

In reality? It turned out they were wrong! So you can see, just because something is "likely" it doesn't mean anything. You try to predict a result without half of the knowledge to even understand what's causing the current conditions. That is called an assumption.