Life, the universe, and everything.

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stefanovic

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You asked for it: "If an astronomical thread starts up, crack on".
School science for me was all about gases, rocks, bunsen burners, animal dissection.
After leaving I found science was actually quite interesting.

How about starting with ancestry.
We now believe that life kicked off with one primitive cell finding its way into another, nearly 4 bilion years ago.
So who do think you are other than a colony of different types of cells?
The latest estimates suggest we have 100 trillion cells in our bodies, each with the energy of cities writhing about inside us.
That number is indeed astronomical.

We are all related in some way. We are cousins and may even be related to royalty from the past.
Humans are not the top of the evolutionary tree, but more like a twig near to the top.
Soon you may not be able to tell the difference between a biological person in the street and an artifiicial one.
 
Slab

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stefanovic said:
You asked for it: "If an astronomical thread starts up, crack on".
School science for me was all about gases, rocks, bunsen burners, animal dissection.
After leaving I found science was actually quite interesting.

How about starting with ancestry.
We now believe that life kicked off with one primitive cell finding its way into another, nearly 4 bilion years ago.
So who do think you are other than a colony of different types of cells?
The latest estimates suggest we have 100 trillion cells in our bodies, each with the energy of cities writhing about inside us.
That number is indeed astronomical.

We are all related in some way. We are cousins and may even be related to royalty from the past.
Humans are not the top of the evolutionary tree, but more like a twig near to the top.
Soon you may not be able to tell the difference between a biological person in the street and an artifiicial one.
Click to expand...

Re bold: I think it’d be pretty easy. In a 4-ball of golfers mixed biological and artificial, use the line about dropping your lipstick on a short putt and only the artificial golfers will laugh
 
Dando

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stefanovic said:
You asked for it: "If an astronomical thread starts up, crack on".
School science for me was all about gases, rocks, bunsen burners, animal dissection.
After leaving I found science was actually quite interesting.

How about starting with ancestry.
We now believe that life kicked off with one primitive cell finding its way into another, nearly 4 bilion years ago.
So who do think you are other than a colony of different types of cells?
The latest estimates suggest we have 100 trillion cells in our bodies, each with the energy of cities writhing about inside us.
That number is indeed astronomical.

We are all related in some way. We are cousins and may even be related to royalty from the past.
Humans are not the top of the evolutionary tree, but more like a twig near to the top.
Soon you may not be able to tell the difference between a biological person in the street and an artifiicial one.
Click to expand...
we're not all from Norfolk!
 
Voyager EMH

Voyager EMH

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If I could kill every other living thing on this planet, I would be the most successful living thing on earth ever.
But only for a very brief moment.
As we are all going to die anyway ...
 
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stefanovic

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Asian Dawn said:
The answer is 42.
Click to expand...
Adams got it right.
How many galactic years will the Sun (and Earth) experience before the Sun swells into a red giant and planet Earth is (likely) completely destroyed?
Answer: 42.

Going further back into our ancestry we find we're a bit older than we think.
The hydrogen atoms in your body were created soon after the so called Big Bang (except that it wasn't big and it didn't go bang) - nearly 14 billion years ago.
Your bigger atoms were created in dying stars which exploded into supernovae billions of years ago.
9 months before your birth you were a single cell.
So next time someone asks your age tell them that all the bits of you are billions of years old.
After all that effort we only live for a few decades, and out ultimate destination is a black hole.
The idea of black holes is not new. It dates back to the 18th Century when John Michell worked off Newton's gravity theory to propose a large enough star would not allow light to escape.

www.amnh.org

John Michell: Country Parson Described Black Holes in 1783 | AMNH

When a country parson first described black holes in 1783, the concept was so ahead of its time it was mostly ignored.
www.amnh.org www.amnh.org
 
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stefanovic

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Now that blah!, blah! blah! at COP28 is over, here's a bit more.

The people population in my lifetime has quadrupled, to become a human infestation.
As a species we've overcome Darwinism.
The weakest are more likely now to survive, and we all want more of what other people have got.
This is great but it has its downside. The price to pay for this is climate change.
We're going to have to adapt to living in deserts and on flood plains.
If we can't manage this then Darwinism will kick in again.

In case you don't know what Darwinism is, it basically means that any change which finds an advantage in its environment will be preserved.
Neo Darwinism has reduced this change to the level of gene.
 
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stefanovic

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You are in a dreamworld.
It's called Plato's Cave Allegory, which means you only ever see shadows of reality.
You cannot see hidden dimensions, but they might appear in dreams.

On the subject of the universe:
It's big. It's dark. But it is lit up a bit by 2 trillion galaxies each containing billions of stars.
Dark matter makes up most of the matter. We don't know what it is other than it likes to hang out with galaxies.
At the centre of a galaxy is a supermassive black hole, into which all the stars are falling.

We don't know what the universe is or why it bothers to exist.
We can speculate the reason, possibly to transition muons (large electrons) into electrons.
But we don't know why it is destroying itself.

Before all the stars flicker out and die, any life remaining might escape through massive worm holes into another universe.
In its final state, the universe will just be radiation.
 
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