The age requirement for the Oldsters forum is at least as old as the moderator, k@, which means ANCIENT!

We'd better all get out of here, before he threatens us with his gnarly cane!

Checking his age again, oh, I'm actually a few months older than k@, ooops!

So I can stay here, but bbchris, you'll have to leave ASAP, this is no place for youngish sirens like you, red-streaked goddess! Only silver-streaked goddesses can stay!

Wrong.

The age requirement for the Oldsters forum is at least as old as the moderator's mental age, k@, which means SIX AND A HALF!

Being a K@, I see myself more as a Hobbes than a Calvin. Different color stripes.

Yes, I have to admit there are a lot of parallels between the two of you...

Calvin's pet tiger is also the playful & creative, but also the lazy & self-indulgent type...

I remember one of my all-time favourite strips, quoting:

Calvin: I wonder why man was put on Earth. What's our purpose? Why are we here?
Hobbes: Tiger food.

A better explaination than most.

Personally I favour the inevitable mutation of carbon atoms into biological life over a several billion year interval once the heavier elements have formed from the remains of class two suns.

The obvious and simplest answer is probably true in this case.

Like everything else in the universe we are here for no reason at all.

If you can think up a purpose for human existance you must also think up reasons for far more long lasting or influential phenomina. For instance suns, black holes, the dinosaurs, and the highly intelligent space-fareing jellyfish civilisation that flourished on Earth during the cretacious period for hundreds of millenia, only to mysteriously die out without leaving a fossel marker.

Wow, they didn't tell me about those when I was studying biology so long ago!
Tell us more, I'm curious!

Well, as jellyfish they themselves wouldn't leave a fossil marker, but what about their technology and space-faring artefacts? Some of them must have been made from tougher materials than their gelatinous bodies?

Didn't the wonderful movie "The Abyss" by James Cameron document the remnants of this culture at the bottom of a deep-sea trench?

The jellyfish were far more advanced than humans. They also lived in the sea and didn't want to polute it. Their technology was based on biological engineering of giant lufa's and other primitive sea sealife which they genitically modified to grow into highly complex biological machines and space ships.

This is what one of their spacehips may have looked like.



Unfortunately when the jellyfish died out there was no one to maintain the artificial environment necessary for their machines and ships to survive so they all died out too and turned to mush long ago.

All except a single, very stubborn, species of hairy sea urchin that managed to mutate into one of Nick Lovats early ancestors.

A far more interesting question is how our expanding universe gets back to being the giant blob of matter that goes critical and causes the big bang over and over again.

The most probable answer in my opinion is that the universe is not expanding in the way we belive.



If for instance the possible expansion of the universe was contained within a giant doughnut with an infinately small hole in the middle, the matter without sufficient velocity to reach the furtherist diameter of the doughnut would fall back the way it came while the remainer would continue on but still be headed for ultimate collision at the doughnuts center where the infinately small hole was.

No doubt LammaNetPolice will be along in a minute wanting one.

Well I'm glad to hear Einstein was thinking along the same lines as me even if he was wrong.

However, MY donut theory is best represented in two dimentional space by a drawing of a donut representing 3 dimentional space, but this does not preclude Hawkings postulation of 7 extra dimensions after time.

In fact I am not even sure time is a dimension at all, at least if it is then our perception of it is wrong.

Given this and the fact that the accellerating expanding universe theory is extrapolated from unexpected red shift readings from the most distant stars then we can't simply assume the universe is moving faster outward at the edges.

If the Suns at the edge of the universe were traveling along a pseudo-spherical radius as represented (inadequately) by my donut and time was able to travel in a straight line (if you like) between us and them, it would appear that these suns were accelerating away even though they are slowing down.

In anycase if they proceed along the surface of my donut until they returned to their point of origin OR fall back the way they came a cyclic big bang would occur.

However as I thought up this whole idea myself I would guess it is wrong.

Interestingly none of the other 7 dimensions Hawking postulates would allow Mr Spock and friends to get through into sub-space with their big old Enterprise as they are very small indeed, so it looks like warp speed is out of the question at the moment.

To bad for LammaPoliceNet as he could have popped through one to get Einsteins donut from 1915 before it got stale.

He can't have mine.

As far as my limited 3-dimensional mind understands it, you don't need more than 4 dimensions for faster-than-light space and, indeed, time travel.
The extra 7 dimensions are just postulated for mathematical reasons, as tiny sub-Quark-size closed loops, so the mathematical formulas become neat and simple, integrating Einstein, Superstrings, Supersymmetry and Super Gravitation (and Superman's Superpowers?) all into one neat and compelling theory, called M-Theory (Matrix, Membrane).

According to the great & fun "Physics of Star Trek" book it could be possible to travel much faster than light by expanding space behind a space craft (General Relativity allows that), but you'd need something like the total energy output of an average sun like ours to bend space sufficiently for a manned space craft.

Same problem with travelling through space and time via wormholes. Keeping one stable and open wide enough to let a space craft pass through would require power of solar dimensions, at BOTH ends of the wormwole! A few years beyond our current technology, I'm afraid...

Maybe someday, when humanity will have joined the galactic Culture collective... By then, there'll be free donuts for EVERYBODY!

Star Trek physics make use of a warp bubble to enable FTL travel as you say, however they also mess with sub-space too, which is vaguely supposed to be a sub dimension I think.

This is to get round the time problem. As time is reletive to speed as soon as you move faster than light without entering subspace you are supposed to go backwards in time. This is no good if you want to pop round to Alpha Centuri to pick up the groceries as you would be back before you went.



Actually there is no problem with the power source. All we need to do is light one of Nick Lovats farts after a particularly nasty curry.

PS. Romulans use a small artificial black hole as a powersource.

I'll let him know what you said when discussing his future website, donated by you and built by yours truly, tomorow at lunchtime! Beware!

When you see him check to see if he has washed his bottom recently. Maybe Nick Lovat is a Romulan spy!

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