Artful Dodger:

> You can't "prove" God but you can offer evidence for the existence of an intelligent force at work in the universe. Isn't that what SETI is all about? Proving the existence of an intelligence "out there" possibily on some other planet? And what is it that SETI looks to find? Signs (or evidence) of intelligence.

At the present, there is no evidence of "intelligence" or "life" outside of our planet. The closest we have come to finding life is organic chemicals in meteorites. Beyond that there is no evidence of life anywhere else, but it is quite likely that in the future life could be found in other planets and even in smaller celestial bodies.

As for intelligence, the most intelligent non-human creatures that we have found so far are primates like cimpanzees and gorillas, as well as non-primates like dolphins and even invertebrates like cuttle fish. However, none of them approaches our ability for language and abstract reasoning. We have found no intelligent aliens so far.

Is there an "intelligence at work in the universe"? There is no scientific proof of that. At best there is conjecture, and it is all along the lines of trying to prove that God (the intelligent designer) exists. This is the "intelligent design" argument, a branch of science that so far receives little support in the mainstream scientific community. Intelligent design is creationism repackaged in pseudoscience.

Artful Dodger: Yes.. it does. It has to do with the way some churches present God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost as something.. 'special' rather than a natural thing. Same with ghosts and the 'paranormal'

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! ..But He loves you.

written by George Carlin

Übergeek 바둑이: Not from the recent shows on Discovery and the likes. It seems life maybe present on moons of other planets in this Solar system. The rules for life being present seem to be found to not be as hard as thought.

The Col: We need more Buddy Jesus dolls

(V): amazon has loads for just $12.50 a pop

The Col: Go well with our Kevin Smith collection

(V):

> It seems life maybe present on moons of other planets in this Solar system.

"Maybe" and "is" are two very different things. "Maybe" implies possibility. "Is" implies certainty. When scientists come out and say "Life is present in other moons ... " then we have certain proof. In the mean time it is all conjecture.

Artful Dodger:
Oh, don't get me wrong. An atheist has faith that God does not exist. That is all an atheist can do, because nobody can prove or disprove the existence of God scientifically.

There are certain things that did happen spontaneously in nature. The formation of the stable chemical elements is one. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen adn hydrogen are abundant in the universe. They arise as stars spew out their matter and energy. It all happens in random systems, like the surface of the sun.

It has been proven scientifically that the basic building blocks of life (aminoacids, nucleic acids and carbohydrates) can be spontaneously synthesized in systems that mimic the early conditions of Earth. Abiogenesis ideas such as the "primordial soup" theory have been tested in the lab. The most famous experiment is the Miller-Urey experiment. Its more modern variants have synthesized all of the nucleotide bases in DNA as well as all 22 aminoacids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

If the base pairs of DNA can arise spontaneously, attaching them in long chains was not impossible, and the spontaneous rise of a viable DNA sequence was not impossible either.

Well, ultimately it is faith that determines what people believe. To me, there is more than enough evidence to show that life arose spontaneously without somebody being there to design it. Eventually scientists will acquire the technology and skills necessary to create life in the laboratory. That will put an end to creationism, and the only intelligent design will be what scientists do in genetics laboratories.

Übergeek 바둑이: Still a theory though that could be applied to any planet/moon that has such items. A common problem with all this science......... we are still learning. We still are basically a planet bound race with only little data on how life might form in the realms of the universe/multiverse.

Tuesday: … except for your post.

Übergeek 바둑이: To me, there is more than enough evidence to show that life arose spontaneously without somebody being there to design it.


I can agree with this too.... what gets me up in the middle of the night, needing whiskey to shut me down again, is the creation of the universe itself.... I dont understand the big bang, and I cannot fathom what existed before that time, nor the creation of something from nothing, nor the existence of nothing, I mean right there....nothing is actually something isnt it? Like Tuesday said, it is comforting to believe that it will all be revealed upon our death, but religion is little more than man made comfort for the soul. Speaking of the soul..... is there one really, or is that something we have created as well? Ahhhhh.... more whiskey please.....

Pedro Martínez: lol thats the most inelligent thing you've said all week!!

Bwild: I like saying elligent things though…

Czuch: IF there was nothing.. recent theories suggest that "nothing" could have just been the latest expansion of a massive (weight and mass wise) singularity. We are at a point (so I gather) that much ado about the creation of the universe is ... complicated and there are many theories floating about.

Basically have a beer and stop worrying about it

From the website posted by Servant:

The Great Whore of Revelation Chapter 17
―The Roman Catholic Religion

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Roman%20Catholicism/the_great_whore.htm

Just when I thought nothing could make me laugh!

Feminism is evil!

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Feminism/feminism_is_evil.htm

Beware of the feminazis! These guys are real comedians!

Barrack Obama - America's Communist President

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20Government/Communism/barack_obama.htm

"The United States now has a Communist president as of January 2009. Some prefer to call President Obama a “Globalist” instead of a Communist, but there's not a dime's difference. Communism is a vehicle created long ago by the International Banking Cartel, intended to bring to fruition a Global Godless Totalitarian Communist Police State. Nazism and Communism are simply two separate legs walking in the same direction—toward world domination, aka, a New World Order. Karl Ritter is considered by most the father of Nazism, just as Karl Marx is considered by most as the father of modern Communism. Both evils are the work of God-hating humanists, Evolutionists and eugenicists. DEVILUTION!"

Whatever you do, don't become friends with a guy named Karl!

"For those who have studied, then you know that Communism was created by the Banksters (i.e., the New World Order gang), as a vehicle by which to achieve world government."

After reading this I will take my money out of the bankster's hands. I am going to start putting my money ujnder my mattress!

The Col: Jews have traditionally seen Jesus as one of a number of false messiahs who have appeared throughout history.[1] Jesus is viewed as having been the most influential, and consequently the most damaging, of all false messiahs.[2] However, since the general Jewish belief is that the Messiah has not yet come and that the Messianic Age is not yet present, the total rejection of Jesus as either messiah or deity in Judaism has never been a central issue for Judaism. At the heart of Judaism are the Torah, its commandments, the Tanakh, and ethical monotheism such as in the Shema — all of which predated Jesus.

Judaism has never accepted any of the claimed fulfillments of prophecy that Christianity attributes to Jesus. Judaism also forbids the worship of a person as a form of idolatry, since the central belief of Judaism is the absolute unity and singularity of God.[3][4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism%27s_view_of_Jesus

Artful Dodger: she deleted her own post after she was caught at not being able to spell HAHAHAHA

Bernice: And how should HAHAHAHA be spelt? j/k

Keep things to the subject at hand please, and not personal bickering. ALL of ya!

Further stuff like that will be deleted.. blah blah blah... and if necessary, bans, blah blah blah. You all know it enough by now.

Artful Dodger: interesting comments on old earth and cosmology. Can you or anyone else tell my how everythink in our universe was small enough to fit into a basketball, then a beachball, and on up to all of the mass we now have in the universe? How could all present mass, potential or realised, exist in a tiny bubble the size of our moon for example? I was an old earther until I did a study of time, what it actually is and how it is subject to basic premise of relativity. There is no real way to judge the relative motion of mass shortly after the big bang event compared to motion of mass today without knowing precisely how fast things were moving then. We see how time is moving now, but using todays measuring stick for the entire span from big bang on up until now is like judging the distance a car has traveled in an hour based on its present speed. By the way, if anyone has been wondering why I have been slow to respond to my games, it's because both my home computer and my laptop are not working properly. Today is the first time in over a month I've been able to get anything done on the home computer. Am at the mercy of my computer, can only use it when it lets me. I know this the politics board, but I would like to see more of science and philosophy being discussed somewhere on this site. Is general chat reserved for anything not listed under any particular heading?

Iamon_lyme: Extreme gravity and the fact that atoms are basically alot of empty space. If blown up an atom would have the nucleus the size of a ball while the electrons would be circulating at say 100 metres distance. Of the main forces in the physical plane.. gravity at the moment is a weak force, it's how come magnets can pick up metal. Yet at the time of the Big Bang, gravity was millions/billions/infinitely times strongly. It seems gravity at the moment 'leaks' into one of the strange new dimensions they are now finding thanks to atom smashers. With enough mass (like a black hole) gravity has enough force to compress matter and through that, bend space and time unlike anything in normal space.

An example of bending space... our Earth's gravitational effect compared to 'zero g' causes enough difference in time that the atomic clocks used in the GPS satellites have to corrected every day by earth based atomic clocks or they would be 10's of miles out.. just from the bending effect difference of zero g and 'one g'.

Another example would be that light takes just minutes to travel from the surface of the Sun to Earth, yet through gravity and other forces takes 10's/100's of thousands of years to reach the surface.

I must talk fast, before computer gets the hickups again. To the best of my understanding, space and time and even gravity are not things in the same way matter and energy are things. Space and time are both relationship of mass to other mass, space is the nothing between areas of mass and time is the relative changing positions of units of mass to one another, both are defined by mass but are of themselves not comprised of mass. Gravity, as I understand it, is the effect side in a chain of cause and effect of motion taking place within any unit of mass and its resulting effect on other mass. Put space and time together, put ;it in the oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, and you have baked a cake called "gravity". Space is the flour, and time is the yeast. In other words, time is the active ingredient. If you remove all space between mass you have neither space nor time. But if it was possible to stop only time, you would still have space. The infinitly small and dense singularity could just as easily be called infinitly large, because with nothing else to compare it to, the size of that point is irrelevant. Technically,, it have no size, since nothing yet exists to compare it to, at least not until chunks of matter are realised shortly after expansion occurs. Anyway, none of this is my area of expertise, but it is fascinating to think about. I am; retired, or unemployed (I haven't decided which yet) so have much more time to get lost in thought (lost in space?) over this.

There is good reason our math breaks down when reverse enginering the universes expansion, when we reach a point shortly after the big bang expansion started. Math is customarily used to explain what we already know about something behaving in a consistant manner, This is how math has always been used, although we can use it now to speculate about things we may start out only imaginating. But the problem before us when looking at expanssion from some nondescript point is that the laws of our universe were in the process of being formed, before there were any laws to explain anything. There was nothing yet formed or fully formed for math to explain. String theory is popular because of its promise of possibly resolving this problem, but it is math in need of theories to explain what the math describes rather than math to describe what is already known. Also, in my opinioin the idea of anything being infinite is 'infinitely problematic' because there is no mathematical difference between the number _Zero_ and an imaginary value represented by the words _infinitely small. It's impossible to resolve this with any form of math we choose to use. I'm not saying there will never someday be a way to represent everything we believe happened through math, all the way back to the very beginning, but the idea of any chain of cause and effect that can be traced back to what amounts to a non existance cause is anathema to anyone trained in natural sciences. Just as there being a god or intelligent designer is anathema to anyone who is convinced there is no such being.

Artful Dodger: Can we assume this 12 year old cosmological genius is smarter than a fifth grader? :oP I am almost certain that I am not. HAHAHAHAHAHA? bigthink link is interesting, but I need to go back and listen again. I sort of understood what he was saying about gravity. I think, maybe, I sort of understood it. If I wasn't now sober all the time, I might have gotten it the first time. Just kidding, but he was rather vague about whatever his point was. It seemed he agreed with what I just said about gravity, but then again, it was so vague I couldn't say for sure what he was alluding to. With my luck, he is registered at this site and I should expect to soon hear from him a critique of my ideas.

It happened again. this always happens. I put everyone to sleep. (it's not you, it's me) :o)

Artful Dodger: I can't access the emoticons here, so you will have to settle for an old fashioned LOL. Hopefully he now uses paper and pen for scribbling his notes, and does not use crayons on the family room wall. My kids were geniuses when it came to knowing when we were paying attention or not. I don't know anything about this kid, but already I'm starting to like him. I payed a lot of attention to how much cereal was in the box, and where the prize could most likely be found. I solved that problem by dumping all of it into a large mixing bowl, and then putting it back into the box after getting the prize. What's his problem with the big bang theory? Is it the idea itself, or because of the exotic math found in string theory? We've infered from the math multiple extra dimansions, and then go from there to say that gravity is leaking into our dimension from one of the others. Something does seem to be leaky, but I don't think it's because of some crack leaking gravity from another dimension into ours. Most of this speculation does nothing more than satisfy the demands of an overly cumbersome mathematical structure, which by the way was originally derived from another equation put together for some other unrelated purpose. I can't imagine this kid saying he likes the steady state universe theory over the big bang theory when the evidence seems to point to some starting point. I'm guessing it's the math he has a problem with. Scientists should stop screwing around with fancy and imaginative theories, and go back to finding simple and common sense anwsers. Do it for the children, like little 12 year old Jimmy, or Tommy, or whatever the heck that kids name is. Doesn't matter, do it for the kids!! So,How am I doing, boss? You think there's a place for me in Democrat party politics?

Iamon_lyme: Singularities (as the scientists say are not bound by large scale physics but quantum level physics.
......Art's point of.... "which I can't explain but then neither can physics." ... is false.

Einstein's physics do not work at the quantum level, but he was ok with that and so are the scientists today. If quantum level physics does not work they.. we couldn't be here. Electrons move by quantum rules.. Plants in their daily photosynthesis use quantum level physics to be ultra efficient in the absorption and utilisation of sunlight.

As to things being infinite..... I'm not sure it is... relatively.

"but I don't think it's because of some crack leaking gravity from another dimension into ours."

It's not a crack.. a fold, a bend, a rotation.. but not a crack... and it's still in one of our dimensions just one of the many our eyes were not designed to see.

"Scientists should stop screwing around with fancy and imaginative theories, and go back to finding simple and common sense anwsers."

.... why? It is our curiosity at the majesty of the universe that lets us understand how wonderful it is. We still are learning about our Universe, seeing as less then a hundred years ago we did not know there was one... just a galaxy as far as Earth knew!!

(V): "seeing as less then a hundred years ago we did not know there was one."
lol..better check google

Bwild: What to show something that anyone who's interested in the name "Edwin Hubble" would know....

"....Edwin Hubble's arrival at Mount Wilson, California, in 1919 coincided roughly with the completion of the 100-inch (2.5 m) Hooker Telescope, then the world's largest telescope. At that time, the prevailing view of the cosmos was that the universe consisted entirely of the Milky Way Galaxy. Using the Hooker Telescope at Mt. Wilson, Hubble identified Cepheid variables (a kind of star; see also standard candle) in several spiral nebulae, including the Andromeda Nebula. His observations, made in 1922–1923, proved conclusively that these nebulae were much too distant to be part of the Milky Way and were, in fact, entire galaxies outside our own. This idea had been opposed by many in the astronomy establishment of the time, in particular by the Harvard University-based Harlow Shapley. Hubble's discovery, announced on January 1, 1925, [8] fundamentally changed the view of the universe...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble

... Better learn some astronomical history Bwild.

(V): I'm being half serious and half flippant about this, so both of those states exist at the same time. That too was a joke, by the way. But my original thought was simply how can everything we see now have existed in various stages of size? The enitre universe existed in an area the size of a basketball, and even when all matter and energy was nearly fully formed, it existed within an area you could in no way now fit the entire universe in. I understand how space itself was being defined during this time, and how on the quantum level the rules defining space can break down as well as other defining features we have come to see as immutable (on a larger nonquantum scale) We all see with the same limited senses. I am simply admitting to my inability to understand everything from the limited perspective of being a creature who cannot hope to "see" how it all works, but must by neccessity rely on my ability to understand it. Everyone relies on faith to some degree, "the evidence of things not seen". But even faith must be based on something other than what we are able to imagine. The mistake many scientists make is to poo poo faith as religious nonsense, while at the same time relying on faith to move their own nebulous theories forward. I am not against science, I am all for it. What I am against is wanton irrationality in the so called search for "truth" by some who are not as intellectually honest as they would like me to believe. Just because I believe in an intelligent designer doesn't mean I can be fooled by 'science-speak'. It is a m;istake to over estimate or underestimate someone based solely on what they believe about God.

Artful Dodger: Oh I feel there is something out there or at least I hope so! I would hate to think that this is it but I dont think of it as a God as portrayed in the bible.
That is why I am a Humanist and tend to "Do as the Romans do when in Rome"

Iamon_lyme: Basically trusting it does work as we know it does. I tried years ago after a 'dream' visualising being one and at the same time everywhere at the same time and it does do your head in as we are not use to it in a physical universe.

"The mistake many scientists make is to poo poo faith as religious nonsense, while at the same time relying on faith to move their own nebulous theories forward."

Like when in the cold war they were training psychics to spy.

.... mmmmm It makes sense now

Artful Dodger: Slight problem in his thinking...

.."..The little stars, they just make hydrogen and helium, and when they blow up, all the carbon that remains in them is just in the white dwarf; it never really comes off..."

If just hydrogen and helium.. where did the carbon come from? And what about the other elements??

Artful Dodger:

"Otherwise, the carbon would have to be coming out of the stars and hence the Earth, made mostly of carbon, we wouldn’t be here. So I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn’t gonna happen."

Only one minor correction for this kid. The earth is made mostly of hydrogen and oxygen, in the form of water. Then its core is made of molten iron, and the crust is made silicon dioxide. Carbon and nitrogen are also important, but carbon is not what the earth is mostly made of.

“Because of that,” he continued, “that means that the world would have never been created because none of the carbon would have been given 7 billion years to fuse together. We’d have to be 21 billion years old . . . and that would just screw everything up.”

I think he is confused. Carbon fused together? He assumes that matter fuses to create life? Or does he mean elementary particles fusing together into carbon atoms? I think he is confusing one thing with another. Well, he is 12 years old. I would advise him to look at the chemistry starting from the core to the surface of a star, and then look at what most elements are made of. Then I would say, what about the carbon in comets and meteorites? I think he is a brilliant kid, with a lot of learning to do. However, I would remind him that mathematical equations are not nature, they are merely a linguistic representation that tries to match what we see in nature. The Big Bang as a theory makes some big assumptions such as the Cosmologial Principle and the universality of physical laws. To prove the Big Bang wrong one would have to disprove those two underlying assumptions. The Big Bang also requires space of uniform curvature (elliptic, hyperbolic or Euclidean space). If one could prove that space near a singularity is not uniform, then the Big Bang theory would fall apart. Well, I am no specialist in the subject. One of these days I might look at the math for it, and convince myself that it is not all bullocks or wishful thinking!

(V): I've never tried visualizing being everywhere at the same time, but I did try to visualize what a space time curviature might look like. It was very disorienting. Couldn't look at it for more than a few seconds at a time. What I fiound interesting about the thought experiment was that I envisioned space contracting, instead of dialating, which at least one theory of gravity says is what actually happens. Try envisioning a vacuum within a vacuum and you will see (and feel) the problem of visualizing it. It felt like a carnival ride. The funny thing about it was that for the most part I got it right, but apparently everything I "saw" was opposite and in reverse order of what gravity (as time dialation) is supposed to be. Space is already a vacuum, so the only way you can acheive a vacuum within a vacuum is by jiggering time so that volumes and distances can change while still remaining to be the same volumes and distances. What I mean is, instead of using a yardstick to measure another yardstick, you can use time to measure a yardstick, If time speeds up the yardstick becomes shorter, slow time down it becomes longer, but in each scenario it still remains the same 36 inches. I watch a few videos of the 12 year old math juggernault, and his grasp of mathematical principles is impressive. I'm not much good at math, so now I know how my kids felt when I tried explaining their homework to them. That's how I felt watching Jacob Barnett explaining calculus and singularities and his thoughts on light speed etc. I was amused and intimidated, but overall I came away with a big smile on my face. I joked about how I hope he doesn't use crayons on the family room wall. He doesn't. He uses an erasable marker to scribble on windows. Close enough. :op

(V): A twelve year old boy who is naturally able to suspend disbelief long enough to wonder about what he has learned is no big surprise. Just means he thinks like any other 12 year old boy. He is playing with ideas and saying to himself, I wonder what this means, or what would happen (in an equation) if this is also true. His ablilities do seem to be limited to seeing the world almost exclusively through math, but he is also apparently very good with language as well, and is good at expaining his ideas. He has aspergers. I can relate to that, as I have a very mild form of it, virtually undetectable. At least undetectable when I was young, I don't know how my life would have been different if I was 50 younger, and growing up in a much different world than I remember. At least now I have a retroactive excuse for my weird behavior, so I guess it's not a total loss. Kids who had it worse than me might have been labeled weird or retarded or incorrigible, or whatever. I believe I may have just barely slipped in under the radar.

Iamon_lyme: Not really. It is and it isn't. I think it'd fairer to say .. it just has no breathable atmosphere. Dark matter/energy exists and we can't see them, particles of ice and gases float about. The sun is giving off constant bits of matter through expulsions as well as various forms of energy. It's like visualising air and seeing in the emptiness all the other forms of energy (such as ley lines)

Same as we say Zero G.... it isn't. You still have various tugs and pulls from other stellar bodies, if we didn't.. there would be no life. Our sun causes enough curvature to cause the Earth to not want to go in a straight line. To get to the moon, you just have to get far enough away from the Earth so that the moon's gravity has enough of a 'slope' to let us slide into an intersection.

As to the kid.. yes he's still learning.. but as one old song bite use to say "don't believe the hype".. He's smart, a good IQ (though personally I think IQ can be an empty yardstick in some ways) and saying he'll out prove Einstein ... ... Maybe he'll manage to merge the Macro and Micro universes ... He has more importantly the ability to question, to look a things and probabilities. It's like when I did science as a kid. I got told lightning came from the ground up.... but that was wrong, and as I found out just recently (the final piece of the story) .. it can start from the ground or from the clouds.. both at the same time, as well as (from about a decade ago) helps to clear certain particles from around the Earth that in time could cause radiation damage to our way of life.

Just the theory my science teacher taught was incomplete from I gather the 1930's, just as how I was taught in the 70's about electrons and how they move was incomplete.</b>

Iamon_lyme:

> I did try to visualize what a space time curviature might look like.

Just remember, when they talk of curvature, they are not talking of the one-dimensional curvature of a two-dimensional curve (for example, the curvature of a circle is the reciprocal of its radius). We can visualize the "curvature" of a line or a sphere. To us curvature is what we see in Euclidean space.

The curvature they talk about is higher dimensional. In three dimensions curvature cannot be visualized so simply. It is expressed as the product of a matrix with orthonormal columns and a three dimenisonal vector. In higher dimensions curvature is expressed as the products of tensors in Riemann manifolds. It is too complex to be visualized in terms our brain can understand. It is understood only in mathematical terms, and therefore, it is an abstract concept. To make it short, Einstein used tensor calculus for his theory of relativity. If you are familiar with the math and the theorems of course it makes sense. If you are like most of us, it is all another language entirely.

> Try envisioning a vacuum within a vacuum

We forget sometimes that "vacuum" is a human concept to indicate the absense of matter in some enclosed space. In reality most of space is made of "vacuum" (for example, atoms have a tiny nucleus and even tinier electrons in orbit around it). However, elementary particles (like electrons, protons, etc.) have a dual character of a particle and a wave. That is the product of the quantum mechanical description of matter.

The real problem that physicists have is that quantum mechanics and relativity theory don't "mix", meaning that there is no exact solution when trying to solve relativistic quantum mechanics (like the Schroedinger equation) into higher dimensions. The attempts at these solutions is what things like superstring theory tries to do. Relativity is good at describing the universe in the huge scale of stars, galaxies, etc. While quantum mecahnics is good at describing the universe in the tiny scale of atoms and molecules. However, there is no unified theory thaht describes the two of them with the same math.

However, some day we will have a prodigy (maybe this gifted child) who will be able to do so. He has the potential and he will do well as long as he is allowed to be a child, and unrealistic expectations are not put upon him.

Artful Dodger:

> He's still young so who knows where his studies will lead him. He has an IQ over 170. He's no small mind when it comes to understanding things in the universe.

He is obviously a gifted child, and provided his Asperger Syndrome is treated carefully, he will succeed through his adolescence and later in life. I suppose that as long as those around him give him a well structured education with good time management, he will adapt without being traumatized by the turmoil of adolescence. From what I read, it is adolescence that is the most difficult time for people diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome It seems also that there is a tendency (65%) to develop anxiety disorder and/or major depressive disorder. As long as he has good medical care he will do well, and he will be able to fully use his gifts.

An IQ of 170 seems impressive, but in reality it is meaningless. My grandfather was a psychologist. When I was a kid he measure the IQs of all his grandkids. I scored at 176, so he assumed I was a genius. Sadly, he was wrong! Don't get me wrong. I am exceptionally good at math, chemistry and physics. I was valedictorian in my highschool. I also discovered that in the real world nobody gives a damn. You won't get a job being a genius. You get a job being practical. So after all the chemistry and math and presumptious bourgeois crap, I discovered that unemployment is a hard pill to swallow, and I got useful skills. Power tools, machinery, you name it. Then I became a bus driver instead. Now I drive a bus, and when I see a pothole I calculate how much weight it would take to crush it a bit more, and make it bigger. Then I figure, is my bus heavy enough?

So a high IQ sounds nice, but then capitalism does not need people with a high IQ. What capitalism needs the most is cheap labour, so that those high IQ capitalists who own the factories and businesses can make a profit at the expense of the low IQ working classes. High IQ in capitalism is valuable, only if it makes the rich richer. Otherwise nobody cares about it.

So, from one genius to another, what the @#%*& are you guys talking about? I know space isn't a perfect vacuum, so give me a break. Maybe there's a lot of stuff between, let's say, the earth and an oncoming meteor, but is there really enough dust and dark matter and energy rays etc. to significantly slow it down or even deflect it by much? When I say vacuum within a vacuum, I'm describing something that can't be visualised, but if it could it might appear to be areas of space that have dialated or contracted because of the effect of time. Anyway, if the kid gets through puberty before the "hype" screws with his head, he will probably be ok. Consider what happens to many child TV and movie actors when they make the transition to adulthood. I hope the kid has a solid down to earth family as he grows up, otherwise he will be like a sheep among wolves before he is ready to face the wolves. Uber, you apparently know, just as I too found out, how flattery and ego building can be a set up for disappointment. Hero worship can do much more harm to the "hero" than criticism. I say give the kid his 15 minutes of fame and then let him disappear back into his world. Ego building is a trap and fame is a killer. Anyway don't mind me, I always start off moody when I get up. I'm ready for Spring to pop in, anytime Spring is ready to show itself. ahem, I said, I'm ready for Spring to show up. awww come on, Spring, that was your cue! Am i the only one who is on top of things today??

Iamon_lyme: I can feel my intelligence leaking out of me and into another dimension. Where did it go? Who did it go to? How can I be certain this is happening? We call them dimensions over here, what do they say they are?Dementians? Dalmation-loins? How can I know? And why for the love of ginger snaps am I replying to my own message? Am I pondering what you are pondering? Narf?

Iamon_lyme: some are super genius.
yours truly..Wile E. Coyote

GT: beep beep! na~ na~ na~ na~ Whoosh!!

Iamon_lyme: Yes.

We've got early summer here. 24oC on average over the last week. Extremely unusual weather compared to our normal April showers!!

GT: Or Doctor Who!!