QUOTE(RedPlague @ Jun 10 2007, 01:48 AM) [snapback]268337[/snapback]
QUOTE(Peregrine @ Jun 5 2007, 04:11 PM) [snapback]266387[/snapback]
By the way, I realize that there is a high US population on this forum, and something like 90% of you are dumb enough to reject evolution (I know, the US sucks, I'm embarassed to live here) and will likely rush to disagree with my point about natural selection. Let me just state that evolution is the best-case scenario for the matrix fanboys. Lets say we reject all of science, and arbitrarily declare that "god did it". Now we're in an even worse position, because creating human-level intelligence (mandatory for the matrix) requires an omnipotent god. Since it is highly doubtful that humans will achieve divine status within the next 993 years, it's a safe bet that we will not be able to reproduce Genesis and simply wish our matrix into existence.
I couldn't agree more, except that i have a hard time believing we came from primates. The whole missing link thing lends itself fairly well to reasonable doubt. Though divine intervention is significantly less plausible. Just call me a disbeliever.
Just a note to Switch/Dark0ne: I know you can't stand the fact that I'm an atheist, but this has nothing to do with religion. RedPlague explicitly stated that he's not talking about divine intervention, and neither am I. So don't even think of deleting this post. Now then...
That's a common misconception: we didn't evolve from primates, humans and primates both evolved from a common ancestor. And the evidence is unarguable, we share an incredibly high percentage of our genes with primates. Even ignoring the fossil record, it's easy to trace back these genetic similarities and contruct an approximate evolutionary tree for pretty much any species. We know what genes we have in common, we know the approximate mutation rate, we know the structural similarities, etc. The only "doubt" comes from creationists who reject the entire concept of science and empiricism.
But the whole "missing link" thing is just a giant appeal to ignorance fallacy. Think about it for a moment... lets take two species, modern humans and the common ape/human ancestor. There's a gap, your so-called missing link. Now lets say a record of an intermediate species is found, call it Species A. The gap-ist's response would be "now there are TWO gaps!" (instead of human-ancestor, now we have ancestor-A, A-human), considering the overall theory twice as weak,
not better supported. Now lets say another species, Species B is found, filling the gap between A-human. Now we have
three "missing links" (ancestor-A, A-B, B-human) to deal with. I think you can see the pattern... unless we have a record of every individual organism between the ancestor and modern humans, there's always going to be a "missing link" you can point to.
And this is exactly what we should expect. Fossils only form under very specific and rare conditions, the majority of organisms simply die and are lost forever. Now consider the incredibly tiny percentage of the planet's surface we've searched for fossils. How many "missing links" are somewhere in a vast wilderness waiting to be found? How many "missing links" have been paved over to build another parking lot? How many "missing links" have been imperfectly fossilized and exist only as fragments or mis-identified random bones?
So in summary, not only does the proof for primates and humans sharing a common ancestor exist, but the only counter-argument is completely fallacious.
QUOTE
CJD, we were supposed to have flying cars what, fifty years ago? Give it up. Besides most people are horrible drivers in two dimensions, do you really want them driving in three?
/aerospace engineer mode on
Actually, we do have flying cars, they just haven't been practical (cost-effective, really) to mass-produce. The engineering problems for a car and a plane are just so different that a flying car would be far too inefficient at both flying and driving. Unless you have a very compelling reason to do it, you're better off buying a car and a plane, and driving yourself to the airport. And that reason just doesn't exist.
But the real reason for that is people insist on taking "flying car" literally, and thinking of some bizarre hybrid. In reality, the ideal "flying car" would replace roads completely, it would be nothing more than an increase in popularity of small planes. And there are only two reasons we can't do this to a high degree, in the modern age of computers and automatic pilots:
1) Our city layout generally sucks for something like this. Yes, you can cut takeoff/landing distance to pretty absurdly small levels (even without vertical takeoff, you can easily design a light plane to operate off a football-field size patch of generally flat ground). But think about how many places you drive to, and imagine putting a tiny airport next to each of them. You'll need some kind of ground transport to get you from a central hub airport to the destination (you might imagine dozens of these in a major city), but that's the bigger problem: our public transit system SUCKS. The necessary public mass-transit to support flying cars would be insanely expensive, and pretty unlikely in the forseeable future.
2) Computers are good, but not quite good enough to deal with problems. Making an autopilot that flies under ideal conditions is easy. Making an autopilot that can deal with bad weather/emergencies/etc is much harder. But this is a pretty straightforward engineering problem, it's only a matter of time before we can build a plane where you just press the "fly to the grocery store" button and the humans are just along for the ride. So poor driving skills aren't that much of a problem.
So there's no real technical reason why we couldn't make the change from driving to flying (and the extra volume for traffic in 3-dimensions is a good one in favor of it). In fact, I could probably design you one right now (well, after a couple more years of classes). The only thing standing in the way is nobody really
wants to do it. If the economic/convenience factors changed for some reason and there was a real demand for them, we'd have flying cars just as soon as the companies could set up their production lines.