Custard Donut (In Space)

I'm from Zaragoza, it is the capital city of Aragon in Spain, it is known for it's basilica "El Pilar." which stands at the foot of the cold, rushing river Ebro: It is also known for a strong regional culture and the style of singing/dancing known as "Jota"

Well that's mostly good news

I wonder what the exact number of Kermans ever spawned is, up to the very second, there must be a number out there that's the right one.

We had tails once didn't we? i don't see why empathy or other human character traits would not be subject to change depending on the the factors involved, which admittedly seem to be vast and complicated, i read somewhere empathy is a group survival thing, aren't we becoming ever more individualistic, ever more alone in our technology world? Could that not erode empathy over time, and if you say it's a slow change we may not notice till it's gone? Maybe we should have scientific guardians that's all i'm saying, people clever enough to at least have a guess as to where we are headed, and the courage to decide if it's the right direction, i never hear scientists talk morals, but i think they should because they understand the world we live in, and people like myself do not.

Gah, it's a moral minefield! If there was a team of scientists in charge of human evolution, they might get slipped a few bucks by powerful people to put a passive, unquestioning gene in there! i think i need to go lie down lol, we're in great danger aren't we?

I remember them, though i didn't have them in mind, they sure look like a warning of what could happen if we or nature changed us for the worse.

Well i hope you are right, but what i was trying to say is that if nature is blind, then we are the only people that can look out for the things we hold dear in ourselves, because it might be subject to change, and if we are not alert, that change could happen without us knowing or without us forming some kind of defence against that change. Edit* also knowing what i know now, i think scientists need to start making moral decisions regarding the things they find out, i'd be much happier if there was an international team of scientists monitoring human evolution, reporting back to the world and proposing any possible changes that might improve us, or reporting dangers we need to be defended from, of course sadly that would require great trust from the public, and as we all know due to the many transgressions of goverments trust is in very short supply.

Shouldn't there be some sort of crack-squad of scientists trying to identify the best bits of ourselves, the bits we value the most, and try defend them from nature's blind hands or enhance them in some way? Imagine we might turn into a super intelligent and completely emotionless people in the future, we might become cruel without knowing it and then we'd be like the bad-guys of space, this has opened up all sorts of worries for me.

Ive been trying to go over the many things i've learnt since i started this thread in my head, and if nature does this blindly, like if it's not even trying to improve things, rather improved things happen because they work better, then many of the things we like about ourselves as human beings could be subject to change in the future, what if empathy or kindness are no longer needed, we may lose them. Also, because we are super intelligent, i'm thinking we are manipulating this evolutionary process in a way it's never been manipulated before, someone up above mentioned thicker skulls, if there was a trade-off between thicker skull versus smaller brain, thicker skull might win out, and then we'd be stupider but nature wouldn't care as long as thicker skulls deflected more of the club bashing we gave one another, which brings me on to another thought, maybe war makes us stupid. Does this mean we are always at danger of what we would view as negative traits or physical capabilites, affecting us in the future? This is pretty confusing, because there are so many variables involved, thicker skull might mean more intelligence and not less, depending on what other factors are involved, we might try to eliminate what we see as a bad gene only to find later on it had unknown beneficiary effects which we would greatly miss?

Well i must go bed, i'd like to thank you all for your posts, while i still don't fully understand i am in a much clearer position than i was, i have asked similar questions many times and this has been the most illuminating for me, i'm glad i asked.

Another very interesting post, may i ask would there have been glowing orchids that failed? Would there have been plants that did many strange things, all the things that cells can do and they just died, would they have tried changing their colour? tried growing long arms to trap insects, make like nets maybe? all these kind of things?

And wait i think i get this, first the fishermen were unwilling to eat or keep crabs that had a shell resembling a human face, so the crabs with a human face flourished, which means that after a while ALL those crabs had a human face, at which point they started getting eaten anyway because there were no other crabs to eat, except now they weren't being thrown back if they only had a face, they were being thrown back if they had a face that looked like a samurai, so now it was the samurai looking faces that were safe, wheras normal faces were still being eaten...is that right at all?

That's the first time in my life i have understood, but is selection the same as evolution?

This is very interesting post but i struggle, i have a few more questions. Does this mean the wasp itself made the flower look like that because of it's own behaviour over many years? And the flower also has affected the wasps appearance and behaviour? Like they make each other evolve a certain way, and maybe even other creatures are affecting them...if so that means all creatures and animals might be affecting each others evolution like in a mad program, is this right? Is this constant evolution so very refined, that it can even get the anatomy of a wasp correct, down to the very body and head? If you notice the flower, it has a head on the fake wasp, i just find that amazing, how did the genes find out the body shape of the wasp? is it like a big rubber block trying to push itself into a small hole, and it can't, but it keep pushing and trying untill it's sides wear away and it is now the right size? This part confuses me very much. The smell thing you talk about now i understand, that one yes, it makes sense that as more wasps go to a certain smell the flowers will make more of that smell over time as they are successfuly attracting the wasps better, but i don't understand how the plant came to make a 3d model of a wasp body out of it's leaf.

Tesla's house looks way too normal for such a spectacular man, i'd expect huge lightening rods at the top hehe, and the Russian monument is fantastic, i've never seen it before, give me vertigo. The reichstag looks very impressive, i believe i did see a Minecraft version of it made.

Do you mean the new ones remember that the old ones failed? Where does it keep that information in it's cells? I googled it and saw a time-lapse of many random structures with wheels trying to move forward, but unfortunately i don't really understand, i think my problem may partly be i'm not clever enough to understand, i've never been to university or had higher education, but i think i'd have trouble understanding this even if i did, because i'd start asking questions like, why are the cars being made? Why does it want to evolve? What is making the decision to try certain combinations at certain times? Stuff like that, a lot of the times i am told my questions aren't relevant but every now and again i risk annoying people with my questions simply because i'm still curious.

It's very cool, i'd like it if Kerbals had a notes section too, "gets sick easily, best placed sitting a few meters away from the rest of crew) hehe

I suppose in a roundabout way i am asking that question, but i'm not sure of the answer, my main curiousity is wishing to understand how this plant managed to know what a wasp looked like without being able to see, and how it knows it's mating habits in order to try and trick it to come to the flower. Ok, thank you.

Haha nice, love the hairstyles

A while ago i asked a question on a forum that went like this: How do trees know that there are animals out there that eat their fruit, and also know that said animals poop that fruit out along with the seeds thus carrying them to new growing grounds, would that not imply that the tree knows animals are out there and also knows they have digestive tracts? The most agreed upon answer i got was the following: that many trees had existed before which did not have fruit, or had fruits that were not appealing to animals and so they died out, thus leaving behind only trees with fruit that was appealing to the animals which ate them. Now that answer has been pretty much acceptable to me for a while, it doesn't satisfy me completely (I'm still wondering how they know animals eat and have a digestive tract) but yeah it looked like a good answer, until i saw this thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakaea This is called a Hammer orchid It's got no eyes, it's got no brain, yet it's changed one of it's leaves to look like a female wasp, notice the anatomical similarity to a wasp body complete with head, and not just that, it's developed a smell gland that gives off an identical smell to that of a sexually receptive female wasp, how did it know to do these things? Were there millions of other orchids trying to grow millions of different shapes and emit millions of different smells? And if so for what reason if they were unaware that pollinating insects existed? Why not try to glow instead? Or explode? How did this flower find out what a wasp looks like? It has to know what a wasp looks like because it grew a copy of the real thing, and where is the mechanism that decided to do that in the first place? Doesn't it need eyes and a brain to achieve what it has? This has left me pretty disatisfied with the answer i was first given to my tree question, because what it suggests is that this orchid species went through every single permutation possible before finding the perfect shape and smell of a wasp, which would mean i suppose that one trying to grow a pair of furry dice whilst emitting a smell of petrol must have existed at some point among millions of other bizarre versions of itself? I looked in wiki but it says nothing about how this orchid does this, so i would very much like to hear your opinions because frankly, i am flummoxed.

Those are some great pictures Xeldrak. The university is very grand and the cemetery looks calm indeed. That is frankly a thing of genius. My favourite part has to be the wheel-doors.

You make a good point, i think i may just be change-averse.

This thread is a wonderful trip down memory lane, i don't know if i should be ashamed or proud to say that many of my fondest memories are of games, or that i remember many times and events in my life because of a game i was playing at the time, I used to hear my dad's shouting through this music at 2AM telling me to go to bed, great days: And as far as the oldest game i ever enjoyed, i feel cockily confident that none of you youngsters here will be old enough to have ever heard of Thanatos, i spent many happy hours on it.

That is one i would most definitely like to see in person one day.

Me too, i like space-lounge but i prefer Junkyard.