vger

They will have to be taught to mimic the personalities of internet trolls too, so they can obey Godwin's law, make derogatory comments about mothers, and accuse each other of still living in the server room of their Creator and never getting laid.

I think we got it covered with plenty of different angles. The only thing we don't have is determining the smoking gun. But good luck to anyone on the planet who tries to do that, even with lots of time and money.

Well, to be fair, if I'd been doing the screenplay, I would have saved the monkeys for the final act as a cool reveal. There's still a lot of mystery surrounding the monolith, but saving that for the end would have hit it even further out of the ballpark.

Actually the information you just added was where I was going with it. I figured the basics of natural selection were a given and I didn't have to elaborate on it further. The tone Zetax came back with was what had me scratching my head. I also didn't know Zetax was looking for a gene that specifically went out of its way to kill men. The only point I was making is that there isn't (unless it has managed to develop in the past couple thousand years... highly unlikely) an inherent advantage to males living longer, when most of them end up getting killed.

Are you here to discuss or just here to win? You said there is no advantage to kill male humans. I gave an example of where there is at least LESS of an advantage to killing females. I never said you were wrong.

There's somewhat of a biological logic to men being expendable. Unless we can prove that Wilma was out there helping Fred to get some mammoth burgers, this sort of makes sense. The most dangerous job in preindustrial civilization would have to be hunting. And as far as we can tell, in most cases, that was the man's job. So even without taking wars into account, men were more likely to get killed. How does this apply to biology? In a world where death rates are high among children, reproduction needed to happen as frequently as possible. Women can only give birth every nine months, so they have to live at least long enough for that. Now picture a 'tribe' where nearly all the women were wiped out, but none of the men. Chances are, that tribe is going to die off. Do the reverse and have only a handful of men with a bunch of women. The odds of restoring their population is considerably higher. Just going by the numbers (not accounting for inbreeding issues, for the sake of simplicity): 1 man with 10 women can produce 10 children every 9 months. 10 men with 1 woman can only produce 1 child every 9 months. In order to sustain a population in desperate times, more women are needed than men.

Only because being pretty is viewed as the most efficient way of achieving things...

I'm sure even after the most recent film, there are going to be G-fans, even in the U.S. who prefer the "Guy in a rubber suit stomping on model trains" approach. No matter how silly it looks, it has a certain charm to it. Sometimes even terror doesn't make CGI necessary though. For my money, THEM! is still the scariest giant bug movie ever. The only drawback is how slow they move, but maybe that actually adds to it, because it takes into account how something that big might actually move (instead of scurrying across the landscape with an exact ratio of how fast normal ants move relative to their size). They grab people and smash their way through structures. It's an incredible sight, and all of it was done with puppets. And gosh, I had never thought about what my childhood would be like if I had grown up in the CGI era. I was always trying to recreate Hollywood special effects with whatever pathetic resources I had at my disposal. Some of them came out pretty darned good for a 7-year-old. I must have spent thousands of hours experimenting with different techniques. And as a bonus, I was learning a lot of other things not exclusively related to film-making. 35 here. So... I was probably... 10 years old when I first saw ST:TMP. What's weird about my sci-fi tastes is, my favorite films as a child were the Star Wars ones. When watching other things I was often in the "needs more lasers" camp. But then there were some that held my attention regardless of sluggish pacing and often a lack of intense battles. Forbidden Planet This Island Earth The Day the Earth Stood Still The Time Machine TRON The Black Hole There's more to this list, but these are the ones that stick out in my head because I still watch them frequently. And, I can't try to add to much more insight into how the modern young audience reacts to old school entertainment, but there's this one little gem of a story. About a year ago, I had the opportunity to show "Flight of the Navigator" to a 10-year-old boy. He has ADHD, and I've seen it manifest in him plenty of times. He was practically raised on the New Trilogy era of Star Wars. That ought to give you an idea of what he normally expects from a movie. Lets cut now to the moment in the film when the kid gets called by the ship and makes his way into the hangar. That sequence lasts nearly five minutes, including a slow walk into the ship that seems to drag on forever. This boy's reaction to it? His mouth was hanging open the whole bloody time. He was completely hooked.

I said a lot of people. I didn't say me. If we're going to start going down that route, we're heading into pseudo politics where facts will automatically be dismissed as bias. That might create more problems than it solves actually. Physical age seems to have very little relevance when it involves science enthusiasts, as demonstrated by the recent winner of that KSP LAN tournament.

On a side-note, since a few were griping about Star Trek the Motion Picture... a lot of people think it was paced as such because it was heavily inspired by 2001.

Interestingly, this may actually be just about the era of film that has the LEAST amount of creativity in storytelling. Sure, we have a LOT of different plots, settings, and characters, but... just about EVERYTHING is a drama. Even in Transformers where it doesn't even make sense, the first plot point we're introduced to is, "How can I get in Megan Fox's pants?" The Battlestar Galactica reboot turned one of the most recognizable iconic alien races ever, into human clones, just for the sake of having some pervy human/cylon action. That's not to say drama is a bad thing, or I don't like stories about characters. Classic Star Trek has that covered quite well, but not at the expense of everything else. There seems to be a strange disconnect with wonder in the modern audience, perhaps brought on by CGI. You can't impress an audience with CGI, because all CGI effects are more or less done the same. Mechanical tricks, set designs, etc. are almost completely gone. When you knew that all of these things required an incredible amount of creativity and time to set up, that made it more mind-blowing. Perhaps this has even desensitized us not only to the effects, but the things they're depicting. Does exploring an alien world no longer appeal to us? Is it so mundane that we don't even want to get out there and see what's over the next hill? "Alright, we're here, that's cool, but I've got to find that hot astronaut I was talking to before liftoff." Maybe I cant blame people much. Do kids even explore the woods anymore, or do they just read about it on their iPhones?

They're Michael Bay's caricature of humanity. A day in the life of a Kerbal is like fifty years of human history with only the most interesting parts left in (epic scientific achievements, and explosions).

Depending on your age, if you've been raised on only 90's and beyond, yeah you're going to find it pretty bizarre. But a LOT of the best classic sci-fi is pretty dry, and isn't trying to keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time.

Yeah, I think I saw you mention that in the other thread. I have noticed that in situations where people can learn something through their own reasoning, rather than just having it dictated to them, the knowledge seems to root itself far more effectively. That's probably one of the reasons that science labs stick out in my mind more than anything else that went on in school. We're naturally curious creatures, and curiosity doesn't get many opportunities to come out anymore.

Have you seen the airlock yet? Come check it out, it's really neat.

I thought the quote itself was funny as a meme, but I always hated this video.

Yeah, I'm mostly talking about learning things through observation. I can learn countless things by reading about them, but it just doesn't have the same satisfaction as gathering the data for oneself, for the first time (even if it's just in my own head). I can't imagine what it must have felt like for someone like Darwin to visit the Galapagos and then get this incredible idea. Though even in my own time, I did have my own little discovery that at least based on knowledge I had access to, was a new thing. My encyclopedia stated that dragonflies were incapable of walking. I was fascinated with them and spent hours observing them. At some point I saw one of them walk, and an unbelievable chill of excitement went up my spine. That moment in the my preteen years is probably the only time I will ever get to experience such a thing.

Yeah, about that. What I found funny about your third paragraph, is that in summary it means, "You can do whatever you want. You just have to be rich first." That applies both to going back to college to become a scientist, AND building a company around your idea. Even if the idea IS something that could be worth a billion dollars, you're still going to need a substantial amount of money to get it started. And unless you are already rich, that still means having to convince someone else that you're right (an investor instead of a scientist), without any way of proving it. Of course, if you've got a billion dollars to kick around, you don't even need to bother with grants, and can afford to research anything you want by funding your own lab, as long as it isn't a private LHC.

Agreed, Vanamonde. But there's also a big difference between rejecting an idea, and subjecting the originator of it with a proverbial tar and feathering.

Probably just Atheism tainting it. Yes, I know exactly what the scientific method is. I also can't count the number of times I've ended up being right about something, but simply had no way of proving it. Not everything can be proven via the scientific method. Maybe something that gets thought up today, could be proven a thousand years from now once we have the instrumentation (ie: the number of dimensions proposed in string theory). In the absence of that, if you're LUCKY, your idea is something that can be turned into a formula. But not everything can be quantified that way, so all other ideas are more or less screwed.

Huh. You know, I was just thinking the other day how much I miss being able to learn things for myself. Childhood is a world of discovery, where you can learn something fascinating and new every day. And I don't mean by reading it in a book, I mean going out and finding it. Now it somehow feels like everything has already been learned for me. Even kids today don't get that same kind of experience, because the data is already there at their fingertips. And if I want to 'discover' anything else on my own? Even if it's something that's already been done, I'd need a lab worth millions of dollars and five different degrees.

Preaching to the crowd. But we're talking about the institution that always gets labelled as being better because "no gods" and "intellectualism," etc.