As I said, space is being created. It is expanding into itself. The unuverse has curvature... if you could travel faster than light, you would eventually come back to the same point where you started. Remember that the Universe does not, and cannot, have infinite space. This is because it had a beginning. And that is a practically unanimous consensus among astrophysicists.

We are living in the largest (expanding) fishbowl ever made!

I've been chewing on this since you said it.

So do you think it is possible that one of the galaxies we see with our satellites and telescopes is our own? Like a reflection? Or I guess like looking through a fiber optic cable at the back of your own head?

 

Hi again,

First, i can not verify any real Egyptian drawing or carving, but i can still easily believe that they had knowledge of such a simple thing as what the brain looks like inside, and that is because they had cutting tools and were curious like most humans.

As to who seeded who, we can not answer that, but we can continue to try, and in doing so come up with some very interesting things about the universe and what is outside of it.

One of these interesting things is that just because we view the universe as a 'contained' volume like a gold fish bowl, that's does not necessarily mean that has to be true. We have many complex behaviors we see in our own universe, and we cant even explain all of them yet, so how could we make the jump to the conclusion that nothing exists outside our universe, or even in between universes if we take the multiverse view of 'everything'.
Maybe we might not see a school bus floating around out there, but what about sub atomic particles?
Case in point: Gravity. It has somewhat recently been suggested that gravity can act out beyond the space we call our universe. That means things outside our universe could be pulling on things inside our universe and would explain some observations in deep space.

There are so many possibilities about what caused the big bang that it's almost impossible to take about only one cause. For another example, all of matter could have been in the shape of a huge pancake, infinitely thin and spread out to infinity in all directions, and perhaps it was collapsing onto itself for eons of time. If ti was traveling at the speed of light to itself there would have been no time. Then as it starts to collapse, time appears, and then as it gets down to a small size gravity stops time again, and it simply implodes and forms what we know as the universe now. There are a lot of other theories out there on how the big bang started. I only remember a few of them, such as the collision of two 'branes'.

What we see out there is something like 5 percent of all matter in the universe. We can not hope to know it all yet.

 

Not all of them. Some religions claim that it is actually impossible to know, that there is a limit to knowledge as it is. I am one of those adherents. And I was thoroughly more convinced since learning of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem. It is actual mathematical proof that there are some truths out there that simply cannot be proved. That is why there's such thing as axioms... For me, at least, the big question lies in whether we should worry and study truths that cannot be proved (sounds almost like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) ... I think that exploring them is definitely worth the time. Our reflections about them can tell us extremely valuable things about ourselves in the process.

Uhm... reread my post. I specifically said that most religions acknowledge that there are things we can't know or comprehend.

The "former" is the "alien seed" folks.

 

I've been chewing on this since you said it.

So do you think it is possible that one of the galaxies we see with our satellites and telescopes is our own? Like a reflection? Or I guess like looking through a fiber optic cable at the back of your own head?

That wouldn't work. My example assumes that you could travel faster than light for this to happen. The far regions of the univere were separated at a speed faster than light during the inflation era of the universe.

 

The former claims the knowledge to explain something, yet that very claimed knowledge doesn't explain what the very thing they claim it allows them to explain.

My bad, I didn't read that last paragraph well the first time around.

As a bilingual speaker, adding a comma where I placed it (in red) makes the sentence much easier to understand.

 

My bad, I didn't read that last paragraph well the first time around.

As a bilingual speaker, adding a comma where I placed it (in red) makes the sentence much easier to understand.

I agree -- it would seem a comma belongeth there. I'm not sure if it has to go there or not, but it seems more natural to have it there.

 

That was my first notion, but my understanding is that we know how to read hieroglyphics well enough that that symbol's meaning is probably known. What is that panel referring to? We should be past the point of claiming that it's a cross-section of the human brain based on some wishful pattern matching.

It's known as the eye of Horus, however the Pineal Gland is a interesting part of the brain. Makes me wonder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland

The results of various scientific research in evolutionary biology, comparative neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, have explained the phylogeny of the pineal gland in different vertebrate species. From the point of view of biological evolution, the pineal gland represents a kind of atrophied photoreceptor. In the epithalamus of some species of amphibians and reptiles, it is linked to a light-sensing organ, known as the parietal eye, which is also called the pineal eye or third eye.

Unlike most of the mammalian brain, the pineal gland is not isolated from the body by the blood–brain barrier system;[11] it has profuse blood flow, second only to the kidney,[12] supplied from the choroidal branches of the posterior cerebral artery.

I'm sure it's not connected to our knowledge of the brain.

The Eye of Horus is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection, royal power and good health.

kv

 

A very interesting read.
Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari
Translated from the Hebrew.
Max.

 

I have often pondered about these two questions:

1) At what point does an organism have feelings? We may agree that a rock has no feelings whereas a dog or bird has.
Does a plant or tree have feelings? Does an earthworm have feelings? An amoeba, protozoa?
We can accept that a plant cell is a living organism. Where is that dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness?

2) The mystery of cell division. Why does a cell divide? How does it know when to divide?

I asked a respected biology professor these two questions and received a very unsatisfactory answer:

"It would serve no purpose to know the answer."

I have to disagree strongly with his/her reply because it is a very practical question to know how animals interpret what we as humans know as 'pain'. This is practical for example for extermination practices and for the slaughtering of animals for food. This has been a question for a long time now so i am very surprised at his/her response.

 

Living organisms can sense noxious stimuli (chemicals), noise, light and so forth. Those senses are very basic. So, it makes sense that killing any organism, including plants, will likely be detected by that organism. That does not mean they are conscious or understand what is happening. Nor is killing them bad, unexpected, or even to be avoided.

Should cows stop eating grass as a result? Being eaten might be good for the organism. Look at parasites that depend on being eaten to complete their life cycle. In the plant kingdom, look at the presumed evolution of peppers and capsaicin.

A very recent SCOTUS opinion ruled that while capital punish must not be cruel or inhuman, it need not be painless (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...xecution-u-s-supreme-court-says-idUSKCN1RD2J5 ). The same should apply to our food supply.

 

Well i think the argument of pain is about whether or not there is an emotional response.
In other words, does the animal sort of cry when subject to pain or does it just register it like a microcontroller detects a temperature level that has gone way too high. From what i have read in the past, it appears that there is a part of the brain that is either there or not and that is believed to be an indicator of whether or not the animal 'detects and suffers' like a human or just 'detects and acts' like a programmed response similar to just instinct. I dont think this argument has been settled for some animals.