I believe superstitions have their place. Some can encourage people (knocking on wood, etc), or allow them to delegate responsibility to an external force (Friday the 13th, black cats, etc), for instance. Do I believe they work? NO. There is no evidence for any effect from a superstition, save for any "placebo effects" that occur (if you believe something will help you/make you healthy/etc, it sometimes does help - slightly).
I would suffer through it once, then report the incident to whatever authorities run the bus system, and hope that that would be enough. If it's not, I would probably go apeshit on the offenders next time (figuratively - first, diplomacy, then anything else). I really have no desire to die from someone else's mistake. Secondhand smoke is almost as deadly as smoking the cigarette yourself.
^This. Times 1000. I swear, the amount of physical punishment I got as a kid would make modern kids afraid for their lives. But, as the saying goes, what doesn't kill me...
I can handle spiders crawling all over me all day long. I'm not afraid of them at all.
Most celebrities host these kinds of benefits. Most of the time, it's not because of good intentions, but because it's a PR stunt. They get their name out there, and they get even more famous because it's now known that they help kids or fund cancer research or some other cliche'd cause. Sorry to be so cynical...
This also means that Disney now has a say on all future Marvel products. I really hope they don't fuck up the next X-Men Origins movie.
Quite possibly, assuming both God and the Devil exist, it's possible that some other angel might take the Devil's place, as a form of universal balancing. Also, I don't remember where I read it, but there is a phrase - something about "how can you appreciate the light, if there is no darkness?". On topic, though, would I kill the Devil? No. I would kill all his followers (it stands to reason that if I have the power to kill a demigod, I can kill everyone who follows him).
Dictator of the Universe. No, but seriously, I'm going into Mediterranean archaeology. I'm in college now, and not sure how I'll pay for grad school.
Oh, also, in addition to my previous post - among most "hard-core" gamers I've seen, 35 is considered ancient.
The reason I play more games than normal is because my ADD/Asperger's Syndrome pretty much slaughters my social skills. I'm overweight because the previous meds I was taking threw my metabolism to hell and back. I don't consider myself depressed at all - in fact, I'm having a pretty good time right now, and loving every minute of it. So no, that study fails, because it doesn't take external factors into account. I would imagine that a lot of people like me (social disorders) get into gaming really heavily, since there is a lot less social interaction. Bet they never asked those kinds of questions!
Actually, any human, anywhere, unless significant genetic changes are made, is still Homo sapiens sapiens. Now, we might have to make genetic adaptations for other planets (slightly different lungs for slightly different atmospheres, denser bones for high-g worlds, etc), but we would probably still be human, and we would still be at war. And I've read the Mars trilogy, and it's pretty good, but I was referring to colonizing an extra-solar planet, to a self-sufficient level.
The only way the people of earth will ever unite is if there is an enemy outside of earth. Now, I'm not (exclusively) talking about aliens. If we humans populate other worlds, self-sufficient worlds, we may start fighting amongst those worlds, with each of them having their own government. Thus, the earth would be at peace, but the race would not. Now, if you mean, will the human race ever be at peace, the simple answer is "No". We humans have bred into us, by evolution or design, an implacable drive to better ourselves, usually at the expense of others.
Just because we can survive on our own planet does not mean we would be able to survive anywhere else. For instance, on a heavier-gravity planet (say, 5 g's or more), you might need an extra set of legs to balance yourself, or a thicker bone structure, or something along those lines. On a light-gravity planet, flying beings might be the norm, and the intelligences there may look more like birds. Or, as I mentioned, in a gas giant, the aliens could look like balloons floating through the atmosphere. Our planet is far from being the norm in the universe. We are merely a small blue speck orbiting an insignificant star in a far-flung arm of an average-sized galaxy. We seriously need to give up this terracentric attitude, or anything that does meet us may consider us to be the worst racists they've ever seen.
You know, Voltaire once said that if God had not existed, it would have been necessary to create him. In my mind, that's kind of what happened. Whether divinely inspired or not, early man, trying to answer questions about the world around him, made up a god to explain the world's existence and current state. Then it just kinda snowballed into the tens of thousands of religions, cults, and denominations throughout history.
There is an absolute certainty in my mind that some form of extraterrestrial life exists, and an at least 99% chance that at least some of it is intelligent. I mean, we have charted anywhere from 100-125 billion galaxies in this universe, depending on which author you read, each of those galaxies containing, on average, a billion stars, any of those stars potentially containing anywhere from 1-10+ planets, with life potentially being able to develop based on lines and chemicals we may no nothing about (think silicon, think gas beings, think energy beings, think aliens living in gas giants, etc). That said, are we likely to meet an extraterrestrial intelligence? Not likely. I would guess that there are about 1-2 intelligent races per galaxy, as intelligence is an incredibly hard thing to develop, compared to simply life. Also, if we meet them, we might not even recognize them as intelligent. What if we met a race that communicated telepathically, and had no need for technology, language, or anything we might recognize as culture? Or perhaps an intelligent race developing inside the clouds of a gas giant? They wouldn't be able to build cities, or make tools, yet they still could be intelligent. It is far more likely that we will find anything from simple plant life or bacterial forms to larger animals, but no intelligence. That's just statistics for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation ^It's a little complex, and no one knows what numbers to plug into it, but this is the equation to determine the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence in our own galaxy. Why would they be human-like, considering the VAST number of planets, most uninhabitable to us, where other types of life could have developed, under different evolutionary pressures than on Earth? It is pure terracentrism to assume that aliens will be like us.
Hey, this is actually pretty good. Innovative battle system, too. Pity the episodes are so short, though.
Actually, Einstein pretty much proved that time travel was impossible, but that time viewing could, assuming some major changes in technology, be accomplished. Also, not to trash your idea completely, but how can 2 atoms start the whole universe? We can smash atoms together today. All they do is explode. ^This started the Big Bang discussions.
I never said they didn't. I just said they might not be afraid of that particular type of encounter. I do believe everyone has something they're afraid of.
I have my own personal (probably unprovable) theory about the Big Bang. It makes some assumptions, but it makes the most sense of anything I've ever heard. What if there was a universe before this one existed? This universe (and I'm not going into it's origin, since that is beyond unprovable) could have ended in what some scientists call a "big squeeze", where gravity pulls all the matter in the universe back together. This recombination, then, could have exploded, either immediately or at some later time, causing our Big Bang. Now, I know that theory is a bit simplistic, and, me not being a physicist, I have no real way to back it up, but it does seem to explain a few things. I doubt it can ever be proven, since another universe would probably be completely beyond our comprehension, and we would never be able to observe it.
I can't prove it, since I read it in a book of random facts I no longer own, but I know I read that dogs, along with several other animals, can taste water.
