This is where it all begins
 

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992568

Pretty damn important discovery with very serious consequences.

interesting

Whatever man can imagine, given enough time, man can achieve.

Including but not limited to [it's] own destruction.

Dear god i hope not :eek2

Man without beerbellies who have huge schlongs make lots of money and are in love with me.

COME ON Science! Get working on that

i disagree. unless you want to say 230,000,000 years is still "enough time" i guess there's not many things we can fathom THAT unimaginable.. but going the speed of light, turning the galaxy into a star wars / star trek type of galaxy, the ability to transport molecules from one space to another ("beam me up scotty"..)

i'd say a good model for those far-fetched ideas that could challenge your point would be right out of current movies :)

man can IMAGINE a lot... do you really think man could invent a "Force" like in star wars? some sort of extra-sensory power that people can harness across the universe? that one would be quite challenging. maybe given enough radiation over time a group of people could.. or at least think they could communicate using this force.. :)

material things, concepts, etc.. could be invented, given time (perhaps LOTS of it) but i think the true key is the things that man has imagined in movies that are not tangible..

You sound like the person (I forget who it was) from the 19th century that said "Everything that can be invented, has been invented".

I remember when I was a boy, the majority of people believed that projecting a picture into ones living room from an invisible signal passing through the air from miles away was not within the realm of possibility.

When I was born my fathers form of transportation was a mule and buckboard.

He watched a picture projected into his living from more than a quarter of a million miles away of a man walking on the moon.

While, in my mind, I think some things may be impossible, I believe that someone in the future will fail to understand that it is impossible and will achieve the "impossible".

Thus I believe the statement to be true.

You know it's really interesting on how fast the RATE of scientific discovery is. Considering that most of it occured within the last 500 years. Humanity's been around for thousands of years. There's definitely an accelleration factor in human knowledge that historians/anthropologists can look into.

My bet is that capitalism, improved information dissemination technology, and the scientific analytical method had a lot to do with it.

Good points, PF. It is important to note that when scientists/theorists tackle "small" issues--ie., specifics of gravity, specifics of cell division, specifics of ethnogenesis, etc they discover and cover more ground than the "grand theorists" of old like Marx and Freud [both later found to be mostly erroneous]. They're also prone to making less mistakes. On the specialized "small" fronts of technology/human sciences the notion of impossibility may not be an issue since there are SO MANY fine points to discover/analyze.

Discovery has been going on for far more than 500 years... In the last 200 years there has been a real swell of science and industry, but discovery has been going on for a long time. We just take most of the advancements for granted now.

Have you seen how the Romans built bridges and roads 2000 years ago? Do you know when atomic theory was first theorized? Who invented wood-joint carpentry? Soap?

Scientitsts in australia have already done the beam me up scotty stuff. Not with a person, but they like broke down molecules or something and transported it a few feet away where it was rebuilt. They said they dont know if it would ever work with people, but the are planning to use it to send excrypted data and shit like that

The movie Fly comes into mind.

that was a nice movie

Good points, Goth. I was referring to the RATE of scientific discovery.

I think knowledge becomes exponential and some of the advances that will be made in this century will be even more amazing than the advances made in the 20th century.

No one ever walked on the moon. It was a hoax, the biggest in history.

Yeah, and we have recovered Alien Space Ships at Area 51.

This hoax theory makes for a great urban legend.

Wow, great article! :thumbsup

indeed :1orglaugh