Mom looks good, I think.

I learned to read at a young age and was fascinated with science fiction. I was too young to separate fiction from reality at that age and really believed that we'd gone to other galaxies like Tom Corbett and the Space Cadets and I couldn't wait to grow up to be an astronaut and go to other worlds and travel through time. I was shocked and outraged when the Apollo missions came around, sending the first men to the moon. Were you shittin' me? We hadn't even made it to the damn moon? It was a thousand times worse than learning Santa wasn't real.

The starship Enterprise finds itself among an uncountable number of the same which have been imported from parallel universes.

Populated primarily by gaseous super giants.

Me's thinking somebodies trying for more grant money.

"Could only" is a bold statement.

See.... that's a sure sign that it's the reporter talking, not any scientist.

Please don't use a right wing talking point...the same one global climate deniers use about grant money.

We have not have a clue about what, if anything is outside our universe. Right-wing talking point, my ass.

"The difference is, we do know about global warming and its cause.
We have not have a clue about what, if anything is outside our universe."

Mostly I agree with that statement except for the fact that we do have a "clue" - we have clues from the effects of gravity from Relativity and from the Cosmic Background Radiation Map.

What I took offense to was your statement:

"Me's thinking somebodies trying for more grant money."

I've personally heard rightwingers say that many scientists lie in order to get funding. That does happen, but with good peer review systems, it's not very often. And when I've heard such statements fly from my own brother (a slimebaugh-listening winger ) when he was wondering how scientists justify their salaries, I'm afraid I've become overly sensitized to the subject!! Ya see, my dh and son are phd physicists - my son, although not part of the group above, is working at the interface of particle physics and cosmology! And I resent the hell out of anyone implying that they are useless liars.


From one of the wingers' bibles - Ayn Rand Lexicon:

"The growth of the welfare state is approaching the stage where virtually the only money available for scientific research will be government money. (The disastrous effects of this situation and the disgraceful state of government-sponsored science are apparent already, but that is a different subject. We are concerned here only with the moral dilemma of scientists.) Taxation is destroying private resources, while government money is flooding and taking over the field of research."

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government_grants_and_scholarships.html

Fuck Ayn Rand and anyone bashing basic research.

arrive at Earth at the same time as the light from the super nova.......

If the gravity wave gets to Earth before the light......

It very likely didnt travel all that distance in this universe.

It's one of those quiet, ongoing, potentially world-changing experiments; as of yet we haven't directly detected a gravitational wave so we don't know the speed of gravity.

Buy yeah, it's likely that gravity transcends this particular spacetime based on it's observed weakness relative to the rest of the fundamental forces. Here's some further reading (caution - ahead be maths):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_theories_of_gravitation

... is merely a maze into which we have been placed, designed to keep us looking in the wrong direction in our quest for understanding ultimate reality. The outward universe we perceive will always be beyond the limits of our bodily senses, the instruments we construct, and our intellect.

The truest instrument and the one we must develop to its fullest is our ability to peer inwards, not outwards. This is the most direct path to ultimately reality, as well as the means for a fulfilling life and the evolution of human civilization.

Or not.
I kinda just made all that up after reading the OP

multiverses out there, it is conceivable that all the roads we didn't take are being played out in multiple realities. Somewhere there is an Earth with a President Gore. There is a Sarah Palin who isn't a dumb ass. Wait ... uh ...
never mind.

You, of course, corrected your mistake. It's good to consider all possibilities, but like you did, we have to toss out the absolutely ridiculous.

But I have to agree with you that a universe with a Sarah Palin who is not a dumb ass is highly improbable.

One of the best sci-fi time travel stories I read postulated that multivereses were constantly being created by every divergence of choice and random occurence. The protagonists went back in time to change their future, but all they could really do was create an alternative timeline in a different universe that paralelled the one they came from.

At least Douglas Adams had us trying to look in the right direction.

I regard it as the precursor to the Hitchhiker's books. The main character traveled the universe seeking the answer to the existential question Why were we creasted only to suffer and die.

Kilgore Trout was a fictional character created by Kurt Vonnegut and at first I assumed it was written by KV, but later learned it was the work of Philip Jose Farmer.

I do remember Venus on the Half Shell and tried to read all of KV's books way back when.

I guess existential thinking has been around since we started thinking that we were thinking.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have the time to go back to all of those classic (and not so classic) books we read as we were growing up? For me I started reading Tolstoi/Dostoevsky way too early but I'm not sure I have the energy to revisit as a somewhat wiser person.

Thanks for your mention of Philip Jose Farmer. I know some folks back in Lawrence, KS that were also influenced by his writings.

And our understanding of the ultimate size of the universe--or should that now be universes--or better still: multiverse--increases by an order of magnitude yet again.

What is that quote of Lovecraft's? "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

But we are; we are . . .

What lies at the end of our species' journey, I wonder? Madness? Or god-like exaltation and power . . .

Glad you're here! Who can tell? These subjects usually take me back to when I read "Childhood's End" and got thoroughly shaken up by it.

Thank you for the warm welcome, calimary.

Confusion will be my epitaph.
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back
And laugh.
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying ...

-- lyrics to Epitaph, by King Crinson

Good one!

What color is the sky in your world?