RadDidIt

Originally Posted by Hopeling

Yes, quite a lot of times. For example, basically every revolutionary discovery in the history of man.

Originally Posted by Hopeling

The ridiculous impossibility of it is exactly why discovering such a thing would raise serious questions.

In the real world, we usually debunk "supernatural" phenomena via science. In fiction, this means that when the dead are rising from their graves, the biologists stamp their feet and plug their ears and say "That's impossible!" briefly before they get eaten (and similar denials for things in other fields). But really, IRL science opposes "supernatural" phenomena because we have no good evidence of them being real. When people all over the world corroborate that, yes, the dead are rising from their graves in violation of every principle of biology, and you rule out hallucination, you don't say "well that must not be true, because I know biology". At that point, the scientific course of action is to say "Zombies are real, and apparently I don't know biology as well as I thought". Once you're not at immediate risk of being eaten by zombies, you can try to figure out why/how it happened, and if the best explanation turns out to be that Hell was full and all the extra souls had to go back to their old bodies and walk the earth, well, you've now got scientific evidence of Hell and souls, and that becomes part of the realm of science.
Similarly, if you discovered a message coded in the digits of pi (or some physical constant, if you prefer, which avoids the "math is unchangeable" problem entirely), you wouldn't throw it out as obviously false, you'd investigate whether it was plausible for a message of that length to occur randomly in a chain of digits of that length, and you'd be able to get some statistical idea of how likely it was to be just a coincidence. If that likelihood is sufficiently low, the rational, scientific course of action would be to accept that might possibly be a message. And if it is a message, who or what put it there?

This also reminds me of a comic that, for the first few panels, asks "what if Earth isn't the center of the universe... because another planet is?": http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php...&id=2302#comic

Originally Posted by Durakken

First if I was in Ellie's position at the moment I'd call BS. Mathematics is not something that can be changed like that. 2+2 can never equal anything but 4. and Pi will always be Pi. It can not be changed and if there is some sort of "message" then it's a coincidence. Nothing more. And no it's not that I'm not posing the question. It's that if you were to change Pi the result would be that it wouldn't be a circle any more and therefor not Pi.

Also Carl Sagan, as much as I love what he was and all that was one of those people that they'll add some theistic thing into their writing to please the theist. DesCartes and Hume are both huge examples of this. They are both clearly atheists, but they pay a lot of lip service to theism.



This is one of those things that it is pretty clear you've been listening to a group of con men that preach about things violating this or that scientific law or theory when they clearly don't have a grasp on what it is they are talking about.

For example the whole "matter and energy can neither be created no destroyed" isn't exactly correct... And that is obvious to anyone that even remotely believes that the universe, as in our physical space, began. If the universe is infinite why wouldn't matter be as well? If the universe is not then whatever created the universe created matter as well. It's not a hard thing to get.

As far as simulating life to see if things follow what I said, there is no point, because we will come across another society that will pretty much show us this and it's obvious Life that favors death dies. Life that favors anti-socialism never gets society going. Life that favors anti-technology dies. It's not a matter of needing modeled because as soon as you favor the opposite of what we favor that life form pretty much dies out because without certain key traits you don't get very far because you simply can't. The only real modeling at that point is whether a society that favors technology lives longer than one which doesn't to which I would argue that technology is a gamble and pays in spades or you lose everything. Either you gain immortality and life among the stars or a pretty short flash in the pan society, where as without technology you may live millions or billions of years before you're killed by your star.



As far as the existence of the universe and such i think that is pretty easy to answer metaphysically which is only hard because we have axioms that prevent us from looking at certain things... such as logic is. Why is logic...because it is... We make the assumption that the universe is ultimately logical without ever really questioning it, however there are other possibilities...

1. Logical: A = A
2. Illogical: A = !A
3. Anti-logical: A != A
4. ???: A != !A

Think those through and you get that 3 and 4 can never result in anything existing, but 1 and 2 both can result in things existing. There is no way we can say whether it is 1 or 2, but if we apply the fact that the universe and that is ultimately absurd because there is no way for it exist and the idea that if one answer can have the other answer in it we should go with that one then 2 is the correct answer... The Universe is Illogical, but within an Illogical universe would exist a Logical universe. Of course within an Illogical Universe everything both does ad does not exist, but hey that's the nature of the beast ^.^

Originally Posted by AzureSkyCiel

Also, Red Widow is a violent tomboy in this universe and rolled as a TW/ brute using the fusion hammer

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

Ouroboros means that we should be able to go back in time and talk the Praetorian Hamidon Pasalima out of a career in science.
Or stop Stefan Richter ever reaching the Well of the Furies.
Or warn the world in advance about the first Rikti invasion.

Originally Posted by Sevenpenny

certainly is...different....really it isnt the first time that PG has not had the "window" to the clevage uniform....this uniform for instance didn't have the "window"....and this...although there is something slightly NSFW about this pic....and I think this one might be along the same lines as one I have already listed....

So...in summary the leotard/cleavage covered uniforms are nothing new....yes the cape is new and it may grow on me if it is allowed to stay....

Originally Posted by BlueBattler

I am hoping that the Devs are considering the input they are receiving on Statesman's death and are taking it into account as they wrap it up.

Personally, I want us to find out that Statesman's death was the only way that WE would be able to successfully defeat the Oncoming Storm ... or that Statesman's death actually helps defeat Wade in the long run.

I fully intend when Blue Battler faces down Wade for the final battle that he's going to call on the Echo of Statesman power so Marcus can get payback.

Originally Posted by SuperOz

*sigh*

No. That's not our job. If that were our job, we'd be doing this story in an AE arc.

It's the writer's job to answer my questions both as a character and as a player.

Originally Posted by Schismatrix

Which is irrelevant since you've stated that they are soulless machines blindly following preprogrammed responses. So obviously the whole thing is just a joke set up by their makers. Only living things gestated in a womb are visited by the Soul Fairy and given a soul at a specific but unspecified stage of gestation, right?

No soul=no consciousness. And inorganic things have no soul. It's a rule which GG made up.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

I wasn't really referring to resurrection powers available to players, so much as storylines revolving around canon deaths and canon resurrections. Thankfully, City of Heroes doesn't have this many, and when they do exist, they tend to be very special cases. This is probably the first one that I feel is dangerous, as it suggests you can pick a dead person of your choice and go resurrect that person with a ritual that could have work on anyone else, some small catches notwithstanding.

Time travel is the one which concerns me the most, as the presence of Ouroboros - specifically, their need for "me" who has the greatest access to the past - could render a LOT of plot points moot. The Menders don't really seem to have any qualms with you riding their time machines into the ground, sending you on past adventures over and over again for no reason other than to get a vial of bees or some such. Yes, they don't like unauthorised time travel since that makes it hard to tell who's causing what change, but they don't seem to mind time travel they can monitor. So, really, why NOT go back in time to before Alexis even left Paragon City and warn her? Or step in and stop the ambush? Or travel back 10 years and shoot Darrin in the head? Or a whole other host of ways to prevent various tragedies.

The most common answer seems to be "don't think about it too hard," but it just seems irresponsible to make time travel this widely available and yet not account for the effect widely available time travel would have on a story.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

This is what I mean when I say a world of super heroes needs to be handled with care. Once things like resurrection become reproducible, concepts like a "resurrection ritual factory" really do crop up, and naturally. This isn't even a nit-pick, it's human nature to see a solution to someone else's problem and ask why it can't be applied to MY problem, as well.

Killing and resurrecting people is a bad idea to do more than once in a blue moon because it raises those exact questions.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

And that's a bad moral because...?

This is why you budget the power creep of your fictional world. This is why you don't make time travel and resurrection commonplace. Because then you have people asking why you couldn't just use a Phoenix Down on Aerith.

Originally Posted by Agent White

Now I'm curious what Nightstar's response is

Originally Posted by Hyperstrike

Originally Posted by Dark One

I'm here.

The rest of you are all delusions of my insanity. I'm actually the last of humanity, sitting in the ruins of one of our cities and typing on a wrecked computer, running out the clock on life...

O.o

Originally Posted by Lazarillo

Insignificant?
Lazarillo is here. Dark One is here. Rad and Arcanaville are here.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

You're using the word "space" in two senses: the colloquial sense and the physics sense. They are different. "Space" as it pertains to the universe and cosmology have a specific, if sometimes debatable definition. By definition "space" is all of the three dimensional space that exists. By definition there is no space outside of space, because any space outside of space would be just more space.

When cosmologists talk about expanding space, they are talking about the geometry of space. When space expands, points separated by a certain distance from each other get farther away. But the space doesn't have to expand into "more space." It has to expand into "something" if you want to think about it that way, but that something may not be anything like space as you know it.

When a balloon expands when you inflate it, the surface expands. But it doesn't expand into "more balloon" that was already there. The balloon itself got larger, and expanded "into" something that has nothing to do with the surface of the balloon itself. In the same sense, our three dimensional space can be expanding into a hypothetical fourth dimension, but that dimensional space would have nothing to do with our space. Its not a different kind of space we can just explore, any more than two-dimensional beings living on the surface of a balloon can just "go" into the third dimensional space their balloon universe is expanding into.

Originally Posted by Durakken

Actually it's more in line with nothing matters at all because it's not happening. Everything that you think of as having existed in the past, present, or future are extant unchanging and linear time is just this weird phenomenon that we are experiencing, but doesn't actually exist.