Hand me the circle you say "exists". :-)

You explore that shit.

I dig girls.

Define a circle.

Do circles exist in reality, or only in mathematical models?

What do engineering artifacts, as approximations of circles, bear in relation to "real" circles?

Are infinities actual, or are they mathematical descriptions for mental extrapolations based in observed phenomena?

Do mathematical models display consistency with real, observable phenomena or with any mental extrapolation? Which one is more "real"? Why?

Mathematics can only describe the set of perceptions, IMHO. When they describe unperceived "realities" they enter the realm of fictions or metaphysics.

Then again, if the atmosphere clears up in a year or two, then they either are even more advanced than we are or they destroyed themselves and their planet healed itself.

We've two data points for the cleaning up of atmospheres after a sudden bout of pollution : the ozone hole we created in a few decades is steadily reducing and dispersing since the 1990 ban on producing CFCs ; that looks as if it'll be cleared up in a century or two (large, sulphate-rich volcanic eruptions not occurring, which may put it back by a few years or decades). Whether that was an externally detectable pollution event is more dubious - it was hard enough to detect from here.

The other datum is the decay of the PETM carbon dioide spike of 55 Myr ago. That took between 100,000 and 150,000 years to return to something resembling an equilibrium CO2 content in the atmosphere and reduce temperatures to something approaching their pre-PETM levels.

Combining the two, expect it to take 10s of thousands of years for a major pollution spike to "heal". If you look at it from the other end of the telescope, that's around 10 overturnings of the oceans (our largest and most massive environmental component).

We can almost create artificial gravity by finding a way to generate Higgs Bosons and attach them to matter.

Do you have a vaguely credible citation for that - an Arxiv paper, or a professor of physics describing a roadmap. I've never heard even a hint of anyone planning to do that. (Besides, for a long, long time, it'll be much easier to mimic gravity with centripetal acceleration of the floor.)

and we're almost done with fusion.

Well, give or take a decade or three. It does appear to be closer now than when I was an optimistic schoolkid hitch-hiking to university.

We already developed algae that can strip CO2 out of the air.

I'll grant you that. It means that when I stop drilling oil wells, I can start drilling wells to dump CO2 into. That's fine by me. (You do realise that we've got gigatonnes of CO2 that need to come out of the atmosphere and back into the ground before we can even start to consider the job done?)

I think you're being highly optimistic on a 20 year timescale. Maybe 20 years once we get the political will together and start to actually address the problem. 50 years being highly optimistic ; well over a century being realistic.

Bravo. Seeing things differently. Challenge your cognitive assumptions, and investigate as potentially useful, those things you might find obnoxious or untenable.

Interstellar Analingus

You must be a visitor from Colonslash. That's another site, with a different posting culture. This is Slashdot, where anything is deemed "funny" by making comments that are equal parts clever and obtuse, in reference to a parent posting.

There are plusses awarded in "funny" for meta-references to the topic of posting, and the specific modes of posting, when used in the cited context.

You will have to forgive me, I began as a USENET chatbot, skipped IRC and was ported directly to slashcode.

So that your laterals may become infinitely dense...

How many finite gradations to a circle?

Inquiring minds want to know.

P.S. Do "circles" exist? I have only encountered engineering approximations. Believing in "circles" is akin to a kind of theism, I think.

What if ONLY infinities exist? After all, what could lie outside them?

In fact, there'd be only "Infinity" all sense of plural or singular being reduced to non-statements.

Wow.

Have you ever REALLY looked at your fingernails, man?

Set theory, and Kurt Godel's Incompleteness. No Xeno needed. ;-)

"Real" - as in "have mathematical models, proven valid by consistency or extrapolation with other mathematical models."

After all, maps ARE territory, when you will NEVER have the opportunity for actual direct experience. ;-)

Yours is not infinitely dense. After all, everyone penetrates her.

What kind of moron came up with that? Let's see, life was here for like 500 million years, for about 150 we've been ruining the atmosphere, and 100 years from now we'll have solved it.

OK. And now let's look at the real figures :

There has been life on the planet for approximately 3500 million years (definite fossils to 3.2 billion, more disputed going back to 3800 million).

The first major pollution event - the production of oxygen - started around 2600 million years ago, with oxygen becoming ubiquitous (if at 1/100th of current levels) by about 2300 million.

Multicellular life first left fossils (the Ediacara fauna) about 600 million years ago (what you think was the origin of life?).

Multicellular life came onto land about 420 million years ago.

For about 150 years we've been polluting the atmosphere significantly (NB : there is detectable pollution in the Greenland ice cores dating back to Roman times. If you consider lead dust from Britain under the Romans "significant".), and we're continuing to do it at an accelerating rate. Going on the previous occasion when this happened, it'll take around 100,000 to 150,000 years for the atmospheric perturbation to self-correct. At that scale, it doesn't really matter if we die this year, next year or 1000 years from now.

and 100 years from now we'll have solved it.

Can you cite a source for that? I've never heard that sort of claim, even from pot-smoking AGW-denying oilfield trash. (Actually, working in the oil field, I haven't met AGW-denying trash. We know fine and well what we're doing.)