It's interesting to note that one of the applications of this technology could be a device that allows you to see the insides of an object by making portions of it invisible.
In my opinion, the people at Slashdot have learned that they can drive a tremendous amount of traffic to a site and thus raise awareness of that site, to the benefit of the people behind it. I've seen this several times, where the only reason somethings are posted is that the sites are created by friends of the Slashdot team. This is one of the differences between legitimate journalism and the stuff that Slashdot practices. I wish Slashdot would pursue the higher standard and start leaving crap like this off.
Between excessive duplicates and ranting, lightweight articles, Slashdot sure seems to have started sliding down the slope of excessive success. Just because it's a slow newsday doesn't mean you have to post fluff like this.
If life is found anywhere off of the Earth - especially in a place like Titan where it's highly unlikely to have been seeded from the Earth - then it's both scientifically and socially reasonable to assume that life is common at least in our portion of the galaxy. This calls into question the Fundamentalist notion of Genesis and thus the validity of most organized religions' teachings. If Science can finally free humanity of the headlock Religion has upon people, then mankind can move beyond the constraints of strict adherance to the teachings of organized religion and into an arena where enlightened discourse can occur on all sorts of topics concerning the essential character of life (such as the true start of the beginning and end an individual's existence, the biological nature of a "soul", etc).
Only when Mankind is free of the straitjacket of Biblical dictates can true evolution in the social notions of ourselves occur. Finding off-world life, even primordial life, makes this an eventual outcome.
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There's a well timed lecture at Caltech on the subject:0 3&template=ist-all
http://today.caltech.edu/eas/item?calendar_id=617
It's interesting to note that one of the applications of this technology could be a device that allows you to see the insides of an object by making portions of it invisible.
In my opinion, the people at Slashdot have learned that they can drive a tremendous amount of traffic to a site and thus raise awareness of that site, to the benefit of the people behind it. I've seen this several times, where the only reason somethings are posted is that the sites are created by friends of the Slashdot team. This is one of the differences between legitimate journalism and the stuff that Slashdot practices. I wish Slashdot would pursue the higher standard and start leaving crap like this off.
Between excessive duplicates and ranting, lightweight articles, Slashdot sure seems to have started sliding down the slope of excessive success. Just because it's a slow newsday doesn't mean you have to post fluff like this.
If life is found anywhere off of the Earth - especially in a place like Titan where it's highly unlikely to have been seeded from the Earth - then it's both scientifically and socially reasonable to assume that life is common at least in our portion of the galaxy. This calls into question the Fundamentalist notion of Genesis and thus the validity of most organized religions' teachings. If Science can finally free humanity of the headlock Religion has upon people, then mankind can move beyond the constraints of strict adherance to the teachings of organized religion and into an arena where enlightened discourse can occur on all sorts of topics concerning the essential character of life (such as the true start of the beginning and end an individual's existence, the biological nature of a "soul", etc).
Only when Mankind is free of the straitjacket of Biblical dictates can true evolution in the social notions of ourselves occur. Finding off-world life, even primordial life, makes this an eventual outcome.