Re: dinosaur cloning and time travel

[brandonc@advant.com (Haist, Brandon)]

From: Stewart, Dwight:


>we can simply GO there & collect the eggs (or whatever) directly.

This could be seriously dangerous.  If you read all the millions of tons of
time paradoxes, you'll see why.  One theory says that if you go back in
time, far enough back, and changed something as simple as steping on a
flower, it would completely change the course of history.  One of the
supports is the mechanisms of Choas.  By alturing the enviorment in some
simple way, it would change the conditions of the system, and in part alter
the stresses in that enviorment, over a long time.  This could change the
challenges and circemstances of natural selection - possibly leading to
completely different species and or lineages.  Since this would take
millions of years to take place (which we would be dealing with), that could
mess things up for the time travels (what if in the new history humans still
exist, but time travel does not?).

If you removed entire animals and eggs, it could excellerate this greatly!
What if you removed the one mutation that started new creatures?  If someone
took an egg of an archosaur ansester, what if it was the one that lead to
all the known desendents?!?!

In the 1960's the U.S. Navy experimented with time travel.  No they did not
make any ships disapper, but they did make two sycronized atomic clocks
change, the one in an air plane was 1/100,000 of a sec. slower, or some
small amount like that.  So it is possible.  They also explained the time
paradoxes by saying if you change history, you don't change your history,
but go into an alternate history where your change is reality.

But then there is the Parallel Universe Theory, that you travel to another
universe, take something (which is suppose to happen in that universe) and
come home - no harm done.

I know I have gotten a little off the wall here, but it is still related to
Dinosaurs.  I would like to believe in the Parallel Universe, that way we
could go back and study and observe dinosaurs in thier own world.  But if we
take something, I guess we could only observe from before that point, or
else find another universe.



>But, don't sell geneticists short: the method used to clone Dolly (the
>sheep) was considered a very long shot.  It "shouldn't" have worked,
because
>the cells were already encoded adult cells.

Discover Magazine said it was the two hundredth something try.

>I'm getting up there in years, but volunteered 20 years ago as a potential
>test subject with the American Theoretical Physics Foundation for time
travel (when >we accomplish it).

If we can time travel I would hope that medicine has improved, and your
health could be restored.  Besides, who better than a wise old person to
understand time!

>Sounds like science fiction?  Well, every scientific breakthrough does
until we >succeed.

Today my Physics teacher said that you could not ever make a 100% perfect
heat engine, it would defy the laws of Thermo Dynamics (you couldn't convert
100% of your heat into 100% work), it was impossible.  I asked him "wasn't
that what people said about flying?  Or Visiting the bottom of the ocean?
Or men on the moon?  Or human created machines on other planets?  Or
extraterestial life (Martian Meteor and Bacteria, at least if you believe
the findings of the study [which many people don't])?  Science is full of
surprises, that's what makes it so incredibly exciting (at least for me)!
~Brandon Haist