Malenfant wrote:I'm not particularly surprised that you'd leap to your own thread's defense, Telepath.
It's not "intellectual snobbery" to point out that these threads go against the established purpose of this board, which is for serious discussion of physics and astronomy topics.
(IYO). If you go here:
http://celestiaproject.net/forum/index.php, you will see that the established purpose of the astronomy board is:
General physics and astronomy discussions not directly related to Celestia
If you want to educate people then you can do so very easily by answering existing questions instead of choosing to 'test our knowledge' with elementary questions that you already know that most of the people who frequent this board can easily answer.
The general point is that this isn't and shouldn't be the place to play "twenty questions' and guess what some random guy is asking for based on really vague "clues". That I think is why some people here (myself included) find that sort of thing annoying - it's the fact that your chosen method of 'education' was just totally inappropriate to this board.
Either way, it rubbed people in the existing community the wrong way, and I believe that the wants of those in the existing community should take precedence over the wants of the newcomer. So you can either adapt to what fits in here and be a useful contributor, or you can continue to go against the grain and continue to annoy people, or you can leave. It's up to you.
I merely posed a set of questions which had been earlier posed by one of the great scientists and communicators of our time, who was also probably largely responsible for the popularization of physics and astronomy, as well as the inspiration for a number of the "existing community" as you call them. Now, he may have been being flippant at the time, but he still managed in a few simple and cleverly posed questions to communicate more about the universe, than all your posturing and pontificating, dare I say it "verbal diaorrhea", has contributed to this thread.
I will be glad to demonstrate this by deleting all my original contributions to this thread, and then we'll see what if anything of value you've contributed.
Hmm, not much left but noise is there?
I will quote SAGAN again to finish...(I know that what follows is philosophy, so doesn't belong on this thread....but then philosophy is the Mother of all Science isn't it?)
You might like to pay special attention to the
bold sections.
[quote]...from A Pale Blue Dot
by Carl Sagan
Co-founder of The Planetary Society
Carl Sagan's thoughts on seeing our world as a "pale blue dot" set in
the vastness of space. This excerpt was inspired by an image taken, at
Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the
spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar
system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home
planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles)
away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it
captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered
light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth
appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Image: JPL/NASA .
Earth, as seen by Voyager 1 at a distance of 4 billion miles.
Click on image for larger view.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it
everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every
human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our
joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and
economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,
every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant,
every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child,
inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt
politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and
sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust
suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the
rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in
glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a
fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the
inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings,
how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have
some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point
of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping
cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint
that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is
nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could
migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment
the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building
experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the
folly of
human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another,
and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever
known.
, here are the answers.... 
), but I really don't think this sort of thread should be encouraged on the Physics/Astronomy board.
