Revoltingly OT: Size of your colon

[Ragnarok]

Just to clearify, I believe you guys may be confusing this Lot with Job. Job is the one who lost his children, his livestock, was cursed with leoprasy and his wife said to curse God and die.
(Another note: the reason that she said that is because she and Job both thought God was causing the calamities. Little did they know that it was actually Satan taking everything away from him. This account was the ultimate example of integrity.)
He did end up gaining double what he had before. Oh, and Narf, it was the same wife who came back to him.
Now Lot on the other hand lived in the city of Sodom just before it was destroyed.
While leaving his wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.

AgentZero: You are right when speaking of Lot losing all he had and impregnating his daughters. But they were the ones to initiate it.
Lot later moved from Zoar and began dwelling in a cave in a mountainous region. The prospective sons-in-law of Lot evidently died in Sodom, so Lot’s two daughters were without mates. They caused their father unwittingly to have sexual relations with them while he was under the influence of wine. This they did to preserve offspring from their father. As a result, each daughter had a son, from whom the Moabites and the Ammonites descended.

Anyways, this thread should get back on topic...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Right, thanks.

[dogscoff]

This they did to preserve offspring from their father. As a result, each daughter had a son, from whom the Moabites and the Ammonites descended.

I thought an Ammonite was a swirly fossilised giant snail thing.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Names get re-used.

[AgentZero]

Ack! It's happening again! TV's been screwy the last few days & we can only get one station, so I just sat through part one of a piece of drivel called Supernova. Self explanatory, it's about people suddenly realizing the sun's about to go supernova. Of course, no one bothered to mention to the writers that our sun isn't big enough to go boom and they didin't even bother coming up with a half-baked excuse for why it suddenly can, which leads me to believe they didn't bother checking. Shoddy bit of fact-checking, that.
Plus there's an American news reporter with an English accent, and I've never heard an American reporter with a regional accent, much less a foreign one. Shoddy bit of casting, that.
And finally, there's a bit where our hero is brought to a massive underground city, designed to support enough people to create the genetic diversity required for the species to survive. Implausible, I thinks, but at least someone in the movie isn't totally daft. But our hero's reaction to it. "This is madness!" And a failed attempt to escape. Now the hero is a) supposedly very intelligent and b) believes the sun is about to explode, so one would think he'd be rather pleased that someone's come up with a way for some of humanity to survive, if they have any chance at all, but no! He thinks it's a terrible idea. Apparently the total annihilation of all human life is ok, as long as you get to spend it with friends & family. Shoddy bit of writing that.

[dogscoff]

AgentZero said:
And finally, there's a bit where our hero is brought to a massive underground city, designed to support enough people to create the genetic diversity required for the species to survive.

How exactly would burying yourself in an underground city protect you from a supernova? Might as well try to protect yourself from an atom bomb by opening an umbrella...

[AgentZero]

Well, obviously, it won't. If the sun actually goes nova. However, at this point that's just the leading theory. If the sun didn't go nova (which it CAN'T!), but did something else that made the surface of the planet uninhabitable, then an underground city at least gives some of the species a slim chance of survival (and not just humanity, mind you, they've stockpiled the DNA of thousands of other species. Coz cloning is just so easy doncha know). And hey, slim's always better than none.

[Wolfman77]

At that point they mightas well have just attached huge rockets to one side of the earth and flown it to another star. Iv'e never cared for any of those disaster movies, disaster indeed.

[Hunpecked]

A humongous solar flare would be a slightly more plausible (and survivable) menace than a nova/supernova. Larry Niven used this device in his story "Inconstant Moon".

[Baron Munchausen]

dogscoff said:

How exactly would burying yourself in an underground city protect you from a supernova? Might as well try to protect yourself from an atom bomb by opening an umbrella...

There is a tendency to think of the star going nova as equal to a huge bomb that would send out a pressure wave destroying everything around it. The mind-boggling amount of energy might well vaporize planets that are too close, but outside a certain radius you are really not looking at a 'shockwave' but something akin to a huge 'solar flare' radiating in all directions. Space is mostly empty after all. The pressure wave would be reduced at a very high rate just like radiation intensity (Inverse square law and all that: http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResou...sesquare.htm).

Sure, the surface of a planet would be heavily irradiated, and even scoured of its atmosphere. But unless it was very close to the star (like Mercury) the solid body of the planet could probably survive. So the underground city makes some sort of sense. The thing is, the planet would then be dead. How long could a human-managed ecosystem with no 'margin for error' survive? Judging by the examples provided by the history of previous human civilizations, which almost all destroyed themselves through mismanagement of their own natural resources in much more forgiving circumstances, not very long...