h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's right.

eeh i am such a newbie. i've just taken a good look around the site for the first time yet and seems there's a loooot more to it than i first realised.

one thing that's bin buggin me though, what does h2g2 stand for? i found this site when searching for the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy, which this has nothing to do with at all unless u consider the fact that it's aim is to produce a guide to everything, but "hitch hikers guide to the galaxy" doesn't fit into "h2g2", so what's is stand for then

If you write an introduction on your personal space (click on "My Space") someone will come along in a few hours to orientate you a bit to h2g2 and give you an official welcome. But before you do that noone can talk to you on your space.

h2g2 is HUUUUUGE

I always wondered why the second '2' too. Maybe because this is the 'earth edition' it is considered the sequel? I'm just guessing... You could go to "Ask the h2g2 community page and ask everyone yourself .

All the best and Welcome,

Ste

H2G2 --> HHGG --> Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The 2 G's stand for 'Guide' and 'Galaxy'.

Yes, H2G2 is huge. There's more here than anyone can take in. The Edited Guide, probably approaching 5000 entries by now, might be the smallest part. There's all those clubs, story and role-playing threads, all the things people do with their personal spaces, <./>askh2g2</.>, PeerReview and the Writing Workshop (which support the Edited Guide), AWW and AGG/GAG/CAC (which take writing that doesn't fit in the Edited Guide), <./>thePost</.>, the Talking Points....

Welcome aboard, 199480! Yeah, write something in your personal space, set your preferences so you have a more personalized nickname, and jump right in! There's more than enough fun for everyone!

Logic and math are a type of "language"

The deeper one digs into the research for the origins and existence of the universe, the more one discovers an underlying order.

Go ahead, say that everything is an assumption.

Then change your mind and say that everything is based on logic and maths.

Uh oh, change your mind again! Popper was right, theories advance through logical falsification.

The question really is, what is at the foundation of reality?

Dunno? ... Shrug your shoulders, go have a brew ... The drink is on me.

Some of the ideas being discussed here remind me the idea of Gaia, whcih I know appears in a range of literature. I was introduced to ths concept by a book by Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge, which was first published in 1983 as a sequel to the Foundation Trilogy. The thing that piqued my interest most in the book was the practical description of what it means to have a galaxy/universe that consists of a shared consciousness of all objects contained within it. I recall that rocks were seen as conscious too, only at a much lesser level than that of animals.

Might be worth a read or a re-read over a nice hot cuppa!

I have two links to Gaia on my links page @ A681833


Alji, of the Red Dragon (Swynwr y Ddraig Goch) (conducting a sun sign poll @ A712595)(Member of The H2G2 Guild of Wizards @ U197895 looking for wiz kids to join, though you don't have to be a wiz kid just know a bit about some subject that you think will be of interest to others or just bore the pants off them. This is an equal opportunities space open to all sexes, ages and abilities)

>Take 'nothing' Nothing is a total absense of any contraints. But since there are no constraints, there must exist the potential for something to exist. And this potential has to be realised for at least some realitites (the realities which are self-consistant)

Given that self-consistant realities must exist, and given that there existed nothing outside reality, the only possible explanation for 'reality' is that reality created itself!<

To me, this is a verbose way of saying; "Everything that can exist, must exist".

This is clearly false or the universe would be far too cluttered. Additionally, the moment the first thing material object comes into existence, the constraints appear. For one, no other material object can occupy the space occupied by the first one.

If you can clear this point up, I will go on to study the rest of the argument. Best of luck.

You might get more interest and have more street cred if you could spell 'existence'. Don't mean to be too picky, but it is in your title.

How do you know that no other material object can occupy the space occupied by the first one? They certainly can in one respect when one allows for being in the same place at a different time. However, in another sense neutrinos essentially pass through "ordinary matter" without much in the way of interaction at all. From the perspective of a neutrino, ordinary matter practically does not exist and so it is entirely plausible that there is a whole "alternative matter" body inhabiting the same space as your body at this very moment. Indeed, perhaps God is everwhere because he is everywhere and "in all things" because he actually is in all things.

Toxxin, we don't take that much notice of spelling and what's posted can't be changed. Anyway -ence = A noun suffix signifying action, state, or quality; also, that which relates to the action or state and -ance = A suffix signifying action; also, quality or state.
I'll put my hand up first if anyone asks who can't spell!


Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

Last things first: God doesn't have a body. He is not material. Therefore what I have to say about material objects clearly doesn't apply.

On the scale of a neutrino, most material objects consist of the spaces between or within atoms. When a neutrino passes through a human body or whatever, at no point does the neutrino even attempt to occupy any previously occupied point. If one by chance does, there is a collision - which is how neutrino detectors work.

Finally, fine - I did mean 'the same space at the same time'.

Does that answer all of your crits, or should I add something further?

Sorry, I just pointed out that for many, spelling errors in the title look a bit amateurish. Maybe I should leave that kind of thing for peer reviewing. Normally I wouldn't have said anything, but it's such a key word in the whole piece.

Shame about the inability to edit posts later. I have an avatar on the SearchMalta site where contributions can be changed at any stage. In fact, I'm Rockulator and one of the volunteer mods in the Sci-Phi section. Its pretty moribund at present, so only go there to look at the archive or if you're interested in Maltese topics.

u say that ur entry proves the existance of god, im only 13 so i may not grasp the entire meaning of what ur trying to say, but u havent proved that god exists. U seem to have proven the possibility that god exists, which isnt prove that he does exist. and u havent disproven other theories of why he dosent exist. did that make any sense at all? did i misunderstand the whole thing? soz if i did but ur philosophical language was a little hard for me to follow...

Well, I certainly hope you do rewrite it, if for no other reason than to make it grammatically correct.
Of course, grammar exists only in my own mind, but it had to have been created by a higher group of linguists who created themselves by agreeing upon a system of rules that govern the universe of words.

I'm making fun of you, just in case you weren't entirely sure.

Here are some of my previous thoughts, mostly about existence in general, not just God. I'm not saying it is right, or entirely sound, however, you may find it interesting or just think it's a load of nonsense. (Apologies for any poor spelling)

Descarte says "I think therefore I am" but we don't know for certain that we are thinking, it just appears that way. We could just be part of the imagination of some other being. In turn, that being could also be imagined by another etc. So my conclusion is that "I appear to think, therefore something is." It can be assumed that that 'something' is infinitely more powerful than anything in his thoughts. You can call this supreme being whatever you like, but God seems appropriate to me.

Fuzzy thinking at is best!

~^M^~

What happened to that Playboy Reporter individual who started this whole thing, anyway? My thanks to anyone and everyone who noticed the misspelling of "existence", and I hope you'll appreciate that Playboy Reporter made approximately 286 errors in his various postings.

Inability to spell eksistunce correctly has, however, little to do with argumentation for or against belief or non-belief in god.

To my way of thinking, God in the senses described in the original article is merely an improbability, and could well be described as "mostly harless"

Belief in God, however, can only to a small extent be described as "mostly harmless" (Considering the vast number of humans and other life forms having been killed in wars and other calamities perpetrated in the name of one god or another, and the relatively few documented instances where such belief actually led to saving or preserving of life.)

However, non-belief in God (per se) may possibly still qualify as "mostly harmless"

Yours fuzzly,

~^M^~

I'm sorta sorry I got into this discussion so late. It's full of wonderful, fuzzy, little gobbits of cosmology and philosophy, and maybe even some physics as well.

As I see it playboy researcher's arguments to prove god's existence are fine, but there is no possible proof that is independent of some set of assumptions. Even "the universe exists" is an assumption.

Playboy researcher's treat for us really is that the universe (or reality or whatever) in some way must exist in a cognitive way in order to exist at all.

Back in 2000 I tried to say some of this in a tongue-in-cheek little entry (A482159) called "Is My God Bigger than Yours?"

"THE UNIVERSE IS VERY BIG ...
IT KNOWS WHAT TO DO ...
IT DOES WHAT IT KNOWS TO DO ...
AND LOVES DOING IT ...
ALL THE TIME AND EVERYWHERE"

My proposal is that the universe consists only of one basic component that has many alternative ways of manifesting itself: space, time, matter, energy, magic, quarks, subquarks etc. We can call this one component, for want of a better word, "consciousness" or "knowing-what-to-do-ness"

But if you are a mid-range macro sentient being that likes to sit around on a friday afterntoon drinking and talkin' big philosophical theories (like me), it may be come as a sort of down-trip to think that a rock, or a copperlite or a piece of tupperware have the same basic consciousness that you do ... albeit, perhaps, less obtrusively (dependent on what time friday evening it is ...)

But I'm afraid this conversation is slowly loosing it's momentum, after 160 contributions.

have a good week-end aitch-too-gee-twos and thanx for the

~^M^~erdo, they 'gree