midnight Target: The act of publishing IS a review process. There is no formal "peer review" for scientific studies or announcements! The 1st to publish gets the credit. I figured you would know this. 
I figured you know what "the act of publishing was" when talking about scientific publishing.
It works like that. A scientists submits a paper to the serious industry journal. That journal sends the copies of the paper to several experts - without supplying the author's name in many cases. The experts make a conclusion whether the work has any merit. Only after that the paper may be published and subjected to
further peer review. After a few rounds of publications and counter-publications the resulting point makes its way into popular publications and to the politicians.
Many scientists post their unpublished works on the web right now for anyone to make comments.
If Mr. Sagan followed that venue, somone like Bjorn Lomborg could have saved him from making a total fool out of himself.
storch:is it not also true that radioactive decay of every sort is not as constant as it was once thought to be The rate of radioactive decay is based on the so called weak forces acting inside the nucleus of an atom. If there is anything more stable in the universe over the last ten billion years, it's the universal constants reflecting those forces. Any change in them that would affect any results noticeably would probaby be a good indication of a supernatural influence. I am sure God could affect intranuclear interactions but not much else.
The change in constants affecting intranuclear interactions would have been clearly wisible in change of the way stars burn - if they burned at all or kept from exploding. If you claim that there were such changes within last few billion years, we would still be able to observe the difference in behavior of stars light from which takes hundreds of millios of years to reach us.
myelo: Personally, I don’t like relativity. Because I would like to travel faster than the speed of light. That sentense while being semantically correct does not make sence because you use the wrong concept of "speed" where it is not applicable. There is no speed faster than speed of light. Speed of light is the infinite speed and only seems finite from our perspective. If you traveled with the speed of light you would arrive anywhere in zero time - which means that it is infinite speed.
It may be hard to comprehend untill you realise that the concepts of time, space, distance and speed that we use in everyday vernacular evolved to denote a very narrow environment that our ancestors lived in.
hyena426: How did the first genetic instruction arise in its coded format prior to phenotypic realization of progeny from which the environment could select That presumes that the DNA->protein self-replicating machinery was the original one to exist. Most likely it was not the case. It many have been some other - or even many other stages that produced complexity and eventually DNA and proteins - which then took off and used the previously existing forms for food, which is why we do not have any examles of non DNA->protein lifeforms around.
For all we know, the first self-replicating entities may have been silicone crystalline types to which ferr-floating organic molecules eventually attached and concentrated.
miko
