Are the Yahoo!Answers points like points in other spheres of endeavor?

Can you aculate enough of them and then trade them for stuff out of a brochure? Can you do battle against other avatars and defeat the ones with fewer points than you have? Do you get more powers depending on the number of points you have, the levels you attain? In the event that an asteroid the size of Texas was hurtling towards earth, with life destroying devastation imminent, would the government put us on spaceships according to how many points we had? Are your points closest to the score you got on the Verbal or Math sections of the SAT?