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The Other Guys Out There
Read more: The Other Guys Out ThereI’ve noticed recently several postings on social media questioning why haven’t we heard from intelligent beings from outer space. The question has so often been asked, if we are capable of listening to signals from outer space, and observing all the stars and planets and galaxies and all the other stuff that exists out there,…
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Where Are They? Part 3
Read more: Where Are They? Part 3In the first two entries in this series of brief examinations of the difficulty of traveling in outer space to new planets and stars and worlds, I looked at how difficult it is for humans to travel in outer space (we’ve only just made it to the moon), and whether the knowledge of the ability…
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Where Are They? – Part 2
Read more: Where Are They? – Part 2In the previous entry in this series of blog posts about the possibility of alien life in our galaxy, and especially about such life visiting us here, I speculated about the wide disparity between the knowledge we’ve obtained about the universe—which is substantial—and our ability to move around in that universe—which is miniscule. We’ve only just gotten…
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Where Are They? Part 1
Read more: Where Are They? Part 1This is likely to be the first of three postings on a topic that has intrigued me for several years—the prospect of intelligent life on other planets. Enrico Fermi posed his famous paradox, basically “Where are they?” in 1950. He was referring to the question of why highly intelligent, highly sophisticated visitors from another planet…
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Where Are You?
Read more: Where Are You?The title of this post isn’t meant to ask where you are in a spatial location, but in terms of time. Where are you—where are we all, for that matter—in the life of this universe? I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. We all live on a rather attractive blue, white, green and brown…
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Life On Venus?
Read more: Life On Venus?Could life ever arise on the planet Venus? That is, Venus as it exists today. Venus is a hellish place, with temperatures of around 462°C at the surface, rain composed of sulfuric acid, lava-flows over much of the surface, and an atmospheric pressure around 90 times that of Earth at sea level. It’s not a pleasant place,…
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It’s All In The Head
Read more: It’s All In The HeadLast week I posted a segment on the lack of imagination in science fiction today, with a view toward how so many sci-fi characters are humanoid in appearance. Now I want to take a short look at what I’m talking about when I say “humanoid.” In the evolution of animals over the past two billion years or…
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The Alien Paradox
Read more: The Alien ParadoxEnrico Fermi is credited with asking the question that forms the basis for “Fermi’s Paradox.” That is, where are all the aliens? Why haven’t we been visited here by aliens from another planet? There are so many stars in our galaxy, and many of those stars, even perhaps all of them, have planets orbiting around…