You might read that title and think I’m a little weird. But, by the end of this post, you’ll be thankful for the lil fellas, too. (Though you may still think I’m weird.) A few years ago, I was having some digestive issues. (Nothing major.) I don’t remember the details — probably just as well […]
“The more you investigate, the more likely you are to find that there is LESS to these stories than meets the eye.” — astronomer Andrew Fraknoi, Science Education and Outreach: Forging a Path to the Future journal Continuing from Part 1, we again consider the question asked in the post’s title: When is a UFO […]
“They can fly rings around the moon, but we’re years ahead of them on the highway.” — old man re UFOs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind There is more than one way to answer the titular question here. One response is, “When it’s called by another name.” During World War II, Allied aircraft pilots […]
“What one man can fantasize, another man will believe.” — William K. Hartmann A couple weeks ago, I shared from Stephen Webb’s book (2015), citing one solution to the Fermi Paradox. This week, I present a follow-up of sorts. It might sound like a joke, and in a sense it surely is. But, as we […]
“… the cleverest man I ever knew, without exception.” — Jacob Bronowski on John von Neumann, The Ascent of Man In the title above, “they” refers to extraterrestrial beings. Does that make the title sound silly or insulting to natives of Hungary? It was in fact supposed to be humorous and somewhat of a compliment. […]
“I am usually baffled by the thoughts and accomplishments of humans in different cultures. I’ll be damned if I can state with certainty what some extraterrestrial source of intelligence might do.” — Stephen Jay Gould, noted paleontologist and evolutionary biologist When I wrote “SETI and the Fermi Paradox”, it was all I could do to […]
“Here [pointing to new, blown-up photo from Voyager] is the Earth in a sunbeam. And you can see it; it is in fact less than a pixel in size. And, uh, this is where we live — on a blue dot. There is no evidence suggesting life anywhere else. For me, that underscores the rarity […]
“We’re kind of the chimpanzee ‘fighting’ civilization. Some other civilization just may have a basically more peaceful personality, like bonobos do.” — Stuart Taylor, SETI astrophysicist The technology to send it isn’t in place yet, but JPL astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang and other researchers have already drafted a new message to broadcast to any alien intelligences […]
“In light of climate change and all the extreme weather we are having, many voters are now reassessing their previous opposition to nuclear power.” — Mark DiCamillo, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies Isn’t this ironic?! Governor Gavin Newsom — one of the greeny-est, Lefty-est politicians in one of the greeny-est, Lefty-est states — is […]
Longtime readers might remember that I have mentioned and quoted from Samuel Sey’s “Slow to Write” blog before. Sam recently wrote a post explaining why he takes the incrementalist approach to pro-life activism over the abolitionist immediatist approach. I thought Sam did a fine job of laying out both approaches and pointing out pluses and […]
