“… 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 […]
Have you ever wondered what life might be like on other planets? As some of my readers know, I am a big sci-fi/fantasy fan, so it’s not surprising that I’ve given this a little thought. All of the life on our planet is carbon-based, but some people — from scientists to science-fiction writers — have […]
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” — Justice Samuel Alito (in the leaked opinion draft) If you are like me, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by all of the articles from the last few days talking about SCOTUS, the leaked opinion draft, […]
Have you heard about the “crisis” in cosmology? “Crisis” seems a bit alarmist to me, but that’s the term some are using. It comes down to the fact that cosmologists can’t figure out how to reconcile the most recent measurements for the age of the universe. See, there are two major methodologies to deriving it, […]
“Waste is an apolitical issue that transcends socioeconomic status and has remained essentially unchanged since the time of the Romans. For generations, we have buried our trash in the ground and our heads in the sand, unwilling to break from a broken business model or take a serious look at how our waste impacts the […]
