Tag Archive

They Are Here and They Call Themselves Politicians

Published on September 25, 2022 By sirrahc

“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 […]

They Are Here and They Call Themselves Hungarians

Published on September 11, 2022 By sirrahc

“… 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. […]

SETI and the Drake Equation

Published on August 28, 2022 By sirrahc

“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 […]

SETI and the Fermi Paradox

Published on August 14, 2022 By sirrahc

“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 […]

Sending E.T. an S.O.S.

Published on July 31, 2022 By sirrahc

“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 […]

Is E.T. Hiding?

Published on April 17, 2011 By sirrahc

Sixty-plus years ago, a physicist by the name of Enrico Fermi postulated that, unless the evolution of life was unique to Earth, there should be many advanced species out there. If this is true, why haven’t we detected them or they made contact? This is known as ‘Fermi’s Paradox’. Adrian Kent of the Perimeter Institute […]