Walkabout

Are We Alone? (Part Two)

This continues a rather long-winded essay on my part. In Part One, I talked about the idea of extra-terrestrial life from the standpoint of cosmology, the planetary conditions that might be needed to produce it. In that post, I went out on a speculative limb, always a dangerous thing from the uneducated. Here, I’m going to compound the error as I talk about the definition of “intelligence.” Please turn your irony meter off before proceeding.

Continue reading “Are We Alone? (Part Two)”

Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you have a reading light over your bed with a funky switch, one that allows the light to turn off randomly.

There will be times when you leave the room with it on, and return forgetting that you left it on, and aren’t reminded of this because in the time you were away it shut itself off. You will, of course, be fast asleep at 3 AM when it turns itself back on. You will not be fast asleep past this point.

This, however, will not compare to the time when you are reading a suspenseful book late at night, and just as you’re getting to the part where the protagonist is about to be ambushed, the light will go off. Your state of mind, which has automatically put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes, will come very close to forcing you out of bed onto the floor and groping for a weapon in full action mode, before you remember that fucking light. It’s amazing what can take place in a fraction of a second…

Are We Alone? (Part Two)

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