Fermi and physics

I’m up to these kinds of things again, by which I mean, thinking exercises that won’t ultimately mean a damn thing – but then again, that’s the story of my life, so why stop now?

Most people that have even the faintest interest in the idea of life on other planets are familiar with the Fermi read more

Half again

Yes, today is that very special day, but only right here in this imaginary, electron-supported environment known as the blogoblob, because it’s the 15th anniversary of the first post on Walkabout. Imagine that! And this is the 2,750th post therein, which is why this past month or so has been overtaken by dross. I regret nothing read more

Asking the right questions

Believe me, I’m well aware that I’m not posting much and then I come in with something like this. You’re right to feel offended. Not that I care at all, but I won’t deny you your affrontage.

So I was thinking earlier of the varying attitudes held when the subject of UFOs (or UAPs if you prefer, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) and extra-terrestrials and so on comes up. read more

Throw numbers in the air

Over at Universe Today there’s an article about rewriting Drake’s Equation, and after reading it some time earlier, it’s been stewing in my mind a little potential posts about it have changed several times, and resulted in this one.

Long story short: an astronomer named Frank Drake wrote out a simple equation, back in the sixties, to examine the possibility of read more

Here’s why, part 1: Alien visitation

[Just a brief opening note here. I originally started this topic quite some time ago and had it sitting in the folders in draft form while I tackled other subjects. In the meantime, the whole ‘Area 51’ hoohah started, and so I decided to finish it off and post it to take advantage of the huge boost it will provide to the website visits. Or something…]

Many years back I started the read more

Too cool, part 29: Flatulent Enceladus

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a masterpiece of subtlety, belying the fascination to be found in one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus is a small frozen satellite, actually a thick crust of ice over what is believed to be a global ocean atop a rocky core. In other words, a hard center suspended in a ‘water’ read more

Let’s hope they’re cute

For one or two posts a year, I have to touch on the idea of extra-terrestrial life, and this particular facet of the topic I’ve mentioned before, but I’m going into it a bit deeper this time. Given the extremely low likelihood of such an event coming to pass, this post counts as far more attention than is warranted, but if I only tackled relevant and important topics, I’d lose read more

Homey don’t play that

As a species, we like to occasionally speculate on extra-terrestrial life – what it would be like, how prevalent it is, what we could learn from it, and so on. More than speculate, really, because we’re actively looking for it (or at least some of us are,) and have done some interesting theoretical science along those lines. I’ve written a few posts about it myself (first of a read more

None of this looks familiar

I’m the middle of a book that will be reviewed here upon completion (well, not right here, but up above somewhere,) and in the meantime, I keep running across thought-provoking content that I want to expand upon. I haven’t been taking notes, preferring instead to keep moving forward on the book, because it’s been taking a while – I’m actually doing much more read more

We Are Not Alone?

I treated the idea of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy in three parts earlier, starting here. But something that I kind of blew past is the idea that we have already been contacted – let’s face it, a lot of people can argue that this really is the case. So, I’m tackling read more

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