There has been another bloodless cow mutilation found in Kansas City, Missouri and five horses in the UK last week. Some blame satanic cults, some aliens and UFOs, others claim that silent black helicopters are involved.
The recent report of the ubiquity of extrasolar planets coupled with the fact that it bodes well for searches for life friendly Earth twins, brought me back to my reading of Carl Sagan's 1966 Intelligent Life In The Universe and later article in Sky & Telescope where he came up with a remarkable number in favor of such.
I read in the Economist about a new study that reveals that our galaxy - not even the entire universe - should be colonized by now. This paper profoundly reaffirms the conundrum that is the Fermi Paradox, an observational problem that is sometimes referred to as the Great Silence.
Back in 1962, a Zambian teacher vowed that his country would beat America as the first country to put a man on the moon, and then they would go on to Mars. Unfortunately, his dream never came to fruition. The Zambians worked hard though. His "astronauts" rolled down hills in barrels to get used to traveling through space. They practiced walking on their hands, as their leader - Edward Makuka Nkoloso - assured them that was the only way to get around on the moon. "My spacemen are ready, but...
In my early life I was deeply impacted by the work of physician and psychoanalyst John C. Lilly. I still have my dog-eared copies of The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1968). Lilly's work, with dolphins and the development of the sensory deprivation tank, has formed the basis of movies, music and television productions.
An animated explanation of the Drake Equation, which calculates the number of intelligent, communicable civilizations in the galaxy. Voice-over by Carl Sagan from the Cosmos clip that is already posted here.
