It has recently occurred to me that there are unanswerable questions that I don't want or care about getting answered. Take a look at just a few of the dozens of unanswered / unanswerable questions:
How exactly did life begin?
Why do we dream?
Is there a pattern behind prime numbers?
Can we travel through time?
Is our universe the only one?
What exactly is consciousness?
Where is all the antimatter?
As soon as you ask for "exactly" something answers then it is going to get difficult to answer. A question I don't consider important the unanswerable realm: Where did I come from?
But then I see a NY Times article and my curiosity is engaged.
Did an alien life-form do a driveby of our solar system in 2017?
The particular circumstance is a cigar shaped thing out there that was given the name Oumuamua — Hawaiian for “scout” — it was first noticed by a telescope on the island of Maui on Oct. 19, 2017, when it was already on its way out of the solar system, having passed closest to the sun a month before. It had come from outside the solar system, from the direction of the star Vega.
Author of the book The First sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Avi Loeb argues that it is no more preposterous to suppose that Oumuamua was a lightsail, a thin material that gets its propulsive boost from sunlight or starlight, either launched in our direction or anchored like a buoy in space, where we ran into it on our planet’s travel around the galaxy. In which case the age-old question — are we alone in the universe? — has been answered.
The NY Times quotes from Loeb's book “But the moment we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization ever to have existed in the cosmos, we will realize that we’ve spent more funds developing the means to destroy all life on the planet than it would have cost to preserve it.”
The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth By Avi Loeb
Here are more montage images - I didn't have to bury the pictures in salt and vinegar potato chips to get the blue green copper verdigris colour.
No comments:
Post a Comment