“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I am a scientist. And it hurts. We move through the world and have adapted an ability to wrap ourselves in buffers that protect us from plain and simple tomfoolery and for lack of a better word roving bands of clowns and mercenaries.
But as ordinary citizens, we often think of things we believe or accept as “true” without so much as a rolling eyeball or doubtful smirk.
Case in point, a July 2023 hearing calling for more government transparency on unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs. A representative stated, “the concept that an alien species is technologically advanced enough to travel billions of light years and gets here, and is somehow incompetent enough to not survive Earth, and crashes, is something I find a little far-fetched.”
True about how far-fetched that it would be if the sticking the landing part is what derails such a journey. But also, if the little green bugger traveled billions of light years to get here — not sure where they thought they were headed. Even if they climbed into a little space rocket from the closest galaxy to the Milky Way (2.5 million light years away) and glanced into their super-powered telescope they would have been looking at triceratops lumbering across the earth. The visible light left the Andromeda galaxy before we even had Homo Erectus on earth.
The earth is only 4.5 billion years or so old. The brightest objects in the sky are called quasars and many are more than 2.5 billion light years away — meaning the light started traveling before the earth had even formed.
I recently walked through a cave in Pristina, Kosovo where the rocks were 80 million years old. A pair of stalactites and stalagmites nicknamed Romeo and Juliet although seemingly in close proximity would have to wait tens of thousands more years for their fateful kiss.
This is what science does. It mystifies and humbles.
Other topics include the non-binary nature of sex chromosomes in humans. Our latent understanding of sex and gender now reveals the mosaic of gene expression and the limits of categories of male & female. I have written about intersex before where many individuals, often unknown to them, have both sets of gonads. We have learned post Human Genome that it is much more complex but many choose to obfuscate with political rancor and mistruths.
X&Y chromosome variations in males include
(source: Children’s Hospital Colorado)
47,XXY (Klinefelter syndrome)
47,XYY
48,XXYY
48,XXXY
49,XXXXY
X chromosome variations in females include:
45,X (Turner syndrome)
47,XXX (Trisomy X or Triple X)
48,XXXX (Tetrasomy X)
49,XXXXX (Pentasomy X)
My favorite modern day physicist is Brian Cox and when asked about the UFO hearings stated the following:
“I watched a few clips and saw some people who seemed to believe stuff saying extraordinary things without presenting extraordinary evidence.”
Cox said he has nothing more to say than “it would be great if true”.
He added: “It would take a bit of the pressure off our civilisation if we weren’t the only means within the Milky Way by which the Universe understands itself.
“Sadly, as of today, I still feel that pressure, so can we perhaps focus on not messing our world up rather than hoping that, to paraphrase Sagan, someone will float down to save us from ourselves.”
A handy reference:
