Unabashed

You know, when I said the planets must be lining up because of all the weird I’ve been seeing, I didn’t know they really were. Interestingly, in this article the author claims that planetary alignments “are nothing more than the visible clockwork mechanism of our natural skies,” and that the myths associated with those movements are all erroneous. Well, number one, a myth is by definition erroneous, or at least a myth is an imagination, invented idea or story or concept. Number two, the author fails to consider all the weird that occurs when the planets line up just so. It’s like saying the full moon has no impact on people, and yet, ask any ER nurse or doctor and they’ll tell you that on full moon nights the ER fills up quicker and fuller than usual, and usually with a healthy dose of weird. I’m not saying it’s not a myth, but in my mind it’s a dangerous thing to dismiss anything too quickly, and I think there are still inexplicable things in this vast Universe we live in. In fact, I think it’s downright simple to presume that everyone who believes there is significance in such celestial drama are wrong, when you have no proof of that yourself.

But it is a nice blog (even though it is way too heavy on the advertising), and the author did point out that the planets were all aligning for our entertainments. So go read Universe Today (just pull the RSS feed like I do and you don’t have to bother with the irritating mass of adspace).

Photograph by Richard McCoy.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: full, legend, lined up, lining up, Mars, moon, myth, order, regulus, Saturn, universe

Titan is cool. Cassini is due to photograph the moon in the next few weeks, and I fully anticipate–in fact, I’m going to go ahead and predict–that NASA will find proof of life on Titan. Why am I so confident? Because exploration of our solar system has never had as much active effort as it does right now. Because Titan has an utterly alien environment–but it’s an environment, with rain and cryovolcanoes, hydrocarbon lakes, mountain ranges… it has potential for water, and it has a stable atmosphere. And, besides that, it would be so freaking cool. But…You wouldn’t want to live there. Forget the fact that it’s cold and that the atmosphere isn’t breathable for humans, focus instead on the fact that the smell of fart would probably pervade every waking moment of your life. Still, whatever life they do wind up finding won’t be able to breathe our atmosphere, and who knows, maybe their farts will smell like our air.

Any way, don’t be surprised when, after a couple of months or years of analyzing the data, NASA announces irrefutable evidence of life on Titan.

The Singularity is near.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Life, NASA, Saturn, Titan