I saw from the Daily Galaxy that Frank Drake has died.

He was one of the pioneers of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and derived an equation (now named after him) to estimate the number of intelligent civilisations in the galaxy, an equation quite often referred to in Science Fiction stories.

It’s a pretty comprehensive assessment of the factors which need to be taken into account in making any such calculation but of limited use as it requires estimating values for several of its components for which reliable nummbers are unavailable.

It has given us humans some idea of what to look for, though.

So far in vain.

Frank Donald Drake: 28/5/1930 – 2/9/2022. So it goes.

Two kites have been flown in the past twenty four hours.

One of them was on another planet.

The other might as well have been.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

But also of greed and thoughtlessness.

O tempora, o mores.

This is an oddity. From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 16/12/20.

It’s a sonified image of the Bullet Cluster with low tones assigned to Dark Matter, mid-range to visible light and higher tones to X-rays.

It may be though that Dark Matter does not exist, as this post from the Daily Galaxy argues.

From The Daily Galaxy today, 28/5/20.

Proxima Centauri b is of course the nearest star to our own sun. The planet – discovered via an update to the HARPS method of plabnet detection known as ESPRESSO – is 1.17 times the size of Earth and orbits its star in 11.2 Earth Days and would be in the habitable zone if the star didn’t deluge it in X-rays. If the planet has an atmosphere though, those might be absorbed.

From The Daily Galaxy for 20/5/20.

The kink in bright yellow may be where a planet is forming. That we as a species can observe such things is mind-boggling.

Via The Daily Galaxy I navigated to this interesting article arguing that neither our species, Homo Sapiens, nor indeed its sometime companion on the planet, Homo Neanderthalensis (which was not, as commonly believed, wiped out by us but subsumed, since Neanderthal DNA forms part of the modern human genome,) invented language. Rather, a predecessor of both species, Homo Erectus, deserves that accolade.

Courtesy of The Daily Galaxy (and the Hubble Telescope) plus some technological trickery here is a visual fly-through of the Orion Nebula in visible and infra-red light.

From The Daily Galaxy, 23/8/17.

Antares, the dying supergiant.

Photo created using Very Large Telescope Interferometry at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

This is the surface of another sun!

Videos made from actual New Horizons footage and digital models of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon are now on You Tube. (I got the steer from the Daily Galaxy.)

Pluto:-

Charon:-

According to this post from The Daily Galaxy, time travel is mathematically possible.

Not by a time machine as such but in “a bubble of space-time geometry which carries its contents backward and forwards through space and time as it tours a large circular path.”

Ben Tippett from the University of British Columbia has created a formula that describes the method. Unfortunately that formula the does not figure in the post. The method also requires bending of space-time by exotic matter – which hasn’t been discovered yet/ Might as well be Science Fiction.

The bubble is described as a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time. The acronym spells TARDIS. Ha very ha.