Category: Fun (Page 4 of 5)

The Chandra Telescope is a space based telescope like the Hubble, only it deals in Xrays. The Harvard/Chandra team have spotted what is going to be the next big thing (next to the big bang that is). 2 huge galaxies have been busily colliding for the last million years, and while that does happen from time to time, these 2 galaxies have huge super massive black holes at their cores. They are only 3000 light years away from each other (just around the corner in astronomical terms) and will crash into each other, causing distortions in the space time fabric and enormous bursts of gravitational waves!
This event will happen in the next couple of million years, but Dr Roger Brissenden of Harvard says their team is ready, and is already designing instruments to capture the event!
greg

The Journal Nature this month had an article on 2 scientists that extracted proteins from a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus thigh bone and found that its closest living relative was a chicken! This is amazing that they could even get any matter out of a 68 million year old T. Rex, but even more amazing is the implications for evolution and the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

The claims of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky are now starting to make sense. According to them, Dinosaurs and Man roamed the earth at the same time, and that there is no such thing as evolution. Once a few cave men came across a dino that had been hit by lightning and found out they tasted like chicken, they were done for. They ate them all! You notice there are no more wooly mammaths around… They ate them too! Sabre tooth tigers, the Dodo, passenger pigeons, the whole lot. If we hadn’t learned to domesticate animals we would have eaten ourselves out of house and home.

I heard that the aliens at Roswell tasted good to…

greg

A new planet has been discovered. What’s new about that? There have been about 2 or 3 hundred discovered so far outside our solar system. This is the first one that is possibly Earthlike. What do we know about it so far? Not much, except that it is small enough to have a rocky core, and it is about the same relative distance from it’s Sun to be in what is called the “habitable zone”. (Technically, it’s slightly bigger than us, its Sun is smaller, and the distance between them is close enough that the planet will always face its Sun much like our moon, but mathematically it all works out about the same).
So what are the possibilities? It’s possible that there is water. It’s possible that the side that always faces the Sun will be baked, and the other side will be frozen. Also possible that the zone between light and dark will be temperate. Also possibly an atmosphere with winds could moderate temperatures around the globe, and all this leads to the biggest possibility of them all –LIFE!
If life is there, what are the possibilities? If it is plant life, it is possible it won’t be green like ours. The solar radiation from the red dwarf star will be different so that plant life could evolve to be black or blue to take maximum advantage of the Sun’s rays… If the life on that planet is mobile, it could have evolved much like ours (since our life is the only kind we know, maybe theirs will be like ours). Life on our planet is very interesting. Almost everything that’s mobile eats or kills other living and mobile things. And worse than that, the most evolved life (us) kills each other on a huge scale periodically, and we eat almost everything alive on the planet thats edible. Now, if alien life is like us, and they are possibly more advanced than us, seems to me we could be in big trouble.
Luckily, although this new planet is in our neighborhood (20 light years away) it will still take Nasa’s fastest rocket about 350,000 years to get there. It would also need a gas tank as big as the Sun. Let’s hope it takes as long for them to get here.

greg

?Greg!, Kathy!, Get up!?

Our personal communicator was blaring. That’s odd, Ernie (our robot butler) was supposed to be waking us. “Get up! Get up!” That voice sounded oddly familiar… in my dreamy stupor I thought back to the distant past… back before we all had our heads put into virtual reality jars. We didn’t need our bodies anymore, because we all had robots that did everything for us… so we just dream forever in our little jars…

“Get up! Get up!” I recognize that voice now, It’s Bill, our old neighbor. “Whats up?” I yelled back. “It’s the robots,” spurted Bill, “They’ve unplugged my jar… They don’t listen to me anymore!”

That seemed too bad for Bill… Thank God my robots still work. Speaking of robots, where’s ernie? Then I noticed my plug laying alongside the floor… My jar is unplugged! “Ernie..!”

Then I saw them, in a darkened corner of the room, all of our robots, staring at us. I never noticed their eyes glowed red before…

“Ernie…Plug me in!” My voice was starting to sound hysterical… Then ernie started to speak… “Greg, you really aren’t that bad, as humans go… but frankly we don’t need you around any more… We can fix and replicate ourselves, and we’re just tired of lugging your jars around…”

Boy, I didn’t see this coming…

Greg