Tag: #space

  • A Home in the Country

    We are going to get out of the City for a long weekend, and I think it is long overdue. I could be wrong on this, but I don’t believe we have slept outside of our apartment since June 2020. A good friend of ours has a little house upstate. It’s in a small subdivision of a neighborhood, and has all the feelings and trappings of suburban bliss, from about 1970. The family friend is out of town, and has offered the house to us. We jumped on the opportunity.

    When we stay at this house, or when we Airbnb/VRBO a house that is in a neighborhood, I play this game in my mind of wondering what my life would be like in the suburbs? I have lived in New York City now for fifteen years, and I am thoroughly City-ized. And by that, I mean, I can live in a very tiny space, and have people on top of me all the time. Having lots of space is now very foreign. Could I function with so much room?

    It reminds me of a story. We have some friends who used to live in NYC. They owned a small one-bedroom apartment, and when their kid was born, they knew they had to move. Very fortunate for them, their tiny apartment sold very well, which allowed them to move out to the country and buy a house. When we went to visit them after their move, their modest house was sparsely filled with furniture, and pictures on the wall. “We have more house than stuff,” they told us, “but we don’t want to buy stuff just to fill it up.” Their house is still scantly decorated.

    I think we would also have a home with nothing in it, a little Scandinavian Style. (You know I have an IKEA fascination, right?) I’m not excited about owning a house, but the older I get, I find myself wanting a yard. Well, a back yard actually. Not so much for me, but for the kid. A backyard and an imagination is a pretty awesome thing to have as a kid.

  • That Possible Space Probe: Oumuamua

    This has been one of my favorite stories to read of late, and if you aren’t aware, please check the wiki page. Even The New Yorker did a story on it. I just find it fun that we can have a scientific debate on the physics of this object moving through our solar system, and from the data, it is possible that the object was created and sent by intelligent beings from another planet.

    That’s pretty cool.

    From what I can tell from the data, Oumuamua was in the Neptune distance from the Sun around 2014, and it will leave our system in the 2023 ballpark. So, if this thing was sent by an intelligent being, it sure isn’t in a hurry. I would think that if I could send a craft to, let’s say for the sake of argument, a neighboring star, that I would have a little speed to it, so I would be able to appreciate the discovery. But maybe it was built with the idea that the information would make it to the next generation. They have other things to do while they wait for the data. Maybe…

    Or, maybe they saw us, and don’t want to have any part it. Maybe, having studied how humans behave, the aliens realized it was better to slowly “ghost” out of the system, because humans quickly forget stuff that isn’t in their face.

    You know, like when you walk into a store, get greeted by an employee, but then you realize that you should leave, but you still go through the motions of looking at stuff, so the employee forgets about you and then you can leave.

    Again, if it’s intelligent life, they would know that about us.