Space and Aliens

Hey all,

I've been browsing around the web, and i'm sure more than a few of you have hit upon an article about a certain theory called the "Fermi Paradox"

Wiki Link

Summed up? There are no other advanced civilizations... or just flat out life that we can see from out little blueberry of a planet... and we have been looking for quite awhile, with very powerful telescopes.



Fermi was just eating lunch when the question of "Where are all the civilizations of the galaxy?" was proposed. He said that we are such a young planet compared to the rest of the galaxy. We know this due to the fact that our sun is something like several billion years younger than other suns in the galaxy. Our sun is about 5 billion years old (link), and the supposed oldest star in the galaxy is about 14 billion years old (link), with the average star in our galaxy being around 6.3 billion years old.

Thats 1.3 BILLION years on average gap for the average star... 9 billion at most. Billion. Thats a freaking big number (1,000,000,000 years).

Next, we look at our own history. Ever since the first world countries got all industrialized, there has been an exponential boom of technology. Everything from a phone the size of a pinky to an elevator that goes into space, and that's just this lifetime.

So, if we are considered a young star... and there are so many other stars out there... and there isn't a civilization?

Fermi says that with this big boom of technology and a billion years head start, this advanced civilization should have shot out probes to every corner of the galaxy for colonization/exploration. Wouldn't you want to know just whats out there? So if there was a civilization, they would undoubtedly have found us, or we should have heard of them... so why haven't we?

The solutions were as follows:
1. They have been here already and are here.

I'm not big on alien conspiracies... theres no evidence for this in my opinion, sorry.

2. They dont care about us.

Kinda interesting. This is valid, they don't care about us and dont wanna talk, and we cant hear them. But.. im sure we would have caught something by now.

3. They were killed off.

Something happened that killed them off. So... like what? Theres an alien race out there, THE GROX!? Probably not, we haven't heard of them either..

Or maybe some sort of event that every civilization seems to hit. No way to really tell... but if you've watched enough sci-fi like me, you'll know the crazy shit that writers sometimes come up with. Sometimes its scary... because its plausible. Tapping into an alternate demension for energy?? Psh, yeah whatever. Trying to re-create the suns energy? You're crazy. But then again... we did figure out about atomic energy, and are currentley smashing particals together with the Large Hadron Colider (LHC) which creates miniature black holes (Don't worry, they aren't dangerous)
As small as they are, we are still doing something that makes goddamn black holes. What does the future hold there..? Did these other civilizations hit the same problem?

Or is it some natural force? Did a sun explode on them? Did a black hole suck em up? Did the planet explode? If there were remains, we probably couldnt see anyting (Space debris and such) since, as far as I know, you can really only see things that are lit up in the sky.

4. They never existed.

The certain climate and science behind creating life is so unique... that they never came to be. Makes sense... the only other planets in our system are only bigass rocks our gigantic gas balls, no life we know of can live there.

And... from what we see... the only planets we have found, which isn't too many really, are mostley all gas giants. So... we are the only unique place that life has exploded in.



So there you have it. Fermis Paradox.

A few other things to consider: Our telescopes cannot see super far, so we still have a lot to explore.

Its kinda freaky to think about... outside of the human race and all of its problems, we are all alone in the galaxy. There's just a lotttt of nothing out there.

Anyways, something for you to ponder...

Yours truly,

-Jake


The milky way, our galaxy. For those of you who live in light polluted areas, you can actually see the inner edge of the milky way in an area thats not very lighted. Such as an island or australia or desert... as well as most all the stars in the sky.

Video Madness

Hot on the heels of my "I'm returning!" post comes this, my first in hopefully many new innovations and posts and things I'm totally not ripping off other blogs no way no sir! I will share to you, my audience, videos from the bowels of the internet which I find to be amusing, interesting, or anything that otherwise catches my interest. Fun!

Today's video has been floating around for a while (over a year according to the Youtube page), but only recently came to my attention. Titled "Overdrift," this video is made of win and awesomesauce. It cleverly satires the ridiculous obsession with "drifting" that some underground racers and wannabe racers that enjoy playing "Need for Speed" seem to have. The video is about a guy who's brother seemingly disappears and dies during a drifting race 10 years ago, who now finds he has to fill his brother's shoes. As it turns out the protagonist's brother didn't die but drifted so hard he went into "Overdrift" and was transported to the D Dimension, the dimensions the dinosaurs fled to when they faced extinction, and also a place where they drift all the time. The protagonist discovers all this when his brother appears before him and tells him he has to fulfill the prophecy of the D Dimension and be the one who can cross between both worlds. More drifting and ridiculousness ensue.

The whole video is drifting between two different dimensions of ridiculous and clever at the same time (see what I did thar?), and is highly enjoyable. If you're someone like me and somehow missed out on it, I highly recommend you watch this video.

DUKE OUT!

-Joe

The Return!

First off screw my naming format! I'm done doing that. It was silly to begin with and I knew I'd break down eventually. More importantly, I'm actually going to try to blog again! Now that school's over and I'm graduating on Friday, I'll have a bit more time to myself...at least until I get a job, which my folks have been really pressuring me on, and for good reason. Tution for college is a whopping 22k a year, even with a 3k per year scholarship...yikes. As much as I need a job my laziness has been, as usual, interfering with that endeavor.

To spice things up, and make myself post a bit more often, I'm gonna try and come up with things to do on a weekly basis, one post of that format on a specific day. I'll start with maybe one or two, but if I can keep myself with it maybe continue with more. Off the top of my head I'll probably attempt to continue the New Music articles, and possibly the gaming ones as well. We'll see.

For now, here's to hoping for no more two month post-less periods!

-Joe

The Last Couple Days

So I've been sitting here, still Joe-less, for the past weekend.

Well, that's sort of inaccurate. I haven't been sitting much. Had an amazing bonfire over the weekend (We do that sometimes) and I also got up at eight thirty on saturday morning to sing the national anthem at a baseball field and then get owned by some fifth grader who sang "my country tis of thee". Sunday was a little better, though I had to take the Dalton home, and I was unreasonably pissed.

Today sucked.

However, I am one of those people that appreciates a terrible day, if it's so terrible it can be comical.

I'll give you the run-down:

Woke up at 12:45. Had breakfast in a bowl that I figured out too late was dirty. Went and got my guitarist, Justin. Got back just in time to take Stp out to the dentist for his appointment (I know you don't know any of these people. I'm doing this to spite you.), and waited a half an hour, beating Justin at Street Fighter IV in Gamestop. We got back to the house, and Stp and his female went to a corresponding love-making session upstairs while we sat and did nothing for a while. Eventually, we went to Dylan's. It was fun, for about fifteen minutes. Then his dad left. Dyl got in an argument / fight with his sister, who called the cops on him. Then Dylan got arrested. We had to wait in his house while his dad was going to get home, and then, when it was cleared up that his mom was going to go find him, we decided to leave. We went back to my house, where I went on 4chan and watched threads about people dying for an hour. I passed the time waiting to drop off Stp's female by being on my computer, again. At midnight, we left to take her home.

And when we came back, things started to change. Stp and I recorded another one of our very-old talk sessions (Which are absolutely hilarious, let me tell you...) and then, we got in contact with a pair of females.

Currently, one of said females is knocked out with her legs in my lap. The other female is next to me on the computer, watching Madigascar but too high to actually sit through it.

I don't smoke, so I'm sort of laughing at her.

Today got better, I suppose.

/Rant

For the record, you won't hear pointless bullshit about my life anymore, this is purely to keep me awake.

On Finishing Work (For the Moment)

I've finally managed to get the blog to a point where I like it (i.e. it looks good and performs the way I want it to), though it's hardly perfect and I'll definitely be revisiting it at a later point. I'd like to thank the folks over at Blogger Templates and The Blog Doctor for the template of the blog and the little bit of coding I did on the site in order to make things cleaner.

"So what took you so long???" you may be asking me.

Well, I felt that the original, Blogger provided template, while very nice, was a bit lacking. So I decided to browse the various corners of the interwebs in order to find a design that I thought looked good, fit the basic "theme" of the blog, and functioned properly. Though there were many, many blog templates I liked quite a bit, not all of them were very easy to mess with the HTML, and some didn't even work at all. Often times it was simply an issue of formatting in accordance with the change to the HTML that made the template simply not work. Granted this could all be problems on my end, but I don't know nearly enough to make any sweeping edits to the blog. Ultimately, this format ended up being one that I liked and worked just the way I want it to. 

"But what is it exactly that was so tricky that caused you to have to work for so long on fixing it?" you may continue to ponder. 

Well you see, with my rather long and rambling posts, particularly my review posts, the front page can get really cluttered and reaaaally long. So in order to fix this problem, I looked up how to make the posts EXPANDABLE!!! (oh shnaps)

Basically, every time one of us here at TEOI (see what I did thar?) makes a long, long post, it will be split into two sections. You, the reader, will be able to see the first chunk of the post as normal, but in order to see the next section, you must click the "Read More -->" link at the bottom of each post. Unfortunately I don't know how to only put that link on posts that actually have more to read, so we'll have to figure out a system here in order to inform you on which posts do have things to read on.

To other authors: there's basic instructions set in the text of each post by default in order to let you know where to write in order to use the "Read More" link. It isn't anything painful to deal with, I promise.

To readers: ROCK ON

-Joe

On Responses To Rik

The blog's only been barren 'cos I've been trying to fix and upgrade the damn thing, hehe. I've been having a bunch of complications with different layouts and formats that both look good and do what I want them to do in order to keep the front page of the blog clean and smooth.

Any ideas or recommendations for templates would be much appreciated, and can be emailed to me here.

(Whoa shortest post made by me ever!)

Need to post something....

This blog has become so barren in the past week.

Announcements:

1. Joe should be coming over my house this weekend. We'll make at least one post.

2. I give up on girls. (Waiting now.)

3. Today's music:

1. I am Ghost- Dark Carnival of the Immaculate

2. Thrice- Digital Sea

3. Bomb the Music Industry!- My Response to an Article in Alternative Press

I'm too lazy to look these up. Be inventive.

On Site Maintenance

First of all, I lol'd really hard at the above picture when I was looking up something to use for this post. You can't not look at it and giggle a little bit.

Anyways, I'm planning on doing some work on the blog in order to make things a bit smoother, more condensed, easier to read, etc. etc. As it is right now, with my ridiculously long posts, one has to scroll for ages to reach the older articles, and that's no fun. Also, I'm not really a fan of the font right now 'cos it seems to be just a bit too small. And I already changed this, but I moved the author for each post to the top, so the reader can immediately see that "Oh no, Joe's making another post on stupid stuff, I'm gonna skip it and go read one of Rik's things/Yogo's reviews/Jake's rants!"

I'll be looking into this and more, possibly trying to customize the site a little bit and make it look a bit cooler and more unique. So if you (the reader) have any suggestions you'd like to put forth, feel free to go ahead and leave me a suggestion in the comment's section. And other authors...please don't go overboard with ridiculousness while I do said tweaking. Danke.

On Haircuts

So. Yesterday I got my hair cut. First of all, I usually keep my hair medium-long, and I like it that way, so I didn't really get much cut off. Texturizing, or some crazy shit like that. Basically I was just getting it "cleaned up" or something similar. Point is, I got some hair removed and paid a woman to do so.

But I'm not here to talk about the actual haircut (I think my hair is fugly half the time anyways). I'm actually here to talk about the goddam mirror.

Seriously, when you're sitting in that barber's chair, you have nothing to do but to stare into that freaking mirror in front of you while your barber person thing does their work. Sure, you can make some small talk with the person, but especially when you're a person like me, a socially awkward white teenage boy, the conversation will eventually fall to silence and you're back to just looking at that mirror, listening to oftentimes thoroughly blah pop songs on the radio over the sound of electric razors.

Let me tell you, those mirror's can e entrancing, mystifying, but they are above all a self-esteem test. Looking into a mirror like that makes you really see all the various flaws in your face. I found myself thinking "My cheeks look chubby; Does one of my eyes always sorta squint like that? Goddammit there's those symmetrical moles again!" I couldn't help but analyze every aspect of my face in some sorta negative light. I never realized my chin looked the way it does!

As soon as one steps away from the mirror, however, things seem to go back to normal as all your focus is taken off of your face. But goddam it's a powerful force. I swear it's all a conspiracy! You go to the barber's and they do a little with your hair, this and that and then it's all OHMAGAWD I need to go buy some skin care products or some lotion or this and that and blah blah blah. It's all "The Man" trying to get you to buy more stuff!

Luckily I'm just too smooth to fall for such ploys.

Rik's Required Listening: Issue One.

Alright, I've determined that I need something to talk about.

So, as a result, I'm going to come up with required listening every day. Three songs that will change how you look at the world for just that day. You can listen to all three, just one, or anywhere in between.

The first three are:

Bluejuice - Vitriol (pious edit) [off of The Zen List, volume two]

Nine Inch Nails - Where is Everybody? [off of Things Falling Apart]

Incubus - Follow [off of Halo II, though there is a version with words which, in my opinion is better.]

Have a great (and strangely wonderful) day. =]