Debbie Roth > Recent Status Updates

But we’ve read some Hogg, some James, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which offended everybody. It’s set on Skye and there’s hardly a Scotsman in it. It’s a particularly English talent, that. The ability to visit foreign places and yet always think of yourself as the most interesting thing there.

Dr. Tyson…is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, where he has served since 1996…also the host and cofounder of the popular Emmy-nominated podcast StarTalk. He is a recipient of twenty-seven honorary doctorates, the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, and the Distinguished Public Service Medal from NASA. Asteroid 13123 Tyson is named in his honor.

If I ever go missing during a night of observing with my telescope, don't look for me on Earth. Look up to the stars, because that's where I'll be. With the Aliens…I might also have gleaned from the Aliens some knowledge…and insight that we all want-that we all need—for civilization to survive its own forces of self-extinction…it may be we who rocket to faraway…planets, becoming the Aliens their legends are made of.

Strong beliefs convince you to think something is true not only in the absence of objective evidence, but also in the face of confounding evidence. The existence of Aliens on Earth has an uncounted number of believers, even though nobody has ever credibly brought forth an Alien for examination by astrobiologists and other scientists.

One of the many features of science that distinguishes it from other human pursuits is that we establish objective truths not by swearing with your right hand in the air while taking an oath…we don't even pinky-swear. We..present the evidence…our analysis…for review by colleagues…it becomes their duty to find any flaws in the methods and tools that acquired the data, and in the reasoning behind the conclusions.

Based on circumstantial evidence, I have concluded that pure biologists make bad astrobiologists. Earth-based life so preoccupies them that thinking outside the box-or rather, outside the sphere-can be a challenging, if not impossible, task for them. In 1996, NASA announced the possibility of microfossil life on a meteorite that was traceable to Mars, based on the analysis of air trapped in pockets within the rock.

In 1998, UFO researcher Ann Druffel published How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction. I bought her book with my own money and blatantly flouted all advice it offered, like, avoid driving alone at night on an isolated country road. Disappoingly, I remain unabducted.

In science, there's no such thing as a credible claim or a credible witness, only credible evidence.

Even Leonardo da Vinci knew five centuries ago that: The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

We would later understand the stability of the solar system through the work of French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in the early nineteenth century. He developed a branch of calculus called "perturbation theory," which allowed a full analysis and understanding of how the flying circus of planets, moons, and comets can remain in stable orbits around the Sun.

Most famous, perhaps, is Medusa, an Earth Alien if there ever was one. Apart from her snake hair, if she simply looked at you, you'd turn to stone. Hero Perseus slayed her with his sword by taking aim via her reflection on the inner surface of his polished shield. Apparently, reflections neutralize the stone-stare. These are the stories that get written when you have no understanding of physics.

Science senses are stimuli to which human physiology is mostly or entirely oblivious…A partial list includes the detection of electromagnetic energy beyond what our retinas see: radio waves, microwaves, infra-red, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. With high sensitivity, we can detect and measure Earth tremors, magnetic fields, and ionizing radiation…We can measure the polarization of light.

There are only four forces in the universe: the "strong nuclear force," which holds atomic nuclei and nuclear particles together; the "weak nuclear force," which mitigates radioactive decay; the "electromagnetic force," which controls all interactions of atoms, molecules, and light energy in the universe; and, of course, the force of gravity. All molecules in the universe are assembled from atoms…

…the unit of volume would simply be the Planck length cubed. The unit of speed would be the Planck length divided by the Planck time. The Planck length is 1.6 x 10-35 meters. The Planck mass is 6.14 x 10-9 kilograms. And the Planck time is 5.4 x 10-44 seconds…Planck gave us a means to measure the universe, right alongside Alien scientists.

Now imagine, if you can, Aliens 5 percent, 10 percent, or even 25 percent more intelligent, along the same vector that places us 2 percent above chimps. For all we know, they created Earth as a literal aquarium-terrarium for their own amusement.

The evolutionary clarion call of “survival of the fittest” is not synonymous with survival of the smartest. Otherwise, modern cockroaches, who trace from Earth’s Cretaceous period 100 million years ago, 2 would be among the smartest creatures on Earth. The question remains: Who declared that humans are intelligent? Answer: Humans did. There’s that hubris again, an ego boosting itself.

In spite of what we think of ourselves, the Aliens might notice that to bacteria, we are simply dark, anaerobic vessels of fecal matter whose purpose is to sustain a vibrant gut biome. The subject of Aliens occupied many episodes of the original Twilight Zone television series (1959–1964)…My favorite episode among them, “The Invaders” (1961), portrays a rustic, middle-aged woman living alone in a small…farm home.

“Goldilocks Zone” of star systems: if a planet orbits too close to its host star, heat from the star will evaporate its waterways and oceans; if the planet orbits too far, the water freezes…Jupiter’s moon Europa sits far outside of the Sun’s Goldilocks Zone. Yet under a thick layer of insulating ice sits a moon-wide ocean of liquid water, kept warm by tidal stress induced by Jupiter and other moons.

Katy Perry, among her nine number one hits, released a song in 2010 titled “E.T.” for her third studio album, Teenage Dream. That track contains multiple suggestive lines among its fifteen stanzas in which she imagines an Alien encounter. My two favorites are “Stun me with your laser” and “I wanna… be there when you vibrate.” Either it’s all metaphor, or she simply wants to bone the Alien.

Rick drags Morty, his pubescent grandson, on these adventures as they encounter Alien life-forms that would make the Burgess Shale proud. We see not only morphological diversity, but biological and behavioral diversity as well. The writers clearly enjoyed all their science classes in high school and college.

The unique composition of the Burgess Shale enabled it to preserve records of soft tissue in countless aquatic animal species from 500 million years ago, just after the Cambrian Explosion of life. This special place on Earth was the focus of the 1989 bestselling book Wonderful Life, written by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Think of Take Me to Your Leader as a book of etiquette and insights for your next close encounter, or perhaps a scientifically infused user’s manual with helpful hints from an astrophysicist who wants to meet the Aliens as badly as you do.

We know the size of the observable universe—more than 90 billion light-years across. We know the age of the universe—13.8 billion years. We know how many galaxies it contains—as many as a trillion. We know how many stars populate those galaxies—approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten sextillion),

The girl with short raven-black hair watched him from a distance, perched on the hood of an aging BMW produced three decades before she was born, cigarette dangling from her tattooed fingers. He seemed too preoccupied to notice her…she could hear the vehicle take three tries to start. She took a drag of her Marlboro and watched him through a veil of smoke, squinting as she memorized his license plate.

Fisk swiped and turned it around again. “Do you recognize this man?” Naji studied the device. “Yes. He’s Mullah Farj.” “Do you know where he lives?” Naji glanced at Walker, who nodded. “This is how we get you out of here. That’s the deal.”

“Do the police have any leads?” “Yes.” “Then why do you need me?” “Because they were in on it.”

This resonates today!

Now Roman is to Roman More hateful than a foe, And the Tribunes beard the high, And the Fathers grind the low. As we wax hot in faction, In battle we wax cold: Wherefore men fight not as they fought In the brave days of old.—Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Horatius”

The plot is intricate, but after an investigation that Nigel Derry describes as “tireless and brilliant,” Blampignon finally makes sense of everything that has happened, while emphasising in the closing words that the vital lead was indeed the “telegram from Le Touquet.”

he opines that: “In nine cases out of ten, the solution to the problem posed by a murder case is to be found in the character of the victim.” This theory is ultimately vindicated when he uncovers the truth...At 11.45 a.m. on Friday, April 22nd, a woman drives out of the Customs sheds at Boulogne Maritime. Four days later…the dead body of this woman is discovered in a trunk some eight hundred miles away.

Tomorrow I’ll…ask him what happened that night. I’ll tell him what Ms. Dahl saw, how she identified him digging that hole in the cemetery…even if they exhume Kylie’s body, any forensic evidence will be gone by now.