Whoa. Been a while.
My daughter asked me if there could be life out there besides us and if we would be "the aliens" if we found other life.
I showed her pictures from the Hubble deep field telescope and explained that our planet sits inside of a solar system, that sits inside of a galaxy like one of those in that picture. I tried to help her get an idea of how big everything around us is.
Then I responded to her question with a question: Do you think it's possible that other life might exist since our universe is so big with so many galaxies like ours?
I admitted that we probably couldn't ever encounter life because the distance between the stars is so vast and the window of opportunity to encounter other life capable of meeting us is so small. But, ironically, the opportunity for life to form elsewhere in this universe is enormous.
Her question got me to showing her videos and then I remembered a blog post that depicted the atmosphere in relationship to ground level. That got me thinking . . . I haven't blogged in a really good while.
I worry about a computer system that doesn't have any logs to report. It's too quiet. Seems like the logs ought to show something somewhere. I get nervous when I look at logs and don't see anything at all but a time stamp of the last reboot that happened half a year ago.
Anyway, that got me to looking over old posts. I remembered why I did this. It's not to entertain others-- though if that happens, that's an added bonus. I did this to clear my head and to create artifacts for me to find again years later so that I may reflect. In other words-- this is my diary of sorts. I see that totally ignoring this endeavor is a mistake even if blogging seems to have gone out of style (Thanks for that, Facebook-- and you too, Twitter).