Ever wonder why our solar system, and those we’ve observed so far, are mostly flat? This cool video gives you a quick explanation.
Lego Curiosity set available 1/1
Lego’s releasing set #21104, a replica of the Curiosity rover currently terrorizing Martians as it pokes, prods, and vaporizes the surface with its laser beam while they do their best to avoid its cameras 😉 . It’s available on January 1st for $30 from the Lego Store. What’s really cool though is that this set started life as a fan-designed model over at Cuusoo and was designed by one of the mechanical engineers who worked on the actual rover.
Voyager 1 in the news
Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object from Earth, has been in the news in recent days due to large changes in radiation levels it’s detected. This had led some to claim that it has exited our solar system, others aren’t so sure. I fall into that later category…we don’t fully understand things like that, and while the Voyager 1 probe is doing an amazing job of helping us learn, it’s only one data point. We’ll have to continue to monitor it along its journey.
You can read more about this over at Slashgear.
The Fermi Paradox
The Fermi Paradox is a fascinating argument…it basically says, if the probability of life is so high in this universe, as it appears to be, where are all the other civilizations? Why is there no evidence of their existence? It’s a puzzle for sure, especially as more and more planets are found orbiting other stars. We’ve already discovered 861, and scientists estimate there are about 100-400 billion planets in this galaxy, of which at least 17 billion are Earth-sized (not all of those habitable). Well, there’s a great article on IO9 (click here) that details eleven possible answers to the Fermi Paradox. My favorite – though it’s also the scariest – is that we’re living inside a sort of computer simulation, one that just wasn’t created to have the same level of detail in the entire universe.