Right now, as I write this, I am thinking about aliens. A few minutes before thinking about aliens and space colonization I was wondering about whether I should prepare paella tonight and have leftovers for the next two nights, and no cooking.
Isn’t the human brain a marvelous thing?
Dr. Stephen Hawking’s brain and his ideas on the universe have always fascinated me, at least those concepts I can grasp. Dr. Hawking is hot these days. There’s that wonderful movie about him called The Theory of Everything. I loved it.
Then, courtesy of one of the blogs I follow, Be Like Water, I found this Ted Talk by Dr. Hawking. ,http://belikewaterproduction.com/2014/12/06/knowledge-is-power-stephen-hawking-questioning-the-universe-science-is-awesome/
According to Dr. Hawking, if I understood his Ted Talk, there is a strong probability that a “few hundred light years” out there, there is a strong probability that there are alien civilizations. Dr. Hawking mentions probability quite a bit in his talks. I tune in to probability because, as both a teacher and a student, studying probability was “easy” for me. We flipped coins to figure out probability of getting heads or tails, and we played with dice to figure out somethingorother.
My favorite math problems were the ones about the probability of pulling out a chartreuse sock from a drawer filled with ten black socks, two chartreuse socks, and assorted single socks of lemon yellow, tan, navy and gray. I learned that, after washing, drying and sorting my laundry, the probability of my ending up with the same sock pairs that entered my hamper happily mated was highly improbable. Talk about everyday math.
According to Dr. Hawking, there is a strong probability that our human race may not survive the next one thousand or even one hundred years. He says we must explore space and consider colonization. I’m all for that. Maybe we’ll find the answers to some of his questions about the universe, and I might find some nice aliens wearing my long lost socks.
The Nothing Expert 
I liked this one. I think some of the aliens have already landed and have been living here for a while. I cannot be concerned with hundreds of years from now though unless someone invents an end to dying.
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