Black Holes

Black Holes

Black holes were foreseen in 1783, John Michell postulated that an invisible star could be massive enough to trap light, so called Dark Stars. The idea, expressed only in a Royal Society letter, remained largely unconsidered for a decade. In 1798, Henry Cavendish,...
Breaking The Great Silence

Breaking The Great Silence

Cosmologists often speak of The Great Silence. If the prospects for extraterrestrial life are so high in the vastness of the Universe, why aren’t we hearing anything from any of our neighbors? At the risk of sounding an unwarranted note of paranoia, it is possible our...
The Great Filter

The Great Filter

In the 1990’s the economist and futurist Robin Hanson coined the phrase The Great Filter as a speculative answer to the Fermi Paradox, the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial civilizations existing in our vast universe and the...