All we are, is passages, avenues through which other people travel. We are each others’ byways, highways, continuously passing through each others’ lives. Passengers, drivers, hitchhikers all.
Dear Diary – April 30, 1999
February 20, 2026
Life on Trappist 1e?
September 12, 2025
In two separate papers published Monday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers zeroed in on the TRAPPIST-1 system, which consists of seven rocky planets that orbit a single star. Both studies outlined initial results from observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, suggesting that one planet in particular, known as TRAPPIST-1e, may have a nitrogen-rich atmosphere like Earth’s, though follow-up studies are needed to confirm the discovery.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/trappist1e-atmosphere-extraterrestrial-life-planet-earth-conditions-rcna229839
Trappist 1e is in the “Goldilocks zone” in orbit around its star (i.e., not too cold, not too hot, just right). However, the Webb telescope can’t determine whether its atmosphere has any carbon dioxide, hydrogen, or oxygen, only nitrogen. Yet nitrogen is a clear sign that life is possible, because without nitrogen, DNA and other proteins are not possible. Of course, it could be simply a whole lot of microbes. Or even just ammonia.
Closer to home, the Mars rover Perseverance has found evidence of life in the distant past. Maybe. It found evidence that certain rock features may have happened because of microbes.
May.
That’s how science works, folks. A whole lot of maybes.
(I still think we need more catchy names for the Trappists. I mean, come on.
Today’s quote
April 13, 2024
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed. And when you’re older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Charlie “Casey” Stengel
Today’s quote
March 25, 2024
Life is a mask through which the universe expresses itself.
Frank Herbert, The Children of Dune
Easy question. Easy answer.
February 7, 2024
LIfe.
I need a break from life.
Just let me hide in a cabin in the mountains with coffee and WIFI and a laptop for writing.
That’s it.
A writing prompt that almost answers itself
February 4, 2024
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
I would say “yes.”
How?
Failure influences my perspective on life.
Successes influence my perspective on life.
Deaths influence my perspective on life.
Births influence my perspective on life.
Travel influences my perspective on life.
I would list the above five as “significant events” in life. But “the passage of time” is a little more vague.
Four years doesn’t seem like a long time to me now, but it sure did when I was 18.
Even six years doesn’t seem all that long now. But to my daughter who graduates from elementary school this March, six years is half her life.
My perspective on this question is that it’s the people in my life that have changed my perspective.
Even my daughter gets this. She wants to visit Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the US again because, as she put it, “a little piece of me is still there.”
But that’s just her perspective. Or is it?
Dear Diary – May 20, 1998
December 4, 2023
All the answers, like the questions, are in here. Life has no meaning, I give it meaning and by doing so, seek to define it. But Life cannot be trapped; it is not an animal or emotion so easily caged, sated, confused, or led. It has a Will all its own, and Its Will merely Is. No thinking, no deliberation or pontification. No grandeur, no sweeping generalizations.
Is.
Dear Diary – August 19, 2004
September 23, 2023
[Note to self – it’s probably not a coincidence that so many of my better diary entries were written in August. I obviously have more time to think and write at that time of year!]
What strange turns my life has taken. Never would I have in a million years expected to be here, now, in this apartment, typing on an extended keyboard into a Japanese computer, in a Japanese city, listening to the same Cure tape I was listening to back in 1996. Has it actually been 8 years?
Ten years ago I was playing role playing games and drinking in Robbins lounge, getting ready to pack everything I owned into a moving van to move to Ann Arbor. A city I didn’t know, with no money for deposit or rent, or a job. Without a clue. Totally hopeless. Instead of exploring the city, I stayed in my bedroom and played games or typed. What was I thinking? I can’t even get in touch with the few people I met there. Even the ones I knew at ND are either gone back where they came from or no longer answer my emails.
I can still picture them all in my mind. I can still see the rooms I lived in, all the way back home. Even the freshman dorm room which no longer exists, since they tore the building down. How can that be?
It must be this which makes us human; the ability to take the visual and turn it into mental. The capacity to make emotional connections between the world outside and the world inside. The belief that there are two worlds. This makes us human, and at the same time it makes us separate. It is a false belief, that we are not of the outside. Yet there is no returning. Once we start, we can never stop. Even changing languages doesn’t help. We merely start over again from a new perspective, still outside the outside.
Another James Webb discovery: UV actually helps life
July 3, 2023
For the first time ever, a team of international scientists detected a carbon compound known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on), or CH3+, in d203-506. CH3+ is significant for understanding how life began on Earth — and how it might develop elsewhere.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/jwst-spots-a-molecule-vital-to-life-in-protoplanetary-disk/
Ultraviolet radiation (UV) is known for destroying complex carbon-based molecules. But could it also provide the energy for them to exist?
Another James Webb discovery: UV actually helps life
July 3, 2023
For the first time ever, a team of international scientists detected a carbon compound known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on), or CH3+, in d203-506. CH3+ is significant for understanding how life began on Earth — and how it might develop elsewhere.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/jwst-spots-a-molecule-vital-to-life-in-protoplanetary-disk/
Ultraviolet radiation (UV) is known for destroying complex carbon-based molecules. But could it also provide the energy for them to exist?
M Thomas Apple Author Page 