Today is the last day of Adv. Web Design, so I’m done here. I had a pretty good time writing for this blog. Sometime over the summer, I’ll set up another blog (host it myself with customized WordPress code so I have complete control). I’ll be sure to post a link here so all 2 your reading can migrate.

Space will continue, and the internet won’t die until the Earth collapses a couple million or billion years from now. By then, it will probably be replaced with some other interplanetary network. When I’m done blogging, everything will still be there.

Anyways, thanks for putting up with my rambling for the past few months, and maybe you will again sometime in the future!

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

British writer Douglas Adams (rest in piece) was pretty knowledgable about space.  He wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (origenaly a BBC radio show that later became “a trilogy in 5 parts”), one of the greatest science fiction series of all time.  This quote holds a lot of meaning to me.

While Adams humorously states the size of space, it is in reality gigantic.  Our galaxy, the Milky Way is pretty unremarkable, it’s about average size for a galaxy (roughly 100,000 light year diameter).  Our solar system, which we are nowhere near done fully exploring, is makes up only .0032% of the Milky Way.

Recap: Our solar system =.0032% of the Milky Way, an average sized galaxy.  How many galaxies are there in the universe?  Hubble scientists estimated 125 billion galaxies, but more recent research suggest there may be as many as 500 billion galaxies.  So our solar system’s place in the universe is give or take (a lot):

16/250,000,000,000,000,000

Humans can not even possibly comprehend this number, it is so tiny.  Our galaxy is nothing, not even a speck of dust on the face of the universe.  Our solar system is even less.  Then you factor in our planet, our country, our states and towns, and realize that we, as humanity, living on a single tiny planet, are nothing.

Now I’m getting to why aliens exist.  Yes, the odds of a planet having the right environment to foster life are extremely low, and even if a planet is capable of supporting life, odds are there isn’t anything on it.  However, when applied to a near-infinite scale, like the universe as we know it, there are many planets that will have life.  Most of these life forms will be bacteria or other non-sentient beings, and those that are sentient probably aren’t little green men in flying saucers.  However, it’s nice to know that somewhere on the road to the drug store, someone else is walking down the same path.

Today I went with an audio post, you can listen to it here:

Enjoy!

I love the song “Code Monkey” by Jonathan Coulton.  At first the lyrics seem to be pointless, a song about a web designer complaining about how he hates his boss and how the girl he likes at the front desk ignores him.  Unless you know about the song’s writer, it’s hard to see the true meaning in this song.

Jonathan Coulton is a Yale graduate who worked as a programmer for 12 years.  He hated his job, and hated working in an office, later saying “I was not a human, I was human resource.”  In 2005 he quit his job to make music full time.  He released a song per week for a year, gaining a following.  Valve Software asked him to write a song to play in the credits of their game “Portal.”  Portal became a huge sucess,  with the resulting song, “Still Alive” catapulting  Coulton to internet fame.  This was repeated in the recent Portal 2, with Jonathan’s new song “Want You Gone.”

Coulton expressed his feelings towards his former life in “Code Monkey.”  The titular Code Monkey feels more like an animal or a machine than a  human being.  No one truly cares about him, just about the code he writes.  In the end, he expresses his dreams of one day leaving the office, becoming a success and finally being happy.

Listen to Code Monkey here:

Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton, Creative Commons BY-NC licence

Screenshot of Space Engine by Matt Mawhiney

Space Engine is a universe simulator.  It uses the same basic technology as a variety of new video games to allow users to explore the universe.  Space engine is procedurally generated, meaning that the universe is not a single, saved file, because then it would be for too large to fit on any computer.  Instead, Space Engine includes a number of algorithms that tell the program how to generate the universe on the fly.  You’ll never be able to see the whole universe, so why bother including it all in the program?

You can download Space Engine here.

Be warned, Space Engine is only for Windows, and it requires a fairly powerful computer to run.