Kittens remind us what it feels like to experience pure joy in discovering the world.
July 10 is National Kitten Day, and what better way to inspire people to adopt and help relieve pressure on shelters than by showing photos of kitten Bud to prove how cute these little guys can be?
Even as a kitten, Buddy was dashingly handsome and had huge muscles! Top image: My mom holds Bud and my niece, who were both babies at the time.
Hiding in my sneakers. Jumping on my head and biting my feet while I’m trying to sleep. Zooms at every ungodly hour imaginable. Boxing his own reflection in the mirror. Inexplicably destroying large objects around the house despite his tiny size and weight. “Fighting” enemies on the screen while I’m trying to play video games. Being obsessed with nursing from my right earlobe.
Those are just some of Bud’s charming behaviors from kittenhood. I miss those days of curiosity, extreme playfulness and adventure.
While I would like to adopt an overlooked adult cat in the future because it’s much more difficult for them to find homes, I would not trade my experience with Kitten Bud for anything.
Perhaps best of all is seeing the pure joy and wonder expressed by a kitten who plays in snow for the first time, discovers the fun of playing with guitar strings or figures out how much fun it is to startle his human by sneaking up ninja-like and giving him a horror movie jump scare.
Everything is new and exciting to a kitten, and it’s an amazing thing to see and participate in. Kitten energy is happy energy.
My first real camping trip ended in disaster, though thankfully without any injury besides wounded pride, after an encounter with a ravenous bear.
The bear was outside my tent.
Its moans cut through the night above the cricket song and I could see its distorted shadow cast against the fabric by the dying fire as it circled our camp.
Something ripped — the canvas of one of our packs, I later learned when daylight revealed the carnage outside — and there was a loud crunch of ursine teeth against plastic packaging and the styrofoam of an egg container.
Then my friend Larry did what he’d been doing all night: he raised a ruckus by banging pots and pans, scaring the 500-pound animal away. Temporarily.
The bear’s breathy vocalizations faded into the distance. After a few minutes I breathed a sigh of relief. I had to pee so badly, worse than I’d ever had to go in my life, but there was no way in hell I was stepping out of my tent. Then I heard the air horn from the campsite a mile or two away.
The bear was making its circuit again. I was still too scared to leave my tent.
An adult male American black bear, the species I encountered in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
How we blundered into a bear
Larry was a family friend and outdoorsman. Since my brother and I were kids of a single mom it had become something of a tradition for Larry to take us and others on annual camping trips every summer. Without Larry, who was the closest thing to a father I’ve had, we would have never known what it was like to tell scary stories by a fire, hook a fish from a river or navigate rapids while whitewater rafting.
That year we headed upstate to the Adirondacks with the aim of climbing Mount Marcy, the highest peak in New York.
Most people think of New York City when they think of our state, and the city and its environs were what I was familiar with. But New York is a big state and once you get north of the suburbs it’s almost entirely rural. If randomly blindfolded and dropped in the middle of the Adirondack mountains, few people would guess they were in New York.
We arrived at the ranger station, registered our destination and set off. Why we didn’t know about the bear I cannot say, but we found out later he was notorious. The rangers were well aware of him, and he was the reason why, after hiking for some 15 miles to Marcy Dam, we saw dozens of packs hanging from the dam itself, fastened to the metal safety railings.
That was our second opportunity to learn about the bear, but when we saw the packs we just shrugged and made our way further in to find a good spot for camp.
After the day-long hike we hurried to set up our tents and got a fire going before sundown, then made dinner. When you’re camping — real camping, not the drive-up KOA camping that’s really an excuse to get drunk with your buddies — you do two things to keep critters out of your camp: you hang your packs from a tree with a sturdy branch, and you dump any leftovers several hundred feet away.
So when my brother and my friend Richie went to go dump the leftover mac and cheese, they came back white-faced.
“Larry! Larry!” they shouted. “There’s a bear!”
Larry shook his head.
“You didn’t see a bear,” he said, laughing.
“But we did!”
Larry didn’t believe them, and I didn’t either. Until I was ripped out of sleep by the sound of a prime specimen of ursus americanus tearing through our camp, helping himself to our food.
Black bears aren’t aggressive in the same way their ursine brethren can be, but they can still be exceptionally dangerous. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
I cannot tell you how many times the bear came back that night, or how many return trips it took him to consume every last morsel of food we brought with us.
What I can say for certain is that he spent the majority of the night making a loop between our camp and two others, including the camp with the air horn.
I was already a bit freaked out even before the bear invited himself into our camp. I had never been in true wilderness before. I never knew night could be so dark, nor had I ever been to a place where there wasn’t even a hint of the ambient glow of a city on the horizon.
I tried to convince myself that the thin fabric of my tent somehow afforded protection the same way a child terrified of ghosts or monsters convinces himself his blanket can shield him from the supernatural. Every kid knows the monsters can’t get you if you’re under your blanket.
By the time the bear came around for the second time that night, I had to piss like a racehorse. I toyed with the idea of slipping out ninja-like for a stealth draining, but who was I kidding? I was too terrified to move.
I thought of urinating every few seconds. I dreamed about it. In the video game The Legend of Zelda, which I played a lot as a kid, there are hidden lakes on the map where fairies restore your health. Your character, Link, says “Ah! Refreshing!” as you’re healed.
I dreamed I was Link stepping to the edge of a lake, where a fairy kindly invited me to urinate.
“Ah!” I said as I emptied my bladder. “Refreshing!”
For a few glorious moments, it was real. It was so good.
Then I woke up and I was back in the tent with a full bladder and the bear outside, tearing his way through our gear in search of every last bag of peanuts and stick of beef jerky.
“Ah! Refreshing!”
I know what you’re thinking because I thought it too. I reached a hand down just to be sure. I was dry. In a way I wished I had peed myself. At least it would be over.
Larry was banging the pots and pans again, and a few minutes later the familiar air horn cut through the night, giving us a temporary reprieve. The bear was someone else’s problem for the next 20 or 30 minutes as he made his rounds to raid the other campsites.
The post apocalypse
The long night finally relented. Birds began tweeting, the sun came over the horizon, and our ordeal was over.
I poked my head out of the tent, then ran to the nearest tree and recreated Niagara Falls in miniature for what felt like an eternity. Sweet relief!
Then I noticed the carnage.
It was actually even more of a mess than this!
Every pack we’d left hanging from a nearby tree had been shredded. The torn fabric and zipper remnants swayed in the breeze, still attached to the ropes around the tree branch. Potato chip bags had been popped with bear teeth and crunched along with their contents, then spat back out. The ground was strewn with egg shells, and all that was left of the bacon was half a plastic wrapper.
The entire area was dusted with powdered milk. Remnants of graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows were scattered in the dirt. In a horrifying display of casual strength, the bear had split a Coleman cooler in half to get at the raw hot dogs and hamburgers inside . There were the barely recognizable remnants of a box of Lucky Charms. And one pack was left intact except for the smallest zipper pouch, which had been clawed open for the handful of granola bars inside.
I stared at it, amazed that an animal could smell food in sealed plastic wrappers inside a canvas rucksack.
We broke camp quickly because we had to go back to civilization. There was no other option: we had no food left.
When we returned to the ranger station, Larry spoke to one of the rangers, who said the other campers were hanging their packs from the dam because the notorious bear had learned how to cut down packs hanging from trees. Just like it did to our gear. Then he reminded Larry why it’s a good idea to have those conversations before you venture into the woods.
It was the most terrifying night of my life, but as an adult I just shake my head and smile whenever I think about it. And all these years later, when I wake up in the middle of the night and stumble to the bathroom, Bud in tow, I still shake off the last drops, sigh, and whisper “Ah, refreshing!”
Note:Every damn word of this is true, or at least as accurate as it can be when experienced through the eyes of a 10-year-old and recalled all these years later. It eventually occurred to me that Larry must have been terrified, if not for himself, then for the fact that he had someone else’s kids with him. I know I’d be crapping bricks if I’d taken my brother’s kids camping and an unreasonably clever bear wouldn’t leave us alone. I told this story to my nieces one night, and instead of having a bit of sympathy, they think it’s absolutely hilarious that their dad and uncle were terrorized by a black bear during a camping trip. Their favorite part is my dream of being Link from The Legend of Zelda and joyfully peeing into a lake. Apparently my misfortunes are rich comedic material for them.
We’ve now officially joined our European friends in deep summer, with an oppressive heat dome settling over the central and eastern US ahead of the July 4 weekend:
My extended family’s July 4 cookout is starting to look more like it’ll be a cook-in, pool or no pool. I think I’ll sit inside and watch baseball, thank you very much!
On behalf of Bud and myself, I hope everyone is taking it easy and staying indoors as much as possible.
For our friends in the New York area, you already know what the deal is: sticky, soupy heat from the high humidity that is the trademark of our summers.
Of course our furry friends have it even worse in this weather. Imagine having a jacket you cannot remove in humid 100 degree heat! Even Bud, a domestic shorthair, has modified his sleeping habits, snoozing next to my head with a paw on my hand instead of draping himself over me like he usually does.
Here’s to hoping everyone stays safe, hydrated and lazy this holiday weekend!
Buddy the Brave covered himself in glory by not being afraid of the fireworks.
The park across from Casa de Buddy is the site of our town’s annual fireworks display and I was a bit apprehensive about the Budster’s reaction this year.
The fireworks are so close that you can both hear and feel their percussive booms inside, but Bud’s been hearing them every year since kittenhood. The first few years I stayed inside with him to make sure he was okay, and to let him see how relaxed I was.
It’s never been a problem.
However, we are talking about a cat who sometimes freaks out at the rustling of a paper bag, and over the past year or two he’s become a little more sensitive. I attribute that to old age.
The fireworks here are no joke:
I gave Bud some grinded-up catnip, knowing that it calms him because he eats the stuff instead of just sniffing and rolling in it like civilized cats do. Then I waited until the explosions began, saw no visible reaction from Bud, and went outside to join everyone else.
When I got back, Bud was splayed out on the floor without a care in the world. He poked his head up as if to say “Ah, there were fireworks today, human? I hadn’t noticed!”
The Budster’s still got it!
We had our town’s fireworks today, I presume, because there are a metric crapton of July 4 events this year, and a neighboring town is known for their world class fireworks display which is always the night of. I still appreciate our display: it’s paid for by a local mom-and-pop business that is extraordinarily generous with the community.
Anyway, what could be more ‘Merican than celebrating our nation’s birthday by blowing things up? ‘Merica!
That’s easy: first contact with an alien civilization.
I’m a space and science fiction fanatic. I mainline science fiction novels, keep tabs on the latest discoveries via the JWST, and I think about what’s out there probably more than I should.
There’s a burning desire in our hearts — for some of us, at least — to know for sure that we’re not the only ones, that humanity is not alone in a cold, lonely and infinite universe.
The events of 2026 are testament to that desire to know. Between the government release of UFO-related documents, former government employees coming forward with tall tales of crashed ships of non-terrestrial origin, and the return of Steven Spielberg to the director’s chair for another film speculating about what’s Out There, we’ve been thinking about aliens quite a bit collectively.
As for that central question, I’m not talking about simple cellular life. I don’t think you can find an astrophysicist, astrobiologist, astronomer, evolutionary biologist or anyone in a tangentially related field who honestly thinks life is unique to our planet.
The more relevant question is whether we are the sole sapient species, the lone civilization in our galaxy.
Credit: CaptainFrank/Pexels
Think about the numbers: There are an estimated 300 billion star systems and trillions of planets in the Milky Way! Life has had a lot of places to evolve.
The Fermi paradox
That was the point the physicist Enrico Fermi made in 1950, when he had a now-famous lunchtime conversation with fellow scientists at Los Alamos. Probability alone indicates the galaxy should be teeming with life.
So, he asked his colleagues, where is everyone?
It’s now known as the Fermi paradox, and it’s guaranteed to come up in almost every conversation about the possibility of intelligent aliens. With so many star systems, planets and moons, surely some other species took an evolutionary path toward intelligence.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. In a universe that is 13.7 billion years old, there has been enough time for innumerable species to evolve and fade, for countless empires to rise and fall. That means the question is “When is everyone?” just as much as it’s “Where is everyone?”
The truth is we’ve only been looking in earnest for about half a century. It’s only in the last four or five decades that we’ve had telescopes like the Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler and James Webb, which have revolutionized astronomy by giving us views we could previously only dream of.
It was only in the 90s that astronomers pointed the venerable Hubble at a black, seemingly empty patch of space, took a two week exposure and changed our understanding of the cosmos forever when the resulting image showed some 10,000 galaxies that were too faint to see before.
That patch covered only 2.6 arc minutes, or 1/24 millionth of the sky!
A partial image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Credit: NASA
Despite what we’ve learned, we’ve barely begun the search for other intelligent civilizations.
Drawing any conclusions from our efforts so far would be like organizing a manhunt, then calling it off five seconds later because the suspect hasn’t been caught yet. Fifty years is nothing when scouring the cosmos. It’s less than an eyeblink of an eyeblink on a galactic scale.
Looking in the wrong place
As for the idea that aliens have visited us, that they crossed the interstellar void to etch patterns in our crops, delight stoners with light shows and evade every camera on the planet except for low resolution bricks from the dawn of the cell phone era, I’m not buying it. Neither should anyone else. Likewise for the claim by the JD Vances of the world insisting alleged UFOs are “demons” sent to torment us.
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is abundantly clear that the UFO enthusiast community can only offer blurry images not because of a lack of high resolution cameras, but because high res photos of the “phenomena” reveal they are mundane objects. They only become strange spacecraft when you blur them and squint.
Bird. Insect close to the camera. Exhaust plume. Debris. Visual artefact. Maybe. Proof of aliens? Absolutely not.
But there’s another, more important reason why aliens are not joyriding through our skies: if aliens are out there, there simply has not been enough time for them to become aware of our existence, let alone travel here.
Even light is “slow” on a galactic scale
As most of us know, when we look at the stars we’re seeing them as they were in the past, not as they are now. That’s because the distances between stars are so mind-bogglingly great that even light, which moves faster than anything in our universe, takes ages to cross the void.
The same limitation applies for anyone who might be looking in our direction from somewhere else in the galaxy. They see our star system as it was, not as it is. They see a silent star system without signs of an intelligent civilization.
Starliners and generation ships are popular concepts in science fiction for interstellar journeys that can take decades, centuries or longer.
Our galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across, so let’s say an intelligent alien race exists relatively close by in galactic terms, at “only” 500 light years away.
We have been a technological civilization for only a short time and didn’t create signals powerful enough to reach beyond our star system until the 1970s, according to SETI. That means there weren’t technosignatures hinting at our presence until about 50 years ago.
As a result, the soonest our hypothetical aliens could become aware we exist is about 450 years from now. That is how long it will take light carrying information about our technosignatures to reach them.
If our hypothetical alien friends are looking in our direction (a massive if in a galaxy with 300 billion stars to analyze), and if they have highly advanced telescopes, they might detect us. If we imagine they’re friendly and they send a message saying “Howdy, neighbors! You’re not alone! There are wonders to discover and many civilizations to meet out here!” it would take another 500 years for the message to reach us.
That means we wouldn’t know anything until around the year 3,000, if we survive that long without blowing ourselves up. (That’s a real possibility, and things aren’t looking very promising right now.)
And again, that’s if hypothetical intelligent aliens exist in our immediate galactic neighborhood. If there’s an intelligent civilization that exists, say, 4,000 light years away — which is still not very far in galactic terms — the soonest we could hear from them is about 8,000 years from now. (Four thousand for them to detect our technosignatures, four thousand for their message to reach us.)
The point is, space is big. Ridiculously, incomprehensibly, stupidly vast. More than 99.995 percent of the galaxy cannot be aware of our existence yet, let alone travel here, because of the reasons explained above.
The distances between stars are so great that we cannot comprehend them as they are, because nothing in human experience compares. We can only understand them in the abstract. As terrestrial animals with short lives, we are simply not equipped to live or think on galactic timescales.
The sun’s location within the Milky Way galaxy. Not to scale.
To put this in context another way, our closest stellar neighbor, a volatile triple star system, is 4.3 light years away. Yet even with the most advanced propulsion systems currently available to us, it would take us more than 70,000 years to get there!
If we manage to crack fusion and humanity’s most brilliant engineers are able to fit a starship with a compact fusion reactor, the travel time to the nearest star becomes “only” about 7,000 years.
Understanding just how big space is, and how long it takes to travel between stars, goes a long way to explaining why we’re wasting our time and resources with a fruitless search for alleged alien craft in our skies.
Light moves at 186,282 miles per second. Credit: Ehsan Ahmadnejad/Pexels
So where does that leave us?
I believe that one day we will learn we’re not alone. By we, I mean our species. I really hope it happens in my lifetime, but for all the reasons explained above, that’s wishfull thinking. The universe doesn’t care what we want, and it certainly doesn’t change the geometry of space-time to accommodate the wishes of dreamers on Earth.
Alien: Friend or foe?
I don’t think we’ll have to worry about belligerence. If a civilization is capable of sending ships to us, there’s literally nothing in our inventory of meager, planet-based resources that could interest a species that advanced. They wouldn’t want to eat us, because our biology would not be compatible. The amount of energy our entire civilization can muster would be laughable to an interstellar species.
And as the physicist Michio Kaku has argued, there’s a very strong argument to be made that if a species is advanced enough that interstellar travel is relatively trivial, it would have long ago shed any tendencies toward tribalism, sectarian violence or inventing gods of the gaps. You simply cannot reach that stage of advancement if you’re wasting resources and your most brilliant minds on war and petty divisions. (Kaku knows that better than anyone. His mentor was Edward Teller of Manhattan Project fame.)
The more significant danger, as Kaku likes to say, is that we may be beneath their notice and we’ll get “paved over.” A civilization capable of building cosmic megastructures, for example, wouldn’t consult us any more than we’d consult ants before laying a six lane super highway over their ant hill.
Still, there’s always a chance we’ll encounter something like MorningLightMountain, the nightmare alien intelligence from Peter F. Hamilton’s incomparable novel Pandora’s Star. The problem with MorningLightMountain wasn’t that diplomacy failed. There was no disagreement over resources or territory. Humans didn’t threaten it.
Rather, the alien’s psychology was so different from ours that it could not understand the concept of allowing other life to exist in the galaxy. No amount of discussion or attempts to persuade it would have made a difference, so immediately upon learning of our existence it launched a genocidal war that forms the bulk of Pandora’s Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained, two of the most beloved books in the modern science fiction canon.
Still, I’d like to think there is a galactic fraternity out there, an informal alliance of intelligent species united by curiosity and the effort to understand our universe. Whatever’s out there is likely to take forms we can never imagine and think in ways that never occurred to us.
If one day we do make first contact, I hope the best of humanity will be our representatives. And on that day, I hope humanity will be awestruck by the wonder of the universe, realize that slaughtering each other over land or beliefs is insane, and finally become united as a species.
Or even better, finally united as the children of Earth. After all, Buddy has made it abundantly clear that if I come into possession of a starship, he gets the most comfortable seat on board and gets to drive. The latter ain’t happening, but as for the former, I’d be thrilled to explore the cosmos with my little pal.
Pain In The Bud 