science – Pain In The Bud

What’s Something You’d Love To See In The Future, But Know You Probably Won’t Live To Witness?

One day humanity will make contact with another civilization in our galaxy. The odds are almost certain we won’t be alive to see it.

Daily writing prompt

What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?

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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.

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.

If Paleontologists Of The Far Future Tried To Reconstruct Cats

We’ve made enormous mistakes in our reconstructions of prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs and mammals. Would paleontologists of the future misinterpret the clues our civilization leaves behind?

Imagine if, far in the future, humanity has spread across a healthy swath of space, colonizing worlds across dozens of light years.

Academics at a prominent science institute, looking to learn more about the humble beginnings of our species, fund a scientific expedition to Old Earth, where radiation and toxicity have finally declined to a point which allows teams to poke through the ruins of our civilization.

As they piece together clues from the rubble, they find references to companion animals who have been domesticated while their wild counterparts continued on.

What does a cat look like? they wonder. Then they find the bones, beginning with a handful of incomplete skeletons…

Critics have long argued that our depictions of dinosaurs are like skeletons wrapped in flesh, with modern representations doing a poor job of representing complete animals. What if the paleontologists and historians of the future mistranslate a word like “fur” or don’t realize the skeletons of cats are the same furry creatures that were human companions?

A tiger imagined as a semi-aquatic animal with scales instead of fur, and a skull interpreted in much the same way we interpret dinosaur skulls. “Surviving texts make clear the tiger was comfortable in water, and like its distant cousin the crocodile, would remain mostly submerged, looking for opportunities to ambush prey.”

No fur, just musculature, as if an anatomy book of animals is one of the few texts to survive in hard copy.

A cat with magnificent plumage: “Research shows felines engaged in elaborate mating rituals, using their vivid colors and patterns to demonstrate virility to females in heat.”

Finally, a winged cat. Outlandish? Maybe. But what if of the scraps of mythology to survive is a statue of a manticore, or paleontologists discover the bones of a cat species mingled with those of a large bird that died alongside it in a tar pit? In our time we’ve accidentally invented entire species of dinosaurs by mistakenly matching skulls from one species onto the spines of others, or wildly misinterpreting clues in the body plans of new and unfamiliar creatures.

Study: Dogs And Toddlers Help Caregivers Find Missing Items While Cats Don’t Lift A Paw

“Can’t find your keys, human? That’s terrible. I don’t know where they are, but perhaps I could recall that information if, say, there were treats involved. Take your time, I’m in no rush even if you are.”

A new study shows dogs and human toddlers are eager to help when their adult caregivers are looking for a missing item, but cats don’t seem to care.

The study, which involved running the same experiment for young children, dogs and cats in their own homes, made it clear cats were fully aware of what was happening and understood their humans were looking for the missing object.

They just didn’t care.

There was one notable exception, of course. If the missing items were important to the cat — a favorite toy, for instance, or a bag of treats — the felines were motivated to help search or direct their humans to the missing objects, the research team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary found.

But at all other times, feline observers were content to hang back and watch, even when they understood their humans were getting frustrated.

By contrast, young children and dogs actively tried to help and signaled to adults when they thought they’d found the object.

“Lookin’ for something? No, I’ll just watch, thank you. Warm, warmer…oh! Cold…colder…that direction doesn’t look promising, human.” Credit: Gord Maclean/Pexels

So does this mean cats are jerks? Probably. Are we surprised by the results? Not at all.

We still love our furry friends, who do have their own unique ways of demonstrating they care about their humans beyond seeing them as providers of food, shelter, and safety, as well as playmates, minions and servants.

Besides, testing whether dogs or cats were helpful or not wasn’t the point. As the authors note, “[t]hese three species provide an important comparison because they share a similar anthropogenic environment but differ in their ecological and evolutionary backgrounds.”

In other words, they’re interested in figuring out how evolution plays a part in how species behave in particular situations. Although it’s yet to be conclusively proven for this behavior, a likely reason is because domestic cats are the descendants of a mostly solitary wildcat species, whereas we humans and our canine friends have long evolutionary histories of living in social groups and cooperating with each other.

The study is included in the March 2026 issue of Animal Behavior.

UK Man Pays $22k To Have Cat Cryogenically Frozen, Hoping To Revive Her In The Future

Using a technology most commonly associated with science fiction, the UK man is banking on a technologically gleaming future where he and his cat can be revived and meet again.

A man in the UK has spent a small fortune on the possibility of reviving his dead cat.

Mark McAuliffe says he was so upset when his 23-year-old cat’s health began to fail that he made arrangements with a Swiss firm to preserve her body when she passed away.

The 38-year-old adopted Bonny, a domestic shorthair, while he was a teenager, and she’s been with him for more than half his life, including his entire adulthood.

Usually when stories like this make the news, they’re about people who preserve their cat or dog’s DNA for cloning.

That’s not what’s happening here.

Bonny has been placed in a cryopreservation unit, which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her entire body. Freezing a body essentially suspends it in time. Extremely cold temperatures — as close to absolute zero as possible — suspend cellular activity, including decay.

It’s called cryopreservation, and while the concept is most frequently invoked in science fiction, putting a body into cryostasis is real and within the technological capabilities of modern science.

The company McAuliffe paid to preserve his cat is Switzerland-based Tomorrow Bio, which is affiliated with the European Biostasis Foundation. The technology is used for several other purposes in the medical field, the food industry and in certain engineering applications.

McAuliffe is gambling on the future, or a version of it in which people and animals can be revived and repaired, like Lazarus in a lab. But it wouldn’t be much of a future for Bonny if her human wasn’t with her, so McAuliffe has reserved a spot for himself as well, hoping to meet her in better times.

“This cushioned the blow about Bonny’s death,” he said, “because I have got it in the back of my mind that it is not going to be the final goodbye.”

Employees of Tomorrow Bio inspect a liquid nitrogen pod. Credit: Tomorrow Bio

The European Biostasis Foundation runs the cryovaults where clients are kept. The organization told the Daily Mail that it has five “full body patients,” 15 preserved brains, two dogs and eight cats. In addition, more than 700 people have made arrangements to have their own bodies frozen upon death.

There is, of course, a hiccup.

While freezing a body is possible, thawing is not — not without destroying the body.

That’s because ice crystals form and rupture cell walls when the body is brought out of cryopreservation, no matter how slow the process.

The workaround involves using cryoprotectants, essentially a form of anti-freeze that would prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals despite the temperature.

That, however, introduces an entirely new set of problems, including the fact that cryoprotectant is toxic at the levels required for preservation.

Preserving the brain presents an entirely different set of problems, as our neurons and neural pathways begin to decay immediately after death. Our brain topology and neural connections are part of who we are, part of what makes our minds uniquely our own. Neuroscience and cryostasis technology each have a long way to go before scientists can even attempt to thaw a brain.

So by spending almost $22,000 to preserve Bony, and buying a plan to preserve himself (at a cost of $230,000), McAuliffe is banking on major breakthroughs in biology, as well as the ability to precisely control temperatures. To successfully thaw a body without destroying it, the entire body must be warmed at the same time, including all internal organs. That’s a significant technical challenge.

It’s also a gamble on the general shape of the future, placing hope that progress will continue. It assumes we won’t lapse into another dark age, that we won’t lose technology and expertise to devastating wars, plagues or other disasters that could set humanity back decades or centuries.

Finally, there’s a major hurdle that has little to do with science behind cryopreservation. It’s the simple fact that human lives are short, companies that promise centuries of operation can’t guarantee that outcome, and a lot can happen while a person sleeps away those years.

There’s a great short story by the Welsh science fiction novelist Alastair Reynolds about a wealthy man who wakes after centuries of cryosleep to find that the company who managed his crypt went bankrupt. From there it changed hands several times until it ended up in the portfolio of a corporate raider.

So the narrator, expecting to be woken to fanfare, deferential treatment and a bright technological future instead finds himself indebted and facing a reality much different and more depressing than he ever imagined.

I sympathize with McAuliffe, who obviously loves Bonny a great deal, and I see the appeal of becoming a refugee from the past, entering into a cryovault in the hope of emerging into a better future. But man, that’s a huge gamble.

In the meantime, there are plenty of cats who need homes and have a lot of love to give. Every shelter cat is a potential Buddy!

What’s With The Stories Claiming Men Don’t Bond With Or Listen To Their Feline Buddies?

There’s a disconnect between the usually careful language of research studies and the exaggerated claims of news articles.

The headlines over the past few weeks have all been variations on the same riff: cats meow more frequently to male caregivers because we don’t know how to bond with the little stinkers, we disregard their feelings, and we ignore their pleas.

Others are more blunt in their assessment, like a story from YourTango that stated women “bond deeply” with cats, whereas we men are merely “manipulated” by them.

“Other studies have found that women are much better at giving their cats more attention, understanding their cats’ emotions, and are more likely to mimic their cats’ vocalization, too,” the YourTango story claims. “Whereas for men, the same cannot be said. Considering they tend to give affection more sparingly than women, it’s no wonder that the dynamic is different.”

Just picture it: women levitating above the rest of us, sharing their amazing Female Affection with the poor, emotionally starved pet felines who belong to men. If we’re trying to get rid of the “crazy cat lady” stereotype and spread the idea that cats are great companions for every kind of person, this probably isn’t helping.

So what’s the source of these claims?

Apparently a study out of Turkey that involved just 31 cats and their humans. All of the human participants were Turkish, and just 13 of them were male. All were recruited online. (And for some parts of the study, like the analysis of greetings by owner gender, only 26 participants were included because the other five did not submit complete data, including the ages of their cats.)

It’s important to make a distinction between what the study’s authors claim and what the media reports, because they’re almost always two different things.

“Science” doesn’t “say” anything. Science is a method for investigating things we don’t understand. It’s not an entity, it has no opinions, and the only clear conclusion from such a small study is that we need more data.

The research team from the University of Ankara counted more meows directed at the 13 male caregivers in their study compared to the 18 female caregivers. In their paper, the team acknowledged their sample size was too small to draw any conclusions, and lacked the demographic diversity to rule out innumerable potential reasons why those 13 cats meowed more frequently than the 18 cats cared for by women.

Even with a more robust sample size including men of different ages, social classes, and nationalities, correlation is not causation, and it may be that the apparent difference in feline vocalizations disappears with a larger study group that more accurately reflects universal demographics.

Indeed, the study’s authors state clearly that feline greeting behavior is “a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that defies straightforward explanation.” (Emphasis ours.)

The conclusion, as always, is that we need more data, which is one reason why studies must be repeatable.

That nuance doesn’t make it into listicles or stories optimized for maximum shareability on Facebook, so instead we get headlines that present studies as the last word instead of the first tentative steps to understanding a phenomenon.

In case it wasn’t obvious, there is no data to support the claim that men “give attention more sparingly” than women, or that women are better at reading feline emotions. We don’t even have baselines or criteria for those claims. How do we objectively measure “better” when it comes to reading cats, especially when every cat and human bonded pair have their own pidgin “language”? What’s the “right” amount of attention?

Buddy the Cat, a gray tabby cat, with a synthwave background. — “Brrrrrrrruuuuppp!”

As the loyal servant of an infamously talkative cat, I’m not sure gender makes any difference. Bud’s vocal tendencies were already present from kittenhood, and I simply nurtured them by engaging in conversations with him, giving him loads of attention and doting on him.

Often our conversations go like this:

Bud: “Mreeeoww! Mow mow! Brrrrrt a bruppph!”

Me: “I know, little dude. You told me, remember?”

Bud: “Brrrrrr! Brrrruppp! Yerp!”

Me: “Yes, but they’ve tried that already. It’s not just about tokamak design, it’s…”

Bud: “Merrrrrp! Mow mow!”

Me: “No, it’s about plasma containment. No containment, no reaction, no energy gain!”

Bud: “Brrrrr! Mrrrowww! Brupbrupbrrrruppp!”

Me: “Yeah, well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

I really do talk about science and science fiction with my cat, since he seems to respond to it. Of course it’s gotta be at least partially due to my tone, but strangely if I talk to him about other abstract things, he acts like I’m bothering him with so much human nonsense.

Regardless, Buddy and I object to the claim that a talkative cat is a disengaged or neglected cat. It’s not that he talks a lot, it’s that he never stops!