MPJ

My first encounter with intelligence quotient, aka IQ, was 25 years ago during my preliminary exam for the mandatory military service. In those years, Serbia was part of a former socialist federation of Yugoslavia along with a couple of more countries, and avoiding army service was impossible. Everybody had to go to serve the "time" for one whole year, and they used those preliminary tests to better fit you into a suitable unit, and doing a form of an IQ test was part of it. They didn't give us the result, but I probably did it pretty well since they put me to be the main operator of a ground-to-ground missile unit. At least my little bit higher intelligence than average "soldier" spared me from the mud, dirt, long marches, carrying heavy weaponry, and other meaningless activities of the service. So I spent most of the time in a classroom surrounded by state-of-the-art simulators, playing video games made specially for practicing real-time guidance of the missil...

There is a debate whether or not Holocene, the latest geological epoch, is already finished with ultimate human impact on Earth's ecosystems, which started along with industrial and technological maturity in the recent past. Many of us believe that a new era, suitably named the Anthropocene, is what we are living in already. With technology rising, it looks like humans already changed fundamentally to the point of incompatibility with our distant ancestors. Perhaps we are indeed heading toward rapid evolutionary change, like in the latest Dan Brown's novel " Origin ", but this premise is way more suitable for another science fiction I have just watched (for the second time). I am sure that for all of you who like intelligent movies , a long-anticipated sequel for "The Man from Earth" finally came, and it, without a doubt, opened the Holocene-Anthropocene transition for John Oldman, a 14000-year-old man who also, like entire humanity, seemed to be going throu...

"It is unwise of some interstellar species to give us technology to leave the Earth; chances that we would use it for star wars are bigger than we would go to the next level and use it for peaceful exploration of the solar system and beyond." - What is Intelligent Life? As promised in my last post story about one grim political view of the last forgettable year , please behold another glimpse of humanity from another angle. Let's move today from raw reality to reality-inspired fiction and make a little peek into three science-fiction masterpieces. Two of them, products of the current almost expired year, are, if you ask me, making this forgettable year, well, a little less forgettable. But before Daniel Abraham's and Ty Franck's "Babylon's Ashes", the sixth book of The Expanse, and "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", the Star Wars sequel, I think this is a perfect moment for me to start the review with another classic, in the most genuine mea...

I remember reading an article in the Guardian last year with the title "Our galaxy may contain billions of planets with the same mass as Earth". Surely, it is a valid scientific guess as it is, but if it is really true, my first thought would be that intelligent life as we know it (assuming we are intelligent species) is as rare as we can imagine. If they are not, the big question is: why are we still not able to detect any single proof of their existence or are they still not eaten by some violent alien species? The only logical answer that we are first one walks on the edge of impossibility to me. Most likely we are missing something important—a discovery as important as fire was. While this statement is still accurate and generally speaking plausible, let's think a little more about it. So to start with the original statement, are there really that many planets with Earth-like properties in our galaxy? Ever since I read the Drake equation for the first time (sho...