One day back in the late 70’s one of my astronomy club pals said hey did you hear? Carl Sagan giving a talk at the UW! When? Tonight! So we all piled in the car and drove from Puyallup to Seattle, making it in just before the monster hall completely filled up.
Sagan gave his then standard talk about the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Nobody really knows of course. The probability, I mean. Turns out its a gag: How many? One. Maybe. Hung jury. The talk was mostly a run-down on things like how many stars, how many of those with planets, how long the stars last based on mass and the rate fusion turns hydrogen to helium, just the kind of thing your way above average geeky teen has studied to death and yet still goes ga ga over.
Little did we know however the best part was the QA. Mostly the questions were pretty standard stuff. But a few grad students had some impressive if hard to follow ones, even a few that seemed almost impossible to answer. Incredibly, one after another he not only answered them all but in a way that enlightened everyone including the questioner. By enlightened I mean even if you didn’t understand the question to begin with you did by the end, and you understood why the answer was correct as well.
Well, with one exception. There was, not a group exactly but a cohort, a number of otherwise unrelated people who had but one thing in common, an utter and complete inability to comprehend. Anything. Quite a few different people but yet they all sounded exactly the same. No matter how eloquent the answer, or how pointed the barb, it was like water on a duck.
Sagan gave his then standard talk about the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Nobody really knows of course. The probability, I mean. Turns out its a gag: How many? One. Maybe. Hung jury. The talk was mostly a run-down on things like how many stars, how many of those with planets, how long the stars last based on mass and the rate fusion turns hydrogen to helium, just the kind of thing your way above average geeky teen has studied to death and yet still goes ga ga over.
Little did we know however the best part was the QA. Mostly the questions were pretty standard stuff. But a few grad students had some impressive if hard to follow ones, even a few that seemed almost impossible to answer. Incredibly, one after another he not only answered them all but in a way that enlightened everyone including the questioner. By enlightened I mean even if you didn’t understand the question to begin with you did by the end, and you understood why the answer was correct as well.
Well, with one exception. There was, not a group exactly but a cohort, a number of otherwise unrelated people who had but one thing in common, an utter and complete inability to comprehend. Anything. Quite a few different people but yet they all sounded exactly the same. No matter how eloquent the answer, or how pointed the barb, it was like water on a duck.