12/08/2020
What’s with the monoliths suddenly popping up everywhere?
You’ve heard it by now. Monolith here, monolith there. Utah, New Mexico, California, North Carolina, Colombia, Santa Barbara, Romania, UK, Germany, Netherlands and many other places have reported monoliths appearing out of nowhere. There are several possibilities as to where these monoliths came from, some of them are far-fetched.
1. Maybe someone obsessed with aliens and the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” decided to erect the first monolith just for fun. Then it became a trend and many people around the world decided to follow on his/her footsteps. (Probability 70%)
2. Maybe the first monolith in Utah was just a movie prop. The film crew left it there after shooting a film/series, and someone else found it and turned it into an internet sensation. (Probability 15%)
3. Maybe a group of people missed April 1st and decided to postpone the prank until December. I say, it’s working! (Probability 9%)
4. Maybe it’s part of a global modern-art installation project. Perhaps hundreds of artists around the world secretly decided to give us something to laugh at/wonder about before the end of the year. (Probability 7%) They probably call themselves “The Secret Monolith Association” and you can only become a member if you contact them via the dark web. (Probability goes down to 0.000000001%)
5. Maybe all these monoliths are part of a giant machine constructed by aliens who were like “I think we have gone too with 2020. Let’s give humans another chance”. On New Year’s Eve, a spaceship may appear in our orbit to activate all these monoliths, which will cause Earth to go back on time to December 31st, 2019 (11:59:59 PM). All our memories from 2020 will be erased, and we will wake up again the next day to experience the year 2020 but without its problems. Those who will still have traces of memories from 2020 will be abducted by aliens and taken to other worlds. (Probability 0%) I REPEAT: PROBABILITY IS 0%!
Either way, I’m enjoying the show, but let me take this opportunity to provide you some astronomical facts about our universe.
The universe is vast and old, which increases the chances of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. Our observable universe is 13.8 billion years old. It’s about 93 billion light years in diameter. It contains at least 200 billion galaxies and over 700 quintillion planets.
According to NASA, nearly 4,300 exoplanets has been confirmed so far. We call them exoplanets because they exist outside our solar system. At least 55 of them orbit in the habitable zone of other stars.
Our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years across. That’s basically 946 quadrillion km (588 quadrillion mi). The Milky Way galaxy contains up to 400 billion stars and anywhere between 100 to 200 billion planets. Our galaxy alone contains at least 6 billion Earth-like planets, which may have the right conditions to support the existence of life.
With all of these astonishing numbers of galaxies, starts and planets, do you still think we’re alone in the universe? Our solar system alone contains promising places where we could find alien life. The list includes Titan (Saturn’s largest moon), Enceladus (Saturn’s sixth-largest moon), Europa (Jupiter’s ocean moon) and Mars.
We’re unlikely to be alone in the universe. Somewhere out there, an advanced alien civilization could be using monoliths as portals to other dimensions. Meanwhile, here on planet Earth we’re still wondering who built them!
~ Hashem
