Grombles

I started my career in the online, or digital world as it likes to be called today, in the mid 1980s. In those days we used incredibly slow modems to connect crude computers via phone lines at a whopping 240 bits a second. There are 8 bits in a byte, so that's just 30 bytes per second. You would watch the magic of characters slowly scroll across the screen as they were revealed one by one. Pictures wouldn't be transmitted for another decade or so and video took another twenty years to become widely available. Only a few people knew how to connect to it or what to do with it once they were. The forerunner to the internet was little more than email and a bit of data between banks. Very few of us guessed what was about to happen. 30 years later we think little of instantly accessing YouTube on our 4G mobiles. And with 5G just around the corner there will be nothing stopping full instant on-demand whatever zapping into our mobiles, watches or glasses. We've all very suddenl...

I've not gone barking mad or joined some weird religious cult (aren't they all?). But I do predict that we will make contact with intelligences from other planets soon. Here's my reasoning: There are approximately 100,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy (easy way to remember this order of magnitude is it's one hundred, thousand, million). Usefully there are also approximately the same number of galaxies in the universe. And assuming every star has about the same number of planets orbiting it as our Sun, and that the Milky Way is an average size of galaxy, that means there are around 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe. A lot. Scientists have long debated the probability of life, as we would recognise it - reproducing, eating, etc - existing outside Earth. Most agree mathematically that it's a certainty. What they did was take all the components they believed were required for life to have evolved on Earth and then extrapolate what they know about...