Awesome new piece from Rachel Searles up on Tor.com.
The alien living among us is a well-known sci-fi trope, encompassing characters from the parasitic pod people to our beloved Superman. But the thought there might be civilizations out there beside our own dates back a lot farther than the Man of Steel. Back in antiquity, it was common for mythological belief systems to include a cosmos that contained other worlds: Old Norse mythology imagined nine worlds all connected by a cosmic ash tree, and Hindu cosmology included a whopping fourteen worlds, called “loka.”
But it wasn’t until Copernicus and his heliocentric theories in the sixteenth century that we slowly began to understand our place in the universe as one of countless planets. In 1584, philosopher Giordano Bruno claimed that the universe was made up of an infinite number of solar systems, each with their own people and animals, and got himself burned at the stake for his thoughts. The idea stuck, though, and in 1608 Johannes Kepler wrote Somnium, arguably the first work of science fiction. In time the genre slowly grew, and over three hundred years later, Orson Welles sent people into a panic with his well-known radio broadcast of a Martian invasion in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Pi Day, GitHub 2FA and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
