English Conversation Course

Our galaxy, The Milky Way, contains roughly between 200 and 400 billion stars. Most of those stars are very dim red and brown dwarfs that cannot be seen even through the largest telescopes but we can predict their existence in different ways. The lower end estimates for total number of planets in our galaxy are around 100 billion. It’s very probable that it is larger than that. The Drake equation was written by Dr. Frank Drake in 1961. It’s used to estimate the number of alien civilizations that could exist in our galaxy at any given time, which would be advanced enough to communicate with us (or at least be detected by us receiving their radio signals). The equation states as follows: Where V is the result number of civilizations to be expected. R is the rate of star formation within the galaxy; fp  is a fraction of formed stars that have planets; ne  is an average number of potentially habitable (depending on size, chemical composition and temperature) planets per...

                Von Neumann probe is a name given to a theoretical type of spacecraft with the unique feature of being able to produce and send its copies to other places. For example, the probe is sent from earth to any planet, where from basic elements available two copies are produced and sent to two new different planets.                 It may seem like a very advanced device and indeed it is, but wouldn’t we be able to build them today? Artificial intelligence systems and humanoid robots are getting more and more effective. Very soon we should be able to make a robot that can construct its copy from spare parts and, if programmed accordingly, it could perform any mechanical task that humans can. We have nuclear sources of power that can work for hundreds of years.         I think that economy is a much mo...

With recent release of Mafia III, I started wondering if we ever get a triple-A game that is considered a finished product the moment it's released. Nowadays developers and publishers abuse the digital distribution systems to the maximum, prolonging development cycle, and intentionally fixing remaining problems even for a few months after the game is released. The question is, do we really have to go through this? ( Source ) Not that long ago, when the Internet wasn't that common and the  Steam platform didn't exist, we had a classical distribution system via stores. When you were buying a game from such a store, you knew that it's a  finished, working and tested product - after all you were paying for it, and you expected to enjoy it for a long time. Game patches were extremely rare, and usually they were distributed only for selected popular titles, mainly via various magazines, such as CD-Action in Poland, which I'm sure many of you s...

( Source ) If I told you that a video game created by a   small indie studio turned out to be a great success, you would probably consider it quite common. If I told you that music in video games can be outstanding masterpieces - you'd say of course.  After all video games industry is nowadays made out of billions of dollars, so it's quite common to find some hidden gems in all those hired artists working for the   best companies. But what would you say if I told you that there is one guy who coded the whole game, drew the whole art and composed entire music, all by himself, as a hobby, and it turned out to be so good that his musical compositions are currently being re-used infinitely, by hundreds of professional artists, in total of at least 20 thousands of tracks? Welcome to Japan. Touhou is a video game developed by the  team Shanghai Alice, which is in fact run by one person - "ZUN". I could now tell you how hard it is to create an...