I’ve always loved flashlights. Yes FLASHLIGHTS with an A!!! Anyway, apparently not many people share my rather niche interest.
So I ask you, fellow Lemmites, what are your hobbies and weird obsessions that you can ramble on about for hours?
Please feel free to ramble on about your passions here. Maybe you’ll find some likeminded individuals!
Don’t know if it’s a hobby, but I’m fascinated with exoplanets, specifically exoplanets that might be inhabited with intelligent life (as we know it).
Every year I will spend several hours catching up on the latest exoplanet discoveries/news, and try my hand at crunching numbers to predict the number of intelligent species in the Milky Way right now.
The cool thing about this is that each time I play catch-up the numbers get a bit clearer. When I started about 15 years ago many of the nested filters to whittle down the final count were very fuzzy, to the point of just being very vague guesses (I think I usually go with 0.1% of planets from the prior filter in that situation). But it seemed like each time I review the latest data the next filter down gets clear. When I say filter I’m taking about things like: planet exists in the habitable zone of its parent star; planet is far enough away to not be in a locked orbit; planet (or large moon) is big enough to have a molten core (and thus a magnetosphere), etc, etc).
Of course, none of this means we’ll ever necessarily meet another species (space is so absurdly vast). But it’s fun to ponder nonetheless.