The Really Habitable Zone
Who cares if liquid water can exist on a planet orbiting a star ? The important thing is whether conditions are suitable for making a gin and tonic, a region "which might actually be worth existing on." Astronomers, they say, need alcohol, and the presence of astronomers is a good definition of civilisation. And a lack of gin might explain why a planet has a terrible atmosphere.
(They note also the possibility of "ginspermia", in which juniper bushes propagate through interstellar dispersal, but suggest that efficient harvesting for maximum gin productions means there are no spare bushes flying through space.)
How to define the parameters for the RHZ as opposed to the old BHZ (Boring Habitable Zone) ? They followed standard practise and made them up. This all involved the consumption of multiple "gins and tonic", which is not a typo : "You want multiple gins, not more tonic." Adorable.
Searching for Space Vampires
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single human in possession of a good space telescope,
must be in search of a space vampire." A strong opener indeed. Apparently inspired by an xkcd webcomic which notes that reflecting telescopes can't see space vampires, the authors realised that not all telescopes these days use mirrors. The Transiting Exoplanet - sorry, Exovampire Survey Satellite uses lenses, so is an ideal tool for searching for spaceborne undead.
They note three prospects for space vampires : free-floating, to be examined in a forthcoming paper by Van Helsing et al.; already landed on Earth; tidally locked around M-dwarf stars. Why M dwarfs ? Because while vampires are susceptible to sunlight, they are clearly unaffected by firelight, which is typically not too much cooler than M dwarf stars. Presumably daylight on planets around such stars holds no fears for vampires there...
They then drew a profile of a vampire and a bat in Microsoft Paint and fed it through some transit photometry modelling package to see the expected dip in the light. Comparing to observations from TEvSS, they find there could be between 0 and 394400933 possible space vampire transit events, i.e. between 0 and 100% of all observations. They consider this to be a major breakthrough.
Conspiratorial Cosmology
Reality is just a conspiracy and "generally misleading", say the authors of this the most incoherent of the suggestions. Loosely based on the idea that if anyone figured out the meaning of existence, the Universe would disappear and be replaced with something more complex, and this has already happened, the authors develop the concept of inflationary imbecility. This is like regular inflation, only for stupidity instead of space.
But who are They who are behind it all ? Following the Chuck Norris theorem - that there's an easy way and a hard way - they suggest that They started with a simple Universe and have been gradually ramping up the complexity. Recent events comprise such things as the challenge of electing an unelectable president and controlling an uncontrollable virus.
And why is the Universe controlled by so much dark matter and dark energy and the like ? They solved this by employing occultism, in which a medium declared that it's due to the Fertile Neutrino (as opposed to sterile neutrinos, of course). This is, apparently, very fertile up to several "guinea pig units", and the ongoing production of fertile neutrinos causes the expansion of space. There follows a lengthy rant about the anthropic principle, philosophy, string theory, the importance of simulations, eventually concluded that we ourselves are the grand conspirators behind it all, somehow. I got as far as, "In order to make sure that we need all the energy we harvest, we will build our spaceships in form of giant SUVs which are constructed such that they have a decent wind-resistance even in the interstellar medium, and we will cause a greenhouse effect in the Galaxy so strong that Dyson-trees (Dyson, 1997) start to grow on molecular clouds" before deciding that the words, "please stop" had never been more appropriate and gave up.
And finally, overheard elsewhere :
Normal services will be resumed as soon as possible.
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