Thanks for all the advice. I took apart as much as I was confident I could get back together without creating new leaks (which was not much), restarted it, and it's still broken. 100% out of energy now so I guess I'll try watching more repair videos tomorrow.

Special thank you to everyone who posts questions and answers on good old-fashioned web forums, and people who make and post repair videos.

Did I get any help from chatGPT or other stupid energy-sucking things like that? No. Would it have been helpful? Also no. I got help from people here, and from questions random people asked and answered years ago.

I watched a bunch of youtube videos, then took out the circulation pump and took it apart. Nothing obviously wrong or stuck. I cleaned it and put it back together. And now the dishwasher seems to be running!! AMAZING.

Of course, I had to loosen a couple of hose clamps and I broke at least one stupid little plastic bit while taking the pump off. So probably won't last long. But I appreciate at least one more load of dishes my machine will do for me!

Incredible auroras all night, doesn't seem like we're in Kessler Syndrome yet (yay) but apparently GPS and Starlink internet aren't working for people.

A goat got into chicken food and I had to force feed him baking soda to try to save his life (we'll see how that goes ☹️ ).

I emailed the CNN reporter who interviewed me about satellite pollution a couple years ago to see if she's interested in the space junk story.

And it's Vaisakhi/Khalsa Day, so I'm going to get amazing free food!

(I included the "astronomer" and "not astronomer" categories, because I am pretty sure the people who I interact with here skew pretty heavily toward astronomers so the yes's might dominate just because of that)

@thomasfuchs Amateur astronomer = astronomer!

@jdlbt yes!

Oooo! One of the goats has some discharge! (I spend a lot of time checking goat backsides at this time of year... yes it's weird, but that's the only way to make sure they don't have babies out in the snow)

She's actually not due for another week, so it could be a false alarm. But she's also ENORMOUS so she could go early.

I checked on all the supplies and made sure the heat lamp is ready to go. Anytime now, goat mama! I am ready for goat babies!

Heyyyyy I got my first interview request that specifically references a mastodon post I wrote!

The fediverse has hit some kind of critical mass of journalists! Hi, journalists!! Thank you!

Watch this satellite obliterate the Kuiper Belt object moving through this set of images.

The dumb satellite is so bright that our auto-detect software threw out the whole stack, because it destroyed the average brightness.

It pisses me off to no end that my taxpayer-funded telescope time is now less and less effective because of one for-profit private company.

(P.S. software dudes: please don't try to mansplain workarounds, believe me, a LOT of astronomers are working hard on this)

My old mercury thermometer says -36C and the official weather report said it was "only" -42C with windchill this morning, so the busses are still running (they never cancel school ever, no matter how cold it gets. This place is wild.)

@mcnees I was actually taking a class from @Mikebrown when this all happened! (But I was a fairly clueless undergrad at the time so I wasn't aware of a lot of the drama until later...)

4. The only civilizations that survive long-term are the ones that realize that exponential growth is unsustainable, and completely reorient to a lower-energy state. This would make them undetectable to us.

(I talked about this idea, called "Homeostatic awakening," a few days ago, with lots of interesting comments: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/111478947136600731)

2. There are other civilizations out there, but they don't travel. This could be because it's just too hard (our furthest probe has traveled something like 0.004% of the distance to the closest star). Or maybe the drive to explore/colonize is a human trait and other intelligent life wouldn't have that drive.

2.b The absolutely most depressing option: there are other civilizations, but technologically advanced civilizations just don't last very long, so the chances that we'd overlap with another civilization nearby and notice their presence is super unlikely.

3. A galactic civilization exists! But they are avoiding us, either because we're morally reprehensible, or because we're in a kind of "wildlife preserve" (though I find these ideas pretty weirdly human-centric...)

Today I'm talking about the Fermi Paradox in my astro-for-physics-majors class (and I'll talk about it again on Friday in my astro 101 class).

It's a really simple question with completely terrifying/mind-blowing implications, first asked by Enrico Fermi (who, ironically, was one of the Manhattan project scientists...)

Our universe is 13.8 billion years old, our Galaxy is at least 10 billion years old, other planets are surely much older than Earth, with more time to involve intelligent life.

"So where is everybody?"

A few possibilities for how to resolve the paradox. I'm going to list them all and put a poll at the end of this thread so you can vote for your favourite!

1. We are alone. We are the first intelligent life that has ever evolved in the Universe.

(Generally in astronomy any explanation that requires us to be special is a bad one. Then again, we are here asking this question, which is kind of the mother of all observation biases)

Time to update my satellite pollution talk.

There are ~500 more Starlink satellites today than when I gave this talk in July.

4,924 Starlinks in orbit now (56% of the total 8,728 active satellites in orbit).

Just your periodic reminder that one private company owned by one pretty awful dude effectively controls outer space now.