Happy Christmas to you all. It’s sad to say that I have not managed to make 2022 the success that I had hoped. While on the plus side this year has not involved catching COVID, I have also been far too busy with work and family life to write all the posts that I had planned.
The year started well with as I finally completed articles on hybrid gasbags and the nature of the gasbag balloons. I even managed to post the first article describing the geosphere of Epimetheus which is my showcase world for lighter-than-air gasbags. Sadly, I then stalled over the summer and have not posted any more. It was a shockingly high 40°C in the UK over this period, so perhaps I can blame the weather for that…
I did manage to post a review of the final Alien Worlds episode which is more related to technology than speculative evolution. I also introduced the fantasy universe of Paracosm with some world snippets, though I haven’t explored that further this year. So at least I wasn’t stuck only talking about giant bags of mostly gas.
Site Statistics
In 2022, if you ignore the common landing pages, my most popular page was the introduction on my sci-fi speculative evolution universe of Exordium though it only had 5.6% of the views. The second most popular was again the physics of lighter-than-air gasbag life at 5.0%. Following this was the introduction for the fantasy universe entitled Paracosm on 3.6% so I guess that means there is some interest in fantasy worldbuilding, though perhaps all these views are bots…
Unsurprisingly the majority of readers are still from the US (41.3%) and the UK (17.7%), though the next five countries are: Spain (5.7%), Canada (4.2%), Brazil (2.6%), Australia (2.4%) and Poland (2.2%). The overall readership map is perhaps also as expected too.
Only just behind Google as a source of traffic has been Reddit with 14% of referrals. I must admit I do get distracted browsing the worldbuilding, speculative evolution and other fiction subreddits. If I hadn’t been spending my time doing that maybe I would have been more successful posting blog articles. Of course, without the referrals, perhaps no one would be reading them.
Since Reddit has been a large source of distraction for me but also a source of traffic, I thought I should link to some of my posts in case any of them are of interest to readers of this blog.
- Astrobiology
- What are the limits on the evolution of projectile use?
- Having a heavier than expected brain seems to be linked to intelligence but what is the smallest brain that could produce human-level equivalent intelligence?
- The presence of oxygen is a biosignature but can it be produced biologically other than via oxygenic photosynthesis?
- Do speculative evolution projects set on other planets need oxygen and, if so, is there an alternative to photosynthesis for producing it?
- What would prevent an alien animal-like equivalent from evolving in the presence of a plant-like equivalent?
- For Halloween, can a parasitic wasp evolve to control a spider corpse to mimic the real robot-zombie necrobot research?
- Evolution of an aquatic intelligent tool-using species
- Fantasy fiction speculative evolution for a flying intelligent species
- Can photosynthesis be used for respiration?
- Exoplanetology
- Mythology
- Technology
- Many people include Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel in their worlds but how many allow FTL technology to also perform time travel?
- Many non-metal weapons and tools were used by cultures on Earth but could a fantasy non-metal using culture achieve what bronze and iron using cultures achieved using some other (magical) technique?
- Picogram-Scale Interstellar Probes via Bioinspired Engineering
This isn’t a plea for upvotes but if it is still possible to comment on any these posts I would welcome the opportunity to discuss any of the ideas further.
TetZooCon 2022
In December this year I took the opportunity to attend TetZooCon in London. It was an interesting experience with a focus on paleontology but with small side of speculative evolution and aliens in sci-fi. In particular, it was good to meet Gert van Dijk who writes the Planet Furaha blog, as it was because of my guest articles for his web site that I started my blog. Due to this, I now have a piece of his artwork hanging on my wall. It was also interesting to meet C. M. Koseman, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Dougal Dixon.
Thank You
Finally, I would definitely like to thank anyone who has read this blog despite the inactivity I’ve displayed. This is really harder work than I realised, though perhaps it is actually just the difficulty of raising young children that has reduced my free time. Fortunately, both my children are displaying an interest in science, technology and biology, so perhaps I can get them to help out with the blog in a few years!
I REALLY need to thank Concavenator on Deviantart again for producing sketches for my gasbag concepts, though I still haven’t managed to include them in an Epimetheus article this year either. They are about to be included though, I promise.
Happy Christmas and best wishes for the New Year.