Woodstock 2017 for Magellanic Penguins

You can judge for yourself whether there's really a million in this crowd since there's a video and it even has swingin' music.



Ed:  you call that music swingin'?

When Magellanic penguins get to feeling randy, any kind of music will do.

Ed:  this is all about sex?

Well, they must eat once in a while but, after that, it's a gigantic penguin Woodstock lovefest.  (RT: ‘1mn penguins’ descend on Argentina in spectacular scene (VIDEOS, PHOTOS))

There are some highly cute pics of the penguins in the RT article.


Making penguins is one of the most improbable sequences in evolution since what bird decides it will make its living by swimming underwater and what sensible creature of any kind decides to do that in the places with the worst weather in the world.  If you read that script for a movie you would probably think it's too unlikely but you see at the top there's a million of them screwing their silly penguin brains out on the beach.

Ed:  life's a bitch for a penguin, isn't it

Well, not for those ones.


The vast spectrum of life on Earth seems like it justifies the evolution of life anywhere but it's in a relatively narrow bandwidth on galactic terms.  Some justify religion in terms of the perfect design of the Universe for humans but that's not true; if it were any more hostile we would already be dead.

We see on Earth there are swimming birds, flying squirrels, and poisonous marsupial duck things (i.e. platypus) in Australia.  We even find anaerobic bacteria living in rocks where there's no possibility of oxygen.  It seems like life is flexible enough to go anywhere but can it really.

There's quite a bit of thinking just now that Life equals DNA equals God but what if that's myopia and organisms on some other planet don't reproduce that way.  That nothing else worked doesn't mean everything else was tried and sometimes there's discussion of life based on silicon rather than carbon. There isn't sufficient Chemistry in the Rockhouse to write rationally of that at any depth but those types of radically different proposals do exist.

The meaning of radical is likely not even fractionally wide enough to cover everything we will encounter.  We're surprised by creatures on Earth even when most do the same things.  We eat, sleep, and sometimes go by millions to the beach.  Who can imagine the strangeness of whatever we will find anywhere else but it's as much a fascination now as it's ever been in my life.