Deep Thought

 EndASUUStrike: Buhari should Save University System By Prof. M. K. Othman Many people have articulately written on the ongoing ASUU strike severally but as a stakeholder whose livelihood majorly comes from the university system, I am compelled to add a few words. Some of the articulated pieces were adequately presented without the need for additional words. However, things are sometimes repeated for emphasis as well as appeal to the targeted people to reason and do the needful. I hope that these words I am adding will appeal to my President, our President, the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, His Excellency Muhammadu Buhari to squarely and permanently address the issues for amicable settlement.  The issues are clear and simple; Government has the wherewithal to end the strike in no time. It is the same issue since year 2009 when the Federal Government signed and sealed an agreement with the union. The 2009 agreement was reinforced by the Memorandum of Understandi...

  Solar System: Mission to Live on Mars III By Prof MK Othman With the knowledge of cosmos science and technology, Mission to Mars was made successfully. In the last six decades, twenty-five missions were launched, went to Mars, and came back to the earth with all the expected outputs successfully. These successful missions were achieved from 2011 to date. However, before achieving those successes, there were twenty-four failed missions to Mars from 1960 to 2011 according to NASA’s historical log. This means that for 60 consecutive years, scientists have been working tirelessly to send spacecraft to Mars and the series of encountered failures did not discourage them rather learned lessons from such failures and moved ahead until success was achieved. As I am writing this piece, NASA’s Perseverance, spacecraft landed on Mars on 18th February 2021. Today, 18th September 2022, a NASA report indicates that Perseverance has been active since landing one year seven months ago and sending...

 Solar System: Mission to Live on Mars II By Prof MK Othman Man’s insatiable and unquenchable thirst for adventure is driving him to think the unthinkable, nurse the "crazy" idea of not only visiting mars but colonizing it and making it a second planet to be occupied by a man in the next 40 to 100 years. The condition on Mars is certainly a far cry from that of Earth. The average temperature on the planet is negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and it doesn’t have Earth’s dense atmosphere, which is what results in huge temperature fluctuations and massive dust storms. Similarly, Mars also lacks a magnetic field, which means there’s nothing to shield inhabitants from the intense radiation that is blasted out by the sun. Living on Mars would be like living in a bunker after a nuclear explosion. Despite the envisaged harsh condition on the red planet, the prospective travelers will not undertake the trip free of charge! Trips to mars are estimated to cost about $10 billion per seat e...

   Solar System: Mission to Live on Mars By Prof MK Othman The solar system consists of a star called the "Sun" with “nine planets” rotating and revolving around it. The planets of our solar system are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. At the advanced level, the solar system includes the satellites of the planets; numerous comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and the interplanetary medium. The Sun is the major source of electromagnetic energy (mostly in the form of heat and light) in the solar system. The Sun's nearest known stellar neighbor is a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.3 light years away. A light year is a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, equivalent to 6 trillion miles or 9.6 trillion km. The whole solar system, together with the local stars visible on a clear night, orbits the center of our home galaxy, a spiral disk of 200 billion stars we call t...

 Nigeria-2023: Crying Aloud for the Youth III By Prof. MK Othman   Dr. Emmanuel Gandu, a veritable ace writer joined me in crying aloud for the youth as we approach 2023, the election year. Gandu provided an analytical situation of our youths, challenges, and potential. As a corollary of my 2-part write-up with the above title, published a few weeks ago, for the reason of space, clarity, and style, I am paraphrasing Gandu’s excellent piece and sharing it with you, my esteemed readers to have a clearer perspective of the youths’ situation – a highly explosive time-bomb or virtuous asset for nation building, depending on how the situation is handled by the leaders, parents, and teachers. The piece is titled “Youths as the Sleeping Giant of Nigerian Politics: The Underlying Forces, the Potentiality, the Facts”. Happy reading.  In Nigeria, youths constitute 60% of the nation's 200 million population with about 20 million out-of-school children, probably the largest in the wor...