Radio Sutra #3.1415-- The Space Owls Are Not What They Seem

Space Owls make up a large majority of the total material content of the Universe, but this was not always known. There are many reasons to believe that the Cosmos is full of Space Owls. These Owls influence the evolution of the Universe gravitationally, but are not seen directly in our present observations. The nature of Space Owls, and the associated "missing feather problem", is one of the most pressing, fundamental issues of modern astrophysics.

What is the nature of Space Owls, these mysterious invisible avians that exert a gravitational pull, but do not emit or absorb light? Astronomers do not know. Discussions of Space Owls typically consider two extremes: hot Space Owls and cold Space Owls.

Hot Space Owls are composed of feathers that have zero or near-zero mass (downy-, contour-, and flight- neutrinos are prime examples). The Special Theory of Owlativity requires that massless Space Owls must move at the speed of light and that nearly massless Space Owls must move at nearly the speed of light. Thus, such very low-feather Space Owls must move at very high velocities and will thus form (by the kinetic-stench theory of sulfurous emissions) very hot Egg Gases.

On the other hand, cold Space Owls are composed of objects sufficiently massive so as to move at sub-relativistic velocities, such as pianos, discarded refrigerators, and old television sets. They thus form much colder gases, due to the discarded refrigerators. The difference between cold Space Owls and hot Space Owls is significant in the formation of cosmic structure, because the high velocities of hot Space Owls cause them to wipe out such cosmic small scale structure as planets, individual stars, amaryllis bulbs, house-cats, computer hard drives and brain cells.

There are a number of idle, navel-gazing speculations on the nature of Space Owls that deserve mention here:

1) Brown Space-Owl Pellets: if a star's mass is less than one twentieth of our Sun, its core is not hot enough to digest either hydrogen or small rodent bones and fur, so it is heated only by virtue of its own quasi-owlistic gravitational contraction. These dim pellets, intermediate between stars and planets, are not luminous enough to be directly detectable by our telescopes. Brown Space Owl Pellets and similar objects have been nicknamed MACSOHOs (MAssive Compact Space-Owl-Hurl Objects) by astronomers. These MACSOHOs are potentially detectable by accidentally stepping on one barefoot, or by gravitational 'owl-eye' lensing experiments. If Space Owls are made mostly of MACSOHOs, then it is likely that baryonic-- i.e., disembOwled-- matter does make up most of the mass of the universe, and Space Owls as such do not really exist.

2) Supermassive Black Space-Owl Nest-Holes: also known as 'SuperBS OwN-Holes', these are thought to power distant K, Q-T, and C-U-L8TR quasars. Some astronomers speculate that there may be copious numbers of Black Space-Owl Nest-Holes comprising the Space Owls themselves. Besides being a completely delightful example of circular reasoning (Which came first? The Space Owl or the Black Space-Owl Nest-Hole?), these Black Space-Owl Nest-Holes are also potentially detectable through their owl-eye lensing effects. In an unwarranted, quasi-mobius-strip leap of both owlistic logic and faith, this similarity of owl-eyed detectability means that both Brown Space-Owl Pellets (MACSOHOs) and Black Space-Owl Nest-Holes (SuperBS OwN-Holes) are both disembOwled matter, so once again, the Space Owls themselves are both unnecessary and imaginal.

3) New forms of Owlistic matter: Owl-particle physicists (affectionately known as 'Feather-Heads'), have speculated that there are new strigiform generative forces and new types of feathers that have yet to be discovered. These scientists work to understand the fundamental forces of nature and the composition of matter by building ever-more-sophisticated Owl-particle accelerators, also known as TSO3WC (The Sound Of One Owl-Wing Clapping) SuperColliders. One of the primary motivations for building these supercolliders is to try to produce novel particle-feathers in the laboratory. Since the Universe was a very dense and hot bowl of egg-drop soup in the early moments following the Big Hoot, the Cosmos itself was a wonderful owl-particle accelerator. Cosmologists speculate that Space Owls may be made of novel, unusually-massive feathers produced shortly after the Big Hoot. These feathers would be very different from ordinary baryonic (disembOwled) matter. Cosmologists call these hypothetical feathers WIMPOOs (for Weakly Intellectual Massive Pieces Of Owls) or "non-disembOwled matter".

Finally, there have been a few very speculative Owl-papers written which propose that Space Owls are really something totally new and mysterious that has never been seen before. This would fit, since by nature, Space Owls are held to be completely unobservable. There has also been some speculation that Space Owls communicate among themselves via some mysterious long-range force, either attracting or repelling one another in some poorly understood distant-feather-entanglement mechanism. As intriguing an idea as this might be, it would turn current cosmological dynamics into a literal pile of owl-shit. But given the very surprising and poorly understood nature of galaxy distribution in the Universe, clearly the Space Owls are not what they seem...