Jawaan!

The Great Filter is the idea that there is some single, almost insurmountably improbable barrier on the path to the stars that explains why we've never seen any sign of alien life.  It combines aspects of astronomy, biology and history to arrive at one inescapable conclusion: university professors dream of book deals. Robin Hanson of George Mason University posits a “Great Filter” that prevents the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced, space-colonizing civilizations. The “filter” would be one or more improbable steps along the path that starts with the creation of a planet and ends with a race capable of colonizing the galaxy

An international team of researchers have stared down the barrel of one of the most violently energetic objects in the universe – and they didn't blink.  Instead, they've figured out the physics behind one of the most impressive astrophysical events in existence. BL Lacertae is a blazar, a supermassive galactic-core black hole emitting vast and variable beams of energy.  Please understand that giving this thing a name like “blazar” is like calling a speeding sixteen wheeler truck full of professional wrestlers, grizzly bears and dynamite a “gentle prodder”.  The English language simply lacks the ability to get across the staggering scale of these events – because it doesn't have a case above upper or letters bigger than capital.  You can try writing down the values as numbers, but they end up being so stupidly huge that our monkey brains, programmed to deal with “one two three lots”, just don't comprehend them. The most famous property of black holes is the event horizon, the “point of no return” beyond which you cannot escape.  But even before this final barrier you're still close to a gigantic gravitational well built out of most of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) – if not a point of no return, it's still a “point of incredibly difficult to escape from”.  We observe vast, super-energetic near-light speed particle streams from the poles of some such systems – what gives them the power?