A professor of physics, Kevin Knuth, formerly a research scientist who worked for four years at NASA’s Ames Research Center, attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “We have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence that followed was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in.
“For nearly 70 years the scheme favored by most scientists has been to look for signals — radio transmissions,” says SETI scientist Seth Shostak. “That’s the classic approach of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), and frankly, it makes sense. Radio can easily traverse light-years, and the technology for detecting it is well known and highly sensitive. But is looking for signals really the best plan? Is it possible that we’re making the wrong bet?”
Check out today’s eclectic coverage of programs broadcast and streamed on the (occasionally “far side”) state of affairs on our pale blue dot, signaling our existence to possible exo-civilizations.
“FM signals and those of broadcast television travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).” –Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death By Black Hole
We don’t know where they’re coming from or when they’ll occur. All we know is these blazingly bright bursts of low-frequency radiation that emit more energy than the sun does in decades come from “some special place” in the cosmos.
We live in a universe where matter is distributed in a hundred billion galaxies, each containing a hundred billion stars, made up of quantum fields where space and time are not existent, that manifest themselves in the form of particles, such as electrons and photons, or as waves. Tucked into the 14-billion-year history of this vast observable universe with 100 trillion planets is a pale blue dot teeming with life and a technological civilization created by a strange species known as homo sapiens.
In the art world, “pentimento,” an alteration, an overlay on a painting, hides evidence of traces of a previous work. In a similar vein, British physicist Sir Roger Penrose argues that extinct universes exist that were filled with ghost black holes that are hidden, embedded in the Cosmic Microwave Background map, and may have harbored alien civilizations from an eon that preceded the Big Bang.