It sounded like noise, but any aliens listening might have noticed a clear, repetitive structure indicating its origin was non-natural - precisely the kind of signal that radio telescopes like China’s Sky Eye are listening for here on Earth. In 1974, the astronomer Frank Drake used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to blast 168 seconds of two-tone sound toward the star system M13. After all, human beings have been doing a variation of that for decades through what is known as active messaging. And the idea that after decades of searching for ET with no success, there could be alien civilizations capable of crossing interstellar distances and showing up on our planetary doorstep beggars belief.īut transmitting gigabytes of data across those vast interstellar distances would be comparatively easy. But the news is a reminder that there is little in the way of clear agreement about how the world should handle an authenticated message from an apparent alien civilization, or whether it can even be done safely.įor all the recent interest in UFO sightings - including NASA’s surprising announcement last week that it would launch a study team to investigate what it calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” - the chance that aliens would be physically visiting Earth is vanishingly small. It wouldn’t be the first time an extraterrestrial search team found a signal that appeared notable, only to dismiss it after further research. At this point it’s difficult to know what, if anything, to make of the story or its disappearance.
The story was apparently deleted from the internet for unknown reasons, though not before it was picked up by other outlets. According to the piece, which cited the head of an extraterrestrial civilization search team that was launched in China in 2020, narrowband electromagnetic signals detected by the telescope differed from previous signals, and were in the process of being investigated.
On Wednesday, a story published in China’s state-backed Science and Technology Daily reported that the country’s giant Sky Eye radio telescope had picked up unusual signals from space. But this scenario became a bit easier to envision this week. Intelligent extraterrestrials who also want to hack our planet would be even more extraordinary. The revelation of intelligent extraterrestrials would be an extraordinary event, and as SETI pioneer Carl Sagan himself once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Personally, I fall on the Agent Scully end of the alien believer spectrum. To discuss the possibility of alien life seriously is to embark upon an uncharted sea of hypotheses. It would be through information that could be sent far faster. If highly advanced aliens really wanted to conquer Earth, the most effective way likely wouldn’t be through fleets of warships crossing the stellar vastness. No one gets eaten in A for Andromeda, but it’s chilling precisely because it outlines a scenario that some scientists believe could represent a real existential threat from outer space, one that takes advantage of the very curiosity that leads us to look to the stars. They realize the message contains blueprints for the development of a highly advanced computer that generates a living organism called Andromeda.Īndromeda is quickly co-opted by the military for its technological skills, but the scientists discover that its true purpose - and that of the computer and the original signal from space - is to subjugate humanity and prepare the way for alien colonization. In the 1961 sci-fi drama A for Andromeda, written by the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle, a group of scientists running a radio telescope receive a signal originating from the Andromeda Nebula in outer space.
(You may be sensing a theme here.)īut the most frightening vision isn’t an alien being at all - it’s a computer program. Humans have invented a rogue’s gallery of nightmarish fictional aliens over the decades: acid-blooded xenomorphs who want to eat us and lay their eggs in our chest cavities Twilight Zone Kanamits who want to fatten us up like cows and eat us those lizard creatures in the 1980s miniseries V who want to harvest us for food.
0 kommentar(er)
