[freeringtonesioo]

dear friends,

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb...te-with-aliens

be well, be love.

david

rearranging stars to communicate with aliens
a proposal to create special constellations that nature would never produce
by jaron lanier


this month i seriously propose that we begin the process of repositioning the sun and other nearby stars in order to send signals to aliens, and that we begin the search for signs that aliens might have done the same for our benefit.

perhaps i should preface this crazy-sounding idea with an explanation. science is an emotional experience for me, sometimes even more emotional than art. the reason, i think, reflects both our current understanding of humanity’s place in the universe and the events of my childhood. astronomy has taught us that earth is a mere dot in an inaccessible vastness. almost everything in the night sky is so far away that there’s little hope of our having contact with other life out there—if such life even exists. worse than the possibility that we are alone is the feeling that it doesn’t matter even if we aren’t. my early life amplified this feeling of solitude: my mom died when i was a kid, and for a time the rest of the human species felt as distant from me as the deep universe does now.

i suspect a similar emotion is hidden in the pasts of many people who become interested in science, especially physics and astronomy. it’s the secret engine inside the archetype of the nerd, the kid who is disengaged from social games but is mesmerized by the bigger game of trying to engage reality in a fundamental way.

there is probably no more concrete, no greater contact-seeking attempt at engaging the universe than the search for alien life. the most prominent efforts, called seti (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), do that by listening for signals: we might get lucky and catch an alien radio transmission, for instance.

luck is important to these efforts because we are confined to investigating such a tiny sector of space and time within an enormous universe. suppose we set up a radio broadcast for aliens to hear, and suppose we could keep the transmitter going for 100,000 years—far longer than civilizations have existed, nearly as long as modern humans have. even that duration would probably be too brief for the broadcast to be heard.

the reason is that the advent of humans easily could have been accelerated or delayed hundreds of millions of years by something as banal as an asteroid hit. if the asteroid that apparently led to the demise of the dinosaurs had missed earth, maybe an intelligent dinosaur would have appeared 50 million years sooner than people did. or maybe an intelligent mammal still would have appeared, but 200 million years later than we did. since evolution on other worlds would presumably be just as sensitive to random events, it is incredibly unlikely that intelligent aliens would happen to be listening during a particular 100,000-year window when our radio broadcasts happened to be washing over their location.

[neonasafluni]

yep, sun has been moved around. it even was made to zigzag.
google "miracle of the sun" and wikipedia will give details. note all references state over 70,000 witnesses. wikipedia lists number as near 100,000. note that see by unsuspecting people over 18 kilometers away ruling out mass hysteria.
michael.
btw i relate so well to your post. we are kindred spirits.