The Message

Let's kick off the year with a message of hope and change we can believe in. Sure we've seen a black president in our lifetimes but I'm not Rev. Jesse Jackson and that doesn't bring tears to my eyes. But what would should it occur in my lifetime would be to hear something from out there a message that simply says

"You are not alone"

And in the case of that message it could take almost any form. Anything at all would be enough. I'm talking about SETI. Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

There is a tender out to build the worlds most powerful radio reciever array and it comes down to South Africa and Australia as the only two countries with sufficient desert space with sufficiently low rainfall per year that is sufficiently remote from any other radio interference.

And other astronomers are trying to identify extra solar planets similar to ours in being in the 'goldilocks zone' with similar atmospheric make up to point this thing at.

I find the prospect amazing that we could draw a line in the sky and say over there that planet supported life too.

I don't know how old the radio transmissions would be, but to me that doesn't matter it may be that we determine there is life on a planet 10,000 years after they developed radio transmission technology.

I don't know, I don't care.

It's what the message would say. For one thing it would destroy the anthropomorphic view of the universe. Like an only child going to daycare for the first time and realising that there's other children out there, just as special.

It would reduce our existence to something infinitely more miraculous than being created by a personal god. It would reduce us to mere random spontaneous chance. Life being a very special development, intelligence being another. One of the rarest and most beautiful phenomena in the world.

It would call into question state boundaries and their importance in a universe that suddenly has confirmed population 2.

Why the fuck is it so important to kill eachother over dirt based on scripture when the universe saw fit to make another pale blue dot out in the sky.

Life would simultaneously become more or less precious. When we discovered that other intelligence exists it means that intelligent life got more than one chance to succeed. And it means success is not a manifest destiny of ours, survival is not assured. We may as a species have to actually work for it, to collaborate and calculate and do, to actually do what is necessary for survival.

And maybe most naively, once intelligent life is found and perhaps found again and again and again we may then turn the search into the next step, to reunite that our great great grandchildren might one day cross that line in the sky and hold someone someday and not just hear but feel and touch and smell and see with their own senses that we are not alone.

And the vatican is also engaged in this search, pondering whether ETI needs to be baptised or not. Good to know someone's tackling the important questions. Douchebags.