Author: ssgeneralsilva10

For centuries, women have made critical contributions to science and to the field of Astronomy specifically.

At ECG we bring these women into the spotlight in an effort to offer the recognition, respect, and appreciation these Women of Science deserve for their important contributions. 

Spotlight on Hypatia (355 CE— March 415, Alexandria)

Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who lived in a very turbulent era in Alexandria’s history. She is the earliest female mathematician of whose life and work reasonably detailed knowledge exists.

Hypatia was one of the most eminent mathematicians and astronomers of late antiquity. Scholars traveled from around the classical world to learn mathematics and astronomy at her school.

She was the first known female mathematician and scholar. Hypatia is known as a symbol of feminism to date. The manner of her death marked the beginning of the end for Alexandria as a center of academics. 

Her philosophy was Neoplatonist and was therefore seen as “pagan” during a time of bitter religious conflict between Christians, Jews, and pagans. Her Neoplatonism was concerned with the approach to the One. The One was an underlying reality partially accessible via the human power of abstraction from the Platonic forms, themselves abstractions from the world of everyday reality. Her philosophy also led her to embrace a life of dedicated virginity.

One day when Hypatia was traveling through the city, a violent Christian mob attacked her and dragged her out of her carriage, brutally murdering her and dismembering her body.

Hypatia’s death was a turning point in the politics of Alexandria. In the wake of her murder, philosophers, Greek and Romans fled the city, and the city’s role as the center of learning declined. She was being called a ‘martyr of philosophy’.

Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria. She was one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Despite these achievements, she is mostly remembered more for her violent death. Her life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict.

“To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.”

Why do we explore space and the universe? Perhaps the answer to this complicated both theological and scientific question can be found in the words offered by a poet. 

T.S. Elliot in his work entitled Little Gidding (1942) wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”. He probably did not have space exploration in mind in 1942. His sentiment, however, poetically captures one of the most important reasons we explore space.

Little Gidding is the fourth and final poem of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. Four Quartets is series of four poems by Eliot, published individually from 1936 to 1942. The book form compilation is considered Eliot’s masterpiece. Each of the quartets has five “movements.” Each is titled by a place name as follows.

Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry, Salvages (1941), Little Gidding” (1942).

Little Gidding is a series of poems that discuss time, perspective, humanity, and salvation.  It focuses on the unity of past, present, and future.  It claims that understanding this unity is necessary for salvation.¹

Little Gidding refers to a small Anglican community in Little Gidding of Huntingdonshire, England. It was first established by Nicholas Ferrar in the 17th century.

According to Elliot, humanity’s flawed understanding of life and turning away from God leads to a cycle of warfare. This, however, can be overcome by recognizing the lessons of the past.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family.

Eliot was first educated at Harvard University. He did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne College, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford.

Eliot settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk. He eventually became the literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Eliot later became their director. 

Eliot founded and edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion (1922-1939). In 1927 he became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church. 

Eliot’s insights into the cyclical nature of life are expressed through themes and images creatively woven throughout the Four Quartet poems. The work addresses connections and the very nature of the human experience. It is considered Eliot’s clearest exposition of his Christian beliefs.²

NASA’s exploration of the universe reveals humanity’s place in nature in the broadest possible sense. That view of ourselves has changed dramatically over the centuries. 

The ancients thought the earth was the center of the cosmos. Everything out there revolved around our earth.  

Then we figured out that our known universe, our solar system, revolves around our sun. After that, we came to believe that our solar system is part of a galaxy (Milky Way), which we believed to revolve around our solar system. Then that understanding changed again based on new discoveries.

One hundred years ago, most astronomers considered the universe to be about 3600 light years in extent, less than a billion years old, and with our solar system near its center.

This is an incredible historic repetition of thought process with respect to our need to think it all revolves around us at some level. It is the height of arrogance. Today science now believes that this is not the case.  

Astronomers today have seen objects 13 billion light years away in a universe 13.7 billion years old containing hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Nothing has been more revolutionary than the idea that the entire universe is in a state of constant and random evolution.  This chronology of the life of the universe, and our place within it, is known as cosmic evolution.

Cosmic evolution is the study of the many varied developmental and generational changes in the universe. Changes in the assembly and composition of radiation, matter, and life throughout all space and across all time.

These changes have produced our galaxy, our sun, our earth, and us. The result is a grand evolutionary synthesis bridging a wide variety of scientific specialties. It is a genuine narrative of epic proportions extending from the very beginning of time to the present, from the Big Bang to the birth humankind. ³

The cosmic evolutionary story has evoked a wide range of responses in the Christian religious domain. Its cosmic narrative of growth and change, its apparent fine-tuning for living beings, and possibilities for abundant life. These things raise long-standing religious questions of Divine Creation.   

On the one hand, cosmic evolution has clearly presented a deep challenge for some conservative Christians.

The apparent absence of a divine creator is not consistent with the literal readings of Genesis.

This perceived conflict mobilized some creationists into political action in the arena of public education. This is a cause more recently and aggressively pursued by the Intelligent Design movement.

On the other hand, many in the religious community view cosmic evolution as compatible with belief in a God. God who created it all and still acts in the universe. They hold positions which range from the more conservative “progressive creationism” to the more liberal “theistic evolution”.

Most mainstream and liberal theologians and laypersons, fall into the latter category. Typically, they endeavor to explore common ground with science by examining traditional religious concepts of divine action. The concepts of natural theology, design, cosmic purpose and God’s relation to the world in the light of the new cosmology. ^[4]

The cosmic evolution idea has roots in the 19th century. It was occasionally invoked in the first half of the 20th century by astronomers such as George Ellery Hale. It really came into its own only in the modern Space Age.

In 1958, in his classic book Of Stars and Men, Harvard College Observatory Director Harlow Shapley wrote that the Earth is “on the outer fringe of one galaxy in a universe of millions of galaxies. Man becomes peripheral among the billions of stars in his own Milky Way. According to the revelations of paleontology and geochemistry he is also exposed as a recent, and perhaps an ephemeral manifestation in the unrolling of cosmic time.“

In his 1967 essays Beyond the Observatory, Shapley wrote, “Nothing seems to be more important philosophically than the revelation that the evolutionary drive, which has in recent years swept over the whole field of biology, also includes in its sweep the evolution of galaxies and stars, and comets and atoms, and indeed all things material.”

Cosmic evolution has become the guiding principle for modern astronomy. The science programs of the world’s space agencies may be seen as filling in the details in this story of the history of the universe.

The very idea was spread during the 1970s and 1980s by NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. It was also spread by NASA’s broader Astro biological seek and find efforts.

For the last decade, NASA’s Origins program has had cosmic evolution as its focus. When the program began in 1996, it was viewed as “Following a 15-billion-year long chain of events.” A chain that begins with the Big Bang and travels through the mysterious formation of all of the elements and energy that cradles life on Earth.”

Cosmic evolution has several possible outcomes. Its endpoint may be planets, stars and galaxies. We observe these and know they exist, and the result is what we might call the “physical universe,” magnificent in and of itself.

Alternately, cosmic evolution may result in a profusion of life, either microbial or intelligent, throughout the universe. This outcome, the Holy Grail of SETI and astrobiology programs around the world, would constitute a “biological universe.”

A third possible outcome, rarely discussed, is a universe in which cultural evolution is taken into account.

If intelligent life is millions or billions of years old, then cultural evolution may have resulted in a “post-biological universe.” A universe in which flesh and blood intelligence has been superseded by artificial intelligence (IA). We can see that happening here on earth today. It is dangerous territory, and we must proceed with great wisdom and caution with IA development. 

Carnegie Mellon AI pioneer Hans Moravec has famously postulated a post-biological earth in the next few generations. Given the time scales of the universe, it seems much more likely to have already happened in outer space.

All of these outcomes have implications for our human destiny. It may be our destiny to populate the universe, or to interact with its flesh-and-blood intelligence in many forms. In the post-biological universe, we may have to interact with IA.

There are more immediate implications as well. Sir Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist and Anglican priest, has called cosmic evolution “Genesis for the Third Millennium.” He suggested that it must be incorporated into religious doctrines.

Reverend Michael Dowd has taken that sentiment to heart in a DVD called “Evolutionary Christianity.” In it he incorporates “the entire history of the universe and the emergent complexity of matter, life, consciousness, culture and technology.”

Space programs can get bogged down in technical details, politics, theological concerns, and funding controversies. We should not lose sight of the longer-term implications. Although its practical benefits are many, space exploration has no higher calling than this search for our place in the universe. ^[5]

In both space and time, the study of cosmic evolution allows us to see the universe as it really is, to reflect on our place in it, and to “know the place for the first time.” At the end of the day, this is what we seek and why we explore the universe.

 

[1] Wikipedia, Little Gidding Poem.

[2] Britannica, Four Quartets

[3] Cosmic Evolution, State of the Science, Eric J. Chaisson, 2009

[4] Omnilogos, Cosmic Evolution: Christian Perspectives, Kate Grayson         Boisvert, Greenwood Press, 2008

[5] NASA, Beyond Earth, Expanding Human Presence into the Solar System, July 21, 2005, Steven J. Dick- NASA Chief Historian

I have authored two books about extraterrestrial communication. One is published.

Extraterrestrial Communication Code: 

The second, Angel Communication Code, will be available to the public before the end of 2023.

This subject is very real and very fascinating. The theme of the books is that ETs left us a message to decode and repeat back to them. If we can demonstrate we understand their message, the lines of communication will open. That is the theory I put on the table along with the logic and evidence that built the theory.

Communicating with another species is probably not going to be easy. Consider how difficult it is already for humans from one culture and language to be understood by those from another. Now we are trying to achieve meaningful communication with ETs. Their bodies, minds and habitats are likely to be far different from humans on earth.

The scientific community recognizes the issue. An artist-led team created a mock message from the stars to test us Earthlings. On May 24, 2023, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter beamed the note from Mars toward Earth.  

Three observatories detected the transmission 16 minutes later.  The Medicina Radio Observatory in Bologna, Italy; the Allen Telescope Array in northern California; and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

This is an on-going interplanetary art project, called A Sign in Space.  Nobody has deciphered the May 24 message, but many continue to try. You can actually find the message and download it from several websites. A Sign in Space

Only three people in the world know what A Sign in Space’s message means. First among them is Daniela de Paulis, the project’s founder. She is an artist in residence at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. She also serves at the Green Bank Observatory. De Paulis and two other co-authors created the mock alien message after consulting with poets, scientists, programmers and philosophers.

Their challenge in creating the message was not just to think like an extraterrestrial but also to neutralize Earth’s regional biases. Her team immediately ruled out language-based communication. She will not however, confirm or deny whether the message contains any text. Her team even agonized over the using of mathematics. Although the fundamental concepts are universal, different societies may think about and represent math differently. “It was really very heavy work to dismantle our Western-centric thinking,” she says.

De Paulis struggled with the message for years after she conceived the project in 2019. A breakthrough came in late 2022 when she contacted artist and computer programmer Giacomo Miceli. He suggested that she draw inspiration from the short story “A Sign in Space” in Italian writer Italo Calvino’s collection Cosmicomics.

A month before the transmission deadline, astronomer Roy Smits joined the pair. He added a mathematical component to make the message “more universal, so to speak,” de Paulis says. It also made it and much harder to crack because it looks nothing like what humans use in our daily conversations.

We have been sending messages to ETs out into the stars for decades with no response to date.  In 1974, scientists shot a radio message into the universe using the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. It was a 1,679 string of 1’s and 0’s. When translated graphically, it consists of crude representations of a human, the Arecibo Telescope’s dish and the DNA double helix, and more.

The likelihood of this “Arecibo message” ever being understood by extraterrestrials is slim at best. Its composer, the late astronomer Frank Drake, gave the Arecibo message to his colleagues to interpret for fun, and not one of them figured it out.

That project, as well as the new experiment, illustrates just what a tall order true understanding between species is. “The beauty of A Sign in Space is to make us reflect on just how it is more frustratingly difficult and ultimately a much more profound sort of contact than Hollywood would ever portray,” says Douglas Vakoch. He is the president of the organization METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, who was not involved in the project.

One of the project’s more than 4,700 subscribers on Discord is Gonzalo José Carracedo Carballal. He is a 34-year-old Ph.D. student in astrophysics at the Complutense University of Madrid. A radio astronomy devotee, he fills his spare time working on radio wave projects. His lab in a room littered with instruments and parts. A satellite dish peeks from his balcony. Tattooed on his right triceps is an excerpt from the etchings on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes’ plaque. These were other 1970s attempts by Earth scientists to introduce our species to ETs that might encounter the craft.

Carracedo Carballal was part of the first group of people to extract the raw message from the ExoMars orbiter’s broadcast. The message was a 40-gigabyte string of numbers describing the waveform of the telemetry data, interwoven with the alien message. Unlike a real extraterrestrial note, which would arrive unannounced, this signal came in at a precisely scheduled time. Comparing the arrival timing with previous transmissions the telescopes received, the amateur code breakers identified a data packet in the radio signal that was more active and sizable than usual.

A week’s effort of filtering the data segment, which Carracedo Carballal likens to peeling layers off an onion, eventually led to an 8.2-kilobyte bitmap image of five speckled clusters set against a blank background. (Shown below)

Soon after Carracedo Carballal and his colleagues found the raw message, speculations on its meaning erupted. Perhaps the message was hinting at the aliens’ appearance, Morse code, cellular automata or the genetic secrets of E.T.

One user enlisted ChatGPT to reverse engineer a first contact appropriate message as a starting point. Several users suggested that the image was a star map broadcasting the civilization’s location. Others proposed that the dots represented constellations of a much smaller scale: molecules, perhaps the bio signatures of the foreign home world.

The raw message looked too random to be comprehensible. Decoding was necessary to wrangle it into a more intelligible form. However, where to start was the critical question. Every attempt would be a stab in the dark. “You start to see patterns,” Carracedo Carballal says of the process. “You have to stop and think whether something is actually there, or you’re just projecting.”

Whenever Ivi Hasanaj, a 32-year-old software engineer based in Germany, starts to work on decoding A Sign in Space’s message for the day, he opens up the raw image on his computer and stares. He stares, and stares some more until an idea occurs to him, and he writes code to manipulate the image.

Hasanaj does not think aliens, or A Sign in Space’s organizers, are the sadistic sort who would make message recipients bang their head for nothing more than their amusement. Messages are meant to be understood. Although he had not thought much about the problem of extraterrestrial communication before this project, He has solved many puzzles on the gamified coding platform Codewars, and this experience comes in handy. For one, he recognizes the difference between decryption and decoding.

Decryption is the process of making sense of a concealed message for which only the intended recipient has a key, or a translation hack, to understand it. This kind of code breaking is much more difficult than decoding: the biggest hurdle is guessing the missing key.

On the other hand, a message with the key already embedded inside lends itself to decoding. When decoding, the user should not introduce new information into the message. Any operation on the raw file, such as a rotation or an overlay, should come from instructions that the reader has managed to extract from the message. Otherwise, it would be like arbitrarily rearranging the letters of a word to arrive at a new anagram.

Hasanaj is not sure of the true content of A Sign in Space’s message, but his own best guess is a numerical system that counts from one to five. He uncovered this from observing a recurring pattern among the brightest pixels in the image.

Hasanaj has not been able to account for the remaining flecks, which constitute the majority of the signal. Perhaps other kinds of information beyond math lurk in the message. He thinks no part of the already slim communication is redundant.  Aliens would probably make every pixel count. He says he will know the correct answer when he sees it.

The community is still trying to decode the message, pursuing 30-some ideas for how to do so, before even attempting to interpret its full meaning. For this process, participants can take a less technical approach to making sense of the message, as they might do for an abstract painting. For now, the signal is still too random to be interpretable.

Watching their efforts unfold, de Paulis thinks these scattershot efforts may be distracting users from exploring each idea to the full. “They can’t focus on one particular decision,” she observes. “I think that’s the main problem.” If the public remains stuck on the decoding process, she says her team will likely organize an online hackathon later in August.

Humanity’s best shot at understanding an extraterrestrial message is to throw a consortium of diverse expertise at it, Vakoch says. A Sign in Space is a shining example of what that may look like. 

In the event of a real extraterrestrial signal reaching Earth, the public is not likely to be invited to help with the decoding process. In 1989, the International Academy of Astronautics established a post detection protocol that largely emphasizes secrecy. The guidelines have had little updating since. “An international committee of scientists and other experts should be established to serve as a focal point for continuing analysis, and also to provide advice on the release of information to the public,” the protocol decrees. “Parties to this declaration should not make any public announcement of this information” until the extraterrestrial, origin is verified.

“The world has changed a lot since the 1980s,” says Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and an outreach and education coordinator for A Sign in Space. Many more radio aficionados have rigged their own telescopes and trained them toward the skies. There is also social media, which spreads news like wildfire. “The public will know no matter what,” Marchis says.

A Sign in Space is a dress rehearsal for scientific organizations to iron out the technical challenges of message sharing and telescope mobilization to confirm signal detection. More idealistically, it is an experiment for sharing an extraterrestrial signal with members of the public and getting them involved. In that sense, A Sign in Space is the ultimate citizen science project, one on a planetary scale. De Paulis calls the participants on Discord her “co-creators.”

Marchis says he would love to make extraterrestrial communication and translation a more democratic affair. “I’d make the data available right away to the entire community of the world,” Marchis says, rather than having it “on the internal network of some random scientists.” That is what drew him to A Sign in Space in the first place. “I’m hoping that this is going to be the way we’re going to move forward in the future,” he says.

In construing the meaning of an extraterrestrial dispatch, those who give it a go often try to anticipate what the message might be trying to say. The go-to answer is often science and math, given that these concepts hold up anywhere in the universe. The movie Contact posits that space aliens will hail us with numbers, throwing us a sequence of primes that look unnatural enough to make humans sit up and take notice.

It is one thing to flag a different species’ attention but another to converse meaningfully across the vast reaches of space. “I think an alien would send information that gives us an idea of who they are and the level of complexity that they have reached,” Marchis says—something that may even give recipients a glimpse of the alien society and its evolution.

This is where art comes in. Art is a creator’s self-expression and a cross-cultural conversation with its beholder. Perhaps the true meaning of an alien’s message is the composer’s original intent plus what the recipients make of it. Interpreting such a message requires not only technical skill but also an artistic, philosophical thread. Thus, communicating with aliens is both a science and an art.

A Sign in Space recognizes the near futility of extraterrestrial communication and turns it into an endeavor that is much more open-ended. “If we ever receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, I can imagine that there will never be an agreement over the cultural interpretation,” de Paulis says. “I think there would necessarily be some miscommunication.” [1]

[1] Scientific American. Can You Decode an Alien Message? Shi En Kim August 3, 2023

 

Extraterrestrial Communication Group’s podcast interview by The Mysterious Radio Program was broadcast on May 19, 2023.  Mysterious Radio Interview

Our debut book, Extraterrestrial Communication Code, was the primary interview subject.  Our sequel book, “Angel Communication Code”, was also explored.  We hope to publish it by the end of the year. Other relevant extraterrestrial communication topics were discussed as well.  

The summary below (italic print) is transcribed directly from the Mysterious Radio Website:

Mysterious Radio is the place to go for mind-expanding, thought-provoking content at its finest.

We are dedicated to exploring the mysteries of this world and taking our listeners on a journey to uncover shocking revelations with top scientists, bestselling authors and renowned journalists.

Our top-rated podcast provides exceptional analysis of extraordinary events, ancient history, supernatural places, true crime, UFO contact and unexplained phenomena. This makes us one of the leading sources for uncovering never before heard information.

Our mission statement is “To inform and empower people through knowledge”. We strive everyday toward a vision that seeks mental enlightenment for all who seek it receiving millions of downloads yearly. Mysterious Radio is proudly produced by an independent podcast team.

Mysterious Radio has approximately 500,000 formal subscribers and millions of regular listeners on several continents around the globe.

This is a big step for our Extraterrestrial Communication Group project. Our Extraterrestrial Communication Group has reached the 3,600-follower mark as of the date of this post and is growing every day. 

It is our expectation that the Mysterious Radio podcast interview exposure will boost that number quite a bit and boost it quickly. Less than 12-hours after the broad cast, the ECG experienced the highest number of visitors in any single day since the website went live in 2021, and the day is not over.

There are 644 Active International Outer Space Agreements by signature as of December 31, 2022.

Most are project specific. In addition, United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs contains 5 treaties. They are referred to as the “five United Nations treaties on outer space” as follows:

1. 1. 1. The Outer Space Treaty.

• • • • Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies
      • Adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 2222 (XXI), opened for signature on 27 January 1967, entered into force on 10 October 1967

This treaty is currently undergoing an update.

1. 1. 2. The Rescue Agreement.

• • • • Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space
      • Adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 2345 (XXII), opened for signature on 22 April 1968, entered into force on 3 December 1968

1. 1. 3. The Liability Convention.

• • • • Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects
      • Adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 2777 (XXVI), opened for signature on 29 March 1972, entered into force on 1 September 1972

1. 1. 4. The Registration Convention.

• • • • Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space
      • Adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 3235 (XXIX), opened for signature on 14 January 1975, entered into force on 15 September 1976

• • • The Moon Agreement.
      • Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies
      • Adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 34/68, opened for signature on 18 December 1979, entered into force on 11 July 1984.

The five declarations and legal principles of these treaties are:

1. 1. 1. The Declaration of Legal Principles.

• • • • Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Uses of Outer Space.
      • General Assembly resolution 1962 (XVIII) of 13 December 1963

1. 1. 2. The Broadcasting Principles.

• • • • The Principles Governing the Use by States of Artificial Earth Satellites for International Direct Television Broadcasting.
      • General Assembly resolution 37/92 of 10 December 1982

1. 1. 3. The Remote Sensing Principles.

• • • • The Principles Relating to Remote Sensing of the Earth from Outer Space.
      • General Assembly resolution 41/65 of 3 December 1986

1. 1. 4. The Nuclear Power Sources Principles.

• • • • The Principles Relevant to the Use of Nuclear Power Sources in Outer Space.
      • General Assembly resolution 47/68 of 14 December 1992

1. 1. 5. The Benefits Declaration.

• • • • The Declaration on International Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for the Benefit and in the Interest of All States. This takes into Particular Account, the Needs of Developing Countries.
      • General Assembly resolution 51/122 of 13 December 1996

The jurisdiction of these treaties and agreements starts at the boarder of outer space. Where the earth’s atmosphere ends, and outer space begins. It is a proposed line, and not all entities accept the line unilaterally. This proposed delineation is called the Kármán line.

The line is named for Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963). He was a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active in aeronautics and astronautics. In 1957, Kármán was the first person to calculate a theoretical altitude limit for conventional aircraft flight. 

The Kármán line is the proposed boundary between earth’s atmosphere and outer space which is accepted by the international record-keeping body FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale). The line is set at an altitude of 54 nautical miles = 62 miles = 328,000 feet above mean sea level.

The line lies within the Thermosphere which is between the Mesosphere below and the Exosphere above. This delineation of the edge of space, however, is not globally adopted.[1]

The Kármán line has no physical characteristics. There is no identifiable change in the atmosphere across it. The line is in place only for outer space legal and regulatory purposes. Atmospheric aircraft and outer space spacecraft are subject to different jurisdictions and legislations. International law does not define the edge of outer space. The Kármán line is well above the altitude achievable by conventional aircraft or high-altitude balloons. 

These limits have remained much the same since the beginning of the modern jet era. For example, the Boeing 747-200 which first launched in 1968, had an in-service ceiling altitude of 45,100 feet. The only notable exception is the Concorde, which is certified to fly at an altitude of 60,000 feet, which is above the ozone layer and into the stratosphere. The higher the altitude the lower the atmospheric density.

The Kármán line has nothing to do with aircraft engine combustion or wing lift.  The Kármán line is set at the approximate altitude where satellite orbits will decay before completing a single orbit.

Scientists often disagree on exactly where the atmosphere ends and outer space begins. Authorities having jurisdiction however, including the United Nations, accept the FAI’s Kármán line definition.  The Kármán line as defined by the FAI was established in the 1960s. Various entities within those nations of the outer space treaties define outer space’s boundary differently for variety of intents and purposes. Treaties and agreements are not laws.

The delineation between earth atmosphere and outer space is very much a-kin to the establishment of the rules for international waters. “International Waters” is not a defined term in international law. It is an informal term, which sometimes refers to waters beyond the “territorial sea” of any State or Nation. The term “International Waters” is sometimes used as a synonym for the more formal term, “High Seas”.  

International Waters (High Seas) do not belong to any State’s or Nation’s jurisdiction according to international law. The Convention on the High Seas was signed in 1958 by 63 signatories. High Seas are defined to mean “all parts of the sea that are not included in the territorial sea or in the internal waters of a State”. It also states that:  “no State may validly purport to subject any part of them to its sovereignty“.[2] 

The Convention on the High Seas was used as a foundation for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), signed in 1982. This law recognizes exclusive economic zones which are set at 200 nautical miles (230 miles) from the baseline. The baseline is where coastal States have sovereign rights to the water column and sea floor as well as the natural resources found there. [3] The High Seas make up 50% of the surface area of the earth and cover over two-thirds of the ocean. International Maritime Law, however, is different than outer space treaties or agreements. Again, Treaties and agreements are not laws.

In the 1960’s there was a genuine need for a globally accepted boundary between our atmosphere and outer space, and for outer space treaties and agreements.  An issue arises in the 2020’s more than half a century later. We must now consider that there is no established or even proposed outer boundary beyond the first boundary as far as we know. How far past the Kármán line does the jurisdiction of earth’s outer space treaties and agreements reach? 

Looking back through history, we can expect that the day will come when local (to earth) outer space “territories” will be measured, defined and put on a spherical map of some sort.  As soon as that happens nations will make claims to the sovereignty of those outer space territories despite any treaties or agreements. It is our nature as demonstrated throughout history. 

Nations have forever gone to war over ownership of territories on earth, regardless of ratified treaties, agreements, or even laws.  We do it with terrestrial territories to this day – every day. We also do it with the delineation of the High Seas.

China for example, is now making their own independent interpretations and challenges to the delineation of the accepted High Seas line. We can only presume China is doing this for reasons of power, money, and conquest, consistent with human history.  This will inevitably lead to international conflict, as it has historically done, depending on how hard China pushes that agenda. If nothing else, the human animal is very predictable on matters of territorial ambitions. 

There is no reason to expect earth Nations won’t do the same when outer space territories are inevitably delineated as were the current political boundaries of soil and the High Seas and International Maritime Law.   It will not matter if it is an outer space territory.

If any region has a border creating a territory, humans will inevitably wage war for control of that territory. They will fight to claim any favorable area as their sovereign territory and then defend it after they have control.  It has been our historic behavior forever and that is the first problem for humans to grapple with as we prepare to migrate into outer space.

The short-sighted second problem is that the outer space agreements and treaties currently in place don’t address extraterrestrials (ETs) in our space. They do not consider where that outer perimeter line begins or even should begin. When the day comes that ET communication happens, will earth make a claim to an outer zone territory and try to defend that outer zone from those ET entities?  To do that, we must be all on the same team. 

What we have in place now does not address an interstellar line where ETs entering our self-proclaimed territory must follow our rules. For ETs to obey our rules, we first must actually have rules and then we must be able to communicate those rules to them. Assuming we can agree on where the line is and who is responsible for holding that line; ETs will either:

1. 1. 1. Respect and obey our rules.
      2. Negotiate our rules to something mutually agreeable for the benefit of both parties.
      3. Disregard the rules because there is nothing, we can effectively do about it anyway.
      4. Inform us that the rules are universal already – here is your copy, welcome to the club.

1. 1.  

Our interactions with ETs will be a function of the ETs purpose for coming here in the first place.  It is comparable to an adult being granted permission to enter a child’s tree house. The adult complies with the child’s tree house rules out of respect for their turf.  They do this knowing full well they can take over the tree house at any time they choose either cooperatively or by force if necessary.

Defense of territory is all about establishing a perimeter. Where should we establish that outer perimeter or should we even try? There is a lot of science fiction-like talk out there about colonizing Mars but it’s technologically very far out there for us right now. We have actually never been there in person, and we certainly will not be able to defend it any time soon.

Maybe we should start by setting the perimeter at the moon-range distance. At least we have been to the moon in person and have a flag in the ground to stake our claim so to speak. At least we have an argument that it is earths sovereign territory for a variety of reasons. The argument would imply that moon-range is the distance from our earth base which is our sovereign territory because of the impact the moon has on the earth’s oceans etc.  The moon has an impact on the earth and therefore, we must protect it. At least we would have a justifiable argument even though we can’t effectively defend that territorial perimeter at this point in time.

The obvious reality of the situation is that we have no shot at claiming and effectively defending a moon-range perimeter around the earth any time soon. We are not technologically there yet.    Moon-range defense distance might be achievable someday far into the future but not for a very long time. Maybe however, the control and defense problems are the same for ETs also. Maybe they ant defend it either. In fact, maybe the need for that sort of conquest and defense is not the way we should be thinking at all.

All of this discussion about war-like defense is based on the assumption that the ETs are coming with the intent of conquest. Maybe that sort of conquest mentality does not even exist any longer beyond our own primitive human nature. If conquest was the ET mission, they surely would have completed that mission by now.  They have been coming to earth for centuries and are probably walking among us today. The evidence of their intent and activity on earth thus far has obviously not been one of violent conquest. 

We don’t know what their intent might be, but it certainly does not appear to be one of violent conquest and control of our earthly territory. Consider the possibility that the notion of territorial control and conquest is extinct within a galactic community. It makes sense because power and control inevitably change hands and the cost is very high and all for what…. wealth and power? Perhaps the universal community has a higher and more civilized purpose.

This is why establishing two-way ET communication is so critical at this point in our time and place in the universe. Once 2-way communication is established and we are introduced to the universal community, we may very well be informed by our new ET friends that the rules are already in place. They may just tell us what those rulers are, and we would be expected to comply in order to be accepted as an active part a more universal community program. Let’s face it, we won’t really have another option.

It is not unreasonable to expect that there is an entity out there similar to the United Nations here on earth, to the fictional series Star Trek’s “The United Federation of Planets”. The logic is there and perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future, earth will have a representative on the Board of such a galactic organization.

When the day comes, and it is probably coming relatively soon, when ETs open the channels of communication, people of the entire earth as a singular common entity will have either a common friend or a common adversary. This will be unprecedented in human history to the best of our current knowledge of human history.

The concept of One World Order takes on a different meaning in this context.  The concept expands into One Galactic Order. One thing seems obvious however things turn out in the future. The people of earth or of any of the sovereign nations upon it do not own outer space or even a miniscule slice of its vastness.

In the words of former President Ronal Regan: “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world”. There is a lot of wisdom in that simple observation and statement, and it can be interpreted as not being just about ET communication. It applies to the return of a higher authority as well. 

The more research I do on the subject of extraterrestrial communication and the universe at large, the more that research circles back to faith and a creator of the universe. Science and faith are clearly linked.

All predictions, indications and current world events are telling us that something very world changing is headed our way in the very near future. The evidence is everywhere, and it has been predicted and prophesied by most, if not all cultures and faiths of the world. With conquest, wealth and power comes corruption and immorality. The very things our creator seeks to correct in his human creation. 

The world we live in today is filled to the brim with corruption and immorality like never before. Is there a government anywhere on earth that is not corrupt? What about human morality and what we are teaching and doing to very young children in school. We are also teaching them by example. Where is all of this going? 

The judgements and corrections to human corruption and immorality will be administered by the only entity that will ever own outer space and the universe. That is for that what we must prepare. The owner of outer space is the creator of it all in the first place. In the beginning God created the heavens and earth (Genesis 1:1).

[1] Wikipedia. Kármán line

[2] Text of CONVENTION ON THE HIGH SEAS Archived 22 February 2019 at the Wayback Machine (U.N.T.S. No. 6465, vol. 450, pp. 82–103)

[3]  National Ocean Service. “What is the EEZ”.  Retrieved 8 September 2019.

 

The Hebrew calendar, which is still in use to this day, is based on the Anno Mundi (“in the year of the world”) premise. Anno Mundi dates events from the beginning of the creation of the earth as calculated as best as possible through scripture.

Ancient civilizations derived their calendars based on the reign of kings or the cycles of the seasons as set by their various gods. In Mesopotamia one would have dated an event as “five years from the reign of King Shulgi”.

In Egypt, it would have been “three years after the last Opet Festival of Ramesses who was the second of that name”. Or perhaps “In the tenth year of the reign of Ramesses who triumphed at Kadesh”. This method of dating was continued by the Romans who counted their years according to three different systems in different eras including from the founding of Rome, and by emperors who ruled at a point in time.

It was Julius Caesar who reformed the calendar and renamed the months during his reign from 49-44 BCE (Before Common Era (BCE) or before Christ (BC)). This calendar remained in use, with periodic revisions, until 1582 CE (Common Era). This is the same as AD (anno Domini), which means “in the year of the Lord” in Latin. In 1582 CE, Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar which is also still in use in the present day. Christians used the Anno Mundi calendar and the Roman calendar in the early years of the faith. In 525 CE, a new concept in dating was introduced by a Christian monk named Dionysius Exiguus (470-544 CE) which provided the foundation for the move to the BC/AD system.

Dionysius Exiguus invented the concept of Anno Domini (“in the year of our Lord”) or AD time in an effort to stabilize the date of the celebration of Easter. While he was working on this problem, Christians of the church of Alexandria were dating events from the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian (284 CE). Ironically, this emperor often persecuted members of the new Christian faith. Dionysius Exiguus’s goal was to bring the eastern and western churches into agreement on a single day on which all Christians would celebrate Easter.

This goal had been decided upon by Constantine the Great at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, but that goal had not yet been achieved. Dionysius Exiguus ultimately succeeded in changing the system of dating years from the Roman system and the Alexandrian system. This new system is centered on the Christian era starting with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. This choice also eliminated another Christian problem, which was the dating historical events based on the reign of an emperor who had killed so many Christians. [1]

The only problem with this dating system was that no one actually knew when exactly Jesus of Nazareth was born. Dionysius Exiguus himself did not know when Jesus was born, and his system made no claims or credits for dating that event definitively. He seems to have arrived at his calculations through a reliance on scripture and the known history of the time to create a Christian calendar which would be acceptable to both the western and eastern churches of the time for the celebration of Easter.

Dionysius Exiguus never made the claim that he knew the date of Jesus’s birth.  He did not begin his quest to reform the calendar for the purpose of accurately dating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  He did it in accordance with the wishes of the pope of the time who wanted Constantine’s vision realized.

The Easter celebration of the resurrection was considered the most important celebration of the church. Constantine, and those in power who followed him, wanted Easter observed by all churches on the same day. It was Dionysius Exiguus’s job to make that happen. He tried to do this by making a new calendar system which involved calculating the date of Jesus’s birth. This was the means to his desired end, not the target end in itself.

The Bible does not specifically identify the year when Jesus was born.  It does, however, provide sufficient information to identify a relatively narrow range of dates. There is no true proof or agreement with Christian theologians on this matter. It is complicated and difficult to understand. One version of the deduction path to the time of the birth of Jesus Christ goes like this:

It was after Archelaus began to rule in Judea in 4 BC when Jesus returned to Israel from Egypt and settled in Nazareth. Before taking Jesus from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the Passover feast when Jesus was twelve years old (Luke 2:42). The Bible says that Joseph and Mary “went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover” (Luke 2:41)- every year.” This means that at least three prior Passover visits to Jerusalem before the visit mentioned in Luke 2:41 that took place when Jesus was twelve years old. If there had been only three prior Passover visits and the one mentioned in Luke 2:41 is the fourth, and if Archelaus began to rule in Judea just before Jesus settled in Nazareth, four years would have passed since Archelaus’ rule began in 4 BC, so the year would have theoretically been 0 AD. There is however, no such thing as a “zero” year. In this system, the year Christ was born is 1 A.D., and the year preceding it is 1 B.C.

Since Jesus is indicated as being twelve years old at this time, it would mean that Jesus was born in 12 BC. If there had been four prior Passover visits and the one mentioned in Luke 2:41 is the fifth, five years would have passed since Archelaus’ rule began in 4 BC, so the year would have been 1 AD. Since Jesus is indicated as being twelve years old at this time, it would mean that Jesus was born in 11 BC. Similarly, if there had been 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 prior Passover visits, Jesus would have been born in 10 BC, 9 BC, 8 BC, 7 BC, 6 BC, 5 BC, 4 BC, respectively. Since the “census” mentioned in Luke 2:2 took place in 8 BC, Jesus was born between 8 BC and 4 BC.[2] There are other versions of this calculation out there, but the results are similar[3].

The BC/AD system is fundamentally flawed in that it misrepresents the birth of Jesus by approximately 6 years, depending on your sources. The year of Jesus’s birth differs depending on which Gospel one reads. While the Gospel of Matthew states in chapter 2:1 that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, the Gospel of Luke states in chapter 2:1-2 that Jesus was born during the first census of the rule of Quirinius, governor of Syria. According to ancient sources, the date of this census is about 6 CE. The Bible is internally inconsistent regarding the year of Jesus’ birth.[4]  6 BC is most often considered the best educated and defensible guess as to the year of Jesus’s birth.

Fixing the date on which the Easter was to be observed and celebrated triggered a major controversy in early Christianity in which an Eastern and a Western position can be delineated. The dispute, known as the Paschal controversies, was not definitively resolved until the 8^th century. Christians observed the day of the Crucifixion on the same day that Jews celebrated the Passover offering which was the 14^th day after the first full moon of spring. Resurrection, then, was observed 3 days later, regardless of the day of the week.

In the West, the Resurrection of Jesus was celebrated on the first day of the week, Sunday, when Jesus had risen from the dead. Consequently, Easter was always celebrated on the first Sunday after the 14th day of the month. Increasingly, the churches opted for the Sunday celebration, and the Quartodecimans (“14^th day” proponents) remained a minority. In the end, it was the Council of Nicaea in 325 that decreed that Easter should be observed on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox (March 21). Easter, therefore, can fall on any Sunday between March 22^nd  and April 25^th .[5]

The first full moon of April (the pink moon) is always the 3^rd full moon of the year. Jesus was resurrected on the 3^rd day after his crucifixion and that is what the Easter feast is all about. This year (2023) the first April full moon in the western hemisphere occurred on Thursday April 6^th and Sunday the 9^th is Easter Sunday, 3 days after the first full moon of April. The number 3 is a huge deal in Christianity and this Easter’s line up of the number 3 does not occur very often, making this year’s Easter celebration just a bit more special.

Happy Easter to you!

[1] LiveScience.com. Keeping time: The origin of B.C. and A.D.  Robert Coolman , Owen Jarus.  January 14, 2022

[2] Bible Verse Study. When was Jesus Christ Born? Author not cited. 2022

[3] Biblical Archeology Society. When Was Jesus Born—B.C. or A.D.? How the divide between B.C. and A.D. was calculated.  Megan Sauter. December 4, 2021

[4] World History Encyclopedia. The Origin & History of the BCE/CE Dating System. Joshua J. Mark. March 27, 2017

[5] Britannica. Easter Holiday. Hans J. Hillerbrand. April 7, 2003

Wilderness is essentially defined as an area undisturbed by human activity as a naturally developed ecosystem. The universe therefore is a wilderness; at least it is to us. As we move into the extraterrestrial wilderness, it is important to reflect upon our history as humans and our handling of our mother earth wilderness in terms of historical paradigms.

There was a time in history when “wilderness” on earth was a dark, dangerous and scary place. It was the place where monsters, wolves, and magical creatures lived. Outer space is our next and possibly our final wilderness. Over time, wilderness on earth became something to be conquered and controlled by humans. The conquest and control of wilderness on earth eventually got out of control and we learned that our earthly wilderness is something of great value and deserved protection from our impacts upon wilderness areas. We realized that wilderness has intrinsic value in and of itself. It is imperative that we pay attention to this lesson as we are in the infancy of our exploration of the universe and learn from our history in this regard.

Roderick Nash argues that wilderness is a basic ingredient of American civilization in his book; Wilderness and the American Mind. According to Nash; from the raw materials of the physical wilderness Americans built a civilization, with the idea or symbol of wilderness they sought to give that civilization identity and meaning.  Wilderness on earth currently enjoys widespread and growing popularity and respect. Ancient biases against the wild are deeply rooted in human psychology and in the human compulsion to understand, control and transform the environment in the interest of survival, and later, of success. Wilderness was the unknown, the disordered, and uncontrolled. A large portion of the energies of early civilizations was directed at defeating nature and controlling it for our benefit.

The origins of European and American thoughts about nature and wilderness can be traced back to Greek philosophers, as well as to the principles provided by the Judeo-Christian tradition, that came to dominate Europe. The conceptual separation of humankind from the natural world received much attention in classical Greek philosophy and came to provide an important influence upon the development of European wilderness values. A major contribution of Greek philosophy to European thought was the application of reason. Whatever the Greeks borrowed from either the ancients or their contemporaries, they transformed through their commitment to reason. Greek rationalism is often presented as a unique vantage point from which to view the evolution of the European mind towards civilization. The historical documents that survive show a clear break away from primitive attitudes into progress and elementary science, from myths into disciplined acquisition of knowledge about the universe.  There is within the Greek tradition, a tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian worldviews. The Apollonian, after the Greek god Apollo, represents a calm, reasoned, and structured form of art while the Dionysian, after Dionysus, is a deeply emotional and ecstatic one.

The result shows humankind turning its attention inward, away from the world that surrounds it, and towards self-conscious reason. Although human life was lived among an ever-changing and material world, Socrates identified this as a problem for the soul to overcome.

Knowledge, and a rational understanding of a wise course of action, depended on forms from outside of nature. Socrates argued that everything for mankind seemed preordained and that nature was provided by the gods for humanity’s use. Plato continued in the Socratic tradition in viewing nature as something that could be acted upon by humans and maintained that humans could improve upon nature. Aristotle expresses the idea of purpose in nature, including the relation of plants and animals to the needs of man. According to Aristotle: In like manner we may infer that, after the birth of animals, plants exist for their sake, and that the other animals exist for the sake of man, the tame for use and food, the wild, if not all, at least the greater part of them, for food, and for the provision of clothing and various instruments. Now if nature makes nothing incomplete and nothing in vain, the inference must be made that she has made all animals and plants for the sake of man.

The fusion of Greek rationalism with Judaic and early Christian thought provided the genesis of the idea of wilderness that has come to rule Western civilization for the past two millennia. We are compelled to recognize that Christianity is not one specific thing, but a combination of historical determinants, including human nature and the agricultural revolution, which together introduced a historically unprecedented direction to human relations with wild nature. The natural world came to be conceived as valueless until humanized. Judeo-Christian faith claimed nothing from nature, for God alone was important and human attention shifted from the intuitive, mystical, and physical to the supernatural and transcendental. Early Christian thinkers readily accepted this worldview that desacralized nature and placed humankind above nature without hesitation. What was important to these thinkers was humankind’s personal relationship with God and not with the physical world which surrounded it.

With the advent of the scientific revolution came the perception of the world and universe as machines that could be simply understood if broken down into their component parts. Capitalism and democracy coalesced with machine technology to effect the conversion of nature into simple components in an economic formula, devoid of any intrinsic value, which has market value only. Modernism completes the intellectual divorce of humankind from nature and defines nature and wilderness in terms of man’s designs upon it. It is this “modern” tradition that the Europeans brought with them to the New World that helped to define the foundations of its dominant social paradigm.[1]

The universe beyond earth is our next wilderness and just look at what we are doing to it right out of the gate. The night sky is a shared wilderness. On a dark night, away from the city lights, you can see the stars in the same way as our ancestors did centuries ago. We can see the Milky Way and the constellations associated with stories of mythical hunters, sisters and journeys.

But like any wilderness, the night sky can be polluted for the sake of nothing more than monetary gain and political power.  Since Sputnik 1 in 1957, thousands of satellites and pieces of space junk have been launched into orbit. For now, satellites crossing the night sky are largely a curiosity. But with the advent of satellite constellations containing hundreds or thousands of satellites, this could change.

The recent launch of BlueWalker 3, a prototype for a satellite constellation, raises the prospect of bright satellites contaminating our night skies. At 64 square meters, it’s the largest commercial communications satellite in low Earth orbit, and it is very bright. While spotting satellites in the night sky has been a curiosity, the increasing number of satellites in orbit means pollution of the night sky could become a serious problem.

On a clear night, particularly near twilight, you can see satellites travelling across the night sky. These satellites are in low Earth orbit, just a few hundred kilometers above Earth and travelling almost 8 kilometers every second. Apps and websites allow us to identify or predict the arrival of particular satellites overhead, and it is genuinely interesting to see the International Space Station travelling by; understanding that on that speck of light there is a crew of astronauts.

In the past few years, the pace of satellite launches has accelerated. SpaceX has made satellite launches cheaper, and it has been launching thousands of Starlink satellites that provide internet services. Roughly 50 Starlink satellites were launched into orbit by each Falcon 9 rocket, and they initially produce a bright train of satellites. These initially produced UFO reports, but are now sufficiently common to not be particularly newsworthy. Once the Starlink satellites disperse and move to their operational orbits, they will near the limit of what can be seen with the unaided eye.

These satellites are bright enough to produce trails in images taken with telescopes. The trails overwrite the stars and galaxies behind them, which can only be remedied by taking additional images. Short transient phenomena, such as a brief flash from a gamma-ray burst could potentially be missed. Starlink is the largest satellite constellation in service, with thousands of satellites in orbit, others are planned.

Amazon’s Blue Origin plans to launch more than 3,200 Project Kuiper satellites, and AST SpaceMobile plans to launch 100 BlueBird satellites (and perhaps more). The recently launched BlueBird prototype, BlueWalker 3, has produced genuine alarm among astronomers.

While BlueWalker 3 was initially quite faint, it unfolded a 64 square meter communications array which is roughly the size of a squash court. This vast surface is very good at reflecting sunlight, and BlueWalker 3 is now as bright as some of the brightest stars in the night sky. It is possible the operational BlueBird satellites could become even bigger and brighter.

At its brightest, BlueWalker 3 is brighter than all but a few stars in the night sky.  Large numbers of satellites this bright could be a problem — a big problem. If there were thousands of satellites this bright, sometimes you would be unable to look at the night sky only seeing bright satellites. We would lose that sense of wilderness, with an almost constant reminder of technology in our sky. This would have a massive impact on professional astronomy for the purpose of short-term financial gain.

Brighter satellites do more damage to astronomical images than faint satellites. Furthermore, many of these satellites broadcast at radio frequencies that could interfere with radio astronomy, transmitting radio waves above remote sites where radio observatories scan the heavens.

For now, under dark skies, we can see the Milky Way as people have seen it for millennia. What happens next is uncertain. The International Astronomical Union has communicated its alarm about satellite constellations, and BlueWalker 3 in particular. The approval of satellite constellations by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has had relatively little consideration of environmental impacts. This has recently been flagged as a major problem by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, but whether this leads to concrete change is unclear.

We may be on the edge of a precipice. Will the night sky be cluttered with bright artificial satellites for the sake of internet or 5G? Or will we pull back and preserve the night sky as a globally shared wilderness with intrinsic value also?[2]

[1] University of Montana. McGovern, Patrick Joseph, “Paradigms and the politics of wilderness preservation” (1993). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 5583. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/5583

[2] Space.com. Michael J. I. Brown, Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University\. BlueWalker 3, an enormous and bright communications satellite, is genuinely alarming astronomers.  January 8, 2023. This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

 

The discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life on another planet might seem incompatible with a belief in God; yet many theologians are now openly acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrials.

Belief in God and Extraterrestrials and Science are not mutually exclusive positions. In fact, Christian leadership has made public that they also believe there must surely be intelligent extraterrestrial life in the universe that is not of this earth. Conversely, Science has also yielded to accept and include God within its traditionally closed minded scientific considerations on the subject of extraterrestrial existence and communication with beings not of this earth.

Father Emmanuel Carreira, the Vatican’s chief astronomer, stated publicly that there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of “extraterrestrial brothers” that are perhaps more evolved than humans. Father Carreira operates the telescope at the Vatican Observatory in Castelgandolfo, south of Rome.

Reverend Jose Gabriel Funes is a 45-year-old Jesuit priest who manages the Vatican Observatory south of Rome and in Arizona. These observatories are actively seeking other life in the universe and even the origin of the universe itself. Funes was also a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict. He told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in an interview. “In my opinion this possibility (of life on other planets) exists. How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere?” He explained that the substantial number of galaxies with their own planets made this possible. When asked if he was referring to beings similar to humans or even more evolved than humans, he said: “Certainly, in a universe this big you can’t exclude this hypothesis. Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent beings, created by God. This is not in contrast with our faith because we can’t put limits on God’s creative freedom. Why can’t we speak of a brother extraterrestrial? It would still be part of creation.”

During the interview headlined “The Extraterrestrial is my Brother,” he said he saw no conflict between belief in such beings and faith in God. He held out the possibility that the human race might actually be the “lost sheep” of the universe. “There could be other beings that remained in full friendship with their creator,” he said.

Christians have sometimes been at odds with scientists over whether the Bible should be read literally and issues such as creationism versus evolution have been hotly debated for decades.

Funes said dialogue between faith and science could be improved if scientists learned more about the Bible and the Church kept more up to date with scientific progress. He said he believed as an astronomer that the explanation for the start of the universe was “the big bang”, the theory that the universe exploded into existence from dense matter billions of years ago. He did clarify this position and said this was not in conflict with faith in God as a creator. “God is the creator. There is a sense to creation. We are not children of an accident. As an astronomer, I continue to believe that God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the product of something casual but children of a good Father who has a project of love in mind for us.”

That is a huge shift in Christian policy given that there was a time in the history of Christianity not so long ago,  when such statements would be considered heresy and one could be tortured and burned at the stake for making such comments. This openly recognized Church position makes this subject more applicable to this Extraterrestrial Communication Group project, given that the Christian Church is now a safe harbor on earth for the simultaneous belief in both angels and extraterrestrials.

As for the position of science; NASA actually awarded $1.1M to the Center for Theological Inquiry, an ecumenical research institute in New Jersey, to study “the societal implications of astrobiology”; which is a code phrase for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Some scientists were as expected, enraged. The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFR), which actively promotes the division between Church and state, asked NASA to revoke the grant, and threatened to take legal action if NASA didn’t comply. While the FFR stated that their concern was the commingling of government and religious organizations; the FFR also made it clear that they thought the grant was a waste of money. “Science should not concern itself with how its progress will impact faith-based beliefs.”

The FFR’s argument might be easily undermined by people of faith; however, when the day comes that our all-inclusive humanity has to respond to the discovery of extraterrestrials, that discovery will raise numerous complex questions that will exceed the theological limitations of science. For example, when we ask, “What is life?” are we asking a scientific question or a theological one? Questions about life’s origins and its future are complicated, and must be explored equally across disciplines; which includes the way we respond to the discovery of extraterrestrials in the consideration of the origin of “Life.” This is not just a fictional or esoteric fantasy. Many scientists now contend that the detection of extraterrestrial life is more a question of when, and not if.

There are several reasons for this scientific confidence, but the primary reason is mostly about the speed at which scientists have been discovering human-habitable planets outside of our own Solar System. In 2000, astronomers knew of about 50 of these “exoplanets”. By 2013, they had found almost 850, located in over 800 planetary systems. That number may reach one million by the year 2045, says David Weintraub, associate professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, and author of Religions and Extraterrestrial Life. “We can quite reasonably expect that the number of known exoplanets will soon become, like the stars, almost uncountable,” he writes. Of those discovered so far, more than 20 are earth-sized exoplanets that occupy a “habitable” zone around their star, including the most recently (in 2016) discovered Proxima B, which orbits Proxima Centauri. It seems that the more we are able to peek out deeper into space, the more certain we become that our planet is not the only one suitable for life as we know it.

With few exceptions, most of the discussions about SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) tend to stay within the boundaries of the traditional sciences. The implications of SETI however, extend far beyond the biology and physics; reaching to the humanities and philosophy and even theology. As Carl Sagan has pointed out in his book, The Cosmic Question, “space exploration leads directly to religious and philosophical questions”. We would need to consider whether our faiths could accommodate extraterrestrials; or if it will shake our faiths beliefs to their core.

Finding answers to these questions might be a new science called exotheology or astro-theology; terms defined by Ted Peters, Professor Emeritus in theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, to refer to “speculation on the theological significance of extraterrestrial life”. As he notes, Peters isn’t the first or only one to use the term, which dates back at least 300 years, to a 1714 publication titled ‘Astro-theology, or a “Demonstration of the being and Attributes of God from a Survey of the Heavens”.

What issues might the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrials raise? Let us start with the question of our uniqueness which is an issue that has troubled both theologians and scientists for a very long time.

There are three principals guiding SETI, as Paul Davies explains in the book Are We Alone? First, there’s the principle of nature’s uniformity, which claims that the physical processes seen on earth can be found throughout the universe. This means that the same processes that produce life here on earth produce life everywhere in the universe.

Second, is the principle of plenitude, which asserts that everything that is possible will be realized eventually. For the purposes of SETI, the second principle claims that as long as there are no impediments to the forming of life, then life will form; or, as Arthur Lovejoy, the American philosopher who coined the term, puts it, “no genuine possibility of being can remain unfulfilled”. That is because, claims Sagan, “The origin of life on suitable planets seems built into the chemistry of the universe.”

The third guiding principal is the mediocrity principle which claims that there is nothing special about earth’s status or position in the universe. This could present the greatest push-back from the major Abrahamic religions, which teach that human beings were and are purposefully created by God and occupy a privileged position in relation to other creatures.

With the loud protests of a small number of religious groups over teaching scientific concepts like evolution and the Big Bang in public schools, and the equally loud proclamations of a few scientists with personal, anti-religious philosophies, it can sometimes seem as though ​​science and religion are at war. News outlets offer plenty of reports of school board meetings, congressional sessions, and Sunday sermons in which scientists and religious leaders launch attacks at one another. But just how representative are such conflicts? In reality, the attention given to such clashes hides the far more numerous cases in which science and religion harmoniously, and even synergistically, coexist.

In fact, people of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. Many simply acknowledge that the two institutions deal with different realms of human experience. Science investigates the ​​natural world, while religion deals with the spiritual and ​​supernatural and therefore, the two can be complementary. Many religious organizations have issued statements declaring that there need not be any conflict between religious faith and the scientific perspective on evolution.

Furthermore, contrary to stereotype, a person doesn’t have to be an atheist in order to become a scientist. A 2005 survey of scientists at top research universities found that more than 48% had a religious affiliation and more than 75% believe that religions convey important truths. Some scientists, like Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and George Coyne, astronomer and priest, have been outspoken about the satisfaction they find in viewing the world through both a scientific lens and one of personal faith.

Though the two generally deal with different realms (natural vs. spiritual), disagreements do arise about where the boundaries between these realms lie when dealing with questions at their interface and sometimes, one side crosses a boundary in its claims. For example, when religious tenets make strong claims about the natural world (e.g., claiming that the world was created in six days, as some literal interpretations of the Bible might require), faith and science can find themselves in conflict.

Though such clashes may warrant publicity, it’s important to remember that, behind the scenes and out of the spotlight, many cases exist in which religious and scientific perspectives present no conflict at all. Thousands of scientists busily carry out their research while maintaining personal spiritual beliefs, and an even larger number of everyday folks view the natural world through an ​​evidence-based, scientific lens and the supernatural world through a spiritual lens. Accepting a scientific worldview needn’t require giving up religious faith.³

References:

¹ Reuters. Vatican scientist says belief in God and aliens is OK. Philip Pullella, Reporting. May 13, 2008

² BBC. If we made contact with aliens, how would religions react? Brandon Ambrosino. December 16, 2016

³ Berkley.edu: Understanding Science. Science and religion: Reconcilable differences

 

BBC News

Tamlin Magee. November 1, 2022

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Humans are still searching for signs of Intelligent Life on other planets – but how would we react towards it if we ever did make contact?

According to many of our cultural touchstones, there’s only one thing for it if extraterrestrials ever take a cosmic detour to our planet: heavy artillery fire.

But from the sugary 1980s blockbuster ET the Extra-Terrestrial and the decades of Star Trek episodes to the books of Isaac Asimov and Ursula K Le Guin, science fiction writers have long wrangled with the question: how would we really treat them?

In popular culture, extraterrestrials are often cast as second-class citizens as or less than human. If it weren’t for the intervention of ET’s human friend, the titular Extraterrestrial would have been cut open on an operating room table. In the 2009 film District 9, millions of Extraterrestrial “prawns” are packed into South African slums – an allegory for human bigotry and cruelty in real life.

Evidence of extraterrestrial life has not yet been found, although we are certainly looking for it. In any case, anything we find in the near future is more likely to consist of the signs of microbial life that may have once existed on Mars than the humanoids depicted in films and TV shows.

But according to the Drake equation, there’s a decent chance, statistically speaking, that intelligent extraterrestrials are out there somewhere – even if the stars would have to align for us to find and contact each other, given the vastness of our galaxy and enormous distance between planets. “Finding life or making contact is always going to be highly unlikely until the day we do it,” says John Zarnecki, emeritus professor of space sciences at the Open University in the UK. “It reminds me of exoplanets: as a young researcher, it was a topic we talked about, and we all suspected exoplanets were out there, but there was no way that we’d ever find one because it was technically far too difficult.”

We now know exoplanets are out there, and some are even potential candidates for life because they host water. So with the search ongoing for   life and the possibility remaining that we encounter it, it’s not amiss to consider how we might react if we ever did make contact – especially considering an intelligent Extraterrestrial species is likely to be very different to our own human one.

Non-human rights

Writers don’t seem to have too much hope that humans would treat Extraterrestrials very well. Perhaps that’s because our track record of affording rights to the inhabitants of this planet, human or otherwise, has been so poor throughout history, despite the international legal conventions supposedly safeguarding them. The granting of inalienable, universal rights – that is, the rights guaranteed to all people no matter what – were enshrined by the international community into law through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 after the horrors of World War Two.

However, except for sanctions, there are limited means to enforce these rights even for humans. While these laws state that people are supposed to have rights like liberty and freedom from enslavement, afforded to each of us from birth to death, some political philosophers have suggested that in practice, these only really exist on paper.

A clue for how we might treat Extraterrestrials we ever do have contact with may lie in the rights we’ve afforded non-human species on our planet. Although many countries now recognize animals ranging from gorillas to crows as sentient, it’s only recently that animal rights groups have made some legal headway in affording “rights” to animals based on this sentience – loosely defined as their ability to experience comfort or distress.

We search the Universe to discover ourselves, because it forces us to reflect back on how we relate to each other, how we relate to our environment, and how we relate to other species and people – Jill Stuart

Some ethicists are already considering how the rights of a completely unfamiliar Extraterrestrial species would fit into our legal and ethical frameworks. But there’s been little in the way of open international discussion around Extraterrestrials. A question was raised at a United Nations General Assembly session in 1977 by the prime minister of Grenada, Eric M Gairy, who believed UFO sightings may have been signs of hostile extraterrestrial life on our planet, and suggested establishing an official investigation body through the UN. But no policy was adopted, and he was pressed to drop the topic by British diplomats, before being deposed in a coup the following year.

Some governments are taking an interest though. Back in 1999, journalist Leslie Kean was leaked a French dossier on UFOs showing generals and admirals believed the unexplained phenomena could potentially be extraterrestrial. Earlier this year, for the first time in decades, the US Congress publicly debated what to do about these mysterious flying objects; although there’s no evidence they’re of extraterrestrial origin.

Jill Stuart, a specialist in outer space law at the London School of Economics, doesn’t believe that humans will make contact with extraterrestrials within our lifetimes. But she still thinks considering what we would do in this situation is a conversation worth having. “We search the Universe to discover ourselves, because it forces us to reflect back on how we relate to each other, how we relate to our environment, and how we relate to other species and people,” she says. “These future-focused scenarios may never happen, but the whole process has value in and of itself.”

A Missing Plan

There are no international agreements or mechanisms in place for how humanity would handle an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence, says Niklas Hedman, executive director of UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa). That’s not to say a framework could never exist. The UN, as the “prime global intergovernmental organization”, would be a fit for such mechanisms, he adds, but ultimately action and debate “boils down to the will of member states”.

Currently, all international space law relates to human activity, says Hedman. The first Outer Space Treaty was signed through the UN in 1967 by the UK, the Soviet Union, and the US, in response to the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could reach targets in space. It serves as the basis for all existing space law, which has developed over time as new possibilities and concerns around space emerged.

All five of the major space treaties, which now cover everything from the prohibition of weapons through to liability for damage and debris from spacefaring nations, center around what humans do in space and how this affects other humans.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence group at the International Academy of Astronautics did adopt a post-detection framework in 2010, building on decades of prior debate. In the case of any detection of signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life, this recommends creating a forum for international coordination through the UN and its Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (Copuous).

Stuart believes it’s unlikely any widely accepted international framework will be developed until it needs to be. People like having material, real-life scenarios to consider in order to bring new ideas into law. Should contact happen, it’s possible that the existing legal frameworks that govern human rights could be extended and adapted to those of Extraterrestrials.

One major consideration in this case would be the intent of the Extraterrestrials: in short, whether they were benign or hostile. This feeds into the debate over whether we should actively be attempting to contact extraterrestrials, or passively looking for signals of their existence, Stuart says – an ongoing contentious question amongst space experts.

When it comes to Extraterrestrials, we have to ask: what kind of intelligence do they have, and why do they have it? – Susan Blackmore

So what would happen if a flying saucer suddenly crash-landed somewhere on Earth? No protocols have been set out or even suggested, but hypothetically, it’s possible that the country it landed in would find itself having to lead initial discussions for how to respond, says Stuart.

“There wouldn’t be any precedent or legal background for there to be responsibility,” Stuart says, adding that if a UFO had been shot down and landed in a nation state, there may be a case that the country should take responsibility for the fallout.

In a 2011 paper for The Royal Society on “supra-Earth affairs”, former Unoosa director Mazlan Othman proposed that the interest of countries in combating the dangers of near earth objects – i.e. asteroids – could offer a model for international cooperation if the existence of extraterrestrial life or intelligence is ever established.

With little in the way of agreed principles about how we would collectively treat any extraterrestrials we encounter, one approach could be simply applying the rights granted to humans. Fitting this into the existing legal framework would make sense, says Stuart.

It’s a reasonable assumption that any species that could travel to Earth would be of a high level of intelligence and sentience, and therefore should be treated akin to humans. This could support a case for “human rights” to evolve into “sentient rights”.

We would also need to take into account the various types of possible intelligence and sentience. Even on our own planet, there are all sorts of intelligences we are only just coming to recognize. The debate continues over whether octopuses, long famous for their intelligence, also have consciousness and can feel pain. The growing practice of mycology, meanwhile, indicates that some fungi show aspects of intelligence, such as having a capability to learn and engage in decision-making.

“When it comes to Extraterrestrials, we have to ask: what kind of intelligence do they have?” says Susan Blackmore, a writer and visiting professor at the University of Plymouth in the UK, who researches consciousness. “Why do they have it? I think we must assume these Extraterrestrials would have evolved by Darwinian evolutionary processes, because that’s the only process we know that will produce living intelligent things.”

Extraterrestrial sentience

In a recounting of a supposed Extraterrestrial encounter in Varginha, Brazil, set out in the 2022 UFO documentary Moment of Contact, a story is told about a mysterious creature claimed to have been found near a crash site clearly in some kind of physical pain. Whatever you think of the sighting, it could be a capacity for pain and suffering that might better guide our approach to affording rights to any visitors from other worlds.

“Could Extraterrestrials suffer?” Blackmore asks. “If so, we should have some moral obligation towards them, and perhaps even build legal frameworks on the basis of [this].”

The ethicist Peter Singer, who has written on the subject of inalienable rights for extraterrestrials as well as animals, says that sentience would ultimately be the key consideration. “Assuming that the extraterrestrial being is sentient, in the sense capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and has other desires and interests that it may take us some time to ascertain, the fundamental ethical principle we should apply is equal consideration of similar interests,” he says.

This term, based on a concept set out by Singer back in 1979, means that all beings capable of enjoyment or suffering deserve to have their interests equally taken into account in any moral decision that affects them. “In other words, the pain of an extraterrestrial counts as much as the pain of an Earthling.”

The difficult issue here would be establishing what interests the extraterrestrials had, he adds. “A lot would depend on the cognitive capacities of the extraterrestrials, which may be far more advanced than those of dolphins, or humans, for that matter – and if they are far more advanced than our own, we may not be able to grasp what they are.”

The Nonhuman Rights Project, a US organization which aims to secure rights for nonhuman animals, believes the starting place for these rights is autonomy, a concept valued in US courts which means an individual has the ability to choose what to do, where to go, how to act, and memory of events that have previously occurred. Consciousness, meanwhile, is far too broad a category to serve as a legal criterion for rights, because no one agrees on what it actually is.

“Today, at least in the United States, every human is born with the inalienable right to liberty, but it wasn’t always the case that all humans had that right,” says Jake Davis, attorney at the Nonhuman Rights Project. “It took many years, it took a civil war, and an immense amount of struggle for every human to be put on equal footing as far as the right to bodily liberty and integrity goes.

“My wish is that if an extraterrestrial species reached out to us, and they weren’t hostile, that we wouldn’t just assume that they are like nonhuman animals – things with which we could do whatever we wanted, because we are human, and they are not. My wish would be that we would evaluate them as peers to the extent that they show those capabilities [such as autonomy] and go from there.”

According to Lori Marino, a former director at the Nonhuman Rights Project, even intelligence and sentience are difficult concepts for experts to agree on. “They are both fuzzy concepts,” she says. “But I would feel confident saying intelligence is how one processes information and sentience is the ability to feel and be aware of feeling.”

In the case of finding multicellular organisms on another planet, provided they are moving, it’s a good bet they are intelligent and sentient, she argues. They would need some form of intelligence in order to exist at all, she suggests. “We should make the assumption that they are sentient and, therefore, capable of suffering, and leave them alone. Of course I am not so naïve to think we will, but that is morally what we should do.”

The idea that humans should ourselves avoid interfering with the natural development of Extraterrestrial civilizations itself has a long history in science fiction, such as in Star Trek’s “Prime Directive” – although in this fictional world, the principal can be overridden if the Extraterrestrial species is deemed too dangerous. Similar ideas are already considered in our own world today, however – NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection, for example, aims to protect both explored planets and Earth.

If Extraterrestrials can make it to our planet, though, perhaps it’s not their rights we should be worrying about.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute, a non-profit research organization which aims to understand and explain the origin and nature of life in the Universe, is optimistic for some contact in our lifetime. But it’s important to differentiate between two kinds of contact, he says.

It’s more likely that we would receive signs and signals from technologically advanced civilizations than receive an Extraterrestrial visit. If we received signs, there would not be any great urgency, because any signal we do send would take so long to arrive that we’d have plenty of time to be deliberate about what we say back.

An Extraterrestrial visit, however, would mean the Extraterrestrial civilization has access to technology far beyond what we’re capable of. When ET’s pals at last pick up the hapless creature at the end of the blockbuster, they probably could have obliterated Earth on their way back “home”, if they had had the inclination.

“If they arrive, personally, I’m going to buy a lot of frozen pizza and head for the hills,” says Shostak. “If they can get here, as opposed to transmitting a message, they are more advanced than we are by an enormous margin.”

In this case, a more appropriate question might be: would our new Extraterrestrial overlords afford us rights?

“What are you going to do if they’re aggressive?” asks Shostak. “It’d be like Neanderthals trying to meet with the US Air Force: the Neanderthals could have all the policies they want, but it wouldn’t matter.”

The following is an abbreviated version of a Declassified NASA document originally published as Classified in 1975. Declassification date is unknown. The entire original document can be found at: NASA Document 3052333 Declassified

This document provides much support for some of the key points made in my Extraterrestrial Communication Code book such as:

1. Extraterrestrials probably left us a message to find and respond to; which we have not.
2. The messages we are sending are way too complicated to be interpreted as intended if found by extraterrestrials.
3. Back to Basics approach to the problem

NASA Document: 3052333 : FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

Lambros D. Callimahos: 

Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence

We are not alone in the universe. A few years ago, this notion seemed far-fetched; today, the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is taken for granted by most scientists. Even the staid National Academy of Sciences has gone on record that contact with other (extraterrestrial) “civilizations” is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us. Sir  Bernard  Lovell, one of the world’s leading radio astronomers, has  calculated that, even allowing for a margin of error of 5,000%, there must be in our galaxy about 100 million stars which have planets of the right chemistry, dimensions, and temperature to support (extraterrestrial) organic evolution. If we consider that our own galaxy, the Milky  Way, is but one of at least a billion other galaxies similar to ours in the observable universe, the number of stars that could support some form of (extraterrestrial) life is, to reach for a word, astronomical. As to advanced forms of (extraterrestrial) life—advanced by our own miserable earth standards—Dr. Frank D. Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, has stated that, putting all our knowledge together, the number of (extraterrestrial) civilizations which could have arisen by now is about one billion. The next question is, “Where is everybody?”

Unless we are terribly conceited (a very unscientific demeanor), we must assume that the “others”(extraterrestrials) are far more advanced than we are. Even a 50- year gap would be tremendous; a 500-year gap staggers the imagination, and as for a 5,000-year gap… (By the way, if they are as much as 50 years behind us, forget it!) It is quite possible that “others” have satellite probes in space, retransmitting to “them” anything that sounds nonrandom to the probe. But they  have probably  called  us several thousand years ago, and are waiting for an answer;  or  worse  yet, they  have  given   up;  or,  more probably, they (extraterrestrials) have reached such impressive technological advances that they have destroyed themselves. In this connection, Professor Losif Shklovsky, Russia’s greatest radio astronomer, has cited the profound crises which lie in wait for a developing civilization, any one of which may well prove fatal:

1. Self-destruction as a result of a thermonuclear catastrophe or some other discovery which may have unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences;
2. Genetic danger;
3. Overproduction of information;
4. Restricted capacity of the individual’s brain, which can lead to excessive specialization, with consequent dangers of degeneration; and
5. A crisis precipitated by the creation of artificial intelligent

Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti were the targets on which Dr. Drake focused his attention in the spring of 1960 in Project Ozma, an attempt to detect possible intelligent signals from outer space.

The growing presumption that (extraterrestrial) life exists in other worlds led, in 1971, to a six-nation multidisciplinary conference held in Soviet Armenia on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The U.S. delegation of about two dozen scientists was headed by Dr. Carl Sagan of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University. The report of this conference, published in 1973 by MIT, deals with such subjects as the evolution of intelligence, the lifetimes of technical civilizations, and the number of advanced galactic (extraterrestrial) civilizations. Last November (1974)  a group of scientists at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico sent a three -minute message beamed at Messier 13, and this represented man’s first attempt to take the initiative in communicating with another civilization. The project was conducted by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, which operates the Arecibo Observatory for Cornell University and the National Science Foundation. Actually, the main purpose of the experiment was to dramatize the capabilities of the world’s  largest antenna at the Arecibo Observatory at that time. The message, consisting of 1271 binary digits or “bits,” is shown in Figure 1. Since 1271 has but two prime factors, 31 and 41, we would naturally be lead to write out the message in raster form, in 41 lines of 31 bits each, or in 31 lines of 41 bits each; the latter case reveals a greater non-randomness in the patterns disclosed, indicating that these are the correct dimensions.

Figure 1 (See Original Document Link)

If another (extraterrestrial) civilization were trying to establish communication with us, it would first embark on attention-getting signals of such a nature that we could distinguish them from random cosmic noise; once we receive a recognizable signal, we have a good chance of understanding the message. For example, they could start with trains of signals corresponding to the natural number 1, 2, 3…, followed perhaps by prime numbers. They might continue with equal-length extended signals consisting of start and stop impulses, with occasional pulses in between; when these signals are aligned flush over one another, they would show a circle, the Pythagorean Theorem, or similar geometric design. ”these attention-getting signals would be followed by what amounts to early “language lessons,” interspersed with items of technical information to help bring us up to the level of our superiors, “them.”

In Figure 2 is shown the write-out of the message, in which the binary 1’s have been replaced by a dot and the 0’s left as blank spaces.

Figure 2 (See Original Document Link)

Now for its interpretation: (Way too Complicated)

There are dots at the four corners of the pictogram as reference points, marking the outlines of the rectangle. At the upper left is a representation of the sun; directly underneath in a column are dots representing 8 planets, identified by the appropriate binary coding to their left, preceded by a binary point as a marker. The erect, two-legged beings illustrated are obviously bisexual and mammalian.  One hand of the male figure points to the fourth planet where they apparently reside. At the top of the pictogram may be seen representations of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms, indicating that the chemical structure of life on their planet is similar to ours.  From the third planet there emerges a wavy line, showing that it is covered with water; the fish shows that they must have visited us and therefore have space travel. One hand of the female figure points to a six (preceded by the usual binary point), perhaps implying that there are six fingers on each hand;  we  could   therefore  assume  that  their number system is probably to the base 12. At the right of the female figure may be seen a bracket, in the middle of which is eleven in binary form (preceded by a binary point): this implies that the beings are 11 units high. A reasonable interpretation is that the unit is 21 cm, the wave length of the transmission, making them about 2-feet tall, which should be all right for average Martians.

In 1952 the British scientist Lancelot Hogben delivered an address before the British interplanetary Society entitled “Astraglossa”, or First Steps in Celestial Syntax. Hogben pointed out that number is the most universal concept for establishing communication between intelligent beings, therefore mathematics forms the basis for the first steps in extraterrestrial communication;  he then illustrated how he could transmit pulses representing integers, and distinctive signals or “radioglyphs” representing ” —{- ”, ”— ”, ”= “, and so on. Morrison later carried out the basic idea a little further, using different pulse shapes to represent elementary mathematical symbols. An entirely different approach was developed by Hans Freudenthal, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utrecht, who in 1960 published a book entitled Lincos- Design of a Language for (osmic Intercourse. ”Lincos,” an acronym of “lingua cosmica,” tries to establish a communication of ideas through symbolic logic, but the general consensus of those who have taken the trouble to study his book is that his plan is too difficult. After all, the object of the exercise is getting ideas across to another party, whose thinking processes may be entirely different from our own. In other words, what we need to develop is an “inverse cryptography,” or communication symbolism specially designed, not to hide meaning, but to be as easy as possible to comprehend. Cleverness on the part of the sender is then the important factor, not reliance on ingenuity of the recipient. (Back to Basics Approach)

The inverse cryptographer—somehow, this term doesn’t  sound quite right—must make his meaning clear to the recipient, even if the latter does not possess a cosmic equivalent of the Rosetta Stone.

As an illustration of how much information could be conveyed with a minimum of material, and as an example of facile inverse cryptography, let us consider a message I have devised to be typical of what we might expect of an initial communication from outer space. In Figure 3 is shown a series of transmissions which could have come from another inhabited planet, many light years away.

Figure 3 (See original Document Link- Still way too Complicated)

The 32 arbitrary symbols are representations for the 32 different signals (combinations of beeps, or distinctive pulse shapes) heard on a frequency of 1420.4 megacycles.

The punctuation marks are not part of the message, but here represent different time lapses: adjacent symbols are sent with a short pause (1 unit) between them; a space between symbols   means   a   longer   pause   (2   units); commas, semicolons, and periods indicate pauses of 4, 8, and 16 units, respectively.  Between transmissions (numbered here for reference purposes) there is a time lapse of 32 units.

The first transmission, (1), is obviously an enumeration of the 32 different symbols which will be used in the communications; in transmission (2) is the clear implication that A represents the integer 1, B the integer 2, and so on to J being the integer 10. In transmission (3), the symbols K for a plus sign and L for “equals” are introduced; in (4), the symbol M stands for “minus”; in (5), the symbol N stands for the concept and sign for zero. In (6), the concept of decimal notation is introduced; in (7), the symbol O must stand for the multiplication sign; in (8), the symbol P must stand for sign for division; in (9), the symbol Q must represent a sign for the reciprocal; and in (10), the symbol R must stand for a decimal point. In the next ten transmissions there are introduced the concepts and symbols for inequalities, approximations, nested parentheses and brackets, powers and roots, factorials, and infinite series defining pi and e. Transmission (21) adds nothing new to the 31 symbols recovered thus far, but  it does quote one of the most beautiful concepts in pure mathematics, Euler’s identity, e —[-  1  =  0.   With this they are telling us that, if they can teach us such a complex notion at this early stage, we will be staggered by what they will teach us by the 200th or 2000th transmission.

Beginning   with   transmission   (22), words and word-cluster concepts are introduced, so that by the time we come to transmission (30) we are now understanding, in a manner of   speaking,    pure    Venerean   sentences. Greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Furthermore,  we can  now see  how we could  recover the It will not be difficult for “them” (extraterrestrials)  to demonstrate their code  they  are  using  on  us,  and   which  will  obviously intellectual and technological superiority (first of all, consist of thousands  upon  thousands of code groups with don’t forget it was they who were able to call us!). If different  meaning;  this  is  easily  appreciated by anyone “they” but know the seventh digit of the “fine” structure who  takes  the  trouble  to  fathom  the  meaning of all 30 constant, ” they are ages ahead of us (we know only the transmissions in the foregoing example first five for  sure,  suspect  the  sixth). This  number, even  right after  this first series of transmissions, if we 137.039…, is the ratio, among  others,  of  the speed  of are  in  direct  communication  with  that  planet,  we shall light to the speed of the hydrogen electron; it may take a have questions  to  put  to  ”them” (extraterrestrials):  the  proof of Fermat’s century to calculate this constant to 9 digit. And after we Last  Theorem,  Goldbach’s  conjecture,  and  many other resolve our pressing scientific questions, it might be unsolved    problems   in   mathematics   and   the   natural appropriate to make discrete inquiries as to how we could sciences.  By the way, Goldbach’s  ’ notorious” conjecture live in harmony and peace with our fellow man—that is, is called by that adjective only because other if we aren’t eaten or otherwise ingested by the superior mathematicians weren’t  imaginative  enough  to make the civilization that had the good fortune to contact us. But as conjecture themselves; it states that every even number far as the cryptologist is concerned, he (and generations of his descendants who might  experience  the  supreme  thrill of their lives when we hear from  “them” (extraterrestrials)  must  keep  a  level head, not get excited, and be prepared to cope with problems the likes of  which  he  has  never  seen. 

Mr. Callimahos won world renown as a flute virtuoso before serving in the Army cryptologic unit in World Wars II. The author of many textbooks, monographs, studies and articles, including the ones on cryptology in the World Book Encyclopedia, Collier’s Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, he has for twenty years taught NSA’s senior course in cryptanalysis.