No doubt the biggest news for UFO watchers lately has been the story that Stephen Hawking has added his name to an initiative to invest $100 million to reinvigorate the search for life in the universe. On the anniversary of the moon landing, nearly thirty of the world\u2019s most eminent scientists signed a letter entitled \u2018Are We Alone?\u2019 The letter points out that today we have search tools far surpassing those of previous generations. Telescopes can pick out planets across thousands of light years and computers can now sift data infinitely faster than older mainframes. The project actually takes the form of two initiatives: \u2018Breakthrough Listen\u2019, which will be the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth; and \u2018Breakthrough Message\u2019, which will fund an international competition to generate messages representing humanity and planet Earth. One of the project leaders, Ann Druyan, explained that the \u2018Breakthrough Message\u2019 competition is designed to spark the imaginations of millions, and to generate conversation about who we really are in the universe and what it is that we wish to share about the nature of being alive on Earth. \u2018Even if we don\u2019t send a single message\u2019 she says, \u2018the act of conceptualizing one can be transformative.\u2019 It is an interesting exercise and it will be fascinating to see what messages people will want to send. It seems to be only a matter of time before we find intelligent life on another planet but the question isn\u2019t how will we deal with it, it\u2019s how will they deal with us? There will certainly be dozens of examples of messages it might be best not to send. For example let\u2019s not tell them that Neil Armstrong\u2019s spacesuit, the one that he wore when man first landed on the moon 46 years ago, is the subject of a Kickstarter fundraising campaign. The museum that holds it doesn\u2019t have the funds to keep the spacesuit in an environment that will stop it from disintegrating, whilst on the other hand, annual Global military expenditure currently stands at over $1.7 trillion. A planet receiving that sort of message might be tempted to just switch the lights off and pretend there\u2019s nobody home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No doubt the biggest news for UFO watchers lately has been the story that Stephen Hawking has added his name to an initiative to invest $100 million to reinvigorate the search for life in the universe. On the anniversary of the moon landing, nearly thirty of the world\u2019s most eminent scientists signed a letter entitled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-2351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorials","category-uncategorized","tag-fergus-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5534,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351\/revisions\/5534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}