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A new book is contemplating how extraterrestrials may reproduce. It aims to explore how sexuality might have evolved on other planets and does so with some interesting illustrations and video. How do you think alien sexuality might manifest itself?
Strange Attractors is a joint effort between Encyclopedia Destructica and the
federally fundedInstitute of Extraterrestrial Sexuality (which is a thing that exists) that intends to explore the variety of ways in which alien species might reproduce. The project is planned to be a series of short films, images and written descriptions that fall somewhere between speculative science, sexual thought-experiment, mockumentary and plain old weird-looking stuff. Where the idea behind this project originated I cannot claim to know, but the fact that it even exists makes me want to believe in aliens.
This cool lamp gives an eerie glow as the tractor beam from a UFO finds an Earthling to beam up and study. You may have seen this type of alien abduction lamp for sale, in stores or on the internet, but you can make one yourself for about five dollars! The instructions are at Dollar Store Crafts. Link -via Nag on the Lake
On June 24th, 1947, Army Air Corps pilot Kenneth Arnold reported an unusual sighting while returning from a mission to find a reported downed plane. Out of the incident was born a new term: flying saucer.
As Arnold recalled, the afternoon was crystal clear, and he was cruising at an altitude of 9,200 feet. A minute or two after noting a DC-4 about 15 miles behind and to the left of him, he was startled by something bright reflecting off his plane. At first he thought he had nearly hit another aircraft but as he looked off in the direction the light had come from, he saw nine “peculiar-looking” aircraft flying rapidly in formation toward Mount Rainier.
As these strange, tailless craft flew between his plane and Mount Rainier and then off toward distant Mount Adams, Arnold noted their remarkable speed — he later calculated that they were moving at around 1,700 mph — and said he got a pretty good look at their black silhouettes outlined against Rainier’s snowy peak. He later described them as saucer-like disks … something the gentlemen of the press glommed on to very quickly.
At the time, Arnold said, the appearance of these flying saucers didn’t particularly alarm him, because he assumed they were some kind of experimental military aircraft. If they were, nobody in the War Department (soon to be merged into the Department of Defense) was saying.
The official position of the Army Air Corps was that Arnold saw a mirage or was hallucinating. The term “flying saucer” received lots of publicity and many other reports rolled in shortly afterward. The incident marked the beginning of the UFO craze. Link
(Image credit: U.S. Air Force)
While some contend that there could exist extraterrestrial civilizations that have been around for a billion years and therefore a billion years more advanced than us, others stand by the Fermi Paradox which asserts if they were out there we would have heard from them.
If there are old civilizations out there, I wonder what one billion year generation iPhones look like.
Fermi reasoned, if there are other advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, then why is there no evidence of such, like spacecraft or probes floating around the Milky Way. His question became famously known as the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is the contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and yet the lack of evidence for, or contact with, any such civilizations.
Scientists meeting for a SETI conference have been told that recent developments in communications technology are rendering the Earth less detectable to alien civilizations.
In the past, TV and radio programmes were broadcast from huge ground stations that transmitted signals at thousands of watts. These could be picked up relatively easily across the depths of space, astronomers calculated.
Now, most TV and radio programmes are transmitted from satellites that typically use only 75 watts and have aerials pointing toward Earth, rather than into space…
“Very soon we will become undetectable,” he said. In short, in space no one will hear us at all.
People will react in different ways to this news, depending on whether one’s vision of alien life is that of a Reese’s Pieces-munching E.T., an all-knowing elder race, a Grey, a Predator, or any of an endless number of other possibilities.
If Little Green Men are one day discovered they’re certainly not going to speak fluent English. Scientists fear this may make any alien contact impossible to understand and could create some very awkward circumstances for the rest of us.
Leeds Metropolitian University’s Dr. John Elliott has devised software he believes will decipher the structure of any alien’s language which would be the first step in understanding what the potential invader of Earth may be saying, declaring or demanding. Elliott’s program is
designed to compare an alien language to a database of 60 different known languages in the world and search for ones that have similar structure.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.
