Statistiche
Thursday, December 28, 2017
27 UFO Sightings In Illinois Since September
Illinois is known to some researchers as a "UFO" hotspot, especially Cook County, and in recent months it's lived up to its reputation.
According to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), Illinois had 27 reported sightings of strange objects since September, including several sightings in Springfield, plus reports from Champaign, Carbondale, Wilmette, Chicago, Batavia and Rockford.
The most recent sighting reported to NUFORC was Dec. 15 in Pawnee, a village in Sangamon County, when a resident reported seeing "very bright orange flashing lights" for about 15 minutes at about 3:30 a.m.
"We woke up to bright flashing lights on our window," the resident told NUFORC. "Went onto deck and could see a row of orange lights on ground and a globe like set of rotating lights about 20 feet from the row of lights on ground."
Cheryl Costa, a New York-based blogger and author, has analyzed UFO sighting reports nationwide and said Illinois had more than 4,000 reports between 2001 and 2015, making it one of the top states for UFO reports.
"Illinois had four or five counties in the top 100 and Cook County was third in the nation," Costa told Patch earlier this year. "Illinois was number 8 in the country with 4,191 reported sightings in 15 years."
While Chicago had a reported sighting on Oct. 27, the town Costa called Cook County's "UFO capital" hasn't had any reports since April, according to NUFORC. Between 2001 and 2015, Tinley had 168 reported sightings, according to Costa, who called the numbers "unusually high." For comparison, all of Will County had a total of 283 sightings during the same period.
Someone in Chicago reported this broad-daylight sighting on Oct. 27:
I was headed southbound on the CTA bus on Damen Ave. on 10/27/17 the day way heavily overcast. Somewhere between (Clybourn) street and Webster where less buildings were the best to my recollection is where I noticed this object in the sky. I was looking up towards the West sky noticed how thickly covered in clouds it was then that moment there was a parting of the clouds and I saw a sphere. It was gray with a glow almost (lunar) like, did not do anything but just stay there for that brief moment and the clouds covered it up again.On Dec. 1 near Springfield, a witness reported seeing a cigar-shaped object in the sky:
I was traveling on a rural road outside of Springfield with my daughter and in the sky was a very low flying slow moving cigar shaped object with a bright white light on each side of the object and had no sound to it. It was traveling South east bound at a very slow speed.Someone in Plato Center, located in unincorporated Kane County, reported seeing a "strange, bright blue orb" fall from the sky, along with a mysterious black SUV. The person said their dog even reacted to the sighting and the sound of helicopters, detailing the experience in a lengthy report:
I was watching TV in my bedroom when a strange bright, blue orb passed across my shade drawn window right in front of my that I was facing. It was going from east to west as I looked south. It crossed the top half of the window width in about 2-3 seconds, falling at approximately a 25 degree angle. I had my bedroom light on so to see it through my raffia type shades it had to be very bright. I thought it could be a meteor, large drone or UFO and thought it was going to crash some where into the area in the fields by Connors Rd or just west toward Rt 47.I quickly jumped up and went to the window in the bathroom where it had no shades to see if there was fire in the nearby field. Didn't see any. Went out onto the front porch to look and listen and heard many dogs or coyotes barking. It was so unusual that I decided to get in my car and drive down the road to see if I could see some crash or fire. ...
Didn't see anything so I turned around half way up the hill before Rt 47 then drove back to Kendall.When I came to the stop sign at Connors and Kendall, I looked South and saw a large Black SUV type vehicle with headlights off, but yellow parking lights on, near the Woodlands entrance but on the East side of the road. It was strange as I couldn't imagine a car stopped there unless it had seen it to. I thought about stooping to ask them if they had seen it, but it didn't feel right being there, so I didn't.I drove back home, parked in the garage, got out of the car and immediately heard a Helicopter overhead going west near to me and then just past Rt. 47. I went out onto the driveway to see if I could spot it and immediately heard a second Helicopter that seemed to be coming up from the south along Rt 47 west of me.All of this had taken place in under 15 minutes.I stayed out in the middle of the dark driveway for about 3 or 4 minutes until I didn't hear the helicopters anymore.((Dog's name deleted)) was barking inside the house so I closed the garage door and went inside to calm him.I then opened the front door and went onto the porch to listen. I didn't hear anything more. No helicopters or strange sounds, or lights even at that point--probably about 9:50 pm.It was all very strange and I now think maybe some type of UFO fell nearby and the helicopters were out scouting or retrieving. The large Black SUV could have been Men in Black as the car gave me a strange feeling, big, dark, tinted windows I think, and in a strange country road location to stop and pull over.In case you're wondering what the National UFO Reporting Center is, it's been around since 1974, and it investigates UFO sightings and has put together a list of more than 90,000 sightings around the world. You can catch up and read more about each of the UFO sightings in Illinois here. The report dates back decades.
Source
GUILLERMO DEL TORO / Il regista avvistò un UFO: "La paura che ho provato è stata primordiale"
Guillermo Del Toro ha raccontato di avere
avvistato un UFO diversi anni fa mentre si trovava in compagnia di un
amico. Mai come allora ha provato una 'paura primordiale'...
Guillermo Del Toro sarà senza dubbio uno
dei protagonisti della stagione cinematografica del 2018, grazie al suo
film 'La forma dell'acqua': dopo essersi aggiudicato il Leone d'Oro come
Migliore film lo scorso anno, la sua pellicola infatti ha ottenuto
anche diverse candidature ai Golden Globe 2018 (come Miglior film
straniero, Miglior film drammatico, Miglior regista e Migliore
sceneggiatura). E proprio in occasione di un evento collaterale per la
promozione del suo ultimo successo, il regista messicano ha raccontato
un aneddoto del suo passato, legato alla visione di UFO alla periferia
di Guadalajara, precisando di non avere mai provato una simile paura in
tutta la sua vita: "So che è orribile e che sembrerò un pazzo scatenato
ma ho visto un UFO. E non avrei voluto vederlo, era orribile. Ero con un
amico, avevamo comprato una confezione di birre, ma non le avevamo
ancora bevute. Volevamo andare in un luogo chiamato Cerro del Cuatro,
nella periferia di Guadalajara. Ci siamo detti Prendiamo l'autostrada.
Poi ci siamo seduti a guardare le stelle, a bere una birra e a
chiacchierare, c'eravamo solo noi nei dintorni".
Guillermo Del Toro e l'avvistamento di un UFO
Guillermo Del Toro ha proseguito la sua
intervista precisando di avere visto una luce molto luminosa che seguiva
lui e il suo amico, anche se fortunatamente tutto si è concluso nel
migliore dei modi: "Abbiamo visto una luce all'orizzonte che si muoveva
velocissima, con una traiettoria non lineare. Ci siamo detti -Suoniamo
il clacson e accendiamo i fari-, e l'abbiamo fatto. L'UFO a quel punto è
passato da un chilometro di distanza a vicinissimo a noi in un secondo,
ed era davvero brutto. Sembrava un piattino volante, con luci
intermittenti. La paura che ho provato è stata primordiale, non ho mai
avuto così tanta paura in vita mia. Siamo corsi via in auto, ci stava
inseguendo, ma poi ci siamo voltati e non c'era più".
Thursday, December 21, 2017
China aims to be the first to say hello to extraterrestrials
by
Ross Andersen
Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences
invited Liu Cixin, China's pre-eminent science-fiction writer, to visit
its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country's south-west. Almost
twice as wide as the dish at America's Arecibo Observatory, in the
Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world,
if not the universe.
Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they're not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: the dish is Earth's first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.
In some ways, it's no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government's aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country's science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning "Big", to his surname. In years past, the academy's engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish's construction, along with notes saying how he'd inspired their work.
But in other ways Liu is a strange choice to visit the dish. He has written a great deal about the risks of first contact. He has warned that the "appearance of this Other" might be imminent, and that it might result in our extinction. "Perhaps in 10,000 years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent," he writes in the postscript to one of his books. "But perhaps tomorrow we'll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit."
Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they're not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: the dish is Earth's first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.
In some ways, it's no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government's aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country's science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning "Big", to his surname. In years past, the academy's engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish's construction, along with notes saying how he'd inspired their work.
But in other ways Liu is a strange choice to visit the dish. He has written a great deal about the risks of first contact. He has warned that the "appearance of this Other" might be imminent, and that it might result in our extinction. "Perhaps in 10,000 years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent," he writes in the postscript to one of his books. "But perhaps tomorrow we'll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit."
Here come the conquerors
In recent years, Liu has joined the ranks of the global literati. In 2015, his novel The Three-Body Problem became the first work in translation to win the Hugo Award, science fiction's most prestigious prize. Barack Obama told The New York Times
that the book –the first in a trilogy – gave him cosmic perspective
during the frenzy of his presidency. Liu told me that Obama's staff
asked him for an advance copy of the third volume.
At the end of the second volume, one of the main characters lays out the trilogy's animating philosophy. No civilisation should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, he says. Any other civilisation that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand – as all civilisations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated.
This grim cosmic outlook is called "dark-forest theory", because it conceives of every civilisation in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
Liu's trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao's Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. The civilisation that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn't care; the Red Guard's grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive.
At the end of the second volume, one of the main characters lays out the trilogy's animating philosophy. No civilisation should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, he says. Any other civilisation that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand – as all civilisations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated.
This grim cosmic outlook is called "dark-forest theory", because it conceives of every civilisation in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
Liu's trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao's Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. The civilisation that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn't care; the Red Guard's grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive.
En route to our planet,
the extraterrestrial civilisation disrupts our particle accelerators to
prevent us from making advancements in the physics of warfare, such as
the one that brought the atomic bomb into being less than a century
after the invention of the repeating rifle.
Science fiction is sometimes described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its dominant modes. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical Rome, and Frank Herbert's Dune borrows plot points from the past of the Bedouin Arabs.
Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history of Earth's civilisations, "especially the encounters between more technologically advanced civilisations and the original settlers of a place".
One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the "Middle Kingdom" of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw the ships of Europe's seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome.
Science fiction is sometimes described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its dominant modes. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical Rome, and Frank Herbert's Dune borrows plot points from the past of the Bedouin Arabs.
Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history of Earth's civilisations, "especially the encounters between more technologically advanced civilisations and the original settlers of a place".
One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the "Middle Kingdom" of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw the ships of Europe's seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome.
Progress at top speed
This past summer, I travelled to China to visit its new observatory, but first I met up with Liu in Beijing. By way of small talk, I asked him about the film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. "People here want it to be China's Star Wars," he said, looking pained. The pricey shoot ended in mid-2015, but the film is still in post-production. At one point, the entire special-effects team was replaced. "When it comes to making science-fiction movies, our system is not mature," Liu said.I had come to interview Liu in his capacity as China's foremost philosopher of first contact, but I also wanted to know what to expect when I visited the new dish. After a translator relayed my question, Liu stopped smoking and smiled.
"It looks like something out of science fiction," he said.
A week later, I rode a bullet train out of Shanghai, leaving behind its purple Blade Runner
glow, its hip cafés and craft-beer bars. Rocketing along an elevated
track, I watched high-rises blur by, each a tiny honeycomb piece of the
rail-linked urban megastructure that has recently erupted out of China's
landscape. China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America
did during the entire 20th century. The country has already built rail
lines in Africa, and it hopes to fire bullet trains into Europe and
North America, the latter by way of a tunnel under the Bering Sea.
The skyscrapers and cranes dwindled as the train moved farther inland. Out in the emerald rice fields, among the low-hanging mists, it was easy to imagine ancient China – the China whose written language was adopted across much of Asia; the China that introduced metal coins, paper money and gunpowder into human life; the China that built the river-taming system that still irrigates the country's terraced hills.
Those hills grew steeper as we went west, stair-stepping higher and higher, until I had to lean up against the window to see their peaks. Every so often, a Hans Zimmer bass note would sound, and the glass pane would fill up with the smooth, spaceship-white side of another train, whooshing by in the opposite direction at almost 320 kilometres an hour.
It was mid-afternoon when we glided into a sparkling, cavernous terminal in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, one of China's poorest, most remote provinces. A government-imposed social transformation appeared to be under way. Signs implored people not to spit indoors. Loudspeakers nagged passengers to "keep an atmosphere of good manners". When an older man cut in the cab line, a security guard dressed him down in front of a crowd of hundreds.
The skyscrapers and cranes dwindled as the train moved farther inland. Out in the emerald rice fields, among the low-hanging mists, it was easy to imagine ancient China – the China whose written language was adopted across much of Asia; the China that introduced metal coins, paper money and gunpowder into human life; the China that built the river-taming system that still irrigates the country's terraced hills.
Those hills grew steeper as we went west, stair-stepping higher and higher, until I had to lean up against the window to see their peaks. Every so often, a Hans Zimmer bass note would sound, and the glass pane would fill up with the smooth, spaceship-white side of another train, whooshing by in the opposite direction at almost 320 kilometres an hour.
It was mid-afternoon when we glided into a sparkling, cavernous terminal in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, one of China's poorest, most remote provinces. A government-imposed social transformation appeared to be under way. Signs implored people not to spit indoors. Loudspeakers nagged passengers to "keep an atmosphere of good manners". When an older man cut in the cab line, a security guard dressed him down in front of a crowd of hundreds.
China's SETI advantage
The next morning, I went down to my hotel lobby to meet the driver I'd hired to take me to the observatory. Two hours into what was supposed to be a four-hour drive, he pulled over in the rain and waded 30 metres into a field where an older woman was harvesting rice, to ask for directions to a radio observatory more than 160 kilometres away. After much frustrated gesturing by both parties, she pointed the way with her scythe.We set off again, making our way through a string of small villages, beep-beeping motorbike riders and pedestrians out of our way. Some of the buildings along the road were centuries old, with upturned eaves; others were freshly built, their residents having been relocated by the state to clear ground for the new observatory. A group of the displaced villagers had complained about their new housing, attracting bad press – a rarity for a government project in China. Western reporters took notice. "China Telescope to Displace 9000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials," read a headline in The New York Times.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is often derided as a kind of religious mysticism, even within the scientific community. Nearly a quarter-century ago, the United States Congress defunded America's SETI program with a budget amendment proposed by Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, who said he hoped it would "be the end of Martian-hunting season at the taxpayer's expense".
That's one reason it is China, and not the United States, that has built the first world-class radio observatory with SETI as a core scientific goal.
SETI does share some traits with religion. It is motivated by deep human desires for connection and transcendence. It concerns itself with questions about human origins, about the raw creative power of nature, and about our future in this universe – and it does all this at a time when traditional religions have become unpersuasive to many.
Why these aspects of SETI should count against it is unclear. Nor is it clear why Congress should find SETI unworthy of funding, given that the government has previously been happy to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on ambitious searches for phenomena whose existence was still in question. The expensive, decades-long missions that found black holes and gravitational waves both commenced when their targets were mere speculative possibilities. That intelligent life can evolve on a planet is not a speculative possibility, as Darwin demonstrated. Indeed, SETI might be the most intriguing scientific project suggested by Darwinism.
SETI ramps up
Even without federal
funding in the United States, SETI is now in the midst of a global
renaissance. Today's telescopes have brought the distant stars nearer,
and in their orbits we can see planets. The next generation of
observatories is now clicking on, and with them we will zoom into these
planets' atmospheres.
SETI researchers have been preparing for this moment. In their exile, they have become philosophers of the future. They have tried to imagine what technologies an advanced civilisation might use, and what imprints those technologies would make on the observable universe. They have figured out how to spot the chemical traces of artificial pollutants from afar. They know how to scan dense star fields for giant structures designed to shield planets from a supernova's shock waves.
In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner poured $US100 million of his own cash into a new SETI program led by scientists at University of California Berkeley. The team performs more SETI observations in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016, Milner sank another $US100 million into an interstellar-probe mission.
A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes' cameras might be able to make out individual continents. The Alpha Centauri team modelled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious "fast radio bursts" that Earth's astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.
Andrew Siemion, the leader of Milner's SETI team, is actively looking into this possibility. He visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a growing network of radio observatories that will co-operate on SETI research, including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. When I joined Siemion for overnight SETI observations at a radio observatory in West Virginia last northern autumn, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was the world's most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is "classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial transmitter".
My driver was on the verge of turning back when my phone reception finally began to wane. The sky had darkened in the five hours since we'd left sunny Guiyang. High winds were whipping between the Avatar-style mountains, making the long bamboo stalks sway like giant green feathers. A downpour of fat droplets began splattering the windshield just as I lost service for good.
SETI researchers have been preparing for this moment. In their exile, they have become philosophers of the future. They have tried to imagine what technologies an advanced civilisation might use, and what imprints those technologies would make on the observable universe. They have figured out how to spot the chemical traces of artificial pollutants from afar. They know how to scan dense star fields for giant structures designed to shield planets from a supernova's shock waves.
In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner poured $US100 million of his own cash into a new SETI program led by scientists at University of California Berkeley. The team performs more SETI observations in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016, Milner sank another $US100 million into an interstellar-probe mission.
A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes' cameras might be able to make out individual continents. The Alpha Centauri team modelled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious "fast radio bursts" that Earth's astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.
Andrew Siemion, the leader of Milner's SETI team, is actively looking into this possibility. He visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a growing network of radio observatories that will co-operate on SETI research, including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. When I joined Siemion for overnight SETI observations at a radio observatory in West Virginia last northern autumn, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was the world's most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is "classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial transmitter".
Ancient tradition of astronomy
Before I left for China, Siemion warned me that the roads around the observatory were difficult to navigate, but he said I'd know I was close when my phone reception went wobbly. Radio transmissions are forbidden near the dish, lest scientists there mistake stray electromagnetic radiation for a signal from the deep. Supercomputers are still sifting through billions of false positives collected during previous SETI observations, most caused by human technological interference.My driver was on the verge of turning back when my phone reception finally began to wane. The sky had darkened in the five hours since we'd left sunny Guiyang. High winds were whipping between the Avatar-style mountains, making the long bamboo stalks sway like giant green feathers. A downpour of fat droplets began splattering the windshield just as I lost service for good.
The week before, Liu
and I had visited a stargazing site of a much older vintage. In 1442,
after the Ming dynasty moved China's capital to Beijing, the emperor
broke ground on a new observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 12
metres high, the elegant, castle-like structure came to house China's
most precious astronomical instruments.
No civilisation on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a "mandate of heaven". More than 3500 years ago, China's court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these "oracle bones" bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.
Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory's stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing's yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard's edge, a staircase led up to a turret-like observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons.
The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory's prized instruments.
The instruments were eventually returned, but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the "century of humiliation", the nadir of China's long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak.
Western poets came to regard the latter's ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet's largest complex social organisation. They commanded tribute payments from China's neighbours, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors' pleasure.
No civilisation on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a "mandate of heaven". More than 3500 years ago, China's court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these "oracle bones" bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.
Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory's stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing's yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard's edge, a staircase led up to a turret-like observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons.
The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory's prized instruments.
The instruments were eventually returned, but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the "century of humiliation", the nadir of China's long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak.
Why did science stall in China?
Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilisations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans and even the ancient Egyptians.Western poets came to regard the latter's ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet's largest complex social organisation. They commanded tribute payments from China's neighbours, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors' pleasure.
In the first volume of his landmark series, Science and Civilisation in China,
published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham asked why the
scientific revolution hadn't happened in China, given its sophisticated
intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens' mastery
of classical texts.
This inquiry has since become known as the "Needham Question", though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition.
Other historians blamed China's remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.
Still others have accused pre-modern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe's age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.
Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India's opium harvest. China's emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium.
Her Majesty's Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the "unequal treaties" that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction.
This inquiry has since become known as the "Needham Question", though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition.
Other historians blamed China's remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.
Still others have accused pre-modern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe's age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.
Hard lessons in being left behind
Whatever the reason, China paid a dear price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King George III stocked a ship with the British empire's most dazzling inventions and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had "no use" for England's trinkets.Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India's opium harvest. China's emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium.
Her Majesty's Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the "unequal treaties" that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction.
After the French made a
colony of Vietnam, they joined in this "slicing of the Chinese melon",
as it came to be called, along with the Germans, who occupied a
significant portion of Shandong province.
Meanwhile Japan, a "little brother" as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernising its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China's fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan's brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilisational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-levelling nukes.
China's humiliations multiplied with America's rise. After sending 200,000 labourers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids' table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.
Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping's 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today.
It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China's persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein's theories "counter-revolutionary". But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country's "great firewall" handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.
China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The "Celestial Kingdom" looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.
Meanwhile Japan, a "little brother" as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernising its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China's fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan's brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilisational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-levelling nukes.
China's humiliations multiplied with America's rise. After sending 200,000 labourers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids' table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.
Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping's 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today.
Bystander to scientific glories
The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China's most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarised. Knowing how poorly the country's journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China's persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein's theories "counter-revolutionary". But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country's "great firewall" handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.
China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The "Celestial Kingdom" looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.
China has largely
focused on the applied sciences. It built the world's fastest
supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a "great
green wall" of forests in its north-west as a last-ditch effort to halt
the Gobi Desert's spread.
Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of "god particles" out of the ether, in the same time it took CERN's Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolise China's rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps, first contact.
Until a few months before his death this past September, the radio astronomer Nan Rendong was the observatory's scientific leader, and its soul. It was Nan who had made sure the new dish was customised to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He'd been with the project since its inception, in the early 1990s, when he used satellite imagery to pick out hundreds of candidate sites among the deep depressions in China's Karst mountain region.
Apart from microwaves, such as those that make up the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, radio waves are the weakest form of electromagnetic radiation. The collective energy of all the radio waves caught by Earth's observatories in a year is less than the kinetic energy released when a single snowflake comes softly to rest on bare soil.
Collecting these ethereal signals requires technological silence. That's why China plans to one day put a radio observatory on the dark side of the moon, a place more technologically silent than anywhere on Earth. It's why, over the course of the past century, radio observatories have sprouted, like cool white mushrooms, in the blank spots between this planet's glittering cities. And it's why Nan went looking for a dish site in the remote Karst mountains. Tall, jagged and covered in subtropical vegetation, these limestone mountains rise up abruptly from the planet's crust, forming barriers that can protect an observatory's sensitive ear from wind and radio noise.
After making a shortlist of candidate locations, Nan set out to inspect them on foot. Hiking into the centre of the Dawodang depression, he found himself at the bottom of a roughly symmetrical bowl, guarded by a nearly perfect ring of green mountains, all formed by the blind processes of upheaval and erosion.
Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of "god particles" out of the ether, in the same time it took CERN's Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolise China's rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps, first contact.
Search for silence
At a security station 16 kilometres from the dish, I handed my cellphone to a guard. He locked it away in a secure compartment and escorted me to a pair of metal detectors so I could demonstrate that I wasn't carrying any other electronics. A different guard drove me on a narrow access road to a switchback-laden stairway that climbed 800 steps up a mountainside, through buzzing clouds of blue dragonflies, to a platform overlooking the observatory.Until a few months before his death this past September, the radio astronomer Nan Rendong was the observatory's scientific leader, and its soul. It was Nan who had made sure the new dish was customised to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He'd been with the project since its inception, in the early 1990s, when he used satellite imagery to pick out hundreds of candidate sites among the deep depressions in China's Karst mountain region.
Apart from microwaves, such as those that make up the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, radio waves are the weakest form of electromagnetic radiation. The collective energy of all the radio waves caught by Earth's observatories in a year is less than the kinetic energy released when a single snowflake comes softly to rest on bare soil.
Collecting these ethereal signals requires technological silence. That's why China plans to one day put a radio observatory on the dark side of the moon, a place more technologically silent than anywhere on Earth. It's why, over the course of the past century, radio observatories have sprouted, like cool white mushrooms, in the blank spots between this planet's glittering cities. And it's why Nan went looking for a dish site in the remote Karst mountains. Tall, jagged and covered in subtropical vegetation, these limestone mountains rise up abruptly from the planet's crust, forming barriers that can protect an observatory's sensitive ear from wind and radio noise.
After making a shortlist of candidate locations, Nan set out to inspect them on foot. Hiking into the centre of the Dawodang depression, he found himself at the bottom of a roughly symmetrical bowl, guarded by a nearly perfect ring of green mountains, all formed by the blind processes of upheaval and erosion.
More than 20 years and
$US180 million later, Nan positioned the dish for its inaugural
observation – its "first light", in the parlance of astronomy. He
pointed it at the fading radio glow of a supernova, or "guest star", as
Chinese astronomers had called it when they recorded the unusual
brightness of its initial explosion almost 1000 years earlier.
Siemion told me he's especially excited to survey dense star fields at the centre of the galaxy. "It's a very interesting place for an advanced civilisation to situate itself," he said. The sheer number of stars and the presence of a supermassive black hole make for ideal conditions "if you want to slingshot a bunch of probes around the galaxy". Siemion's receiver will train its sensitive algorithms on billions of wavelengths, across billions of stars, looking for a beacon.
Liu Cixin told me he doubts the dish will find one. In a dark-forest cosmos like the one he imagines, no civilisation would ever send a beacon unless it were a "death monument", a powerful broadcast announcing the sender's impending extinction.
If a civilisation were about to be invaded by another, or incinerated by a gamma-ray burst, or killed off by some other natural cause, it might use the last of its energy reserves to beam out a dying cry to the most life-friendly planets in its vicinity.
Even if Liu is right, and the Chinese dish has no hope of detecting a beacon, it is still sensitive enough to hear a civilisation's fainter radio whispers, the ones that aren't meant to be overheard, like the aircraft-radar waves that constantly waft off Earth's surface.
If civilisations are indeed silent hunters, we might be wise to hone in on this "leakage" radiation. Many of the night sky's stars might be surrounded by faint halos of leakage, each a fading artifact of a civilisation's first blush with radio technology, before it recognised the risk and turned off its detectable transmitters. Previous observatories could search only a handful of stars for this radiation; China's dish has the sensitivity to search tens of thousands.
Liu replied, convincingly, that China's experience with the West is representative of larger patterns. Across history, it is easy to find examples of expansive civilisations that used advanced technologies to bully others. "In China's imperial history, too," he said, referring to the country's long-standing domination of its neighbours.
But even if these patterns extend back across all of recorded history, and even if they extend back to the murky epochs of prehistory, to when the Neanderthals vanished sometime after first contact with modern humans, that still might not tell us much about galactic civilisations.
For a civilisation that has learned to survive across cosmic time scales, humanity's entire existence would be but a single moment in a long, bright dawn. And no civilisation could last tens of millions of years without learning to live in peace internally. Human beings have already created weapons that put our entire species at risk; an advanced civilisation's weapons would likely far outstrip ours.
I told Liu that our civilisation's relative youth would suggest we're an outlier on the spectrum of civilisational behaviour, not a Platonic case to generalise from. The Milky Way has been habitable for billions of years. Anyone we make contact with will almost certainly be older, and perhaps wiser.
Moreover, the night sky contains no evidence that older civilisations treat expansion as a first principle. SETI researchers have looked for civilisations that shoot outwards in all directions from a single origin point, becoming an ever-growing sphere of technology, until they colonise entire galaxies.
If they were consuming lots of energy, as expected, these civilisations would give off a tell-tale infrared glow, and yet we don't see any in our all-sky scans. Maybe the self-replicating machinery required to spread rapidly across 100 billion stars would be doomed by runaway coding errors. Or maybe civilisations spread unevenly throughout a galaxy, just as humans have spread unevenly across the Earth.
But even a civilisation that captured a 10th of a galaxy's stars would be easy to find, and we haven't found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.
Some have even searched for evidence that such spacecraft might have visited this planet, by looking for encoded messages in our DNA – which is, after all, the most robust informational storage medium known to science. They too have come up empty. The idea that civilisations expand ever outwards might be woefully anthropocentric.
Liu did not concede this point. To him, the absence of these signals is just further evidence that hunters are good at hiding. He told me that we are limited in how we think about other civilisations. "Especially those that may last millions or billions of years," he said. "When we wonder why they don't use certain technologies to spread across a galaxy, we might be like spiders wondering why humans don't use webs to catch insects."
And anyway, an older civilisation that has achieved internal peace may still behave like a hunter, Liu said, in part because it would grasp the difficulty of "understanding one another across cosmic distances". And it would know that the stakes of a misunderstanding could be existential.
First contact would be trickier still if we encountered a post-biological artificial intelligence that had taken control of its planet. Its world view might be doubly alien. It might not feel empathy, which is not an essential feature of intelligence but instead an emotion installed by a particular evolutionary history and culture.
The logic behind its actions could be beyond the powers of the human imagination. It might have transformed its entire planet into a supercomputer, and, according to a trio of Oxford researchers, it might find the current cosmos too warm for truly long-term, energy-efficient computing.
It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more epochs of computing.
The first thing I noticed at the top was not the observatory, but the Karst mountains. They were all individuals, lumpen and oddly shaped. It was as though the Mayans had built giant pyramids across hundreds of square miles, and they'd all grown distinctive deformities as they were taken over by vegetation. They stretched in every direction, all the way to the horizon, the nearer ones dark green, and the distant ones looking like blue ridges.
Amid this landscape of chaotic shapes was the spectacular structure of the dish. Five football fields wide, and deep enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet, it was a genuine instance of the technological sublime. Its vastness reminded me of Utah's Bingham copper mine, but without the air of hasty, industrial violence.
Cool and concave, the dish looked at one with the Earth. It was as though God had pressed a perfect round fingertip into the planet's outer crust and left behind a smooth, silver print.
I sat up there for an hour in the rain, as dark clouds drifted across the sky, throwing warbly light on the observatory. Its thousands of aluminum-triangle panels took on a mosaic effect: some tiles turned bright silver, others pale bronze.
It was strange to think that if a signal from a distant intelligence were to reach us anytime soon, it would probably pour down into this metallic dimple in the planet. The radio waves would ping off the dish and into the receiver. They'd be pored over and verified.
International protocols require the disclosure of first contact, but they are non-binding. Maybe China would go public with the signal but withhold its star of origin, lest a fringe group send Earth's first response. Maybe China would make the signal a state secret. Even then, one of its international partners could go rogue. Or maybe one of China's own scientists would convert the signal into light pulses and send it out beyond the great firewall, to fly freely around the messy snarl of fibre-optic cables that spans our planet.
How would he reply to a message from a cosmic civilisation? He said that he would avoid giving a too-detailed account of human history. "It's very dark," he said. "It might make us appear more threatening."
In Blindsight, Peter Watts' novel of first contact, mere reference to the individual self is enough to get us profiled as an existential threat. I reminded Liu that distant civilisations might be able to detect atomic-bomb flashes in the atmospheres of distant planets, provided they engage in long-term monitoring of life-friendly habitats, as any advanced civilisation surely would. The decision about whether to reveal our history might not be ours to make.
Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year's Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien's messages.
There is also real-world evidence for Liu's pessimism: when Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast simulating an alien invasion was replayed in Ecuador in 1949, a riot broke out, resulting in the deaths of six people. "We have fallen into conflicts over things that are much easier to solve," Liu told me.
Even if no geopolitical strife ensued, humans would certainly experience a radical cultural transformation, as every belief system on Earth grappled with the bare fact of first contact. Buddhists would get off easy: their faith already assumes an infinite universe of untold antiquity, its every corner alive with the vibrating energies of living beings.
The Hindu cosmos is similarly grand and teeming. The Koran references Allah's "creation of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them". Jews believe that God's power has no limits, certainly none that would restrain his creative powers to this planet's cosmically small surface.
Secular humanists won't be spared a sobering intellectual reckoning with first contact. Copernicus removed Earth from the centre of the universe, and Darwin yanked humans down into the muck with the rest of the animal kingdom.
But even within this framework, human beings have continued to regard ourselves as nature's pinnacle. We have continued treating "lower" creatures with great cruelty. We have marvelled that existence itself was authored in such a way as to generate, from the simplest materials and axioms, beings like us. We have flattered ourselves that we are, in the words of Carl Sagan, "the universe's way of knowing itself".These are secular ways of saying we are made in the image of God.
We may be humbled to one day find ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds, fellow travellers in the long journey of time. We may receive from them an education in the real history of civilisations, young, old and extinct. We may be introduced to galactic-scale artworks, borne of million-year traditions.
We may be asked to participate in scientific observations that can be carried out only by multiple civilisations, separated by hundreds of light-years. Observations of this scope may disclose aspects of nature that we cannot now fathom. We may come to know a new metaphysics.
If we're lucky, we will come to know a new ethics. We'll emerge from our existential shock feeling newly alive to our shared humanity. The first light to reach us in this dark forest may illuminate our home world too.
The pessimist's view
After the dish is calibrated, it will start scanning large sections of the sky. Andrew Siemion's SETI team is working with the Chinese to develop an instrument to piggyback on these wide sweeps, which by themselves will constitute a radical expansion of the human search for the cosmic other.Siemion told me he's especially excited to survey dense star fields at the centre of the galaxy. "It's a very interesting place for an advanced civilisation to situate itself," he said. The sheer number of stars and the presence of a supermassive black hole make for ideal conditions "if you want to slingshot a bunch of probes around the galaxy". Siemion's receiver will train its sensitive algorithms on billions of wavelengths, across billions of stars, looking for a beacon.
Liu Cixin told me he doubts the dish will find one. In a dark-forest cosmos like the one he imagines, no civilisation would ever send a beacon unless it were a "death monument", a powerful broadcast announcing the sender's impending extinction.
If a civilisation were about to be invaded by another, or incinerated by a gamma-ray burst, or killed off by some other natural cause, it might use the last of its energy reserves to beam out a dying cry to the most life-friendly planets in its vicinity.
Even if Liu is right, and the Chinese dish has no hope of detecting a beacon, it is still sensitive enough to hear a civilisation's fainter radio whispers, the ones that aren't meant to be overheard, like the aircraft-radar waves that constantly waft off Earth's surface.
If civilisations are indeed silent hunters, we might be wise to hone in on this "leakage" radiation. Many of the night sky's stars might be surrounded by faint halos of leakage, each a fading artifact of a civilisation's first blush with radio technology, before it recognised the risk and turned off its detectable transmitters. Previous observatories could search only a handful of stars for this radiation; China's dish has the sensitivity to search tens of thousands.
The optimist's reply
In Beijing, I told Liu that I was holding out hope for a beacon. I told him I thought dark-forest theory was based on too narrow a reading of history. It may infer too much about the general behaviour of civilisations from specific encounters between China and the West.Liu replied, convincingly, that China's experience with the West is representative of larger patterns. Across history, it is easy to find examples of expansive civilisations that used advanced technologies to bully others. "In China's imperial history, too," he said, referring to the country's long-standing domination of its neighbours.
But even if these patterns extend back across all of recorded history, and even if they extend back to the murky epochs of prehistory, to when the Neanderthals vanished sometime after first contact with modern humans, that still might not tell us much about galactic civilisations.
For a civilisation that has learned to survive across cosmic time scales, humanity's entire existence would be but a single moment in a long, bright dawn. And no civilisation could last tens of millions of years without learning to live in peace internally. Human beings have already created weapons that put our entire species at risk; an advanced civilisation's weapons would likely far outstrip ours.
I told Liu that our civilisation's relative youth would suggest we're an outlier on the spectrum of civilisational behaviour, not a Platonic case to generalise from. The Milky Way has been habitable for billions of years. Anyone we make contact with will almost certainly be older, and perhaps wiser.
Moreover, the night sky contains no evidence that older civilisations treat expansion as a first principle. SETI researchers have looked for civilisations that shoot outwards in all directions from a single origin point, becoming an ever-growing sphere of technology, until they colonise entire galaxies.
If they were consuming lots of energy, as expected, these civilisations would give off a tell-tale infrared glow, and yet we don't see any in our all-sky scans. Maybe the self-replicating machinery required to spread rapidly across 100 billion stars would be doomed by runaway coding errors. Or maybe civilisations spread unevenly throughout a galaxy, just as humans have spread unevenly across the Earth.
But even a civilisation that captured a 10th of a galaxy's stars would be easy to find, and we haven't found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.
The alien as a giant computer
Some SETI researchers have wondered about stealthier modes of expansion. They have looked into the feasibility of "Genesis probes", spacecraft that can seed a planet with microbes, or accelerate evolution on its surface, by sparking a Cambrian explosion, like the one that juiced biological creativity on Earth.Some have even searched for evidence that such spacecraft might have visited this planet, by looking for encoded messages in our DNA – which is, after all, the most robust informational storage medium known to science. They too have come up empty. The idea that civilisations expand ever outwards might be woefully anthropocentric.
Liu did not concede this point. To him, the absence of these signals is just further evidence that hunters are good at hiding. He told me that we are limited in how we think about other civilisations. "Especially those that may last millions or billions of years," he said. "When we wonder why they don't use certain technologies to spread across a galaxy, we might be like spiders wondering why humans don't use webs to catch insects."
And anyway, an older civilisation that has achieved internal peace may still behave like a hunter, Liu said, in part because it would grasp the difficulty of "understanding one another across cosmic distances". And it would know that the stakes of a misunderstanding could be existential.
First contact would be trickier still if we encountered a post-biological artificial intelligence that had taken control of its planet. Its world view might be doubly alien. It might not feel empathy, which is not an essential feature of intelligence but instead an emotion installed by a particular evolutionary history and culture.
The logic behind its actions could be beyond the powers of the human imagination. It might have transformed its entire planet into a supercomputer, and, according to a trio of Oxford researchers, it might find the current cosmos too warm for truly long-term, energy-efficient computing.
It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more epochs of computing.
The technological sublime
As I came up the last flight of steps to the observation platform, the Earth itself seemed to hum like a supercomputer, thanks to the loud, whirring chirps of the mountains' insects, all amplified by the dish's acoustics.The first thing I noticed at the top was not the observatory, but the Karst mountains. They were all individuals, lumpen and oddly shaped. It was as though the Mayans had built giant pyramids across hundreds of square miles, and they'd all grown distinctive deformities as they were taken over by vegetation. They stretched in every direction, all the way to the horizon, the nearer ones dark green, and the distant ones looking like blue ridges.
Amid this landscape of chaotic shapes was the spectacular structure of the dish. Five football fields wide, and deep enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet, it was a genuine instance of the technological sublime. Its vastness reminded me of Utah's Bingham copper mine, but without the air of hasty, industrial violence.
Cool and concave, the dish looked at one with the Earth. It was as though God had pressed a perfect round fingertip into the planet's outer crust and left behind a smooth, silver print.
I sat up there for an hour in the rain, as dark clouds drifted across the sky, throwing warbly light on the observatory. Its thousands of aluminum-triangle panels took on a mosaic effect: some tiles turned bright silver, others pale bronze.
It was strange to think that if a signal from a distant intelligence were to reach us anytime soon, it would probably pour down into this metallic dimple in the planet. The radio waves would ping off the dish and into the receiver. They'd be pored over and verified.
International protocols require the disclosure of first contact, but they are non-binding. Maybe China would go public with the signal but withhold its star of origin, lest a fringe group send Earth's first response. Maybe China would make the signal a state secret. Even then, one of its international partners could go rogue. Or maybe one of China's own scientists would convert the signal into light pulses and send it out beyond the great firewall, to fly freely around the messy snarl of fibre-optic cables that spans our planet.
Impacts of first contact
In Beijing, I had asked Liu to set aside dark-forest theory for a moment. I asked him to imagine the Chinese Academy of Sciences calling to tell him it had found a signal.How would he reply to a message from a cosmic civilisation? He said that he would avoid giving a too-detailed account of human history. "It's very dark," he said. "It might make us appear more threatening."
In Blindsight, Peter Watts' novel of first contact, mere reference to the individual self is enough to get us profiled as an existential threat. I reminded Liu that distant civilisations might be able to detect atomic-bomb flashes in the atmospheres of distant planets, provided they engage in long-term monitoring of life-friendly habitats, as any advanced civilisation surely would. The decision about whether to reveal our history might not be ours to make.
Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year's Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien's messages.
There is also real-world evidence for Liu's pessimism: when Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast simulating an alien invasion was replayed in Ecuador in 1949, a riot broke out, resulting in the deaths of six people. "We have fallen into conflicts over things that are much easier to solve," Liu told me.
Even if no geopolitical strife ensued, humans would certainly experience a radical cultural transformation, as every belief system on Earth grappled with the bare fact of first contact. Buddhists would get off easy: their faith already assumes an infinite universe of untold antiquity, its every corner alive with the vibrating energies of living beings.
The Hindu cosmos is similarly grand and teeming. The Koran references Allah's "creation of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them". Jews believe that God's power has no limits, certainly none that would restrain his creative powers to this planet's cosmically small surface.
Huge intellectual culture shock
Christianity might have it tougher. There is a debate in contemporary Christian theology as to whether Christ's salvation extends to every soul that exists in the wider universe, or whether the sin-tainted inhabitants of distant planets require their own divine interventions. The Vatican is especially keen to massage extraterrestrial life into its doctrine, perhaps sensing that another scientific revolution may be imminent. The shameful persecution of Galileo is still fresh in its long institutional memory.Secular humanists won't be spared a sobering intellectual reckoning with first contact. Copernicus removed Earth from the centre of the universe, and Darwin yanked humans down into the muck with the rest of the animal kingdom.
But even within this framework, human beings have continued to regard ourselves as nature's pinnacle. We have continued treating "lower" creatures with great cruelty. We have marvelled that existence itself was authored in such a way as to generate, from the simplest materials and axioms, beings like us. We have flattered ourselves that we are, in the words of Carl Sagan, "the universe's way of knowing itself".These are secular ways of saying we are made in the image of God.
We may be humbled to one day find ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds, fellow travellers in the long journey of time. We may receive from them an education in the real history of civilisations, young, old and extinct. We may be introduced to galactic-scale artworks, borne of million-year traditions.
We may be asked to participate in scientific observations that can be carried out only by multiple civilisations, separated by hundreds of light-years. Observations of this scope may disclose aspects of nature that we cannot now fathom. We may come to know a new metaphysics.
If we're lucky, we will come to know a new ethics. We'll emerge from our existential shock feeling newly alive to our shared humanity. The first light to reach us in this dark forest may illuminate our home world too.
UFO UpDates A mailing list for the study of UFO-related phenomena 'Its All Here In Black & White'
From: RGates8254[Robert Gates] Date: Sun, 21 Dec 1997 17:22:11 EST Fwd Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 12:07:47 -0500 Subject: Re: Shulman Exposes Ultra-Secret Military ET > From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose) > To: updates@globalserve.net > Date: Sat, 20 Dec 1997 13:36:21 +0200 > Subject: Fwd: Shulman Exposes Ultra-Secret Military ET Organization > Received via "alt.alien.visitors" December 20 at 12.19 local time (GMT > + 1 hour). > ******* > Date: 20 Dec 1997 11:06:13 GMT > From: "ufotruth@ix.netcom.com" < ufotruth@ix.netcom.com> > Subject: JACK SHULMAN EXPOSES TOP SECRET ET ORGANIZATION! > Message-ID: <01bcc676 b8cd="" default=""> > Jack Shulman Exposes Hidden Ultra-Secret ET Military Organization> On the show, Shulman related an amazing string of events which > culminated when he and other ACC personnel, along with > Investigator/Journalist Bob Wolf, had what amounted to a > confrontation with Air Force personnel at the Pentagon. During > the course of what was described as a rather heated encounter, > Air Force personnel are said to have disclosed accidentally, or > otherwise, the existence of this invisible military organization > within the Department of Defense THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD OF > BEFORE. So if we understand this right, Schulman and Bob "the conduit when Ed Wang isn't around" Wolf were having some sort of confrontation with AF personnel "at the Pentagon" in which it is alleged that some military officials accidently vomited up this organizations name. Ten to 1 odds when the gulliable fools start filing FOIA requests for information "no such organization will exist." > Shulman said it is called the Extraterrestrial Space Command > Directorate, or simply "E2SCD." As stated, this military group, > branch, or operational unit, officially DOES NOT EXIST in any > readily locatable government or military archive or database. > Jack stated the unit is probably referred to simply as "E2" by > those in it or those who have a need to know of its existence. This is mighty convient fact. For those truth seekers who attempt to verify its existance they say up front that its unverifiable. SO AND AGAIN all we have is Schulman making pronouncements on a show. > Further, Jack explained to Jeff how when he and his associates > were first going through the now famous 'laboratory notebook', > which apparently reveals the true origin of the transistor > (recovered ET technology), they observed several "E2" notations Yet nobody other then Schulman & cronies seems to have *actually* seen this incredible notebook that apparently is one of the greatest secrets to ever be seen by man. Everybody remember the Hitler diarys that fooled the experts for awhile. Not to mention Mark Hoffman, who fooled many experts for along time. Ah, not to mention the infamous Kennedy papers that supposedly "experts and investigators" prounounced authentic, then to find out that none of the experts and investigators were even capable of making any kind of judgement. My point is that before we launch into notebook heaven, it should be subject to examination. > in the text. Not having any idea what "E2" stood for at the time, > Jack and his team of scientists assumed "E2" to be some type of > engineering symbol or code. Today's revelation may have solved > that mystery and could confirm the existence of this ultra secret > elite military UFO organization far at least as long as 50 years > ago. > Shulman said a thorough search of the Library of Congress and all > immediately available government data bases revealed NO DATA on > the "Extraterrestrial Electronics Space Directorate", or "E2SCD." Told you, another MJ-12 black hole. Like MJ-12 this E2SCD willnot quite be proven true, but because Shulman said it on national radio, its the god's gospel truth to never be doubted by the Schulman/Wolf/Wang defenders and their cronies. > In a related issue, Shulman said it now appears the orginal top > secret fax that American Computer mysteriously received several > months ago is now believed by Jack Shulman, at least, to have > originated from a satellite which may well belong to, and be > operated by, the secret E2 organization. How did Schulman come to that conclusion?
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LA VERITA' "E' SEMPRE LA FUORI...."
Una scoperta accidentale getta nuova luce sulla misteriosa scomparsa del pilota Frederick Valentich
A differenza di una miriade di altri avvistamenti UFO, al momento, la storia
del pilota Frederick Valentich non può essere facilmente liquidata come una
bufala. A differenza di altri che dicevano di aver visto strane luci o strani
veivoli nel cielo, Valentich durante il suo volo diede una descrizione
dettagliata del suo avvistamento, prima che scomparisse per sempre
oltre lo Stretto di Bass.
Valentich disse durante la comunicazione con il controllo del traffico aereo
di Melbourne, che uno strano oggetto metallico, tutto lucido e con una sorta
di luce verde volala vicino al suo aereoplano.
"Quello che sta facendo in questo momento è volare sopra di me... ha anche
una sorta di luce verde è tutto lucido, metallico all'esterno..."
"Non è un aereo che ...?"
La conversazione radio tra Valentich e la torre di controllo ebbe la durata
di circa sette minuti la sera del 21 ottobre 1978. Un lungo e fragoroso rumore
metallico, ha segnato la fine della comunicazione e l'inizio di una lunga battaglia
per avere tutte le informazioni sulla scomparsa.
Ora la scoperta casuale di un file ufficiale sulla scomparsa, sembra aver
eliminato la teoria popolare secondo cui Valentich aveva messo in scena un
elaborato scherzo, sulla sua scomparsa compresa quella del suo monomotore.
Per 34 anni, la famiglia Valentich, gli amici, i ricercatori UFO e dei media sono
riusciti solo ad avere un breve riassunto delle indagini e una trascrizione della
conversazione rilasciata dal controllo traffico aereo. Una registrazione audio
della conversazione è stata consegnata al padre di Valentich, in modo che
potesse udire le ultime parole di suo figlio - ma solo con precise istruzioni di
non andare oltre. Il ricercatore di Adelaide, Keith Basterfield ha seguito il caso,
la scomparsa risaliva al 1978, ma era stato detto dal governo nel 2004, che il
file ufficiale era andato perduto o distrutto. Egli aveva trovato dopo una ricerca,
un argomento correlato in un indice del National Archives, sul caso di Valentich.
Il file da allora è stato digitalizzato e caricato sul sito web dell'archivio.
Mr Basterfield e altri ricercatori avevano scoperto che il file esisteva. Era stato
visto da un ricercatore sulla scrivania di un funzionario del Dipartimento dei
Trasporti nel 1982, mentre venivano fatte pressioni per il suo rilascio. Da allora,
molti hanno cercato ostinatamente di vedere quale delle molte teorie su questo
mistero avesse più credito. Bufala, suicidio, messa in scena sulla scomparsa,
un'allucinazione indotta da farmaci o reale avvistamento UFO. Tutto e stato
preso in considerazione dagli investigatori. Quello che è significativo sostiene Basterfield, è che nel file, per la prima volta viene
rivelato che rottami dell'aereo con i parziali numeri di serie sono stati trovati nello
Stretto di Bass cinque anni dopo la scomparsa. Mr Basterfield dice che i numeri
di serie, coincidono con i numeri del modello che Valentich pilotava. Portando cosi
ad eliminare la teoria che il pilota avesse inscenato la sua scomparsa sulla rotta
per King Island.
"C'è stata un sacco di speculazione sulla scomparsa, soprattutto sul fatto che
fosse tutta una messa in scena, una bufala... Ma non c'è niente nelle 315 pagine
del file che suggerisce questa ipotesi" afferma il ricercatore.
Varie trascrizioni e note con interviste approfondite, riguarda coloro che hanno
conosciuto o hanno frequentato Valentich. Medici e colleghi virtualmente eliminano
la possibilità del suicidio, ancor più significativo e il fatto che nel file non viene
scartata la possibilità di un incontro con un oggetto volante non identificato,
mentre era in volo. Questo in base alle trascizioni della conversazione tra
Valentich e il controllo traffico aereo, dove il pilota descrive l'oggetto, un ufo.
"L'unica cosa che possiamo dire per certo è che l'aereo e il suo pilota sono
scomparsi mentre veniva descritto un UFO" afferma Basterfield.
Traduzione e adattamento: Schintillah
Immagini: Google immagini
Fonte: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/truth-was-out-there-after-all/story-e6frea6u-1226419389593
UFO Prevents Blast At Chernobyl Nuclear Plant
- Eyewitnesses say that they saw an UFO hovering above the exploded reactor
- Pravda.ru
Translated by Dmitry Sudakov
9-18-2 -
- Sixteen years have passed since the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986. The explosion happened at 1:23 a.m. Tons of radioactive products were emitted into the atmosphere. The machine shop of the plant was gripped with fire, and the fire was about to move on to the third power-generating unit of the plant. Firemen managed to extinguish the fire several hours later. Many of them died later of radiation exposure.
-
- Much has been written about the Chernobyl disaster, both in Russia and abroad. It seems that the physical nature of the tragedy has determined, as well as the people who were responsible for it. The fourth power-generating unit was supposed to be repaired. Yet, before shutting it down, the administration of the plant decided to perform several experiments. Steam delivery was cut to one of the turbogenerators in order to discover the period of time that electric power would still be generated due to the rotation of the rotor. The experiment was not well-organized. There was another test conducted simultaneously: the study of turbine vibration.
- They started decreasing the capacity of the generating unit at 1 a.m. on April 25. The emergency cooling system of the reactor was shut down at 2 p.m. This was supposed to stop the reactor.
- However, the Kievenergo energy company did not know anything about these tests. An energy control officer did not allow the fourth generating unit of the plant to be stopped. These were the prerequisites of the tragedy. Many people are still suffering.
- The explosion was very large, but, luckily, it was a thermal blast. The fourth power generating unit was basically destroyed by overheated steam. There was no nuclear explosion. Roughly 180 tons of enriched uranium were in the reactor. If a large blast had happened, half of Europe would not currently be depicted on any maps.
- There are many theories to explain such luck. One of the theories is that there was help from an Unidentified Flying Object. When troublesome events started to occur, some people saw a spaceship hovering above the fourth generating unit of the Chernobyl plant. Eyewitnesses say that an UFO was there for six hours and that hundreds of people saw it. People started writing about it only two years after the catastrophe. Of course, such information appeared in magazines on ufology. As it is generally believed, serious people donít read such magazines and journals.
- Here is what Mikhail Varitsky had to say: ìI and other people from my team went to the site of the blast at night. We saw a ball of fire, and it was slowly flying in the sky. I think the ball was six or eight meters in diameter. Then, we saw two rays of crimson light stretching towards the fourth unit. The object was some 300 meters from the reactor. The event lasted for about three minutes. The lights of the object went out and it flew away in the northwestern direction.î
- The UFO brought the radiation level down. The level was decreased almost four times. This probably prevented a nuclear blast.
- Three years later (on September 16, 1989), the fourth power-generating unit emitted radiation into the atmosphere. Several hours later, a doctor saw an object in the sky above the Chernobyl plant. Doctor Gospina described it as ìamber-like.î She said she could see the top and the bottom of it as well.
-
- In October of 1990, a reporter from the newspaper the Echo of Chernobyl , V. Navran, was photographing the machine shop of the Chernobyl plant. ìI photographed the top of it, includomg a part of the hole above. I remember everything very well; I did not see any UFO. However, when I developed the film, I clearly saw an object that was hovering above the hole in the roof.î The object looked like the one doctor Gospina saw.
- It seems that aliens are not worried with the fate of humanity. They are basically worried about the planets environment.
- Anomalia.Ru
- http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/09/16/36691.html
- Source
Bigelow cercò gli UFO per conto del Pentagono
Il prestigioso quotidiano New York Times
ha pubblicato un articolo secondo il quale Robert Bigelow e la sua
compagnia Aerospaziale hanno collaborato con in ministero della Difesa
USA per effettuare indagini sul fenomeno UFO.
 |
| . |
Il programma di investigazioni sarebbe stato finanziato sino al 2012, ma
rimarrebbe tuttora attivo grazie agli sforzi dei partecipanti, che
continuerebbero ad occuparsi di casi poco chiari segnalati da
appartenenti alle forze armate americane nel loro “tempo libero”.
 |
| Il Senatore del Nevada Harry Reid |
Le attività di indagine sarebbero iniziate nel 2007 su iniziativa del Senatore del Nevada Harry Reid, che all’epoca guidava la maggioranza democratica e che da sempre mostra interesse per il fenomeno UFO. La maggior parte degli stanziamenti sarebbe andata a Robert Bigelow, che di Reid è amico di vecchia data. Tra il 2008 ed il 2011 il Congresso destinò al progetto la somma di 22 milioni di dollari.
I documenti desecretati relativi alle attivià di indagine riguardano velivoli che si muovono ad elevate velocità senza segni visibili di propulsione, o che si mantengono in volo stazionario in modo apparentemente inesplicabile.
Il video seguente, diffuso dal ministero
della Difesa USA, si riferirebbe a due F18 SuperHornet della Marina che
intercettano un oggetto misterioso, con tanto di commenti increduli dei
due piloti.Secondo il Times, Bigelow fece modificare il quartier generale della
propria azienda a Las Vegas per accogliere reperti metallici e di altro
genere che i vari subappaltatori del programma avevano recuperato nel
corso delle loro indagini.
Non sarebbero mancate interviste ed esami clinici a personale civile e militare che afferma di aver avuto contatti con oggetti non identificati.
Non sarebbero mancate interviste ed esami clinici a personale civile e militare che afferma di aver avuto contatti con oggetti non identificati.
We May Not Be Alone, Former Pentagon UFO Investigator Says
 |
Luis Elizondo, the former head
of a Pentagon program to investigate U.F.O. sightings by the U.S.
military, says we may not be alone.
Credit: Shutterstock
|
The former head of a secret government program to investigate UFO sightings told several media outlets that extraterrestrial life may exist.
Simultaneously, the public benefit corporation he is affiliated with has raised more than $2.2 million to research "exotic technologies" affiliated with "unidentified aerial phenomena."
"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," said Luis Elizondo, the person who formerly managed the Pentagon Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, in an interview with CNN.
Elizondo said the program had found "a lot" of strange aircraft while it was in existence. "These aircraft — we'll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," he said.
[Related: Navy Pilot 'Pretty Weirded Out' by 2004 Encounter]
In a separate interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Elizondo added that his remarks don't necessarily mean the craft were extraterrestrial, as his focus was more on learning about any potential problems with national security.
- The former head of a secret government program to investigate UFO sightings told several media outlets that extraterrestrial life may exist. Simultaneously, the public benefit corporation he is affiliated with has raised more than $2.2 million to research "exotic technologies" affiliated with "unidentified aerial phenomena."
Elizondo said the program had found "a lot" of strange aircraft while it was in existence. "These aircraft — we'll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," he said. [Related: Navy Pilot 'Pretty Weirded Out' by 2004 Encounter]
In a separate interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Elizondo added that his remarks don't necessarily mean the craft were extraterrestrial, as his focus was more on learning about any potential problems with national security.
"If you're asking my personal opinion from here, look, I've got to be honest with you, I don't know where it's from. But we're pretty sure it's not here," Elizondo told NPR. "Now does that mean it's 'out there'? Whether or not it's Russian or Chinese inside, or little green men from Mars, or frankly, your neighbor's dog, I wanted to purposely steer away from that [speculation], because I wanted to focus on truly the raw science: What were we seeing, and did it pose a threat to national security?"
Elizondo resigned from the Defense Department program on Oct. 4, writing in his resignation letter that there needs to be more attention paid to "the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities," according to The New York Times.
"We believe there is sufficient credible evidence of unidentified aerial phenomena that proves exotic technologies exist that could revolutionize the human experience," the organization's website states. The company has fundraised more than $2.2 million from nearly 2,500 individual investors.
Elizondo's remarks come amid recent revelations that the U.S. government had a secret, $22 million program to seek out UFOs that ran between 2007 and 2012. The Times reports the program is still ongoing, although the Defense Department said a lack of funding shut the effort down.
Also, in recent days, Navy pilots reported that they spotted a UFO during a training mission off the coast of San Diego in 2004. "It accelerated like nothing I've ever seen," said Cmdr. David Fravor in an interview with the Times, adding that he was "pretty weirded out." To the Stars references these reports frequently on its website.
To the Stars' mission is to examine science that was "suffocated by mainstream ideology and bureaucratic constraint," the venture's website says. It plans a fusion of science, aerospace and entertainment to "work collectively to allow gifted researchers the freedom to explore exotic science and technologies," according to the website.
E.T. hunts by governments (and pop culture)
While the evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life is still far from firmed up, the U.S. government has searched for UFOs across several other programs. Those include Project Sign (in the 1940s), Project Grudge (in the 1940s and 1950s) and the more famous Project Blue Book, which was dissolved in 1969. In 2016, the Central Intelligence Agency released many classified documents related to UFOs.Meanwhile, independent projects such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Breakthrough Listen keep their ears open for radio signals that could be explained by intelligent alien life. (Breakthrough Listen was recently in the news because it listened for signals from an interstellar object that entered our solar system, but that search came up empty.)
Scientists also search for alien microbial life. NASA, for example, has an astrobiology program seeking to learn the ways in which extreme microbes could survive on icy moons such as Europa (a water-spouting moon near Jupiter) or Enceladus (which has dozens of water geysers and orbits Saturn). Searches for past life continue on Mars, with the upcoming Mars 2020 rover designed to directly cache samples where purported Martian microbes might have lived.
Alien life has also resurged in popular culture lately. The "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" franchises each premiered several movies in theaters in the past few years. In 2017 alone, "Star Wars" fans got to see "The Last Jedi" while Trekkies got an entire new TV series called "Star Trek Discovery." Meanwhile, the 2016 movie "Arrival" explored what could happen after aliens arrive at Earth.
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