6 Billion +, yet still lonely

I'm not going to argue the existance and nature of UFO's here. Everyone knows that they are spacecraft flown by a superior race of extraterrestrials here to administer an ambitious program of rectal probing...the only true way to understand life on Earth. No, I'll save that for another post. Rather, I want to discuss our haphazard eagerness to reach out to anyone and anything in the cosmos that may be listening. Allow me to elaborate. Back in the 1920's it was believed that Mars was home to an intelligent race of beings. A branch of the U.S. military even proposed beaming radio signals to the planet, and maintaining total radio silence world wide for 3 days, in order to listen for any response. In 1963, Arecibo, the world's largest single dish radio telescope was built in Puerto Rico and used extensively in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, whose objectives were to listen for and communicate with intelligent alien life in the universe.

These are but a few examples of major undertakings headed by credible government organizations, dedicating large amounts of resources to the cause. In addition, radio and television broadcasters have inadvertantly been beaming off signals into space since the early 20th century, some of which were strong enough and sent long enough ago to reach distant star systems. Imagine aliens picking up signals of the early Chaplin movies or the Howdy Doody Show, they'd think we're a bunch of retards. And, rest assured there have been countless other private ventures, some more respectable than others, who've built UFO landing pads, welcome signs (making the retard conclusion that much truer) and tried to get ET's attention in all sorts of different ways. My question is this...why do we think it'll be ET or Alf on the other line? Not only does our shameless search for cosmic companionship seem desperate, but it's dangerous too. Who's to say it won't be Predator or Alien, or something even worse, just waiting for an opportunity to invade? If history has taught us anything, it's that resources are finite, and anytime a group with sophisticated technology comes into contact with another possessing less advanced technology, the lesser group is exploited, and often eliminated. Homo Sapiens drove Neandertals to extinction this way. Colonialists exploited Native Americans similarly. The list is endless. What makes our case more extreme is that we are carelessly and actively yelling to the universe, here we are, come and get us! And believe me, nuclear weapons or not, anything possessing technology advanced enough to receive our cosmic messages and find it's way to our planet, has the capability to kick our ass with relative ease. So, maybe we should shut up a minute, eh!?!

I don't mean to sound paranoid. I'm an eager proponent of cosmic exploration. We should go out and explore all we can, but we should do it for our own good and on our own terms, and not get into anything we can't handle just yet. That's why I like NASA's Voyager approach, when it launched unmanned Voyager I and II spacecraft to the outer planets, and then up and out of the known solar system. Today, after flying through space at 40,000 km/h for almost three decades, the Voyager spacecraft are 2 of the most distant* human objects in outer space. With their main mission of planetary exploration successfully completed, they now serve as humanity's ultimate message in a bottle, each carrying a pictographic plate describing us and where we're from, as well as a gold plated record of sounds from earth, complete with encoded instructions on how to get it to play. The message works. Just enough detail to tell our story, but vague enough so that they probably couldn't track us down, because who really wants a long distance relationship anyway?

If I could change one thing about the pictograph though, it would be this...notice that the humans are drawn in front of a representation of the voyager spacecraft's dish, in order to give whoever receives the message a sense of scale. A bit too honest, no? Isn't it customary to embellish a bit? It's not like they'll come and check, and even if they do travel all that way just to meet us, you'd think their feelings would be based on more than looks. Eitherway, never underestime the power of intimidation! They'd be far less likely to mess with us if they though we were giants...or at the very least, better hung! I mean c'mon, the tiny genitals are just embarrassing, gees! Aside from that, the plate is perfect. As for the gold-plated record, WOW, I tell ya, any alien that successfully assembles a record-player from those crazy instuctions can probe me anytime!

*NASA launched Pioneers 10 and 11 a few years before the Voyagers. The Pioneer spacecraft travelled to Jupiter and Saturn then off into outer space, while collectively, the Voyagers travelled to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, before leaving the planetary plain.