In this post, my first "What's on YOUR coffee table" for the year 2015, I examine the fragile state of human existence on Earth. Have we just been plain dumb lucky so far?
"Night" is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, in a place where everything is inverted, every value destroyed." It's a chilling read.
During his daily radio program, Dr. Michael Savage
@ASavageNation often quotes philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist George Santayana: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Winston Churchill used the phrase as well, which some claim dates back to 1700. Nonetheless, was it fate that brought the two books together on my coffee table? If planet Earth ever were invaded by an alien horde, would humanity experience "Night" on a much grander scale?
Australia's giant Parkes radio telescope detected a "fast radio burst," or FRB, last May. Researchers call FRBs, whose origins haven't been explained, "tantalizing mysteries of the radio sky." The first of such cosmic outbursts was detected in 2007.
While we may be interested to know here these radio signals originated, we may not want to alert the broadcasters to our presence here. I'm not wearing a tinfoil cap. And while I'm not expecting any 'visitors' anytime within my lifetime... "But of that day and hour no one knows."
Becky Ferreira
@beckyferreira writes on
motherboard "...the riddle of these radio eruptions is far from solved."
Theories abound.
In 2006, legendary genius Stephen Hawking spoke of the need to find a new home for man. According to him, our only chance of long term survival is to live on other planets. He is also a firm believer of the existence of biological life in many parts of the universe, but he warns against contact with extraterrestrial life. Most likely, aliens will represent a great danger to humans. They can conquer and plunder Earth, "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.
But we may already have given away our existence on the big blue marble. First you have all the radio and television waves that have been floating out from earth through space since transmissions began, and that's a little more than a hundred years ago. Aliens could just be starting to pick them up, if not now, then any day now.
There's all the stuff we've been launching into space. And our biggest goof by far could be the
Voyager spacecraft. There's more about summoning potential invaders
here.
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