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IPFS News Link • General Opinion

A Statement to the Stars

• ncc-1776.org

I am thoroughly sick and tired of thinking and writing about this election in the forlorn hope that some one of the candidates may be microscopically less evil, stupid, or insane than the others. Having done more than my share of political scribbling for the year, I am now turning my attention to a topic it actually makes me happy to think about, a subject that may even affect the future of the human race a hell of a lot more than what gink gets to live in the White House the next four or eight years and drop bombs on folks living half a world away.

The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who helped develop the atomic bomb, was curious about this matter, too, and asked a question about it that has become known as "Fermi's Paradox". If reason, he asked, and an awareness of evolution, tell us that sapient life is abundant throughout the galaxy, then, aside from rustic fables about redneck First Contact and abducted hillbillies, why haven't we heard from otherworlders?

For decades, we have been listening faithfully, like RCA Victor's charming little black and white puppy, for some sign that there is actually somebody Out There, communicating with his neighbors, and that we can eavesdrop on him like a rural party line. The trouble is, it's as if we were primitive natives on some tropical Pacific island, watching for smoke signals on the horizon, or listening for distant jungle drums, when real civilization communicates with itself by radio, television, and the Internet. No fully advanced, starfaring culture is going to employ a medium limited to the pokey speed of light,

At its forty-million-mile closest, it takes over half an hour for E.M.S. signals to get as far as Mars, the planet next door. Four and a quarter years to get to the nearest star—and four and a quarter more back. Forget radio.


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