I just saw the DVD of the new documentary about Daniel Ellsberg and the 1971 leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam war from 1945 to 1967 commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to figure out how the US had got into that mess. You can see the film online for …
Category Archive: Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
Jan 31 2008
Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-4: What if we get a signal?
One of the big problems with ETIs is that it is very unlikely that we can make actual physical contact with them. One reason is just statistics, as I said earlier. While the odds of life existing elsewhere in the universe need not be too small, the chances that any one ETI will cross signals …
Jan 30 2008
Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-3: The most likely contact scenario
What is likely to be our reaction if we did receive an unambiguous signal that there existed ETI somewhere else in the universe? The reaction would be hard to predict because it is not a topic that is not publicly discussed much. This is a bit surprising because it is not such a stretch to …
Jan 29 2008
Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-2: The chances of ETI existing
I thought of ETIs because of recent sudden reports of their appearance. About 40 residents of the town of Stephenville in Texas reported seeing a UFO a few weeks ago. And then the website Machines Like Us highlighted the reception of a mystery signal by a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Nothing definitive has been …
Jan 28 2008
Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-1: Getting a signal
In the years 2002 and 2003, during the peak of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement, I was invited to a few meetings of that movement to provide the opposing view. This was the time when the IDC side was promoting such debates as a means of increasing visibility for IDC ideas. During those meetings …
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