Monday, April 25, 2005 - Posts

Monday, April 25, 2005

`:-| fascinating

a neat hubble picture brings up thoughts of extra-terrestrial behavior

Red Rectangle Nebula

“The Red Rectangle Nebula is one of the most unusual celestial bodies in the galaxy. This detail from the Hubble image shows the twin stars at the nebula's core ejecting conelike streams of gas and dust outward in opposing directions, producing a distinctive rung-like pattern. Astronomers know of no other nebula like it in the universe.” (HO, NASA / AP)

reminds me of star trek and other scifi where they are all hot to investigate unusual structures.  which gives me an idea: wouldn't we be best served in our search for "aliens" by focusing on such regions for just such reasons1 ?  assuming beings actually travel there, and that would seem improbable.  besides, these sorts of regions aren't exactly safe.
 
similarly, maybe if we create a ruckus locally, someone would pay attention to us.  however, it will be quite a while before we are capable of sending up an extragalactic flare. 
 
what about others doing this ?  any such "billboards" are probably going to look like the results of natural processes to us.
 
heeyyyy...
 
 
1 in the time travel sub-genre, this is known as “the jesus effect” [or so i thought; i can't seem to find a reference], sort of related to the fermi paradox: if there were time travel in humanity's future, wouldn't crowds of travelers appear at major historical events ?  of course, this assumes that what we consider “major” remains so, the implication being that the travel will have been achieved in a future we would consider meaningful.  some authors have worked out some sort of barriers that time traveling folks can't penetrate before.  in at least one story this is expressed in the form of time travel needing a receiver, the first development of which results in its own peculiar circumstances.
Posted by fractalnavel at 10:15 PM | with no comments
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you can't take the box out of the box

the lack of global mass media access in the u.s.
so how come you can't get bbc on cable ?  i think they'd make a killing here.  which probably means that the us cable operators probably have some regulations that they have lobbied to have in place to prevent just such a thing.
 
for that matter, why can't we sign up for arbitrary feeds from around the world ?  and you can't just point a dish, since some of the satellites used are below our horizon.  i wonder what the us would be like with a truly global diet of input.  and no, the web isn't it.  we are in the habit of partitioning that information from our perceptions of our own culture.  it's much different with the traditional mass media.
 
growing up in detroit we always had canadian broadcast tv and radio as an option.  it really helped in some events to see a different perspective.  in contrast the continental heartland of america is myopic and bigoted.  zieg heil for the faderland !
Posted by fractalnavel at 2:04 PM | 1 comment(s)
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