So sue me.
Posted on 08/09/2004 10:46:50 PM PDT by Arkinsaw
Forget waiting for ET to call -- the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia.
Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell.
The coded message would only be discovered once the human race had the technology to read and understand it.
Writing in New Scientist magazine, Davies said the idea should be considered seriously.
For more than 40 years astronomers have been sweeping the skies with radio telescopes hoping to catch a signal from an alien civilisation.
So far the search has been in vain. But Davies believes it is wrong to assume that extraterrestrials who may be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us technologically will have chosen to communicate by radio.
Leaving artefacts for humans to find once they are sufficiently evolved -- like the obelisk in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey -- might be a more attractive strategy, he said.
But ensuring the survival of such an artefact over possibly millions of years would be difficult.
A better solution would be to incorporate information into the human genome, allowing it to be copied and maintained over immense periods of time.
One way to do this might be to deliver alien viruses which could infect cells with message-laden DNA, said Davies.
Scientists have recently discovered large sequences of "junk" DNA that contain no genes and appears to be very stable.
"If ET has put a message into terrestrial organisms, this is surely where to look," said Davies.
A computer could be used to find obvious attention-grabbing patterns within these stretches of DNA, he said. If a sequence of junk units of DNA were displayed as an array of pixels on a screen and produced a simple image "the presumption of tampering would be inescapable".
The DNA code was easily big enough to contain a decent-sized novel or a potted history of the rise and fall of an alien civilisation.
Davies added: "Trying to second-guess alien communication strategies is fraught with uncertainty, so we should try everything we can afford. The truth may be out there somewhere. Or it could be a lot closer to home." – Sapa-DPA
So sue me.
I saw this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It sucked.
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TNG/episode/68598.html
9 seconds.
I was posting from Subspace.
That explains it. I was piggybacking on a carrier wave so the Jem Ha'dar wouldn't intercept the message.
Maybe the secret message is not in our DNA but inside rat DNA instead. Something like "watch out for the hairless two-legged pests, we couldn't get rid of them all...see you soon".
National Stupifyer? what has stolen the minds of the liberal media lately?
The good news is that the aliens really did put an encoded message into the DNA of the species destined to stride across the universe. The bad news is that it's the gerbils.
"It's... It's a cookbook!"
The new outer limits had an episode of this sort.
Probably in a cockroach....only Clinton and Cockroaches would survice a nuclear war.
The bad news is that it's the gerbils.
as Richard Gere would say.. "Shove it!"
All your DNA are belong to us
Leaving something on the moon would be much easier, and harder to dismiss as BUNK.
They already have figured out the code in John Kerry's DNA. It says --- I was in Vietnam.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm, the DNA code spells out a sentence in English.
It says, "TO SERVE MAN"!!!
Gee, I dont get that.
I did just see an alien messenger on another thread, however I believe they were in the process of being blown up.
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