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Edward Snowden on alien communication


Everything having to do with aliens and UFO's all share in appearing as a many sided mirror of many possibilities. All of reality is nothing but a myriad of potentials: it could be alien communications & it could be background cosmic radiation. Here's The Big Four So's of Snowden:

"So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communication will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means.

So when we think about everything that we're hearing through our satellites or everything that they're hearing from our civilization (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default.

So what we are hearing, that's actually an alien television show or, you know, a phone call ... is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.

So it could be possible there are alien messages constantly hitting our satellites, and we just don't recognize them because they're so heavily encrypted."

So when you are peering into the darkness and all you see is nothing, take comfort in knowing that the shadows could be comprised of many shifting shapes of living creatures. All this alien stuff is a function of imaginary thought in many ways, as it encourages a creative interdisciplinary dialogue.
 
For a specie travelling light years from one spot to another, I think maybe something like a quantum entanglement communication method (spooky action at a distance) might do the trick.... Forget light speed radio waves getting mucked up by inter-stellar radiation and whatnot. If we could detect quantum entanglements on a cosmic scale, maybe we could watch alien TV :D

How Quantum Entanglement Works (Infographic)

In quantum physics, entangled particles remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances. The phenomenon so riled Albert Einstein he called it "spooky action at a distance."

Imagine instantaneous communications whether you are 1 or 1 billion light years away :eek:.... spooky ! ... If you were travelling near light speed (or above), I wonder what would happen to that quantum state. Would you instantaneously get to see your friends age on the home planet while you barely aged on your quantum TV set ? Or maybe entanglement only works when both locations are on the same time line.

Superluminal communication - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
However, some argue that superluminal communication could be achieved via quantum entanglement using other methods that don't rely on cloning a quantum system.[clarification needed] One suggested method would use an ensembleof entangled particles to transmit information,[4] similar to a type of quantum eraser experiments where the observation of an interference pattern on half of an ensemble of entangled pairs is determined by the type of measurement performed on the other half.[5][6][7] In these cases, though, the interference pattern only emerges with coincident measurements which requires a classical, subluminal communication channel between the two detectors.[citation needed] Physicist John G. Cramer at the University of Washington is attempting to perform one type of these experiment and demonstrate whether or not it can produce superluminal communication.[8][9][10]
 
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An excerpt from my book.

When I was in London in May, 2009, I attended a lecture given by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku at the RSA. He talked for approximately half an hour about his book, The Physics of the Impossible, and then there was a period of time for questions and answers. I raised my hand, because I wanted Kaku to elaborate a bit on what he had written about the prospect of communication with an extraterrestrial civilization.

“You’ve written about the possibility that there’s a galactic conversation going on that we’re not part of, and that’s far beyond us,” I asked. “Two questions: first, what do you think might be the best way of tapping into that conversation, if it’s taking place, and second, how soon do you think we might have the ability or knowledge to do so?”

There were a few snickers in the audience as I finished, but Kaku skipped a couple of other questions and went directly to mine. I think he appreciated that I was interested in a subject that he clearly takes seriously, and also that someone had actually read his book before coming to the lecture.

“Let me try to answer that,” he said. “First, why don’t the aliens visit us, and how do we contact the aliens who are out there? Well, if you’re walking down a country road and you see an ant hill, do you go down to the ants and say, ‘I give you trinkets, I bring you beads, I give you nuclear energy, I give you biotechnology - take me to your ant leader’? Or maybe you step on a few of them.”

I remember thinking at the time that if there was anything that might make people more uncomfortable than the prospect of not being at the top of the food chain, it would be the idea that those further up the chain than us might be as inclined to step on the “ants” as we are, whether by accident or on purpose. I’m sure that explained the few nervous chuckles I heard from the audience.

Kaku smiled, and continued. “A galactic civilization that could soar through the galactic space lanes would consider us not too different from an ant hill. Now, let’s say that there’s a ten lane super highway being built right next to the ant hill. Would the ants know how to communicate with the workers? Would they know the frequencies that the workers use? Would the ants even know what a ten lane super highway was, or the purpose of a ten lane super highway?”

“Then you begin to realize,” he explained, “that a galactic civilization is about a million years more advanced than us, and on that scale, their frequencies, their culture, their goals, are going to be very, very different from our little ant hill. So how will we make contact with these people?”

He continued for a bit by describing how we’re going to detect many Earth-like planets in the years to come. This, he said, would be an existential shock for many people, particularly once they realized that those planets might contain life more advanced than our own. Then he delivered his punch-line.

“We don’t know their frequencies, we don’t know how they communicate. For example, when you send an e-mail, it’s chopped up into many pieces and then re-assembled at the other end, because it was a military weapon. The message was chopped up because in the future Los Angeles may be destroyed, New York may be destroyed, and your e-mail will still get through because it’s been chopped up into pieces. Let’s say that an alien civilization does the same thing. They take a message, chop it up, and send it through many, many avenues to have it re-assembled at the other end. That’s the most efficient and error-free way to send a message. If we were to listen in on alien signals, we’d hear nothing. We’d hear gibberish. So we could be teeming with intergalactic civilizations, and we’re simply too stupid to know it."​
 
Yup, confirming what we always fail to recognize, just how dim we are. People are at home on earth but the lights of the mind just have not been turned on yet.

In some ways his response confirms something of what we do see of the UFO, flashes of fragments of evidence of someone else's exceptional technology at work in the skies above us. We are a pit stop for a pee break on the intergalactic ten lane superhighway.
 
They take a message, chop it up, and send it through many, many avenues to have it re-assembled at the other end. That’s the most efficient and error-free way to send a message. If we were to listen in on alien signals, we’d hear nothing. We’d hear gibberish. So we could be teeming with intergalactic civilizations, and we’re simply too stupid to know it."

This could make sense in a local star group (less than 12 light years) where waiting a bunch of earth years to reassemble a chopped up message is not an issue. Intergalactic communication is a whole other ball game... If quantum entanglement is actually understood and applied science creates a phone with the idea, then it'll probably be the ultimate reason why we can't detect signals through efforts like SETI. Instant communication using entanglement could also be encrypted making it impossible to decode (even with a quantum computer LOL).

Earthlings have done fairly well with 100 years of applied science :)
 
“Let me try to answer that,” he said. “First, why don’t the aliens visit us, and how do we contact the aliens who are out there? Well, if you’re walking down a country road and you see an ant hill, do you go down to the ants and say, ‘I give you trinkets, I bring you beads, I give you nuclear energy, I give you biotechnology - take me to your ant leader’? Or maybe you step on a few of them.”
...

Kaku smiled, and continued. “A galactic civilization that could soar through the galactic space lanes would consider us not too different from an ant hill. Now, let’s say that there’s a ten lane super highway being built right next to the ant hill. Would the ants know how to communicate with the workers? Would they know the frequencies that the workers use? Would the ants even know what a ten lane super highway was, or the purpose of a ten lane super highway?”

“Then you begin to realize,” he explained, “that a galactic civilization is about a million years more advanced than us, and on that scale, their frequencies, their culture, their goals, are going to be very, very different from our little ant hill. So how will we make contact with these people?”

I get it, but the fatal flaw in this thinking is that the power dynamic is necessarily equivalent to that of a human and an ant.

What is the basis for this?!?

It's just made up; there's no reason why this 'galactic civilization' he's talking about might not only be a few decades or a hundred of years ahead of us, thus rendering everything else he says as moot.

It is not a logical argument.
 
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I get it, but the fatal flaw in this thinking is that the power dynamic is necessarily equivalent to that of a human and an ant.

What is the basis for this?!?

It's just made up; there's no reason why this 'galactic civilization' he's talking about might not only be a few decades or a hundred of years ahead of us, thus rendering everything else he says as moot.

It is not a logical argument.

Yeah... the human ant vs the condescending semi-god argument is kinda weak. Assuming that the environments on other life-bearing planets are relatively the same, Maslow's hierarchy of needs on organic sentient ET's should apply through time. IMHO sentient organics are the ultimate planet products and should be on the same playing fields as far as this pyramid is concerned ;)

450px-MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg.png

Self-actualization
Main article: Self-actualization
"What a man can be, he must be."[10] This quotation forms the basis of the perceived need for self-actualization. This level of need refers to what a person's full potential is and the realization of that potential. Maslow describes this level as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be.[11] Individuals may perceive or focus on this need very specifically. For example, one individual may have the strong desire to become an ideal parent. In another, the desire may be expressed athletically. For others, it may be expressed in paintings, pictures, or inventions.[12] As previously mentioned, Maslow believed that to understand this level of need, the person must not only achieve the previous needs, but master them.

Self-transcendence
In his later years, Maslow explored a further dimension of needs, while criticizing his own vision on self-actualization.[13] The self only finds its actualization in giving itself to some higher goal outside oneself, in altruism and spirituality.[14]

Replace man by 'sentient organic being' .... You would think that a civilization that survives a million years would have ultimate altruistic motives and spiritual state of mind. Thus a real reason why no alien entity has destroyed us.... or would actually crush us by mistake.
 
I get it, but the fatal flaw in this thinking is that the power dynamic is necessarily equivalent to that of a human and an ant.

What is the basis for this?!?

It's just made up; there's no reason why this 'galactic civilization' he's talking about might not only be a few decades or a hundred of years ahead of us, thus rendering everything else he says as moot.

It is not a logical argument.

Funny you should mention it. Here is the section of my book immediately following the one noted above:


As I left what was a thoroughly entertaining lecture, I thought to myself that it’s quite possible Kaku is right. His views seem to reflect the overwhelming majority opinion amongst the scientific community. But given the way that our own development has gone over the past century, it can’t be said that he is certainly correct. The technological developments necessary to get us to the stars may not be thousands of years away – they may only be hundreds of years away, or perhaps even less. We just don’t know anymore. Indeed, Kaku himself has speculated that a Type-I civilization, which would be a truly planetary society, capable of travel within the solar system, and eventually perhaps even limited interstellar missions, could be achieved in as little as a century. A Type-II civilization, which would be capable of interstellar flight within our local region of the Milky Way, might only be eight hundred years or so beyond where we are now, according to Kaku.

To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the same period of time that passed between Caesar and Belisarius. To add even more perspective, imagine this: if you had told someone living at the end of the Spanish – American War in 1898 that in less than a century, the United States would possess bombs that could obliterate entire cities, launched not by artillery but by flying machines that could travel several times the speed of sound, all while men walked on the moon, they probably would have locked you up in a rubber room.

In short, predicting the future has always been a tricky thing, and that’s never been more true than it is today.

Accordingly, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that a civilization in our nearby "galactic neighborhood" could have developed space-faring abilities before us, and made their way here at some point, without having to imagine the aliens as god-like beings so far in advance of us that we wouldn’t be able to recognize them, or communicate with them at some level. I also think that it’s not unreasonable to imagine that they would have some degree of interest in us. Not in our technology, of course; indeed, probably not for anything in the physical realm in which we place so much stock.

It’s therefore quite possible that Kaku has gotten his timeline wrong, and that the more applicable analogy might not be humans in relation to ants, but rather adult humans in relation to the youngest members of our species. After all, while an adult is obviously recognizable to a five-year old child, they have vastly different outlooks on the world, on life, and on each other. Nevertheless, the adult still takes a profound interest in the development of the child, particularly a wayward child prone to self-destruction.

Regardless of the comparative levels that we might be at in terms of development, Kaku has made the more fundamental mistake of viewing contact from the perspective of humans trying to participate in a conversation with an advanced non-human intelligence. The more logical way to look at it is from the perspective of the advanced non-human intelligence, whomever or whatever they may be, trying to make themselves understood at some level by us. Any contact is going to take place on their terms, and not ours.

When a parent wants to interact with a baby, for instance, they don’t read War and Peace, or King Lear, in the hopes that the child will understand; rather, they tickle them, and say things like “goochy-goochy coo,” and sing them lullabies. Eventually, when the child gets a bit older, the parents will progress to simple illustrated stories like those written by Dr. Seuss. I think we’re a long way away from being able to read their version of Tolstoy or Shakespeare, but we might just be developed enough to see them spin the shiny silver ball they’ve placed above our crib, and listen as they softly sing their version of “Frère Jacques” to us. Maybe a few of us are capable of an even greater understanding. As we’ve seen in our own species, there are always some precocious children, such as Mozart, who outgrow the cradle more quickly than most.

The great 20th century drama critic George Jean Nathan once wrote that great art is as irrational as great music. “It is mad,” he asserted, “with its own loveliness." The same could be said, in many ways, of the paranormal, which almost always seems to possess an element of irrationality to it. This raises a fascinating possibility: what if the paranormal is a form of artistic expression by an advanced non-human intelligence?

For example, one can find similar displays of the lights often ascribed to UFOs in our own culture. Black light theatre is a wonderful example, which I have been fortunate enough to see in person whilst traveling in the Czech Republic. If one were to travel to Nevada for the annual Burning Man festival, one would also see various light displays; so too at almost any Fourth of July celebration, or more than a few minor league baseball games I’ve attended.

It stands to reason that an advanced non-human intelligence, whether they’re from another solar system, another dimension, another time, or even from right here on Earth, may be doing something similar for us, which we perceive as paranormal phenomena. If our art is capable of as many manifestations as there are human beings with imagination and creativity, think of how much more an advanced non-human intelligence might be capable of achieving, particularly if they have the same desire to create as we do, but combined with a greater capacity and much broader experience.

This leads us to another intriguing possibility – that whatever is responsible for the paranormal (and there may be more than one actor involved) has the ability to create art within the subconscious of another species, as a form of communication and enlightenment and perhaps even entertainment.

I think that if we had a chance to interview the advanced non-human intelligence, it might say something like this, by way of introduction:

Hello.

While my species does not really have "names" as you comprehend them, you may call me Vincent, although we have had many such appellations in our long interaction with you.

We find your species to be most interesting, at least from an anthropological point of view, so we decided to make contact, many thousand of your "years" ago (memo to humans – your linear concept of time is extremely quaint, but then you are an extremely quaint species, which is why we like you so much).

We have found it best to present ourselves in ways that fit in with the cultural norms of your time. Accordingly, we have actually appeared in many forms (the burning bush was my favorite, with the UFO meme a close second).

We do this using a technology that is far, far beyond your comprehension. You would probably call it magic, or the supernatural. Your species is still confined to your physical reality, or at least what you perceive as "reality," but we operate on different "levels."

I guess the best way to explain it to you is that when we make contact, we do not do it in what you would consider the literal sense, but rather in a more figurative way, using what you call dreams, and the subconscious, and... well, it all gets rather complicated, I'm afraid.

Suffice it to say, we are far more interested in the mind and spirit than the body (that is what happens when you get to our level of development as a species), and so that is where we make contact. In a sense, we "speak" to you, across the vastness of space. Indeed, once you really understand how things work, you realize that space is not actually that vast after all.

The wonderful thing about this form of communication is that it allows us to participate in your development, and slowly help guide you to a greater level of understanding, not about technology but about yourselves on an individual basis which will hopefully one day add up in the aggregate for you as a species. When you have been around as long as we have, that is what really matters.

I have to admit that it has been a rough haul at times, but some of you seem to "get it,” and so we keep trying. Two of my favorites have been Henry Alline and Hildegard of Bingen, but Bach and that McCartney fellow were also very open to the bigger picture, albeit in a different way. Mozart was “out there,” even for us, but he was something truly special. And I admit that I have a soft spot for The Smiths, because there is indeed a “light that never goes out.” As a result, we have not abandoned the effort.

One final thing. I know many of you spend an inordinate amount of time debating where we are from, to which I can only ask the following: does it really matter whether we are from Zeta Reticuli, or another dimension, or another time, or from your own planet?

Does it even matter if we are you?

This scenario is one that I find plausible for a number of reasons. It takes into account the wide range of described encounters with a possible advanced non-human intelligence throughout human history. It makes us part of the story, but not necessarily the center of the story. Most important, it places the paranormal in its historical context. It provides us with a tremendous opportunity to speculate not just about the nature of the phenomenon, but also about ourselves and our relationship to it.
 
Humans have done well or poorly depending on how you measure us holistically across time. We can see to the edge of the big bang and we have killed most living things on the planet. I'm not sure the hierarchy of needs applies as it's also a human created device that measures our needs. How could we even comprehend the needs of the super race of alien beings? They may as well be gods. When we consider the other categorization of Type I, Type II and Type III civilizations, of which we have not yet met Type 1's definition of harnessing the power of the planet yet, at least not without wiping it out which we are on track to do, we pale in comparison, and ants we remain. The gaps in how we use power in these categorizations and the gaps in needs and beliefs that might follow from such species that may have managed to survive self-destruction leave us so removed from understanding what they are or could be that we may never get to see more than just a shadow of what they are.

Thinking further along these lines there is little motivation for the Type II to visit the ants especially when they could probably learn all they want to without our notice and without even coming here physically. Whatever UFO's are the only way we seem to be able to talk about them or have talked about them is by centering ourselves in the story as we can only understand things on human terms. Consequently many of our myths, stories and narratives about the UFO are almost always couched in the tales we have always told about strange creatures stealing our children in the night, or beings visiting us from the stars to impart wisdom, or demons to desecrate us. It's really the only story we know and can tell. If we look at things sideways a bit more perhaps we might recognize that we are observing something that is not about us at all, but on occasion involves us purposely and that might indeed be a big concern. The Type I's may be indifferently playing tricks on us.

We can not communicate with the UFO pilot but we like to trick ourselves into thinking that we do all the time be ye contactee, chaneller, or convinced of that great art of creative story telling: telepathy. There is nothing two way about this experience, but like with nature, which is also outside of us, we made art and learned a lot about ourselves and about our place in nature. Given that the UFO is also a part of nature in some way, call it space nature, the best we can get out of this is to make even better art that might indeed help us to understand ourselves in relationship to other aspects of nature beyond our atmosphere that we can neither quantify, measure nor communicate with.
 

We don't know what at least half of the mass in the universe consists of, the nature of "dark energy", or have anything remotely near an understanding of quantum entanglement. We are not even half-way to a testable hypothesis for quantum gravity. And yet most of our "experts" pronounce a complete absence of interstellar communication based on an inability to detect modulated energy on the EM spectrum !

Imagine also, the kind of equivalent 'bandwidth' even casual communication between advanced species might have. Larger minds mean more complexity communicated in an equivalent or shorter length of time. I frankly doubt our brains capable of following an advanced species conversation in real time.

I always give Kaku special credit for his disciplined open mindedness. Michio Kaku is sort of the Jacques Vallee of physics.
 
Funny you should mention it. Here is the section of my book immediately following the one noted above:

To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the same period of time that passed between Caesar and Belisarius. To add even more perspective, imagine this: if you had told someone living at the end of the Spanish – American War in 1898 that in less than a century, the United States would possess bombs that could obliterate entire cities, launched not by artillery but by flying machines that could travel several times the speed of sound, all while men walked on the moon, they probably would have locked you up in a rubber room.

In short, predicting the future has always been a tricky thing, and that’s never been more true than it is today.

Tremendous technological progress in such a short time... from horse to space shuttle in 100 years. So fragile though that you could wipe it out with a single solar flare. It makes you wonder if the conditions for our current techno flash might not have happened in the past.
Had scientific documents been sacred 500 years ago instead of religious documents we would already be travelling to other stars. Instead, scientists were burned at the stake.
Giordano Bruno - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An easy guess is that within the next 100 years we'll have permanent outposts on Mars. Having all your eggs in the same basket is never a good thing. Bizarrely, while earths resources dwindle and climate goes out of wack you'll have settlers on Mars trying to make that planet more earth like. Elon Musk has even suggested nuking the poles to create an atmosphere. (Sounds like he stole the idea from that Total Recall movie). Why do I get the feeling the elite will escape to mars while earth burns.

By the way, NASA will release some important information on September 28th at 11:30 ET.

[Update: Sub-surface life highly likely on Mars. Water found on Mars: Briny water flows]

The solar storm of 2012 that almost sent us back to a post-apocalyptic Stone Age | ExtremeTech
7936905134_61fa20b066_h.jpg
 
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.. Michio Kaku is sort of the Jacques Vallee of physics ...
Interesting comparison. I like them both. However I'm not as sold on the Kardashev Scale as some folks. It's basic premise is on size/energy consumption/energy output, but in recent times the trend is to make things smaller and more energy efficient. So perhaps it's not about capturing the entire energy output of a star, but creating power sources that are small, powerful, and efficient that power devices of a similar nature. The one trend where size continues to climb is in aerospace. We have larger passenger jets now than ever before, but they're also more efficient than ever before. Also eventually, assuming space exploration becomes a reality, we'll be creating huge mother ships with fusion generators.

But the point I guess is that the trend seems to be going both ways; larger and more powerful, and smaller and more efficient. So the Kardashev Scale, while sort of an interesting concept, is maybe a bit simplistic. Take it to it's extremes, where a civilization harnesses the power of the entire universe, and maybe, in a sense, that's already being done, perhaps by some super efficient computer that is creating our whole universe using less power than a single household.
 
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Tremendous technological progress in such a short time...
Nice graphic. What gets me is that while it shows how small and insignificant Earth is compared to the Sun, there are other stars that make our Sun look as small in scale to them as the Earth is to the Sun and even smaller. It's just crazy!

 
Until humanity truly KNOWS an alien race and their civilization, how can we possibly evaluate how intelligent we are? How can we possibly project outward what a totally alien civilization would do? I just see so many assumptions here that are based on ourselves. I know that this is inevitable when the topic is raised. But we need to bear in mind that we have NOTHING to compare ourselves to outside planet Earth. So we are just making things up based on us!
 
Until humanity truly KNOWS an alien race and their civilization, how can we possibly evaluate how intelligent we are? How can we possibly project outward what a totally alien civilization would do? I just see so many assumptions here that are based on ourselves. I know that this is inevitable when the topic is raised. But we need to bear in mind that we have NOTHING to compare ourselves to outside planet Earth. So we are just making things up based on us!

Don't forget we're decoding the Neanderthal model too. We happen to be the successful model with a potential star-faring future. We can only assume what other successful models on other planets similar to ours might be like. Non-organic life forms might exist and might have a totally different brain to organize and process information... but that's way out there.

However, I think its a safe bet that self-aware organic life forms that followed a similar evolutionary path will develop interfaces that boost their maxed out brain capacities. Or will find ways to genetically modify their brains to boost processing and sensory capabilities.
human-computer-interface-3.jpg

Scotch tape included :)
 
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