The little, weak, fangless animals emerged from the savanna would not have broadcast their location in a vast terrestrial jungle without knowing what was out there. None of our neolithic ancestors would have done such a thing. The message was a binary-encoded image of a human and some basic information about our civilization, such as the number system we use and the composition of DNA. The same approach has been followed in radio messages sent to possible extraterrestrial intelligences, like the Arecibo Message, beamed from Puerto Rico in 1974.
It was believed that mathematics was a universal language comprehensible to any intelligent civilization, regardless of their culture or language. The Voyager spacecraft included a set of symbols called the Golden Record that were intended to convey mathematical concepts to any extraterrestrial civilization that might find the it, including basic arithmetic operations as well as more advanced concepts such as exponents and logarithms. This attitude was embodied in the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched by JPL in 1977. In the years since World War II there has been widespread political support to search for alien life, soothed by a mysterious consensus among bureaucrats that everyone 'out there' is likely to be our friend. "Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us".īut popular culture, once driven to panic by Orson Welles' dramatization of a Martian invasion, has unaccountably become blind to this concern, possibly because it can no longer frame it as a subject other than entertainment. In The War of the Worlds, Wells argued that since there is nothing special about life on earth, there should be nothing special about its moral sensibilities either. Wells to ask whether minds evolved on other planets should not be morally as well as physically alien. The then-noveltheory of Darwinism impelled H.G.
Have notions of a malevolent God gradually fallen into disfavor simply because humanity wishes it to be so, or does the decline reflect a trend in the value-setting aspect of intelligence itself? The question is not new.
0 kommentar(er)
