Are significant numbers of humanity the product of an ancient and advanced alien civilization? Have we, across the millennia, been periodically modified and refined as a species? In short, has our genetic make-up been manipulated by otherworldly beings that view human civilization as one big lab experiment?
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As part of the new Breakthrough Initiatives program, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has announced a $1 million USD prize for crafting the best message to represent humanity to potential extraterrestrial contacts.
The message, of which would be transmitted as part of the ‘Breakthrough Message’ phase of the program, where the message would be beamed to stars that would be likely to support civilizations. Astronomer Franklin Drake, one of Breakthrough Initiatives’ members, and pioneering member of earlier searches for extraterrestrial contact, says that they will automatically eliminate anything written in a human language. "Some people have foolishly composed messages in English. Big mistake," Drake warns.
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Researchers in the UK say they may have discovered a miniature device that was used to seed life on Earth.
Analyzing samples taken from the stratosphere by a high-altitude balloon, researchers from the University of Buckingham discovered a tiny metallic sphere imbedded in the sampler. Astrobiologist Milton Wainwright describes the object: "It is a ball about the width of a human hair, which has filamentous life on the outside and a gooey biological material oozing from its center." The object was found cratered within the sampling container, implying that it had hit the collector at high speed, rather than just floating in the air with the rest of the particles collected.
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In 1975, a paper by physicist Michael Hart inspired Enrico Fermi to ask the question: where is everybody? He asked it because of the silence of the universe around us–no radio signals, nobody coming in for a landing, indeed, nobody approaching us in anything like a conventionally understandable manner.
Now, whether you believe that extraterrestrials are here or not, a good argument can be made that, even if many of them present such an unconventional picture that we literally cannot recognize them as what they are, some, at least, should be in some sort of more conventional contact with us.
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