Astronomers to Check Interstellar Body for Signs of Alien Technology



It’s not only eccentric Science Fiction authors who dare to speculate on the nature of this 400-meter cigar-shaped interstellar visitor which passed within the orbit of Mercury then grazed Earth, at 15Million miles; before exiting the solar system to destinations unknown…

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/11/astronomers-to-check-interstellar-body-for-signs-of-alien-technology

“The body is now about twice as far from Earth as the sun, but from that distance the Green Bank telescope can still detect transmissions as weak as those produced by a mobile phone. Loeb said that while he did not expect Green Bank to detect an alien transmission, it was worth checking.”

Green Bank telescope

Artist Impression

Actual Spacecraft

Perhaps they were just buzzing us and will now come round to line-up for a strafing run…

 

Meaningful Relationships…

I enjoyed ths wired article at lot—all the while experiencing an ominous sense of wrongness.

If you have read your Asimov, it feels like parts of humanity are heading towards Solaria.

Eventually, all traces of our base, biological behavior will have been criminalized and proscribed—purged from polite society. The only flirting or f&*king we will be doing then, will be with our robot housemaids.

 

‘Levy takes Alan Turing’s famous claim that the convincing appearance of intelligence (in AI) is proof of intelligence, and he expands that into the emotional realm:

“If a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not? If a robot’s artificial emotions prompt it to say things such as ‘I love you,’ surely we should be willing to accept these statements at face value … Why, if a robot that we know to be emotionally intelligent, says, ‘I love you’ or ‘I want to make love to you,’ should we doubt it?” Human emotions, he argues, are no less “programmed” than those of an intelligent machine: “We have hormones, we have neurons, and we are ‘wired’ in a way that creates our emotions.” ‘

Taken to extremes, this is the dark Armageddon of the body snatchers. Humans are swapped out, uploading into shiny, hygienic oids, one by one. Society continues, but it has become a kabuki of raging and laughter—there is nobody home, no Cartesian observers in the cockpit, nothing going on behind cold android eyes…

…I fear we are only starting to scratch the surface of future shock