Everyone loves the Internet. How else would we learn about dancing mortgage offers, the latest wardrobe slips and the deep insights provided by pictures of cats?
Yes, this modern wonder is surely something any advanced civilization would undoubtedly cherish, just like say, aliens would. And aliens, if they are out there, likely already have one, suggests one space scientist.
“A galactic Internet might be in use already, but by aliens, not by humans yet,” says Italy’s Claudio Maccone, writing in the current Acta Astronautica journal. Maccone is a co-chairman of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) permanent committee of the International Academy of Astronautics. In his wide-ranging report — which ponders everything from the last 3.5 billion years of life to the next 10 million years of humanity undertaking galactic colonization — the notion of aliens with e-mail is among the more mild of his suggestions.
Maccone thinks that space physics explains why aliens, if they are out there, are likely too busy with their own galactic version of Facebook to pay much attention to all the noise coming from Earthly broadcasts of old baseball games and M.A.S.H. episodes, now making their way across space. They likely have a better way to talk to each other, thanks to an effect called gravitational lensing.
Source. US Today read more
