News On The Space Alien Front

Via the New York Post,

NASA scientists plan to launch pictures of naked humans into space in the hope of luring aliens to us.

The depictions will also include an invitation to respond should an intelligent alien race find the space nudes.

Fortunately, the hypothetical aliens shouldn’t be too shocked by the unsolicited nudes.

The pictures aren’t graphic photographs of naked humans but a drawing of a naked man and a woman next to a depiction of DNA.

The man and woman are waving in an attempt to look more inviting.

NASA scientists revealed the image in a study that’s part of a project called the “Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG).

The image looks like this:

But I have a bunch of questions, starting with whether this is redundant. It appears possible that the space aliens could be watching episodes of Naked and Afraid well before this transmission reaches them, after all. According to the BBC,

A television company has joined forces with a social networking site to send a message to the nearest theoretically inhabitable planet. But can our television and radio broadcasts already be picked up in space?

. . . Space scientist Dr Chris Davis, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, says it is possible that television and radio signals from Earth could be picked up on other planets, but it isn't easy.

. . . "Of course, no one more than about 50-70 light years away will have yet heard from us, but I figure that our earliest broadcasts are washing over about one new star system each day. So the potential audience is growing."

We're back to the remarkably blithe assumption that the space aliens can decode the binary transmission that contains this strangely puerile message. Well, yes, if they've invented the warp drive, of course they can do it, and a great deal else. But if that's the case, why haven't we heard from them already? But even if we accept the calculations that say there are n to the 25th planets with the conditions that allow life to develop, on how many of those does life evolve beyond pond scum?

I was banned from the comment section of an economics blog many years ago when the blogger posted a mathematical calculation, and I asked how math evolved from pond scum. But the problem is there: reason, with the ability to understand and manipulate the physical world, is necessary to invent warp drives or decrypt interplanetary messages in a bottle, but that's something entirely separate from the physical world itself and as far as I can see, does not necessarily come from it.

So this reflects a certain unintended Genesis bias in the transmission, which is no different from the Carl Sagan pictographs on the Voyager disks. And let's face it: the depiction of the naked earthlings on either the Voyager disk or the new transmission has nothing to do with how earthlings actually look outside of porn sites. People don't usually walk around that way. This is part of the oddly puerile vibe of the whole communication-with-aliens project, especially given the current emphasis on gender equity. Heck, why not show five earthlings in unisex space suits and leave the details for later?

The BITG project is entirely heteronormative and transphobic. I have no idea how NASA got away with this.

But the depiction in the transmission also reflects another Genesis bias, which is that the historic depictions of naked Adam and Eve represent earthlings in their prelapsarian state, at worst in the instants between the temptation of Eve and Adam's bite at the apple. The strange pixellated rendition is a peculiar parody -- earthings male and female aren't actually like that; the portrayal is so unrealistic as to be unscientific.

Real earthlings are flawed, they grow old and die, they don't look like porn stars.

Meanwhile, the never-Trump but right-wing Hot Air blog is reporting sympathetically on congress's impatience with the slow implementation of the AOIMSG (Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group), the next iteration of the Project Bluebook UFO hunt boondoggle. And indeed, Hot Air now reports with delight that the House is making progress:

I find it hard to believe that I’m actually typing this, but it’s true. After so many years of calls for more transparency from the government on the subject of UFOs (or unidentified aerial phenomena, as we’re supposed to call them now), a House subcommittee on intelligence will hold public hearings on the topic next week. This is the first time that such a hearing has taken place in more than half a century.

These people are as dumb as the goys who are sending fanciful pictures of porn stars into space. They're pleasing only themselves.