Mac Thoughts, Vol. I

One of my favourite photos of Mac, with my friend Veronica Reynolds in 2006 when we were all in Santa Ana, California - Mac and I working on Best Evidence, and Veronica studying acting in Los Angeles. Thanks to social butterfly Veronica, we wound up at a wedding "after party" that evening, which went on until the wee hours of the morning. Mac and I ended up in a room with some of the guys in the wedding party having a conversation about kung fu movies, and then time travel.

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of Mac Tonnies, at least in passing. On some days, however, in different ways and for different reasons, I think of him more than others. I've decided that on those days I'm going to delve back into areas of Mac's work that I found particularly interesting over the years, and post snippets of it here. Call them "Mac Thoughts".

Today is one of those days, so...

From January 31, 2003, at Posthuman Blues:

Mainstream SETI avoids another unsettling possibility: that some extraterrestrial radio transmissions may not be signals at all, but templates for actual alien personae. If it's possible to place a self-replicating automated probe in another star system, it could be used as a receiver as well as an observation instrument. Neurologically inclined aliens could "upload" themselves into a computational substrate and "fax" themselves to the distant receiver at the speed of light.

This concept, which Mac continued to be intrigued by until the end of his life, later became the core story for the play Doing Time, which is now a screenplay in development titled The Icarus Imperative.

Of course, no instalment of "Mac Thoughts" will be complete without a musical selection that both he and I enjoyed. Today, a little REM.

"Everyone here comes from somewhere."

I like to think that someone like Mac winds up somewhere, too.

Paul Kimball

How Do We Craft A Message To The Stars?

Very interesting interview in the National Catholic Reporter with Dr. Douglas Vakoch, the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at SETI.

How Do We Craft A Message To The Stars?

An excerpt:

Rather than emphasizing our strength and wisdom in a message to more advanced civilizations, I suggest a more humble approach. I think the most powerful message that we could send to beings on another world is that we are a young civilization. We are in our technological adolescence. We are struggling. We are uncertain that we’re even going to survive. And yet, we have enough hope that we are willing to send a message and listen, maybe a hundred or a thousand years, with the hope that we’ll get a reply.

On the one hand, the type of message that Dr. Vakoch is describing makes eminent sense to me. On the other hand, however, given that we have no idea what we might encounter "out there", caution should be the order of the day.

Paul Kimball

The Drake Equation

Here is SETI's Dr. Frank Drake explaining his famous equation for determining the prevalence of alien life in the galaxy:



If you want to play around with the numbers in the Drake Equation, and see what you come up with, you can do so here.

You can also read Stan Friedman's critique of the Drake Equation (and SETI in general) here.

Paul Kimball

Michio Kaku on aliens, SETI

Kaku points out why SETI is truly a silly effort to investigate:

"We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation, and we wouldn't even know."

Bingo.

"We are so arrogant, we're so conceited, that we say they must visit us... I don't think so."

Bingo again!

Paul Kimball

Kimball & Friedman - The Media and UFOs

Here's another clip of Stan and I on Melanson Live back in 2004, this time discussing the media and UFOs. We also touch upon SETI, and my colleague Mike MacDonald, who made The Shag Harbour UFO Incident and Northern Lights, and is currently in post-production on Intruders.

FYI -at the start of the clip, the lead-in question was: "what did you find most surprising when you made the film?"

Paul Kimball

Seth Shostak, Bad Science, and UFOs

If you want to hear some bad science, tune into the December 20th, 2006 episode of Are We Alone, SETI's weekly radio program, with Seth Shostak, which is about UFOs.

If there are really aliens out there listening in, I hope they don't hear this. They'll think we're still stuck in pre-Enlightenment days.

Shostak et al manage the unholy trifecta of bad science - they distort facts, they ignore other facts, and they make mistakes about the facts. For example, at one point Shostak manages to conflate the MJ-12 documents with the legitimate CIA and NSA documents that Stan Friedman and others got through Freedom of Information Act requests. In the process, Shostak shows that he knows nothing about the subject he's chosen to bash.

Note also that Shostak et al tie the UFO phenomenon directly to the ETH, never once mentioning any other possibilities. The open mind that Dr. Michio Kaku urged people to keep with respect to the UFO phenomenon at the end of Seeing is Believing is nowhere to be found on Shostak's show.

In the meantime, SETI continues to search the skies for the ET equivalent of "I Love Lucy" or "The Honeymooners", while pumping out, in the form of radio shows like this, the scientific equivalent of bad pro wrestling - phony, derivative (nary a new thought pops up in this episode), and just plain boring.

I've finally figured it out - Seth Shostak is the Vince McMahon of ufology.

Which means it's time for... a head-to-head showdown with...

The Easter Bunny!

Who Has More Scientific Credibility on UFOs
	The Easter Bunny
	Dr. Seth Shostak
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Yet again, I find myself compelled to cast my vote for The Easter Bunny!



Look out Seth!

Paul Kimball

P.S. For some reason, this hilarious video reminds me of Easter during my fourth year at Acadia. Hmm...

Carl Sagan explains the Drake Equation

Part 1



Part 2



Fascinating stuff from a great communicator.

I'm not nearly as anti-SETI as most ufologists are - what's the harm in looking for radio signals? It's not like it costs that much money, and, as I said in a radio interview once, I think ufologists are just jealous that SETI has been more successful in engaging science and the public than ufology has.

But, whether you like Sagan or SETI or you don't, watching him do the calculations is interesting, especially if you accept the possibility that there may be millions of technological civilizations in the galaxy (a number that seems way too high to me; I would always go with a more conservative estimate, based on the principle that it's better to be pleasantly surprised than rudely awakened). It stands to reason, if that's the case, and if they manage to survive what Sagan calls their "adolescence", that they could - indeed, almost certainly would - develop the ability to travel between the stars, if not in person then at least in the form of advanced probes, probably using some form of artificial intelligence. From there it isn't a giant leap of logic to conclude that one or more of those probes, or perhaps even crews, made its way to Earth at some point, and took a look around. Perhaps they're still here. One can't prove that on the available evidence, but it's not an unreasonable hypothesis, even if there had never been a single UFO sighting.

Ironically, given that he was not a supporter of the ETH, Sagan's reasoning, using Drake's equation, should give comfort to those who are supporters of the ETH, and should give pause for thought to those who would dismiss the ETH out of hand.

Paul Kimball