Bloggers are afire with the "news" of a United Nations designated representative for future encounters of humanity with intelligent alien life. So the Sunday Times tell us via the Aussies (link via First Things). Try a Bing search for a hint of the excitement. Alas, Trekkies, it's apparently not so. No, the all-knowing UN hasn't overreached this far, yet.
I recall an episode of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, years ago, in which the clever host asked his audience the rhetorical question (paraphrased from aging memory): "Why do the UFO's always land in places like Roswell? Why not Central Park?"
I'm a geologist/geophysicist by training and profession. Is the public aware, and have my fellow geoscientists realized, that in the earth's four billion year rock record there have been found no, none, nada, zip, zero... traces of evidence of any extraterrestrial intelligence: fossilized tricorders, abandoned transporter chambers or obsolete stargate molds, detached Enterprise engine imprints?
Sorry, sci-fi (or should I say SyFy?) addicts. We nose-in-the-dirt folk haven't found anything indicating anything more than a history of life (and love) that makes coherent, evolutionary sense. In other words, there is no evidence for visits to earth by extraterrestrials in the 4,000,000,000 years in which earth rocks formed (and were preserved). Of course, they could have packed-up any remnants of whatever they might have used, leaving earth's forests in better shape than when they first arrived.
(By the same token, however, we, together with the larger scientific community haven't successfully explained the very nature of existence and the ability of humans to comprehend it.)
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