quahaug
I used to keep a lot of back issues of wired, which I saved because I thought they had some cool stories. Surprisingly, many are packed with examples of very obvious vapor ware, and have aged really poorly.
A small handful, however, still read like notes from an exciting future, and I find myself returning to them, when searching for inspiration.
It doesn't matter much, whether my car or your car is autonomous, so long as the prevailing wind perpetuates a certain concentration of robotic vehicles on the road. Choice, freedom, privacy, become mere platitudes in such an environment. Meaningless words parroted in the same sentence as terrorism, patriotism, job creation and affordable healthcare.
The term "uploaded" is being subjected to special semantics in this case. Consciousness is not transferred over to the receiver by the act of transmitting a signal.
If I make a telephone call, and leave a voicemail message, the answering machine does not get up and walk around. Even a sufficiently advanced voicemail recorder would only be an interpretation of artifact left behind by a creature, and not the original being.
When you think of it as an event similar to an electromagnetic pulse from a hydrogen bomb, and not as a beam from a laser pointer, it changes the rationale for why it might not be a repeatable event. If it was a pulse and not a beam, it might still be prone to occlusion, in terms of whether pulse were generated on the surface of a planet, and on the side that only happened to be facing toward us at the time (not away), while our antenna was pointed at the night sky, but that still increases the probability of reception.
The alternative concept for a pulse, is that it was generated from a small space craft or space probe, and not on a planet capable of eclipsing the signal.
Considering that it lasted 72 seconds, that might fit the profile of a weapon, if you consider the duration of typical video of a mushroom cloud. 72 seconds might also fit the profile of a jamming signal generated while a weapon was en route, to prevent detection while being delivered to a target.
Where do we see intelligence and anomalies converge?
- War, and other forms of political conflict
- Accidents, even if non-destructive, like when the cat sits on the keyboard
- Experimentation, and research into novel discoveries, unfamiliar to a civilization
- Distress, final acts of desperation, where no hope is provided by circumstance, but behavior is engaged in anyway, because there is no consequence
Scientists say that if the signal came from
extraterrestrials, they are likely to be an extremely
advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a
2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on
Earth.
That would certainly explain the intensity, brevity and lack of repitition for this particular signal?
One might expect residual evidence of destructive forces at work, such as a debris field or hot gas clouds, but that assumes that the weapons are of a conventional nature we might readily understand.
In order to fulfill certain contracts or receive insurance coverage, written language for company travel policies must ensure the continuity of proprietary trade secrets, and redundancy for mission-critical personnel, in case of disaster, or catastrophic accident.
There was a tech company (during the 80's or 90's?) that was completely destroyed by a single random plane crash that killed a handful of the key people in one fell swoop, but the name escapes me, and my google skills are failing. Maybe someone else will remember. I want to say it was a vintage video game company, but it might've just been some old (now defunct) electronics company...
For this same reason, the president and vice president of the united states don't fly together. I think military command adheres to similar rules.
It's not enough to merely keep humans in the picture, but to keep healthy, undamaged humans in the picture.
Let's say, perhaps, that after a particularly costly war, the only humans left are a mixture of mentally unstable, angry, ambitious, victory-driven amputees, with intense biases imbued upon them by surviving particularly horrific and violent combat. These people, in a warped attempt to say "never again", optimize an artificially intelligent, fully automated child-rearing skinner box [1] to mold children into their own image, as the natural and perfect outcome which produces a society averse to violent warfare. The result is that every child that emerges from the skinner box is an angry, warped sociopath, missing limbs, who rationalizes even trivial behavior with an arbitrary moral high ground of extreme polar ideology.
But wait... aren't humans... technically classifiable as self-assembling intelligent constructs, spewed forth from the bald nothingness of space and time by mere coincidence? What if WE are the beast we fear?
Oh... oh god.
...yeah, sure, let me just call my buddy who used to be a mechanic for Tupolev.Jeff Bezos tried his damnedest to make them seem like santa clause just in time for christmas, but we need some real megawatt tech celebrities to work their magic. Bezos is balding, for christ's sake.
I mean Mark Zuckerberg with all his cute, cuddly animal-loving vegetarian tendencies wouldn't harm a fly.
If HE'S okay with drones, then they MUST be okay! (insert obligatory emoticon)
And, oh yeah...
CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET
15 PANOPTICOID DRONES MANUFACTUED BY LOCKHEED, YOUR LOCAL
SHERRIF'S DEPARTMENT WILL BE ENFORCING ALL EVICTIONS IN
YOUR COUNTY BY NON-LETHAL PEPPER-STUN DRONE STRIKE. IN THE
EVENT THAT YOUR HOME IS FORECLOSED, YOU WILL BE ORDERED TO
VACATE UNDER THREAT OF NON-LETHAL FORCE.
---
CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET
27 PROTOBEDIENT DRONES MANUFACTUED BY NORTHROP/GRUMMAN ALL
TRAFFIC STOPS ON STATE ROAD 902 WILL NOW BE CONDUCTED
AUTONOMOUSLY. DO NOT TAUNT THE PROTOBEDIENT DRONE.
***end citizen alert notification***