astro picture for the day/ Astronomy mysteries, Space Aliens, and Gods

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/John Landino

I've related the hypothesis about the U.F.O. craze that started up right around the time of the space age and gods before. My Thursday, March 3, 2016 blog post - astro picture for the day/ "In Search of . . ." as a window onto the mythmaking mind.  This desire to read into things "aliens/intelligence/gods" just keeps going(not that any of these people read that blog post).

This anthropocentric interpretation of anything weird in astronomical phenomenon goes back long before the two examples I'm about to show.  Back in the 1960s, Joselyn Bell and her colleages at first thought the impossibly regular energy bursts they were detecting with their new radio telescopes must be Aliens, sending out messages to us. They originally called these radio bursts - LGM's, little green men.  Here's Jocelyn's wiki - > Jocelyn Bell wiki . Scrolling down to "Academic Career", we see "In July 1967, she detected a bit of "scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars.^[19] She discovered that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse per second. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1)"  What she had in fact discovered were Neutron Stars - the compact remnant of a supernova explosion.   These were theorized before, but the theory seemed crazy at the time.  But, this craving to be saved by some intelligence has continued.

Around 2015, some astronomers were disturbed enough by a certain stars sudden brightening and dimming to suggest that, KIC 8462852, a star about a thousand light years away, must be Extraterrestrial Intelligences building a Dyson sphere.  A Dyson sphere is a kind of inverted solar collector completely surrounding a star.  So, the collective energies of the star is collected for as long as the star lives.  The smaller the star, the longer it lasts.  If you have a comparatively smaller star than our sun, this technology can feed a culture for trillions of years.  If you tap the energies of say a neutron star, or even a black hole, one could go for even longer periods, but that's beside the point here.   Here's the wiki - > KIC 8462852

Tabby's star, above, didn't get any E.T.'s.  So, the search has continued. Now, it's great radio bursts from billions of light years away. These impossibly energetic bursts must be E.T.'s accelerating solar sails to near light speed!  If not that, they must be E.T's, billions of light years away, trying to make contact with . . . us! Here's the fast radio bursts wiki - > fast radio bursts wiki Quoting from it(scrolling down to "Origin Hypothesis"), "Some have speculated that these signals might be signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.^["

While I'm at it, let's show some. I remember meeting some fellow Avionic Tech back in my navy days. Me and this guy actually went out some some American Civil war park in Tennessee.  Somewhere in there, he related something to me.  I mean I'm talking science, and his scientific excitement is . . . the face from Mars. Googling "face of Mars" didn't take me long to find this wiki -> Cydonia (region of Mars) . The first image is this famous "face of mars."

I'm willing to guess that I don't have to point out which mound on this Mars image is the face of mars.

Here's the recent imaging of this face of Mars,

The wiki link provided above even shows what E.T. dreamers hope is an Alien pyramid,

I can't even keep track of how many times  I've seen at Yahoo news, people viewing images from the Jet propulsion laboratory, have found some impossible space relic somewhere on the surface of Mars. There must be some shiny piece of an Alien spacecraft off in the distance. It just never ends.

Even some of the most rationalistic futurists, like Arthur C. Clarke was fond of reading into astronomical phenomenon, some intelligence.  I remember reading in some writing of his that one of the asteroid moons is hollow.  Ope!  says Arthur C. Clarke it must be some calling card from an ancient Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  There must be a library of knowledge in there that these E.T's must have left us to save us from ourselves.

I don't feel like rereading Isaac Asimov's "Extraterrestrial Civilizations", but as time goes on, the book takes center stage.  It was the original "Rare Earth Hypothesis."  And, it's a great rationalists book about Extraterrestrial Civilizations. It points out that the mythologizing of god(s) of ancient times is the same as the U.F.O. craze of today.