![[1273] A Message Of Hope](/comics/2021-06-13-1273-a-message-of-hope.png "[1273] A Message Of Hope")
This is literally what happened.
Reading all these reports, I have to say that all these aliens really don’t behave like you’d expect super intelligent beings to behave like. It makes you wonder how they got these amazing vessels that can do unbelievable maneuvers. Is there a fundamental flaw in the way humans experience the world that makes us miss something rather obvious about the true nature of the universe?
- Sandra: Today, we have something special for you, a message of hope!
- Woo: Ohh, I’m curious!
- Caption: On 16 September 1994, a couple of aliens decided to break the Prime Directive and deliver an important message to humanity.
- Caption: Naturally, they landed next to a Zimbabwean elementary school to do so.
- Caption: This was their message to the frightened grade schoolers:
- Alien: Technology is bad, ’kay?
- Woo: How, in Seeoahtlahmakaskay’s name, is that a message of hope??
- Sandra: Well…
- Sandra: If these hypocritical smooth brains managed to master interstellar space travel, we can too!
- Sandra: But thanks for saving our butt in Nuremberg in 1561. We owe you one!
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First
Hypocritical smooth brains?
WONDERFUL, LoL.
Also, we had to go back 6 centuries to find something we MIGHT be able to thank them for?
After all we are STILL not sure why the artist painted the sky like that or what the flashing lights meant.
Even if her ‘guess’ is right about it being a battle, how does she know these hypocrites were not the ‘bad guys’ in the matter?
I have no idea what this is referring too but I feel confident it’ll take me down a cryptozoology rabbit hole when I google it.
You’re assuming that all members of the race are super intelligent.
As a race WE have readily available vehicles that make use of chemical energy to transport people and goods far more than we could under our own power. I can drive a car but I certainly couldn’t build one.
This is the equivalent of some hippies in a VW Campervan showing up to an isolated tribe to tell them flowing water isn’t worth it.
@ Dave:
The1994 Ariel School incident is actually very interesting and even as a skeptic I’d thoroughly recommend reading the story. The second reference is about something an entire city witnessed in medieval Germany, there’s a Wikipedia article about it titled “1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg”
That last panel is more Indiana Jones than Close Encounters of the Third Kind; it’s a representation of the Spear of Destiny, the blade that supposedly pierced Christ’s side after the crucifixion. Originally housed in Nuremberg, the spear was later moved to Vienna to keep it away from Napoleon. In the wake of Waterloo, the Austrians refused to return itt. Later when the Third Reich annexed Austria, the Germans grabbed it back. After the war, it was returned to Austria again.
There is some evidence to suggest that we are on the average stupider than our ancestors. Stupid people find it easier to survive in civilization and the advantages to being smart dwindle. If I had to guess, I would say that the ancestors of these aliens made their Artificial Intelligences to REALLY LIKE aliens, the same way we like our pets. To be frank, most of our pets are a lot stupider than their ancestors but they are thriving because we like them.
@ Walter D Davis:
I absolutely believe that. Working in a factory requires little thought and natural selection now just favors whoever breeds the most with the well to do having less kids. Given enough time in a safe environment, organisms shrink and simplify.
We are on the cusp of gene editing, though, and I don’t think it’s been that severe.
After reading about the 1561 Nuremberg incident as well as a similar one in 1566 at Basel, Switzerland most observed characteristics can be explained by a solar event and not require alien involvement:
Both “incidents”
• Occurred at high latitudes (near polar region)
• Occurred near an equinox (Earth axis perpendicular to solar plane)
• Occur at dawn or dusk (maximum sunlight refraction)
• Exhibit a “blood red” sky (highly refracted sunlight)
• Fully involve changes to the appearance of the Sun itself (dichotomy of scale/location)
• Major artifacts appear symmetric around the Sun (similar to stellar lensing)
• Involve “globes” that exhibit turbulent behavior (turbulent refracting atmosphere)
• Last 1-2 hours and then just disappear (rare “just right” conditions disappear as Sun rises)
Refraction occurs when light passes though media of different densities: sharp boundaries such as water-air or continuous gradient such as in a gas. The amount of refraction varies with wavelength. The longer wavelengths (red) are refracted much more than the shorter wavelengths (blue). A red/orange sky color is caused by the refraction of light through the thin to thick atmosphere perpendicular to the direction of travel. Red light is refracted to ground level and the blue light passes overhead. We observe this every dawn and dusk when the Sun is low in the sky. At this time the light is passing through the thickest (i.e., most dense), atmosphere and longest path.
If something were to massively increase the density of the atmosphere over a huge area of the light path, that would greatly affect its refraction and would explain the sky turning red. If something were to massively affect the Earth’s magnetosphere it could very well cause wild, turbulent localized fluctuations in atmospheric density leading to strange optical phenomena.
So what could cause such a event? Possibly something similar to a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). A CME is “an eruption of magnetized plasma from a star’s corona into the solar wind”. These vary in size and potential damage and happen fairly frequently depending on size and speed. Fortunately the massive ones are rare and the Earth is a relatively tiny target. However, if the conditions are just right the damage can be considerable as happened in 1859. Unfortunately, such events leave no reliable archaeological record embedded in rocks, ice or trees.
Many characteristics of a CME are consistent with the observations at Nuremberg and Basel:
• The phenomena occurred over a period of hours – similar to CME timelines
• The CME particles follow the Earth’s magnetic field to the polar regions – northern Europe
• The strong CME magnetic field would interact with the Earth’s – probably very turbulently
• It was a light show only – no sound – similar to auroras
• A massive influx of charged particles into the atmosphere with turbulent magnetic field could cause wild density variations
• Dark globes are just circular areas absent of light – possibly caused by extreme refraction
At this time, we are only becoming aware of and measuring the frequency and size of solar events. The causes, mechanisms, and even if we have observed all possible types, is still unknown.
Perhaps the most compelling reason for attributing a natural cause to these events is the absurdity of the thought that two different groups of aliens, advanced enough to invent inexpensive interstellar transportation, would come to Earth to battle for an hour or so, and then just leave.
1561 Celestial Phenomenon over Nuremberg
1566 Celestial Phenomenon over Basel
Carrington Event (1859)
My buddy used to say that if aliens were smart enough to build spaceships that could visit Earth, but wanted to stay hidden…then they’re probably smart enough to turn off the blinking marker lights on their spaceships! LOL
Yeah … we are not seeing alien scientists and researchers, THOSE know how to stay hidden. What we see are hippies and teenagers.
It’s still a message of hope: if interstellar travel is so cheap hippies and teenagers can do it …
One more point: Based on articles on topic, the aliens were talking about environment and pollution, not technology. The message could’ve easily be not to STOP developing technology, just to do it more carefully and not destroy the nature in process.
… aaaand, it’s completely possible they were talking from their own experience. “Don’t do the same mistake we did.”
Clearly they have not been interacting with humans long. As good as attracting business to an inn by calling it ‘Don’t sleep here!’ as what they did. Now to keep people away from something make it dull and cause immediate genital damage on use.
I think Douglas Adam’s had it right in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The aliens people see are just rich kids buzzing us for fun!
This reminds me of a short story by Harry Turtledove, titled “The Road Not Taken”. Basically, it posits the theory that most races in the galaxy figured out an easy way to develop faster than light travel, and can blitz around the galaxy with ease. We didn’t… because we instead focused our technology towards our ever-increasing weaponry and explosives.
Net result a group of aliens come by earth, and sensing no warp-signature emanating from the planet, figure it’s an easy planet to raid for resources or maybe conquer and colonize. They make a big show of landing in force and come swaggering out and start to fire… muskets at us, preparing even a few canonshot in case they really need to scare us.
We mow them down with machine gun fire, and blow holes in their ships with our tanks. We blast them with missles from our aircraft. We nuke them. They die very quickly. We capture some ships, and can now create an interstellar empire than none can stand against.
Technology is bad, ‘kay.
I like the “teenager hypothesis”. The erratic and inconsistent behavior can be explained by the mere fact that we are not seeing the Aliens, but only teenagers that like to prank.
@ Ashton Blaze:
If Hippies in a Campervan can find the tribe, how come they haven’t been visited by ethnologists, missionaries, salesmen and exploiters of whatever plants and minerals are around?
I mean.
Look at humans.
We definitely have people using a device that bounces signals into space and back all for the purpose of saying the planet is flat and no one talks aboutnit because of some huge global conspiracy.
Some members of a species are just dumb.
@ Jarawara:
I remember that. Most amusing, I thought.
Cyndre wrote:
yep, and one of the ‘famous’ artists on site painted what he saw.
THAT painting made him even more famous and there have been questions about the lights in the sky since.
Zach wrote:
Actually, there is a lot of ‘scientific evidence’ showing humankind’s fertility level is dropping… fast.
Some nations/continents are already showing a NEGATIVE population growth.
Besides the problem of what is really “obvious about the universe”, humans have evolved only to quickly process the fraction of existence that was most vital to human survival for millions of years. This relatively narrow sum of perception that comes most naturally to us has been dubbed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as The Middle World.
“It is the world where objects are neither extremely large or extremely small, where things stand still or move slowly compared to the speed of light, and where the highly impossible can be safely treated as impossible.”
This, and other dangerous or otherwise faulty biases more or less hardwired into the human brain, are perhaps among the reasons aliens haven’t decided to visit us yet.
Well, to be honest, I think it’s better that we don’t know the true nature of the universe.People have driven themselves mad, and even been killed for trying to find the truth. That our society hasn’t been able to get an actual one-on-one with aliens from other planets, and the fact that they’ve limited their interactions with us, speaks volumes.
We aren’t ready. We may never be ready. Not 10 years from now. Not a 100 years from now, perhaps not even before the end of this planet’s life cycle.
We keep searching for answers because we have all these questions about everything. From our origins, to the origins of our planet, our universe, etc. Many answers, we can find within, while many of the answers are simply out of our reach. I think it’s admirable that we keep trying, because it’s that curiosity and resilience of our species that are some of our most incredible qualities as a species.
But there’s just no way to account for how our race would respond to the reveal. The actual truth of them coming down and saying. “Hi, we’re here. We know you have questions. Here are the answers.”
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel film has a great scene between Lois Lane & Perry White that discusses the ramifications of contact with someone from another world. Honestly, it makes a lot of sense.
If our species continues to fight wars over different ideologies & religions, who’s to say conflict wouldn’t erupt over this? Obviously, not everyone would be against attaining knowledge from other worlds, but many just wouldn’t want it or would simply reject it because it simply is uncomfortable. Heck, we have disagreements over the people we put into our governments for pete’s sake.
The whole thing’s a mess. Because we ourselves are a mess. I just hope our species can find a way forward. Before we destroy ourselves.
This is just one fella’s opinion, though.
Thanks for listening to my soapbox/ted talk.
Stay safe, sane & healthy out there everyone.
@ Darkness S1ayer:
It’s impossible to know the “true” nature of the universe anyway.
Alleged “laws” of science like Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian Relativity are more correctly referred to as “principles”. They are descriptors, not controllers, and they are used in the development of our technology and predictioning the outcome of natural phenomena because of their usefulness, not because they are “the truest of the true”. Models of the aspects of our universe are constantly being adjusted in light of new information, which is akin to enhancing or even completely replacing tools that do a better job at predicting things.
It’s actually impossible to understand anything without using a model.
To figure out how any phenomena in the world works, we have to gather information
about it to see how it behaves; we cannot know how anything works prior to experience or
experiment (that would assume knowledge about something unknown). Given that no one can
predict future experiences or the outcomes of future experiments, every model, no matter how
well it works now, will eventually have to be adjusted or even completely overhauled in light of
unforeseen experiences and/or experiments which contradict the model (hence, observing a black
swan when, prior to that experience, all swans were white according to the model of swans). An
understanding cannot encompass that which has not yet been observed or experienced with a
given phenomenon, so that information must inevitably be lost in the understanding; therefore,
every understanding of anything in the universe must inevitably be a model, so there is no way we will ever be able to determine the “true” nature of the universe.
Lets be clear: I respect the authors and I appreciate the quality of the work. That being said…
I am loosing interest for this comic. For some time now, the story stopped advancing, and it is just some gags with no character development. The most story we had were Under a Killer Balloon and the Divine Comedy, which were just dreams or forgotten by the characters.
@ Jarawara:
Another story in Analog came even closer.
Alien teen borrows the family saucer to take his girlfriend for a jaunt. A little nookie out of sight of their parents and some laughs at the primitives on a backwards planet.
A Terran experiment interferes with their spacedrive and brings them down. Contact with the locals is strictly forbidden so they take off their clothes (those they haven’t taken off already) and are prepared to try to blend in. (NO fun being stranded but better than what the Galactic Authorities would do to them if they were found out.)
When the Terrans turn off their apparatus, the saucer works again and the teens get the hell out of there. But the incident has given the Earth scientists a hint as to how the saucers work and they are following up those leads as the story ends.
They probably just rented that thing or borrowed it from their parents.
Oh, and I think I know the one on he left.
Yeah, it was a very interesting read.
Okay what most people seem to confuse is that a UFO is not necessarily or even likely a craft guided by intelligence. For all we know it’s just a phenomenon of weather, turbulence, light or magnetic fields. It’s Unidentified! If we knew there were aliens in them then they would be Identified. People assume UFO=Alien but that isn’t the case. for all we know they are drones sent back in time from our future or ghosts of quantum particle interactions. WE DON’T KNOW!
Valkeiper2020 wrote:
thats though because of how society has develop, unprotected sex between female and male equals kids (see where issue is)
Thank you for being at least on person who understands the true nature of scienece and the the universe. Gives me hope.
@ Ghyslain:
Bye!
@ Valkeiper2020:
They currently think it was a phenomena called ‘sundogs’
Valkeiper2020 wrote:
But is that population decline due to reduced fertility, or to deliberate choice not to have children? (Whether forced as in the ROC, or voluntary as in working women deciding they’ve better things to do than have and raise kids)
@ Wagstaff:
But people can and do predict future experiences – some even are correct.
Everyone can predict into the very near future – that’s how we catch balls, avoid oncoming trucks, and generally navigate our world. No (conscious) model involved – in baseball and cricket the batter has started the swing that will intercept the ball before the conscious brain is aware the ball has started its flight.
@ Skulker:
Rather interesting hypothesis, but I suspect your idea could cause a blood red sky for a different reason. The particles entering the Earth’s atmosphere are going to cause one heck of a light show in the form of an aurora borealis.
Normally we’re used to seeing aurora as green, because the particles from the sun hit the upper atmosphere, which is mostly oxygen, which releases a green glow upon impact. However, high velocity particles, such as those released in a CME, would hit the lower atmosphere, hitter more nitrogen and resulting in a vibrant “blood” red.
In the event that we were to be directly hit by a particularly powerful CME, you could potentially cover the upper latitudes in blood red aurora. If you were to cover the entire sky with these aurora, you could potentially make it appear as if the entire sky had turned blood red, maybe? This would probably be terrifying in the middle ages…
@ OldBrit:
It’s the PRC, not the ROC.
For God’s sake, know the difference.
Speaking of the PRC, Novil, what are your thoughts on the situation in Myanmar? And please address it in the comic somehow.
@ OldBrit:
The point is that a model is only scientific if it is falsifiable. That means it must be possible to prove it wrong with an observation.
As great as any model can be for predicting the outcome of any event, they cannot be right 100% of the time.
@ Wagstaff:
My point was that your axiom ” no one can predict future experiences” is false.
Oh wow hey those aliens look like jiren of universe 12 you better be careful his race is verys trong it took all of our powers combined to defeat him.
@ Skulker:
RE: the 1561 Nuremberg incident as well as a similar one in 1566 at Basel, Switzerland.
The events were only reported in Europe? Seems to be a little “special pleading” there;
especially as there were no electrical effects reported as there were during the 1859 event.