Is there Intelligent Life on the Earth?

Definition of Intelligence:

Classroom Exercise

Standard Definitions

Detecting Intelligence:

• Try This Scale - whole earth
• SF Bay
• Pacific Northwest
• Tillamook Bay
• Brazil Deforestation
• Sweden
• Battle of the Bulge
• French Riveria
• Merry Old England
• Cradle of Civilization?
• Where's this?
• Find Civilization
• Civilization Under Water

As the above imaging excercise should suggest, it is very difficult to actually detect the artificial activities of man on a large scale.

Although we may think we are a creative species, we do not manifest that creativity on large scales. Indeed, the largest man-made object which can be seen from space is a linear device known as the Great Wall of China.

As we will discuss later, "intelligent" life on the earth principally manifests itself via escaping electromagnetic radiation principally in the form of Television Broadcasting and Military Radar. An exquisite combination to symbolize the collective intelligence of the planet.

Let's imagine that we live on a distant planet that has intercepted some of this stray radiation (and that we don't work for the NSA ). We decide to send an imaging spacecraft to the Earth to learn more about the source that has produced the signal.

Hypothetical Journey to earth to find intelligent life.

As we approach earth our imaging system begins to see features on the landscape - in this case Lake Michigan As we get closer to the earth and our picture resolution improves we begin to notice deviations from the natural landscape. These deviations are clustered on the land surface and have a morphology that is independent of the continental land mass upon which they are located. They appear as grid patterns .

The grid patterns do not respect continental boundaries, they are everywhere the same. This is a large scale manifestation of the erasure of culturual differences through Technology. As we zoom in the grid pattern becomes more pronounced until we see collections of rectangular plots laid out. Further zooming delineates discrete imobile structures.

Rectangular immobile structures are seen embedded in the overall grid pattern. This pattern is consistent from one grid pattern to another. Whatever has built these structures has done so in a uniform manner. But still no motion has been detected until we reach a resolution scale of about 10 -meters. On that scale the grid resolves into ordered motion which is laid out in rigidly constructed patterns.

Check out this live view of San Francisco .

Other Live Cameras connected to the Web

Now we are done. We have a consistent picture of the nature of intelligence on the earth. It is uniform and rigid, always repeating the same pattern. Small, metallic mobile units function within the larger foundation if well-defined grid. But have we missed anything.

We descend closer and reach a resolution limit of 1-meter. We notice a large rectangular object (okay a bus) become immobile and a bunch of stuff pours out and moves in random and chaotic patterns. We conclude that the intelligent life on the earth must really do something about these parasites!

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The Electronic Universe Project

e-mail: nuts@moo.uoregon.edu