The Century Times

Since times immemorial, humanity has always been curious to know the unknown. It has always endeavoured to undertake the seemingly impossible and invincibly challenging tasks merely to satiate its ever-curious desire to uncover the secrets of its existence, universe, super-natural powers and the likes. …And has been successful in finding at least a few answers to some of the eternal questions previously thought unanswerable!

But a mere thought of possibilities of existence of life at some other planet gives butterflies in our stomach switching our minds into a world of fantasies with vivid imaginations of Alien creatures, their advanced technologies (justified by the never-ending rumours of sighting UFOs!) and a possibility of a friendly communication with them. But the prospect that life did once exist, still exists and could be sustained in the future on our neighbouring planet Mars has taken a huge step forward with the confirmation by NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander showing “perfect evidence” of water ice on planet Mars.

Recently the discovery of a planet with near perfect conditions for harbouring life named Gliese 581c has created so much excitement among us earthlings that despite its being some 119 trillion miles away (astronomically closest such planet to Earth), people here are going all out to establish communication with their possible counterparts there! Infact a popular social networking website called Bebo has made arrangements to beam a digital capsule into the outer space directed towards the newly found planet Gliese 581c for a 120 trillion mile journey through space in the hope that it will be received by the Aliens present there.

Interestingly enough, the digital content scheduled to be beamed on 8^th October, 2008 by Bebo will contain messages created by visitors of its website in the form of photos, videos, drawings and text. About 1000 visitors have already submitted their messages for beaming them to habitants of Gliese 581c. Most of these vouch for Aliens’ help to save our dying planet Earth from Global Warming, Natural Disasters, etc., while others tell them about ourselves, our achievements and extend a warm handshake for friendship. Its really interesting to note what we humans want to communicate with aliens.

A similar earlier effort to send a message into outer space was made way back in 1974, when a binary message was beamed from Arceibo Observatory – still the largest radio telescope in the world, towards the globular star cluster M13. Although this attempt at extra-terrestrial communication was mostly ceremonial, a reply to it was received in 2001 in the form of crop-circles in the home town of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute). Though its deciphered to be a perfect reply to our 1974 message, its authenticity is debatable as it appeared in just 27 years whereas M13 is located over 25,000 light years away. This means a reply from there will take at least 50,000 years.

Whatever might reality be, but the latest effort by Bebo website is kindling some hope out of nowhere. And probably this is first time that business world is trying to take some commercial mileage of the natural human instinct of peeping into the unknown. But what’s the harm if it helps humanity to take another leap in the process! Lets not only be optimistic but over-optimistic. What else are we here for?

Update@17th September, 2008 :

Its now over 7,000 entries at Bebo in contrast to less than 1000 at the time of writing this article.

Its so pessimistic of people and the media to predict the end of the life for the now ongoing critical experiment to search the ever elusive particle matter Higgs boson at the biggest ever man made particle-accelerator laboratory viz. Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) located some 300 feet under the Franco-Swiss border. Actually, majority of people can’t accept any change . People protested when our planet was declared spherical in shape, they were against the journey undertaken by Columbus to prove this concept, they couldn’t absorb the man’s landing at Moon, the Earth revolving around Sun etc. etc.

For those who argue with the proverb: “Curiousity killed the cat”, I’ll only say that   “Satisfaction brought it back”.

[This Article was originally written by me for the editorial section of a quarterly magazine - Aryavata Anusandhan’s August-October,2008 issue and is being reproduced here due to readers’ favourable feedbacks]