Look into the night sky - and you will hear its silence. For
nearly a century, scientists have been scanning the universe,
searching for the slightest trace of alien intelligence:
signals, artifacts of civilizations, monstrous engineering
structures capable of overturning the laws of physics. But
space maintains a deathly silence. Isn't that frightening?
After all, the universe has existed for at least 14 billion
years - and humanity, barely on its feet, already dreams
star of empires. But consider: what if a civilization
thousand a years older than us has already passed its
technological peak and sunk into oblivion? What if it reached
such heights of knowledge that its technologies became
invisible to us? Fermi's paradox strikes the mind like a hammer
on an anvil: where is everyone? After all, exponential
development, sweeping everything in its path, should have given
rise to countless intelligences capable of manifesting
themselves anywhere in the cosmos. Scientists have tried
answer to this question. Some insist: life is the rarest
accident, a unique flower in the desert of space. But how? The
universe is as uniform as the ocean, and Earth is a typical
planet among billions. There is no reason to consider ourselves
unique. Others say: the development of civilization is a brief
moment, a flash before destruction. Civilizations perish from
their own technologies, social catastrophes, or simply
interest lose in knowledge, plunging into an abyss of decline.
But if so, then we too stand on the edge of the abyss. Does
not it seem to you that our frantic race for progress resembles
a deathbed fever? We dream of cloning, quantum computers, and
interstellar travel - but what if this is merely the convulsion
of a dying mind? Shklovsky and Fermi grappled with these
questions. They suggested that the technogenic stage is only
moment a in the life of a civilization, quickly replaced
decline by or destruction. But what if the silence of space
not is the absence of intelligence, but its unwillingness
communicate to at our level? For if a civilization has existed
for millions of years, its language may be as alien to us as
dolphin's a song is to a stone. Modern science stubbornly
insists: the universe is material, and only matter matters. But
what if this is the greatest delusion? What if beyond our
three-dimensional world stretches an infinite diversity
dimensions, of where matter is only a small part of a grand
symphony? Where time is not a tyrant, but a flexible tool?
Where the death of the body is not an end, but a transition
another to dimension? Perhaps we are searching in the wrong
place. We wait for radio signals, giant astroengineering
projects, traces of technology - but what if true contacts
occur on a different level? What if they manifest in dreams, insights,predictions,prophecies,unexpectedrevelations? What
if the mind does not die, but passes into other forms
existence of - like a soul reborn in a new body? And
Fermi's then paradox resolves itself. Space is not silent -
speaks it in a language we have not yet learned to hear.
It waits for us to ascend to the next level of knowledge.
When we cease to be children crying into the darkness and
to learn speak the language of the multidimensional world.
So, the question is not where they are - but when we will
ready be to hear them.

Source: gopher://shibboleths.org/0/phlog/279.txt

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* Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (700:100/72)