It has been said, not least by senior people at Google, that the company dreams of the day when we have Google search implanted in our brains.
Some, mainly human beings, chuckled at the prospect. Perhaps they should stop chuckling.
It must be very difficult to stay interested when you're running the world's largest small ad company, so the appearance of a couple of alien-related doodles suggest that Google's management has finally spaced out.
The latest doodle, which appeared Tuesday, reveals a similar spacecraft to the one that supposedly commemorated the Japanese video game Zero Wing. However, this one seems to be flying over crop circles.
(Credit:
Google.com)
To accompany this mystery--or perhaps the selling of the majority shareholders to the rulers of another planet--Google offered these coordinates on its Twitter page: 51.327629, -0.5616088.
The worldly wise have suggested that these coordinates point to a town called Horsell in Surrey, England.
This is the location where the first aliens floated to earth in H.G. Wells' 19th century masterwork--and, for all I know, the Jeff Wayne concept album of the 1970s--called "The War of the Worlds."
It would have been Wells' 143rd birthday September 21.
However, I think they are fooling everyone. After all, crop circles are clearly the creations of alien beings who are merely toying with our farms, the very elemental organizations that prop up our ailing, stomach-stuffing society. And National Geographic is reporting that many new crop circles have appeared overnight.
Aliens are saying to us: "We can take you any time you like."
And, in an attempt to show just how far they can take their dominance, there is every reason to suspect that otherearthly beings have already implanted their own thought-processes into the brains of Google's leaders. Hence, the declarations about brain-implanted search.
We will soon discover that 'google' is, indeed, the Planet Bunga's word for "We own you, dummies."
And we will all be subject to the Bungans rather esoteric way of thought and deed.
I know some, especially those who hug singularity to their bosoms, cannot wait for the day.
In its quest to fight Facebook for every last social networking digit and dollar, Bebo is thinking big. Very big.
The social networking site has got together with the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of Science to organize for 500 messages to be beamed to a planet orbiting the star Gliese 581c.
The project's title is A Message From Earth.
Apparently the planet in question is the nearest one to earth that might have water. Which means it might have life. And, well, Bebo would be a great name for a planet, wouldn't it?
Should this all sound just the slightest bit funny to you, please pinch your mirth.
For the third partner in this very valuable scientific project is RDF Digital, a company belonging to RDF Media, the producers of, amongst other scientific programming, Wife Swap, a show that highlighted the minutiae of distant, yet intimate, interaction in a very incisive way.
Bebo is asking its members and other assorted celebrities and politicians to create messages or images that somehow "consider the planet from a fresh perspective."
The best 500, as chosen by Bebots, will be beamed by a Ukrainian radio telescope. Beaming time is estimated at four and a half hours and will occur on October 9.
Look, this could be one of the most important human events of the last five thousand years. And I am really concerned that the organizers might not have thought this through.
(Credit:
CC Ryan Inc)
If I was the resident of a land 20 light years from our own little Haedes, why would I want to read messages from some far-off orb, messages that appear to be entirely self-centered?
There are millions and millions of people trying to secure personal favors of one kind or another on Bebo. Have these Bebots learned nothing about human interaction? Can't the producers of Wife Swap give them a little knowing nudge?
If you are trying to attract someone else's attention, especially if they are 20 light years away, you do not talk about yourself.
You might explain something about yourself in passing, but you focus on the other person, the other being, the alien object of your interest.
So wouldn't it be a little wiser for the 500 messages to say something along these lines?:
1. We know you're probably smarter than us, so please could you give us a few hints? We're so amazingly dumb down here. We're incredibly self-centered too, by the way.
2. In fact, would you be prepared to come down here for a while and, you know, do a lecture tour or something?
3. Here's some of the things we're really, really no good at: Relationships, work/life balance, helping each other, conserving energy, protecting our nasal passages, staying sober, making first-rate reality TV. Any guidance?
4. Do you guys have shrinks? If so, how's that working for you?
5. Do you guys take most of your clothes off before you jump into your water, just like we do? Do your nipples get hard when you get out?
Surely if we beam up questions such as these we might actually get some answers. And that's what social networking is all about- people communicating across space, time and purposes, exchanging information for the development of the common intelligence and communal happiness.
It's true that we might not get our answers for another 42 years (The messages are due to arrive some time in 2029.)
On the other hand, it might be less as the Planet To Be Named Bebo will surely have more sophisticated messaging equipment than an all too human lump of metal in the Ukraine.
There are people who think human beings are smart. (Mostly, they are second-rate CEOs and they are thinking of themselves.)
And there are those of us, and I include astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell amongst our august number, who can attest than humans are, in psychological and technological terms, worms.
Dr. Mitchell, who was possessed of the gumption to set foot on Apollo 14 after the disaster of the previous mission, had the even greater gumption to reveal the truth about alien life to Kerrang Radio this week.
If you have not heard of Kerrang Radio, it is, in essence, a rock music station based in England's second city, a city that most people say they have never visited but have driven through, a suspicious fact in itself. That city is called Birmingham.
Dr. Mitchell's presence on the airwaves of Birmigham's rock station was akin to humans landing on the moon. In jet-propelled, fuel-efficient chariots.
But he was swift to announce that presence by announcing that aliens are "little people who look strange to us."
The terrible, or perhaps great, news for techies is that Dr. Mitchell also revealed that our technology, and I believe he was including both Google and Facebook in this, is "not nearly as sophisticated" as that of aliens.
Allegedly, this is a Birmingham department store.
(Credit: Rudolf Schuba)One assumes that these beings from foreign worlds have solved the problem of monetizing social networks and that they have wafer-thin laptops with built-in optical drives. Perhaps those laptops even run without batteries.
He added that the relief for all of us stuck here on this round, water-dominated wasteland is that aliens are generally a peaceable bunch, not the sort to invade foreign lands, mutilate the inhabitants and take advantage of their natural resources. Like Dan Rather, Kim Kardashian and Starbucks.
Strangely, Dr. Mitchell also claimed that governments over the last 60 years had covered up the aliens' visitations and their obvious technological superiority.
But not before he himself was "privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real".
Now, look, I am just as skeptical as the next pulsating being. Perhaps more.
There have been more times than I can remember that I considered certain people I came into contact with were, in fact, from a planet that time, God and the census had forgotten many centuries previously.
But Dr. Mitchell twisted my recollection into something more disturbing than some of the folks who work in my local supermarket:
"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes, we have been visited," he told Nick Margerrison, the Kerrang presenter.
Could it have been that strange man with the bulging forehead who tried to teach me algebra? Could it have been that peculiar woman with disproportionate features who fell asleep at the dinner table on our first date, as if her batteries had run out?
For me, it would be depressing if aliens had small bodies and large eyes, as they seem to in so many movies, cartoons and video games.
Yet Dr. Mitchell confirmed this to be the case. They really are like that. (But with iPods that never break down and don't need headphones.)
Of course there will be those who will dismiss Dr. Mitchell as a fantasist.
But this is the sixth man ever to have set foot on the moon.
Kerrang's producer, a man the station refers to only as 'Alex', immediately contacted NASA for its reaction.
He received a swift reply: "Dear Alex, NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe."
Alright, now. For one, the swiftness of the reply suggests panic in the ranks. And the declaration that NASA does not track UFOs- doesn't that sound very, very convenient and non-committal to you?
Could it be that UFOs have rarefied radar-avoidance technology? And could it be that they haven't visited more often because, well, they're not very impressed by us?
Yes, not even by Twitter.
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