Communication with other Earthlings... Put the "Top Men" on it!

Ok you maniacs... I just came off of 9 days of sitting night alert for the hospital helicopter.  Probably some lives were saved... I don't know... that weirdness happens in the back of the aircraft. If there is one thing all pilots must know, don't get involved in anything that happens behind the back of your seat. It gets weird back there.

So, I came home at 6 am this morning and reasonably decided to have some good morning whiskey and watch documentaries about whales.

It started me thinking... The US space program, the human genome mapping, the LHC...  There are some large awesome projects advancing human knowledge that have really made humanity better. Let us say we put some Apollo level commitment (money) into language/communication with other species.  It is pretty obvious that whales, coyotes, and some birds have for real languages.

These guys are starting the project...

Can you imagine if we could communicate reliably with other earthlings?

There are bowhead whales over 200 years old. There are trees that communicate chemically that are over 90,000 years old (roots only)... imagine we got our top intel nerds working on cracking coms from the oldest and possibly most experienced beings on earth!

Let's imagine we put the best code breakers and linguistics specialists on the case of talking to whales, dolphins... and maybe a few trees...  and we could learn from their perspective.

Whale dial up?

These whales are sending modem amounts of data... basically by sounding like a fax machine underwater.

There is a lot of untaped knowledge... wisdom maybe... if we can figure out how to communicate.  If we really are the TOP species on earth... we should be able to pull this off!  Plus, learning to communicate at a fluent level with other species might be make the Universe a little less lonely.

See the night sky again... before it is full of spaceships!

For just a few moments... I thought they were here!

So, a few nights ago, I was flying the hospital helicopter from Albuquerque to Shiprock, NM.  Just as we were passing a few miles East of Chaco Canyon, I looked to the west and saw what looked like a formation of about seventy spaceships coming over the horizon!

I even said over the intercom... "What the fuck is that!"  (a huge formation of spaceships was the implied part!)

ARTISTS CONCEPTION:

As you can see from the artist conception, the space ships were all in formation in a line coming out of the west!

Over the next few minutes, the lights seemed to move off down the horizon to the south.  They also looked like they weren't coming out of the west anymore but were just all lining up and going south.

The lights/space ships were only visible through Night Vision Goggles... looking with the naked eye, none on board could see anything thing.  

All 4 of us on board could see them through the NVG's though.  Two Paramedics, a Flight Nurse, and a pilot.  A pretty solid bunch to make a claim to the press about what we had seen!  (Which is where i figured this was going to go.)

To be honest, it felt a little like the scene in "Independence Day" when the giant spaceships all arrived and hovered over the cities...  Though not as ominous given that it wasn't a full on Hollywood special effect... but more ominous because there was no f-ing doubt that this was real!  

For a few brief moments... I considered the possibility that it was either aliens arriving.  Just as realistic could also be that the government was launching some swarm of crazy anti-gravity spacecraft.  What didn't seem plausible was that it was a formation of military aircraft.  The formation was too perfect of a line, and there is no way short of war that we could get that many aircraft all up at once at the same time.

It was awing!  Seeing something in the sky that weird and unbelievable!  And we weren't the only ones!

It was all over the news!

Though, unfortunately after a small amount of research...  it turns out that the explanation is much more mundane than aliens or antigravity starships...

It was SpaceX filling the sky with cheap communication satellites.  A sort of global internet from space.  Though the article mentions it, one of the first things I thought about after I learned what the lights really were, was that the night sky is about to never be the same again.

Just like most humans can barely see the stars where they live, soon even out in the middle of no-where... the sky is going to look like an interstate at night with spacecraft criss-crossing the stars and constellations for the rest of our lives.  

I recommend if you want to see a sky with minimal human fingerprints on it... go see it soon, as it will not last long.