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Showing posts from September 20, 2015

Snowden says aliens could be trying to get in touch right now

Edward Snowden worries we're not hearing aliens' messages.  HBO/Screenshot by CNET We have many assumptions about extraterrestrials. We assume that, in some way, they'll understand how to communicate with us. We assume they may well be more advanced than us. We assume they have spaceships and weapons that can zap us into granular matter with just a twitch of their noses.  What if it's all one big misunderstanding? Edward Snowden, who used to be a contractor for the NSA before he became famous for leaking some of its practices, worries that we might currently be deaf to alien communication. He expressed this view during a fascinating chat with Neil DeGrasse Tyson  on his StarTalk podcast . This was courtesy of a robot-controlled video screen from his Moscow location -- a communication system that DeGrasse Tyson described as "an iPad on wheels." It was wide-ranging chat between two nerds. Sample from Snowden: He once read a metallurgy textbook. S...