Reports emerged in the past few weeks revealing that in the late 1950's high level US military officials hatched and vigorously pushed a plan to explode an A-Bomb on the Moon. The reports struck me, and my guess is most of you, as quite bizarre. The apparent rational of the cumulative US military leadership at the time was that the free world had become uneasy about Soviet military capabilities after the successful launch of Sputnik. Something had to be done, military bigwigs felt, to dramatically demonstrate that US technology, especially rocket technology, was equal or superior to that of the USSR. A highly visible, dramatic A-Bomb blast was needed, the argument went, to calm potentially rampant fear of the Soviet Union. The effort to promote this plan went on behind the scenes for a good length of time, one to two years, at least.
Bizarre and insane, yes. But coming across the reports made me feel better about a proposal I sent a little over three years ago to Mark Gearan, then The Peace Corps Director. At the time the bridge to the new millennium and making Internet available to all, especially to school children through all grades, was being spoken of as a major objective. Computer technology and Internet development had reached a level which could allow a very different dramatic and positive demonstration of the power of a new, and basically, American technology in the service of peace. It was already theoretically possible for everyone on Earth to participate in a Communication with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (CETI) Project. The US had previously sent CETI messages into space. Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973, each carried a version of the same simple plaque (necessarily limited by severe space and weight constraints). Though the plaques cleverly encrypted a great amount of information, they were merely attached to the vehicle mainframe and looked remarkably like caveman drawings. Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, also each carried a version of the same message. Less constrained by space and weight limits, each Voyager carried a gold-coated phonograph record containing pictures, sounds, music, and greetings in 54 languages from Earth. In a few short years, however, weight and space constraints of previous CETI missions had been overcome from both sides. Rockets were more powerful and storage and communication equipment demanded less space and weight. A satellite could easily carry a simple Peace Message from each of the four billion people on Earth, lets say a one page, or less, Peace Message containing each person's hopes and fears about possible encounters with ETI's or posing questions to ETI's about the nature of their life and society. In practice, hundreds of millions could probably participate, the limitation being access to Internet. Such messages could be sent via Internet to a dedicated URL where a server would store the messages and allow them to be transferred to a satellite and launched into space. Such a project would, of course, be highly symbolic since the messages might take millions or billions of years to be received, or might never be received, but the effort, itself, would be the point. It would help bring focus to ultimate concerns, and certainly to concerns more propitious than those of the generals in the late 1950's who wanted to demonstrate the power of US technology in a quite different way.
Part of the original suggestion was that the Peace Corps would find the Clinton Administration (already focusing on the Bridge to the New Millennium and universal Internet access, and with a Vice President who invented Internet) and NASA (having played a significant role in extending our view of the universe through cooperative efforts producing results such as the Hubble Telescope revelations) to be quite willing partners in such a Peace Project. The Project would also serve to demonstrate the dramatic development of computer and Internet technology on Earth in a very short period.
Voyager was a step up from Pioneer, but to move from those early efforts to having technology allowing hundreds of millions, or billions of individuals around the Earth to each post their own Peace Message to potential ETI's is something we would not have believed could be possible only 10 years ago.
It was also suggested that a New Years Eve 2000 launch might add impact, that being the accepted beginning of the New Millennium. But since 2001 is technically the beginning of the New Millennium, maybe there is still a dramatic moment in the offing, as well.
I never received a reply to the proposal and thought maybe it was deemed silly. Having been apprised of aspects of "high level thinking" in the late 1950's, I now think better of the CETI Peace Message Project and also think it has a much better chance of a good reception at grass roots levels.
If you like the idea, the main route is to pass this on to friends. But it also wouldn't hurt to lobby some of the powers that be with hope they might be responsive. This can be done, for starters, by E-mailing some or our key employees in the hope that The Peace Corps, The White House, and NASA will get it together and provide a URL to implement such a Peace Project and bring it to fruition. Three of the four E-mail contacts are at web sites, as follows:
Go to site:
peacecorps.gov
>>Click on category Peace Corps Press Office/Public Affairs
>>(Fill out E-mail form addressing it to Mark L. Schneider, Peace Corps Director)
Go to site:
whitehouse.gov
>>(Then click on each of the following and fill out E-mail form for):
The President
The Vice President
The First Lady
Mrs. Gore
Send E-mail to:
comments@hq.nasa.gov
>>(Address it to Dan Goldin, Director, NASA)
Go to site:
georgewbush.com
>>(Fill out E-mail form addressing it to George and Laura Bush [since either they or
>>Al and Tipper Gore will be the next occupants of the White House])
Caveat Emptor: Some of the E-mail form access procedures these days are laborious. |
