the 8th

We need the freedom to fail a little more often...
... we need the freedom to make mistakes. Only then can we learn to succeed.
-Judsen Culbreth

I want to walk through life and not be dragged through it.
-Alanis Morrisette

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.
-Rodger von Oech

Preconcieved notions are the locks on the door to wisdom.
-Merry Brown

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn
to see the other and honor him for what he is.
-Herman Hesse

I believe in things greater than us that are unexplained. The mysteries of life are so profound; that is why this legend and other kinds of mythology exist. I feel it keeps us human.
-Pellington

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
-Mohandas Gandhi

Never doubt that a small group of thoughful, committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
-Margaret Mead (she's an anthropologist!!! I studied her!!!)

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon the how our children grow up today. There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing when we save our children, we save ourselves.
-Herman Hesse




It is curious how thoughts behave. They elude me in a crowd. Like spirits, they must be spoken to in silence before they will explain themselves.
-Helen Keller

People spend a lot of time looking for perfection-- the perfect child, the perfect self. They don't exist-- not in this life. But the difficulties we have are to help us grow. We need to embrace them rather than resist them. It's the process thats important.

- Ms. de Azevedo


and this... interesting subject and someone just told me there is a whole documentary on this subject, subject being after finding alien life in space may bring us to better reevaluate ourselves as living, moral beings. This is an experiemental letter to ETs on this subject.


______
TO: OCCUPANT (Please Forward if Necessary)
LIMITED-TIME OFFER-- SEE INSIDE FOR DETAILS

Dear Alpha,

I hope you won't mind if you I call you that, after Alpha Centauri, one of our regular-yellow-star neighbors. I could call you Zeta, after Zeta Reticuli, to cover the bases, but I like Alpha, Aleph, the beginning: This could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

First off, I know we're the new kid on the block. The Hubble might as well be the Humble for what it's shown us about were we fit in the big picture: a miniscule pin stuck into a map of infinity (You Are Here); a pale blue-green speck in a vertiginous, star-spackled Vast. It's been a corrective lens for human astigmatism.

Our astronomers say we're just one of hundreds of millions of habitable planets. And that 75 percent of the stars in our galaxy's temperate zone are older than out sun, meaning you could be our big brother ten millions years ahead in birth order (so much for sibling rivalry). I bet we remind you of yourselves back when you were young and full of mischief; didn't you once go around stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, extinguishing your fellow creates, soiling land, water and air like there's no tomorrow? (If you're reading this you had a tomorrow and I can't tell you how encouraging I find that.)

If we can nearly see you now, you've already spotted us. Maybe you've homed in our planet's most visible artificial landmark, the Great Wall of China, having no doubt there's belligerent -- I mean, *intelli*gent!-- life down here. Sort of: our really largest man made features are the clouds of smoke from burning rainforests, the bone white of dying corals reefs, the leaching tan of encroaching deserts--ultra large-scale public art installations whose theme, I suppose is our lack of love for each other, for ourselves, and for our fellow beings.

I try to imagine what kind of beings you are. Maybe you'd appear to us as superevolved lizards or cerebral fish; as the magenta-winged offspring of clever birds or the brainy descendants of great cats. Some of the creatures we're carelessly extinguishing might remind you of home probably doesn't give you much confidence about inviting us to dinner. (I'll assume you're too evolved to want us for dinner.)

On the off-chance you've snagged our Pioneer's golden tablet, you know what we look like. (Hint: We're the bipeds on the right, not that rectangle-thing in the middle.) I hope you enjoyed the Solomon Island agrams of our anatomy (we'll show you ours if you show us yours). But we forgot to put our best foot forward. The geniuses who put that parsec-traipsing pinata together left out the good stuff, like somthing called the Sermon on the Mount ("Do good to them that hate you" --how's that for a starter?) ; to say nothing of the Dhammapada, the Mishnah, the Mathnawi of Rumi, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, and lots more where those came from.

I could summarize by saying we get it: each of us a thread, woven by universal affinity, in the tapestry of the Great Whole. We could ace the written portion of the galactic entrance exam; it's the practicum we'd flunk. We can sense there comes a point when an intelligent species gets so smart it's too clever by half, and the only possible way through is the evolutionary bottleneck-- what I expect you did -- is just to pop the cork of universal love. Love each other, love the planet; love madly, with no fear, without restraint. our sci-fi writers always envision you with really big heads; but if you've made it any further than we have, you must have gigantic hearts. I like to imagine you can feel the invisible waves and fluxes flowing between creatures as directly as we feel each other's warmth and breath and pulse. ( Our nonverbal signals to each other are relatively crude-- even an octopus blushes more expressively, in more colors. Too often we're left guessing at each other's feelings, getting it all wrong.)

Speaking of feelings, as I write these words, I feel far away not just from your world, wherever it is, but from my own. It steals over all six billion of us from time to time; a moment we say silently to ourselves, how can we? how can we let each other suffer so; how trash our Garden; how can we not take care of everyone's children? We're going through a terribly awkward phase, that's for sure, and taking our own sweet time coming out of it. We're just figuring out how to talk to each other and, more importantly , how to listen. (That's what that great dish at Arecibo* really symbolizes -- a big human eardrum.)

Now we're all abuzz that mass communications have created some kind of planetary nervous system, an awakening bud of self-consciousness- the Global Brain. But you're probably awaiting a bigger development -- the Global Heart. Maybe you're already scanning the heavens with your intergalactic stethoscopes, listening for coherent heart murmurs among the pulsars; for what the Little Prince (was he one of your guys?) said was essential but invisible to the eye. If your instruments can detect that spectrum, then you've seen more than our great walls-- you've seen through the cracks to all our small kindnesses. You know us not as the Planet of the Super Clever Apes, but the Planet of the Angels in Training.

We are growing beyond our Big Blue Marble phase, when we first looked in the mirror and recognized an Us. Now we're ready for relationship: We're looking for an Other, someone to start an I-Thou relationship. At the same, we're realizing maybe there is no Other. We know that, strictly speaking, everything started out as a dot of quantum fuzz, expanding into a universe in a fraction of a second (1/10 to the 25th power, we figure). Way Back When , it was all stuck together, a single agglomerated substance of One. So if nonlocality is true-- if each mote that's been in contact with another stays so forever, then the stardust we are and you are and everything is remains in some state of unbreakable entanglement. Call it the Cosmic Mirror Neuron. Or as one of our great Earth poets, William Blake, put it: Thou canst not stir a flower without disturbing a star.

Not that we mean to (disturb you, that is, with all our flower-stirring). It's just that for so long, we've been the frog at the bottom of the well, thinking our little round patch of sky was the universe. Six hundred years ago, our religions were still telling us the Earth was the center of Creation; and now the Hubble vistas are out stained-glass windows.

We know you're out there, somewhere. But until we hear from you, the stars look lovely, bright and cold. A famous biologist -- a winner of our great Peace Prize, no less--- once looked through a telescope and pronounced "Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe." You'd probably have a good laugh over that one. Not just the alone part-- the Unfeeling part. The universe must be agog with feeling: How else could it have given birth to such deeply feeling progeny? This irresistible urge to reach out to you is a sign of our gregariousness; of our desire -- our profligacy--to make relatives. We're ready to dive into the cosmos heart-first.

We've seen the nurseries of light where suns are spawned in searing fire. We've trembled at the roiling black hole at the center of the Milky Way, gobbling up stars like TicTacs. We know that life's job is coherence, attraction; that entropy already has all the help it needs.

The point is, dear Alpha, dear cipher in the inky void: We'll make it through, just in the nick of time.

By the time this reaches you, millennia will have passed. But if we're still here to receive your reply, we'll be home free. Heck, if we manage to find a steady source of dilithium crystal, we may land on your doorstep to accept it in person -- all spruced up , hair slicked back, nice smile (not showing too many teeth), with a little gift for the Missus or the Mister or the Little Spores. We may even have a thing or two to teach you.

Maybe we already do. I've enclosed an attachment, the diamond words seers (and not incidentally, the newest findings of our scientists) translated into the universal harmonic language by some galactic goodwill ambassadors called the Beatles:

All you need is love. (You can trust me on this.)

Very Truly Yours,

A Friend

P.S. Please send a formula for neutralizing spent plutonium, the schematics for superluminal drive and a design for a cellophane free CD case? Thanks!

---Marc Ian Basarch