After futile decades of listening for any signs of a civilisation beyond Earth, SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – is considering broadcasting our own message to the stars.

New Scientist reports that a meeting will be held in Texas in June to discuss if, and how, and in what form, such an attempt at communication should be made.

There is opposition. Our oldest stories tell us that it’s not always wise to let the gods notice you, which is what’s on the mind of SF author David Brin. He resigned from a SETI panel because he felt there wasn’t enough discussion of the potential repercussions from such a broadcast. He says: “I dislike seeing my children’s destiny being gambled with by a couple of dozen arrogant people who cling to one image of the alien”

Underwater cities. Space stations. City-sized ships.

The stuff of science fiction is just day-to-day business for Jacque Fresco, a futurist who’s come across my radar a few times in the past. He’s a designer and an inventor with a view on where we’re going and what we need to change to survive.

His latest work is The Venus Project – a vision of how to integrate the best of science and technology into a comprehensive plan for a new society based on both human and environmental concerns.

Click on the link above and you’ll see some absolutely breathtaking art that wouldn’t look out of place on an SF book cover. You can find out more about The Venus Project here:

“Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.”

About time, too.

They can perform quite complex tasks effectively. Unlike Hoon and Hewitt.

Courtesy of Warren Ellis, the first item relating to the previous blog post, herewith known as “the pattern”.

For your consideration: the Daily Telegraph is reporting a British policeman had a close encounter of the third kind at a crop circle near the standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire. His description of the figures he observed – more than six feet tall with blonde hair – is of a recurring type which UFO watchers have christened “Nordics”.

The police officer said: “They ran faster than any man I have ever seen. I’m no slouch but they were moving so fast. I looked away for a second and when I looked back they were gone.

”I then got scared. The noise was still around but I got an uneasy feeling and headed for the car. For the rest of the day I had a pounding headache I couldn’t shift.”

So: crop circles, aliens and standing stones – that ticks three boxes all at once. More to come…

If you haven’t heard of the 2012 meme gathering pace around the world, you will soon, thanks to a new movie by Roland Emmerich. According to various sources, December 21 2012 is supposed to be either a) the end of the world as a result of a collision with a comet or asteroid/a collision with a rogue, unidentified planet/a geomagnetic reversal/a black hole/some as-yet-unidentified source or b) the end of the world as we know it, caused by a shift in human consciousness, or perhaps, a spiritual awakening leading to a long foretold golden age.

Part of this belief is based on the Mayan Long Count calendar, which, according to some academics, comes to an end on December 21 (or 23) 2012. An End, with a capital E. Typically of the academic world, there is no firm agreement on this, with some saying the calendar actually ends 4.134105 × 10 to the 28th years in the future. Which is what is commonly known as “wiggle room”.

But it’s not just the Mayans. A similar prediction lies in the myths of the Hopi Native Americans, in the I Ching, some say in a code hidden in the Bible, and in the writings of the philosopher Terence McKenna, who created a formula which predicted a singularity of infinite complexity on December 21 2012, when everything and anything imaginable will occur simultaneously. Which seems to happen in my office on a regular basis.

All New Age Nonsense, some say. Well…it doesn’t matter. Much to the annoyance of my arch-rationalist friends, things which don’t exist can often have a greater effect on the world than things that do. If enough people believe we are approaching a time of “spiritual awakening” or “consciousness change”, they will make that happen. Altering patterns of behaviour. Becoming, say, more environmentally-minded. More socially aware, or politically aware. Then, 2012 becomes a focal point for changing the world. Putting it right.

On the other hand, maybe all these predictions are right.

For that reason, I’m going to be documenting here anything and everything which might relate to this. Strange events, odd coincidences, political and environmental acts, UFO sightings, religious phenomena, scientific advances and anything else which might take my interest. Who knows – a pattern might appear – or not? And as anyone who has read my books knows, I’m very interested in hidden patterns.

I’m interested to hear of any links, sightings, bizarre occurrences – personal or global, acts of activism, and transcendence, which may or may not fit into this. You can sign up for my forum and leave a message there, or DM me through that site.

I think we can have some fun with this.

Courtesy of Warren Ellis:

This is the creepiest thing I’ve read recently. David Carradine claiming he’s being haunted by a ghost in a closet. Shortly before he died…in a closet. A J-horror flick in the making…

From Princeton University:

“Beyond its revolutionary technological applications and scientific impact, the evidence of an active role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality holds profound implications for our view of ourselves, our relationships to others, and to the cosmos in which we exist. These, in turn, must inevitably impact our values, our priorities, our sense of responsibility, and our style of life. Our ability to acquire, or to generate tangible, measureable information independent of distance or time challenges the foundation of any reductionistic brain-based model of consciousness that may be invoked. The lack of notable correlations in the data with standard learning curves or other recognizable cognitive patterns, combined with the repeatable and distinct gender-related differences, suggest that these abilities may stem from a more fundamental source than heretofore suspected. Certainly, there is little doubt that integration of these changes in our understanding of ourselves can lead to a substantially superior human ethic, wherein the long-estranged siblings of science and spirit, of analysis and aesthetics, of intellect and intuition, and of many other subjective and objective aspects of human experience can be productively reunited.”

You know I’ve spent the last nine years writing about this stuff in Age of Misrule, The Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent, right?

And then Dan Brown goes and writes about it in The Lost Symbol and gets all the attention. Bastard.

It’s interesting and inspiring research and like Brown says in his book, has the potential to instigate a paradigm shift in scientific thinking.

One very speculative and futuristic possibility is that of using gene therapy to equip humans to see ranges of light invisible to them at present, such as ultraviolet or infrared light. Some birds and reptiles can sense UV light, for example, and some fish can sense wavelengths approaching those in the infrared.

I want some.

ANCIENT Egyptian temples were aligned so precisely with astronomical events that people could set their political, economic and religious calendars by them. So finds a study of 650 temples, some dating back to 3000 BC.

I find Egypt and its history endlessly fascinating. Don’t know how many books I’ve read on the topic, including a load about secrets encoded in the symbols and the landscape. But the fact that it’s still giving up those secrets is a source of great joy.

People prize what they don’t understand at least as much as what they do.

Read page 3 for a mad Puritan worldview you probably thought died out 200 years ago, and page 4 for the nuts.

We’re going to be getting a lot more 2012 apocalypse meanderings in the weeks and months to come…

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.

They had the Loch Ness Monster and a crashed alien spaceship too.

A giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic and known as “Predator X” had a bite that would make T-Rex look feeble, scientists said Monday.

I’m a sucker for stories like this.

Of course, we all did know this, right?

(I didn’t make this, btw: the video on the progression of information technology was researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman. Google them to find out more of their work.)

The brain is a strange and wonderful thing, and we know relatively little about it.

How to hack your brain.

And I should point out that the Incredible Shrinking Pain aligns very neatly with some Eastern spiritual teachings about how the mind can control the body’s responses.

“The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “

Something on the edge of the universe pulling us inexorably toward it? Possible proof of the multiverse? And National Geographic wrap it up in a page…

A major study by medical experts at UK and US hospitals is trying to shed some light – of the end of the tunnel variety – on near-death experiences.

Attempts to explain NDEs away as hallucinations have generaly failed because hallucinations are random and person-specific. NDEs follow a very established pattern – rising out of the body, travelling up a tunnel towards a bright light, a sense of tremendous well-being, whole-life review, meeting a figure of light and dead relatives and friends. Those who experience it are profoundly altered.

Others have suggested its the dying brain dealing with a lack of oxygen and a flood of endorphins, but other studies have shown the brain responds in a totally different way to those two things.

Friends I have in the medical profession are certainly very interested in this, and see it as a definite phenomenon that deserves this kind of detailed study.

Spent a few hours on Bank Holiday Monday (or just ‘Monday’ to the world beyond the UK) travelling around the Mendip Hills in Somerset, which is rich in items of interest for anyone with a taste for prehistory or the Roman occupation, or the myths and legends of Britain. The landscape around the hills is wild and evocative and pretty unspoiled, as long as you ignore any business with Camelot, Arthur or Avalon in the name (otherwise known as the Glastonbury Tourist Fleecing Industry).

Cheddar Gorge is filled with plenty of spectacular caves that have turned up some great finds. Gough Cave delivered us Britain’s oldest complete skeleton in 1903 – mitochondrial DNA tests show his descendents still live in the area 9,000 years later. And nearby Soldier’s Hole contained some of the oldest Neolithic tools, dating back about 40,000 years and possibly Neanderthal.

I would normally advise you pass by Wookey Hole, not far from the cathedral city of Wells, which is essentially a pretty grotesque tourist attraction aimed unapologetically at the lowest, almost subterranean, end of the taste spectrum, complete with plastic dinosaurs and King Kong, a ludicrously inflated entry fee (£15 for adults, a tenner for kids) and the tired, desperate air of a travelling Carny. But the caves deserve to be seen, and the guides will give you a fantastic amount of interesting information if you catch them after the tour (thank you, James).

The legend says the Wookey Hole caves were the home of a witch, of the old-fashioned ‘evil’ kind, who terrorised the locals until a Glastonbury monk made sure she got her come-uppance in good old wrath of God, consigned to hell kind. Not sure how much of this is Carny huckstering – a great deal, I imagine. More interesting is the fact that the caves were sacred to the Celts, who used them as burial chambers. It’s also a powerful symbolic magical and spiritual site as the location of one of the biggest springs in the region the birthing point for the underground River Axe. There’s a suggestion that the Celts used the system of caves for numerous ritual acts.

Get past all the showmanship and there’s still a lot of power there.

Just back from a few days in Paris where I’ve been doing research for a new project, and I was struck by how much better the French capital is than our own stinky, slow-moving London. Not so much in the cutting-edge abstracts of ideas – the two cities are pretty equal on that front – but in the basic, bricks and mortar structures. Paris feels like a capital city, grand and weighty with a rich, powerful history. Looking up the Champs Elysee to the Arc de Triomphe from the Place de la Concorde, you get a sense of awe that London never really evokes. It’s there throughout the city. The French have held on to their history well, but wtihout letting it get in the way of modernity and innovation.

The Pompidou Centre is head and shoulders above Tate Modern in my view. The design of the building matches form with function so much better, and the exhibitions just seem so much better curated.

And then there’s the Louvre. London has nothing like this. A temple to art and history that is as big as a village. With that great glass pyramid surrounded by those grand, ancient buildings, this is the point that shows up where the French are best at moving forward while holding on to the power of the past. The Louvre itself is just breath-taking in design and function. The big downside, as I’m sure others have mentioned, is that it’s a victim of its own success. So many people swarm through the warren of rooms that it’s impossible to appreciate the art and artefacts. Hot, sweaty, constant, blinding camera flashes… Seeing the Mona Lisa is like standing just before the stage at a gig, swept back and forth by the crowd and fighting to get close enough to get a glimpse. Dan Brown Tom Hanks and Ron Howard got to film here at night, and were allowed to wander through the rooms at will while making The Da Vinci Code movie. I envy them.

But still…good food, good wine and an abundance of surliness – what more could you want when you’re travelling?

1.2 billion years ago. Sorry. Bit late with this news.

I sometimes think scientists sit around all day reading pulp SF novels from the fifties while they’re looking for the next big thing to work on.

Plans for a doomsday ark on the moon.

Not saying it isn’t a good idea, but I’m still waiting for ray guns and Lensmen.