Saturday, September 24, 2005

Trivia: In search of a cosmic Rosetta Stone

Alright, let's face it, apart from the tenuous connection provided by the Rosetta analogy, this has nothing to do with Egyptology, but it has been a poor week for trivia, so this will have to do. And anyway, I liked it:
"The images are vivid, capturing the essence of exploration. Archaeologists digging up the remains of long lost civilizations. Anthropologists encountering exotic cultures with strange languages. But do archaeologists and anthropologists have anything to teach the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), where encounters are at the distance of light-years, and a round-trip exchange could take millennia? Absolutely! was the resounding response at a conference held last year of the American Anthropological Association. One of the best-attended sessions of that meeting consisted of papers from leading scholars who pondered the daunting challenges of reconstructing alien civilizations . . . . many of the same scientists had gathered at the SETI Institute for a symposium fittingly called In Search of a Cosmic Rosetta Stone, a reference to the slab of basalt that provided the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs."
See the above URL at the space.com website for more.

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