Contact?

The Drake equation is not actually an equation. It’s a checklist. Other suns have planets, check, water is the exact opposite of rare, check, there are earth-size planets, check, and we’re getting closer and closer to it seeming like there is other intelligent life out there.
Anyway, for the past week or so there’s been a buzz about alien signals having been received and I, for one, think we should go ahead and give it the benefit of the doubt and get this all checked out. It’s a win-win. If the Canadians are correct, we’ll have discovered alien life! Wow! That’s awesome. If it can’t be proved, we’ll keep honing the process and focusing on those planets -all 234 of them – until we find out something, and add to our scientific knowledge and capabilities. If it can be disproved, well, that’s pretty impressive, too, and something we deserve to know. If there are 234 earth-like planets out there WITHOUT intelliegent civilizations, we can begin to colonize the galaxy.
What we’re talking about here is a new study from E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, two astronomers at Laval University in Canada. Their study, titled “Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars,” found signals coming from 234 out of the 2.5 million stars they analyzed – a tin percentage, to be sure, but all of those 234 stars are similar in size and luminosity to our sun.
The signals are pulses of light, regularly spaced. So, even if it is a signal from aliens, we will have no way of knowing what they’re saying. But, we’ll know the3y are saying ‘We are here!
And think about this: 234 planets. If they are intelligent signals, and 234 planets are sending the same one, that is like a federation of planets. That implies the Star Trek universe is out there and just waiting for us. That’s pretty amazing.