Starshell

Here’s my new tattoo by the phenomenal Karla Dagovitz.

It’s inspired by a Jon Lomberg illustration in Carl Sagan’s 1973 book The Cosmic Connection.

The gist of the concept is that we could be in the midst of intelligence that we can’t comprehend. The example given is what if the sound you hear when you hold a seashell up to your ear isn’t just blood rushing through your own head, but some connection to alien technology? It wasn’t meant literally, just as a mental exercise. I like to compare it to the concept of ants crawling on a telephone line. How could you explain that concept to an ant?

The significance of this tattoo to me is as a symbol of how much of the universe is still beyond our understanding and what’s waiting to be discovered. ¹

Here’s the relevant section from the book:

At this very moment the messages from another civilization may be wafting across space, driven by unimaginably advanced devices, there for us to detect them—if only we know how.

…

… perhaps the messages are already here, present in some everyday experience that we have not made the right mental effort to recognize. The power of such an advanced civilization is very great. Their messages may lie in quite familiar circumstances.

Consider, for example, seashells. Everyone knows the “sound of the sea” to be heard when putting a seashell to one’s ear. It is really the greatly amplified sound of our own blood rushing, we are told. But is this really true? Has this been studied? Has anyone attempted to decode the message being sounded by the seashell? I do not intend this example as literally true, but rather as an allegory. Somewhere on Earth there may be the equivalent of the seashell communications channel. The message from the stars may be here already. But where?