Intricate mathematics if you wish. (A chicken egg is also VERY intricated once you start studying it, a professor got lots of surprises when he tried calculating the formulas of one simply spinning on itself.) But these are quite simple to draw, technically. The only challenge for human pedestrians being the scale.
Crop circles being "proof" of the existence of advanced extra-terrestrials is purely a matter of belief. Notice the twin parallel paths streaking the fields... AND the crop circles? Anybody could use those to make such images "without a trace", it's a simple prestidigitator's trick, hiding in plain sight. No crop circle so far had appeared in the middle of a PRISTINE FIELD devoid of tractor paths, even though a using a helicopter or balloon would make it possible. These are merely a challence of "figure construction", at heart. Plus, these drawings could very easily be more sophisticated mathematically, by using parabols and ellipses. Remember how you draw a perfect ellipse? A pen, a string, two tacks.
I've seen AND DRAWN more mathematically intricated stuff when I was a kid. Just takes a few cog wheels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph I made all the figures illustrating that article, and still have the toy today. :-) I've also done some calculations on the algebra involved in Spirograph. The comparative number of teeth between the two cogs determinates the number of apexes and the number of rotations needed to complete a full line. In fact, with a ratio of 1:2, you get curves very similar to an ellipse.
I like crop circles, they're pretty, they draw tourists which compensate the farmer for his crop loss, they're art. But I don't feel any need to wear my foil hat and go make a druidic mass in their middle.
I mean, think about it: some aliens would suddenly start making those hugely obvious signs, and not give us any other information? Would you cross the galactic void just to make sophisticated graffiti on another planet? Scratch that: if they have religious motivations, they actually might. I can imagine GWBush financing a journey to Mars only to make sure there's a mile-long crucifix in the red dust before there can be a crescent or a magen-David.
Many other elements do not add up in the extra-terrestrial hypothesis: - Why systematically vandalize human fields, and never leave any drawing in a more harmless place, like a desert? There are lots of them available, with plenty of free space. The Nazca natives thought of this milleniae ago. - Why only in some very specific countries? - Especially countries with such advanced monitoring technology, they could track a man on foot with their surveilance satellites? Something big enough to make these would slip unnoticed? Would YOU use a radar-stealthy, camera-invisible space craft to make such visible marks announcing your presence? - If I wanted to announce my presence, I would simply put my ship in an orbit around the moon, and wait for a NASA hailing radio message. Or a laser optical signal. Something simple. You don't make contact with an unknown intelligent species by multiplying riddles, you make it simple. When I approach a dog/cat, I start by showing myself, and then let it sniff my hand. - Also, a very efficient way of saying "we are extraterrestrials making these symbols" would be to make one of THEIR symbols next to one of OURS. Something in the spirit of the graphic message sent with Pioneer 10 & 11. In ANY intelligent species' point of view, these images in the fields are purely abstract. Too unclear. Too Fox Mulderish.
Not meaning to rant out of the blue. Just to comment on all that crop circle stuff in one go.
Firstly, I'd better say that I may be classed as biased because I'm a believer - but I also come from a scientific background and was originally a sceptic when it came to crop circles. I now edit http://www.cropcircleresearch.com which tries to focus on rational scientific research, especially as I have personally witnessed a number of anomalies first hand.
To answer Pascal, I agree that some of the geometries are quite simple. Indeed nature itself is quite simple. It's this elegance which can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Although PI is quite elegant and (relatively) easy to explain, it's proof is much more complex and of course we can never know the complete value for certain. Also, crop circles HAVE been discovered in pristine fields (organic farms without 'tram lines' in them) as well as in snow covered mountains and rice paddy fields (where one report described how 20,000 gallons of water had mysteriously vanished.
I agree that there's little in the way of conclusive evidence that they're made by aliens (the non man-made ones I mean - we know a lot of hoaxing now goes on), but there is definitely a statistical correlation between crop circle locations and UFO sightings - but of course the UFOs could be as inquisitive in the crop circles as we are....
Regarding the message sent by Pioneer, I wrote a lengthy paper on the crop circle allegedly sent in reply to that signal, which you can read at http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/articles/arecibo.html
I agree that it's a hugely complex, and interesting, subject though - and even more so if you keep an open mind and don't blindly believe the claims of hoaxers. ;-)
Pascal - I agree with your logic and thinking steps. Traveling to Red Square from New York only to etch your cell phone number on one the stones would be a bad decision in terms of ROI. Maybe the aliens are using a HUGE Spirograph made of Titanium. Ezekiel's Spirograph, perhaps.
I don't know where Pascal gets that alien thing. Or that aliens are entities who travel through time+space to visit us from a distant place.
Thanks for an interesting comment, Paul.
What a magnificent art form crop circles is! That we don't know who or what is creating them makes it all the more spectacular. I've always wanted to see one in real life.
"But the aliens theory is only one theory of many." What, don't tell me you believe that leprechauns, ifrits or kappas would go all the way to Gloucestershire just to dance a large-scale farandole?
"The large, complex ones would be insanely hard to make, even in daylight and taking much longer time than they took to appear." I have learnt never to underestimate the miracles that good training and teamwork can accomplish. Not to mention the help of a good moonlight. Ever seen the superhuman feats these chinese performers can do WITH A SMILE? Nobody's ever been caught, but some people have confessed doing crop circles, and proven their claims by doing some more in front of witnesses. Then of course there's the mimicking effect once the fad is launched. In fact, it'd be nice to see contests, similar to those for sand castles or ice sculptures. (Two other examples of near-unbelievably crafty man-made art, yet which nobody considers supernatural.)
"I'm a believer" (Paul dixit) Hey, that's no prob', yo. :-) I only have some difficulty chatting with fanatics. And anyway, it's a near-impossible task to find people who don't have some opinion about most matters. People who think, I mean. Of course, if you now edit http://www.cropcircleresearch.com, I'll grant you it is a valid criterium for being considered biased. Ever so slightly. ;-) Oh, the whole discussion wasn't about bias? My bad. Let's move on then, shall we?
I personally profess firm belief in the following rationality principle: "If it can be explained or reproduced by humans, it shouldn't be considered as supernatural". Works for miracles, werewolf murders, David Copperfield (a native Terran until proven otherwise) and even crop circles. Now, if you want to make a hobby of studying them, it's no more silly than postage stamps, postcards or old comic books. :-) BTW, I don't believe old Dave has magical powers, but I admire without hesitation his talent to "create magic" and amaze us. In fact, knowing that they ARE tricks, I appreciate them even better. I've read articles explaining the basic prestidigitation tricks and techniques. Well, when I see somebody do them, and I KNOW how he does it, and STILL can't begin to spot him doing it, I know the guy is good, and my respect goes to him. For instance, that paramedic at the last hospital I interned in. He was an amateur magician, did some tricks right in front of me, and left me in admiration for totally bluffing me at point blank range.
"Also, crop circles HAVE been discovered in pristine fields" AH! That's the least I'd expect, even though I've never seen any examples myself. But I'll remind you how the special effects were made in the very first Invisible Man B&W movie (a classic!): the actor walked normally in the snow, leaving prints, up to making the fallen body mark. Then he was removed from the otherwise pristine snow with the help of an off-screen crane. Finally, the scene was shot backwards, with a technician wielding a rake lowered on the crane's hook during each pause to erase the prints in reverse order. (Or maybe he walked in, erased one footprint of the actor and all of his own, and then the process was repeated.) I read how it was done years before seeing the movie, and had to admit it worked great on screen. Just to remind you that 50 years ago, people already knew how to make visually convincing marks in pristine areas. So "it can be explained". It's no counter-proof of course, just a rational counter-argument to supernatural speculations. Ockham's razor.
Have I told you about the "haunted concrete slab" affair in France a few years ago? It was an ordinary-looking area of concrete in front of a private house's garage in the suburbs, and one day it started cracking. And heating up something surprising, with no visible reason. When the owners wanted to remove it and install a brand new one, the worker with the jack-hammer received a powerful electric shock. I'll let you ponder for a little while what was going on, knowing that it was no human hoax or plot. Hypotheses welcome. Tune in later for the shocking truth revealed! :-)
"a statistical correlation between crop circle locations and UFO sightings" As their name says, we don't know what UFOs initially are, hence the name. Many are later identified. Optical effects, laser shows, various man-made crafts, light-up frisbees, fireworks... Around the Eighties, there was a huge wave of UFO sightings over Belgium, all amazingly matching in description: three blinding lights in a triangle pattern. It was later revealed that at that same time the USA tested their new stealthy F-117 planes over Belgium... because that country had the appreciated quality of lighting its highways at night, so the radar-invisible crafts didn't need to use active detection instruments to know their whereabouts on the map. The lights were the landing spotlights. As for why did the radars pick nothing at these moments... :-)
Mysteries are always possible, of course. But in the Middle-Ages, people kept seeing devils at just about every forest path twist and curve. In the 20th century, they keep seeing UFOs and aliens. Except in the regions of Earth where they still believe in magical creatures! [Our Srilanki cleaning lady never heard of any space creatures, but boy is she an expert on "guaranteed genuinely existing" spirits, like the yakking Yakça, the lewd Loo-Loo, the tag-along Tagalog, the two-headed serpent (maybe with a third head at the tip of its tail, I forget)...] I once read a captivating report explaining how the infra-sound waves caused by wind resonance in the vast corridors of ancient castles could cause weird visual phenomenons by directly affecting the human eyeballs. Same thing may happen from electromagnetic waves created by an earthquake which sometimes artificially induce a mild hallucinatory temporal epileptic seizure. Such witnesses will be of perfect good faith... but will have witnessed no lovecraftian evil manifestations!
So my own belief is to doubt anything that hasn't been established as hard facts... and then some! I loved how, in X-Files, they scenarised that this whole aliens thing was just a government cover-up to distract nosy people like Mulder from looking into the REAL dark secrets. And then next season they ruined the brilliance of the thing by making it that the aliens actually existed and WERE being concealed by the Govt. That series got on my nerves because it was almost never about mysteries, mostly about paranoid conspiracies, and a truth "out there", maybe, but impossible to ever know. Bah.
I like this example of X-Files, because it sums up the bottom line: who can you believe? Or believe to be tricking you? The openly-admitted hoaxers? Or the people whom we know lied to us about forced sterilization, letting "niggers" die from Syphilis, Saddam's Anthrax, and pretty much everything they thought of? Or those who believe a fornus-eating fornit inhabits their typewriter? Answer: hear everybody, trust no-one. Find your own answers, and even these you need to always keep doubting a little, out of caution.
That being said, I'm a big fan of crop circles. They're very cool. And, as I said, it's nice that their interest among the public makes it up for the farmer whose crop has been partly ruined. Now, MOO-ve over, I wanna see then too! Still, I seriously doubt they're made by the landing of space crafts. Otherwise, many would be identical in shape, unless it's a shape-shifting, shell-like apparatus of a nature we can barely comprehend... ;-)
Hey, Paul! The logo on your site is IDENTICAL to the image Eolake put on this post! Coincidence? I think not. Do tell us who's been visiting your dreams, Eolake. Maybe the Andalites are trying to warn us that it's almost too late to stop the Yeerks from Controllerizing us all.
Okay, I've read that Arecibo article now. Since I like playing the Devil's Advocate, here's my fierce shattering of your pretty crystal bubble/globe. Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride! ;-) "Please refrain from smoking and keep your seats in the upright position. Thank you for flying Air Ratic."
- There are problems with the original message. I read a reasoned critic of it "back in the days", and some of the things it tries to convey are far from perfectly rendered. Sometimes it comes close to a riddle, like a puzzle which you can olny put together because you already know what the final image will look like.
- Right to left, left to right... does it matter? Do we even know how aliens would draw two-dimensional grids by default, anyway? And why not a grid of 73x23? What would become of our brilliant picture THEN? What if they "expand" it from bottom to top? Many questions, many hazards... Also, using three prime numbers would've allowed for transmitting a volume image. A much more detailed, clear and efficient message could've been transmitted even back then. And by using bigger numbers, our representative image would at least have had a head. But enough capillotomy.
- Since this is all based on publicly known data (and heavily publicized, at that), what's to prove it couldn't just have been the doing of plain old Earthlings hungry for some fun? Anything "we know that they know", we too know, quod erat demonstrandum.
- Why such a complicated means of response? Why not a similar medium: a radio transmission, which would've had the great added merit of telling us both: that the "others" exist for sure, and in what direction of space to look for them? So far, to our knowledge, no crop-flattening space craft travels through space any faster (OR cheaper!!!!!) than a nice, three-minute radiowave transmission. Wouldn't YOU reply to a contact by a channel as similar as possible? Like using sign language to chat with native Americans? "Why make things simple when it is so simple to make them complicated?" - Shadok proverb
- This message of ours was emitted in 1974, that's 34 years ago. Since it's going at the speed of light, how in Hades could it have already been received at a target distance of 25,000 light-years from us??? Taking in account that the reply needed time to reach us back, and supposing some unknown miraculous sci-fi technology was involved, we need to czech in that direction if there is anything located between 17 and 34 light years from us. But I doubt it: to optimize the signal's transmission, that targeted galactic cluster was probably in a direction straight out of our galaxy, with the least possible number of interfering Milky Way stellar systems on the way...
- Assuming the "Greys" are already here on our planet... Both their survival and amazing stealth raise an incredible number of questions. Starting with "Why the fuck do they leave us to destroy ourselves (and perhaps them) through war and planetary messing?" If they're so goddamned superiorly intelligent, by now they should know that their going public would literally start a new irresistible worldwide religion (already going strong without any solid proofs), and that they would promptly be listened to. Instead, they play binary Tetris in corn fields? Must be some very alien thought processes they have...
- Not to mention the logistical difficulties of supporting and concealing 21.3 billion weird midgets on our pocket-sized world willage.
- But that Silicon-based triple DNA helix tops it all, really. If their bio-chemistry is so radically different from ours, they just cannot feed from our planet's biomass. Already -to quote but one random example- an avocado is highly toxic to dogs, cats, cattle, goats, rabbits, fish, birds, and plain lethal to horses. Same for many foods between species that share the same genetic code and origin of life. You intend to serve them Big Macs? Furthermore, there's absolutely no reason why their genetic code would take the form of helicoidal DNA, a structure stemming directly from the molecular composition and structure of Adenin, Guanin, Thymin, Cytosin and Uracil, linking through hydrogen bonds along a deoxyribose "rotating ladder". With the added element Silicon, the odds of that same form being their genetic molecules are lower than those of peace in the Middle-East. For instance, proteins with their aminoacid sequences carry a very similar type of information (basically, the genetic code once translated), but they have lots of other possible structures besides the SINGLE alpha helix. Assuming that the super-simplified shape of DNA would be obvious to extra-terrestrials was quite hasty from the Arecibo coders.
- "Some point in our own future - perhaps when the sun has become smaller": actually, the older our sun gets, the more it'll inflate, because its mass and therefore gravity field both keep decreasing (by emission of solar wind particles, and by the mass loss of all that emitted nuclear fusion energy). Ending, for our sun, in a sudden "red giant" burst that'll reach our orbit and sear the Earth entirely like a bunsen burner blowing on a moth. In about 4 billion years. Or 50 million, I forget. Need... recharge... batteries... need... RED BULL! (Aah, that's better! Up, up and away!)
- Oh, and please forgive me, but I can't resist another nasty slash: how can you know the SIZE of these beings? Ours was indicated by a unit witnin the message, the length of the carrier wave. (I'll assume that they will unserstand so much.) So, what's telling us theirs is not the size of a "pixel" in that field? That would imply some pretty gigantic "little greyish green men"...
- I read an article about a "CD-Rom crop circle", maybe you've got it on your site. It was a nifty piece of work, but so complex to do "by hand" that several mistakes slipped through, according to computer experts.
- "You cannot dispute the fact that people the world-over are communicating more because of their crop circle experiences". By constitutional right, sure I can! I'm positive there will be so few people connected to the internet reading MY here communication, that I'll be very fortunate if I get a single lukewarm flame. Yoo-hoo? Royal Air Force, are you up there in the Skies? Your momma makes crop circles when she sits at picnics! Come on, insult me, communicate. Whatever you do, don't just IGNORE me! (Pretty please?)
- "To create either within the constraints of a few hours of darkness is extremely impressive": well, if you gather 12 people, each would have to flatten 2x73 "pixels" to do his share once the grid is set. Far from impossible for a club of dedicated enthusiasts. Or a college prank. How far is this field from Princeton, again?
Okay, so I've had my fun. Sorry, didn't mean to suggest anybody's stupid, or anything. In reality, since these field art works feel like entertaining yet quite un-serious "mysterious messages", I just dealt with them in the same perceived tone: tongue-in-cheek comedy. Now, anybody implying I might be a Yeerk Controller bent on covering up the invasion-infestation, I'll animorph into an Antares Ogre and munch on your puny carcasses! Raaaarrrrr! [Calming down.] Harrumph! If there's one thing I can't stomach, is people not taking humour seriously.
To conclude more seriously: guys, that's some nice deductive work on a quality enigma, but beware of the tree hiding the forest. When you focus too much on solving the puzzle, you might forget to think about the whys (the whies?) of the puzzle itself. I'd rather demonstrate against racism and inflation and unemployment, than brandish banners in fron of the Pentagon demanding "the truth about the flying saucers that are being concealed from the public".
If one is to base upon the duration of those UFO phenomenons, any half-decently intelligent species wanting to make contact with us would have done so by now, with dozens of less convoluted means at their disposal. They would know the English language (at least that one) like their own, receive our innumerable radiowave transmissions from radio and TV, and know exactly how to send us a transmission of their own with complete safety, since we can't even fire at them on a lunar orbit without weeks or years of planning. That is, if they understandably want to be cautious when making wirst contact. So why draw in the crops? Like Kabel Yaache said.
BTW... a giant alien Spirograph? (Hopping with frantic excitement.) D-d-do you p-p-people REALIZE what this means? It means they have perforated spinning gears! It means... it means they too have invented the wheel!!! Such a fascinating revelation and scientific discovery, I think I'll... (swoon)
Ploof!
[Coming around] Oh, and, for the record? A simpler way to give those Reds the fingers would be to travel to West Berlin, go in clear sight of the Wall, and moon those stinkin' commies! Viva la libertad, amigos! Arriba Guevara! (Oopsie! My mom tells me the Che was a far-left activist. Ah, whatever. Mojo, baby, let's shag!)
BTW, Bert, I've read that many medieval church statues and stained glass windows bore details that only became accessible thanks to modern technology; in their days no worshipers would've ever noticed them. The likely conclusion was that the artists went the extra mile "just for the eyes of God". Talented graffiti is art, and it's cool. We even have some here in Beirut, lucky me! :-) I too would love to see a crop circle for real. They're cool regardless. Other cool stuff: Nature's art, ice castles, felines of all sorts, beautiful nude women...
If... if crop circles are man made, they are made using a laser beam.
The challenge with the circles, of course, is the scale. Such mathematical precision necessarily calls for some advanced tool to greatly simplify the process.
Furthermore, as the artist derives no benefit whatsoever from these projects, I can't imagine anyone continuing to do them, year after year, unless an easy and automated method has been discovered.
A laser would solve the mystery. It's the only way where one could program the shape at the comfort of one's home and then only visit the scene to "print" it out.
Using this method, even a low azimuth of the beaming location (say a hilltop) or the tilt of the ground would pose no difficulty as you could parameterize the algorithm and recalculate the shape as needed.
Or alternatively, one could execute the "burn" from the center of the figure. Say from the top of a tall, self-standing ladder, or something.
If this is not the solution, then it's the aliens.
As I've told you, some hoaxers proved they were the authors of several crop circles by making new ones in front of many witnesses. And the press.
All it took them was a lawn roller, some stakes and rope, and careful measuring and teamwork. The rest is basic (more or less) geometry. It's in no way different than drawing such figures on a paper sheet with a pen, ruler and compass. Only the larger scale represents something of a challenge and requires some beforehand training. Not everybody can juggle or ride a skateboard, either, but it's in no way supernatural! (Although... I once saw these chinese acrobats do their amazing act, and their costumes looked very much extra-terrestrial. I think the one with the extra pair of purple antennas was their group leader.)
The Nazca geoglyphs were also thought to have been made by aliens, lasers, and basically only possible for somebody capable of flight milleniae before the hot air balloon was invented. Turns out the Nazca natives were perfectly capable of doing by themselves these images destined to "their gods in the Skies" (christians could've used the same words, and yet nobody's bringing aliens to explain it). In fact, aerial photography has revealed that while the nazcans were very talented for their time, a few mistakes slipped by their attention. Quite excusable, since their geoglyphs dwarfed the most ambitious of modern crop circles.
Basically, there's nothing to prove that our modern-day field images are anything more than improvised artistic gardening sessions. Some have even been made for advertising purposes, now that anybody can view them with Google Earth. They paid the field owners, and made them without the help of any aliens OR lasers. Ockham's razor...
The Wikipedia article even has links to sites that will give you a complete crash course on circling your own crops. [Benny-Hill-speed escape from angry farmers not included, proced at your own risks.]
"All it took them was a lawn roller, some stakes and rope, and careful measuring and teamwork."
That's the thing, when you look closer, that's not at all everything to it. Like I said, sometimes there are complex weaved patterns at the bottom. And normally the stalks are not just flattened, they are somehow bent in a way that doesn't kill them, they keep growing.
- Many plants can survive being stomped and will keep growing, under favorable conditions. Lawns are originally a selection of the more robust wild herbs, after all. Remember the pressure principle of the nail bed? One single stalk could probably never resist the plank treatment. Hundreds of closely planted stalks can. The force each of them receives is very decreased. I've seen once a cabaret act where a woman got herself suspended solely by her hair. Human hair IS that strong... if properly prepared, so that all the hairs equally share and bear the weight. She did have a very high hairline though, because such "games" aren't harmless to the roots on the long term. Already, a customary tight ponytail is very unadvised.
- Zen sand artists also routinely create some very complex patterns, purely by hand or with simple tools. Got any close-up photos of these braided stalks to show us? Anything palpable in the likeness of your arbosculpture post? I love to be convinced, but only with solid stuff, not mere wild rumors from unknown alien buffs. Some of whom might even be wearing foil hats.
- I'm going to be mean and return you your own Ben Hecht quote of the day: you can't trust every sensationalist bit of detail some "crop researcher" mentioned. You need to czech your sources carefully, tovaritch. You, I'd trust, if you tell me you inquired yourself on a crop circle and present your findings. Same for TTL. Paul I'll trust as well a priori, simply because he's part of the select few on this planet to think and talk rationally. (I care far less about someone's opinions than about how they express them. :-) I noticed how Paul was very careful about jumping to any conclusions in his Arecibo Response article. That's a rare trait which I admire. But so far, it seems none of you have been firsthand witnesses. You're more than welcome to counter-disprove my wronginess.
I won't just run on the heels of any unknown writer on a sensationalist conspiracyonnist site. In this I'm a hopeless cause. There are too many would-be Mulder Agents who will see just what they expect to see: definite proof that "ooh, spooky! something inexplicable" is going on, no matter if all their "clues" allow only wild speculations, and if the conclusion that "it cannot be explained" applies only to their self-attributed detective skills. Someone once said: "People who say something is impossible mean in fact that THEY cannot do it". I've spent enough of my life listening to "deep believers" as the exclusive source for proof of the existence of God... and ergo the iron-clad veracity of the Bible and how they interpret it! Some even claiming that the Bible/Koran allowed them to know more about the Universe than any science reading. (Which makes me wonder how they ever could fail to invent the nuclear-powered laser computer in Y1K...) Taking the conclusion as the basis of a theorem guarantees the results. It doesn't, however, guarantee their reliability. Beware of the "scientific methods of already-believer" jibber-jabberers. And shun the frumious bandersnatch, for maybe there are no snarks.
The thing is, knowledge can be proven, but a proof of ignorance, in the vein of "I'm establishing that there is no explanation", is never a serious valid reasoning. At best, a temporary result in an ongoing search. A search for facts, not merely hoping that some remote day the Grey graffityist will finally show up on CNN and sign his vegetal fresco.
Don't declare that the "magnetic fields are going wild"before you check your compass. Maybe that's no alethiometer you've got in your hand.
You got that one wrong, buddy. Everybody knows that "Life is a circle". Therefore, I don't see any relevance with this whole matter of crop.. um... ah... er... circles? (Aw, DANG!)
[Goes to skulk in a remote corner.]
Mind you, I am not of the belief that extra-terrestrial life, and one evolved at the level of superior intelligence (well, at least at our level of "unintelligence") can't exist. I'm pretty sure it does, actually. I'm just disillusioned by the great lack of serious witnessed every time there's the tiniest hint of an Unidentified Flying Object sighting. The masses are way too fond of catchy beliefs, too collectively irrational. Same as the story of these "miracles" which happened in my former village a few years ago. Just a short-lived collective hysteria fad.
Crop circles are a fact. Their origin? At worst, a human hoax. At best, a pure hypothesis. Or the other way round. :-)
And I'd really love to grasp the logic behind the presumed contacts of extra-terrestrials with humans, by the thousands, yet none confirmed decently enough with clear hard elements. Do they want to go public, or to play über-mysterious riddles? What? Does not compute. Look at nearly ALL fiction about existing aliens. When they go and make contact, it's in a frank, soon worldwide official way. Or they keep it secret because of some ongoing enemy planetary conquest/destruction plot. But honestly, the intelligence of an ANT would be enough to realize that this planet is no prize. Not if we predictably ruin it in the short term. Even a humble insect flees any perceivable pollution.
My main argument against riding the "aliens are among us" bandwagon, is not that it's outlandish (that would rather appeal to me), but that it's unconvincing. They very probably exist. They're very probably not right here among us.
Otherwise, they would probably compliment us on the nice artistic quality of our field circles, Nazca figures, Great Wall of China, Stonehenge and Carnac megaliths, and other cool human accomplishments. (If the megaliths were of alien hi-tech making, the very least they would've done is make them of regular shape, no? Prehistoric tiny carved stones still have a regular shape after all this time, while menhirs are usually VERY crude. Even ancient Egyptians were very good at sculpting huge blocks of stone, without any lasers or force fields.)
P.S.: Big Mind... is that similar to Gannalech the Grand Intellect? Et tu, Mortimer?
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." -- Douglas Adams
Was your Quote of the Day trying to cleverly conclude the debate? :-)
Mathematicians noticed that when they divided the circle into ten equal sections, the lines represented the digits in pi. The first line moves along three sections, followed by a dot for the decimal point. The lines then move outwards, firstly by one section, then by four sections, followed by one section and so on until the final line measures four sections, completing the first ten digits of pi. ---------- ritu Wide Circles
It's seven? Then I guess the last digit of pi isn't the Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Only 1/6th of it... (Not bad, Eo and Chuck!)
As for the infinity "problem", it's not one. An infinite addition of numbers may very well have a finite result, it's one of the basic things you learn in number sequences. For instance, the infinite sum of [1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +... + 1/2^n], for n=0 to infinity, equals 2. More aptly, the limit of this series is 2 when n approaches infinity. Same for pi, in the end it's just some number between 3 and 4. You just have to make your crop circle with very very tiny planks when you get close to the end. (You'll know when you get there: like Eolake mentioned you'll notice a 7, and after it there's only Planck's limit. That's where it got its name from, because your crop-flattening plank can go no further.)
Spooky coincidence: last time I bought DVD movies, a few days ago, Bender's Big Score was among them! But I won't be viewing any extras, apparently it was a bare-bones bootleg version. But it's still great value for money, at $2 a disc. Cheaper than a cinema ticket.
Considering there are people making a living out of it, I can only conclude that at up to $35 or more for a single-disc edition DVD, the movie majors are being far too greedy. $20 for a two-disc edition of something I really want is my limit. Yesterday, I was at the mall with my mother, to pick some music CDs for a gift (an all-official store). Well, I couldn't even find a bargain bin, because they don't have one any more. They used to, and I bought from it. Morons. Greedy morons, who'd rather make a large benefit on an ever-shrinking sales volume, as the economic gap widens like the Great Rift African Valley.
P.S.: The two digits before the seven are twos. There was a hint about that in this very simple and cool approximation: 22/7 = pi You can check it out with your calculator. :-) This is why pi = 3.1415926535........227 The Universe is whispering something to us, right there. Ssssh, listen! I can hear it.
How deep a bleep would a slick bleepgeek geek if a bleepgeek could geek bleep in his meek sleep amidst cheap sheep? A whole holy Gawd slug fest, Batman!
And no, this time it's NOT some Danish tongue-twister! (Well, at least it's not Danish...)
27 comments:
Intricate mathematics if you wish. (A chicken egg is also VERY intricated once you start studying it, a professor got lots of surprises when he tried calculating the formulas of one simply spinning on itself.)
But these are quite simple to draw, technically. The only challenge for human pedestrians being the scale.
Crop circles being "proof" of the existence of advanced extra-terrestrials is purely a matter of belief. Notice the twin parallel paths streaking the fields... AND the crop circles? Anybody could use those to make such images "without a trace", it's a simple prestidigitator's trick, hiding in plain sight. No crop circle so far had appeared in the middle of a PRISTINE FIELD devoid of tractor paths, even though a using a helicopter or balloon would make it possible. These are merely a challence of "figure construction", at heart. Plus, these drawings could very easily be more sophisticated mathematically, by using parabols and ellipses. Remember how you draw a perfect ellipse? A pen, a string, two tacks.
I've seen AND DRAWN more mathematically intricated stuff when I was a kid. Just takes a few cog wheels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph
I made all the figures illustrating that article, and still have the toy today. :-)
I've also done some calculations on the algebra involved in Spirograph. The comparative number of teeth between the two cogs determinates the number of apexes and the number of rotations needed to complete a full line. In fact, with a ratio of 1:2, you get curves very similar to an ellipse.
I like crop circles, they're pretty, they draw tourists which compensate the farmer for his crop loss, they're art. But I don't feel any need to wear my foil hat and go make a druidic mass in their middle.
I mean, think about it: some aliens would suddenly start making those hugely obvious signs, and not give us any other information? Would you cross the galactic void just to make sophisticated graffiti on another planet?
Scratch that: if they have religious motivations, they actually might. I can imagine GWBush financing a journey to Mars only to make sure there's a mile-long crucifix in the red dust before there can be a crescent or a magen-David.
Many other elements do not add up in the extra-terrestrial hypothesis:
- Why systematically vandalize human fields, and never leave any drawing in a more harmless place, like a desert? There are lots of them available, with plenty of free space. The Nazca natives thought of this milleniae ago.
- Why only in some very specific countries?
- Especially countries with such advanced monitoring technology, they could track a man on foot with their surveilance satellites? Something big enough to make these would slip unnoticed? Would YOU use a radar-stealthy, camera-invisible space craft to make such visible marks announcing your presence?
- If I wanted to announce my presence, I would simply put my ship in an orbit around the moon, and wait for a NASA hailing radio message. Or a laser optical signal. Something simple. You don't make contact with an unknown intelligent species by multiplying riddles, you make it simple. When I approach a dog/cat, I start by showing myself, and then let it sniff my hand.
- Also, a very efficient way of saying "we are extraterrestrials making these symbols" would be to make one of THEIR symbols next to one of OURS. Something in the spirit of the graphic message sent with Pioneer 10 & 11. In ANY intelligent species' point of view, these images in the fields are purely abstract. Too unclear. Too Fox Mulderish.
Not meaning to rant out of the blue. Just to comment on all that crop circle stuff in one go.
Good points.
But the aliens theory is only one theory of many.
The large, complex ones would be insanely hard to make, even in daylight and taking much longer time than they took to appear.
Nobody has ever been caught making one, as far as I know.
There is also often very complex patterns of woven stalks at the bottom of the flattened parts.
Firstly, I'd better say that I may be classed as biased because I'm a believer - but I also come from a scientific background and was originally a sceptic when it came to crop circles. I now edit http://www.cropcircleresearch.com which tries to focus on rational scientific research, especially as I have personally witnessed a number of anomalies first hand.
To answer Pascal, I agree that some of the geometries are quite simple. Indeed nature itself is quite simple. It's this elegance which can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Although PI is quite elegant and (relatively) easy to explain, it's proof is much more complex and of course we can never know the complete value for certain. Also, crop circles HAVE been discovered in pristine fields (organic farms without 'tram lines' in them) as well as in snow covered mountains and rice paddy fields (where one report described how 20,000 gallons of water had mysteriously vanished.
I agree that there's little in the way of conclusive evidence that they're made by aliens (the non man-made ones I mean - we know a lot of hoaxing now goes on), but there is definitely a statistical correlation between crop circle locations and UFO sightings - but of course the UFOs could be as inquisitive in the crop circles as we are....
Regarding the message sent by Pioneer, I wrote a lengthy paper on the crop circle allegedly sent in reply to that signal, which you can read at http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/articles/arecibo.html
I agree that it's a hugely complex, and interesting, subject though - and even more so if you keep an open mind and don't blindly believe the claims of hoaxers. ;-)
Pascal - I agree with your logic and thinking steps. Traveling to Red Square from New York only to etch your cell phone number on one the stones would be a bad decision in terms of ROI. Maybe the aliens are using a HUGE Spirograph made of Titanium. Ezekiel's Spirograph, perhaps.
I don't know where Pascal gets that alien thing. Or that aliens are entities who travel through time+space to visit us from a distant place.
Thanks for an interesting comment, Paul.
What a magnificent art form crop circles is! That we don't know who or what is creating them makes it all the more spectacular. I've always wanted to see one in real life.
Have you ever seen someone spraying graffities, some of them located in impossible places? Aliens? No.
Some of them are real pieces of art.
TTL,
It's not from me, but from some crop circle buffs, like Paul for instance:
http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/articles/arecibo.html
"But the aliens theory is only one theory of many."
What, don't tell me you believe that leprechauns, ifrits or kappas would go all the way to Gloucestershire just to dance a large-scale farandole?
"The large, complex ones would be insanely hard to make, even in daylight and taking much longer time than they took to appear."
I have learnt never to underestimate the miracles that good training and teamwork can accomplish. Not to mention the help of a good moonlight. Ever seen the superhuman feats these chinese performers can do WITH A SMILE?
Nobody's ever been caught, but some people have confessed doing crop circles, and proven their claims by doing some more in front of witnesses. Then of course there's the mimicking effect once the fad is launched.
In fact, it'd be nice to see contests, similar to those for sand castles or ice sculptures. (Two other examples of near-unbelievably crafty man-made art, yet which nobody considers supernatural.)
"I'm a believer" (Paul dixit)
Hey, that's no prob', yo. :-)
I only have some difficulty chatting with fanatics.
And anyway, it's a near-impossible task to find people who don't have some opinion about most matters. People who think, I mean.
Of course, if you now edit http://www.cropcircleresearch.com, I'll grant you it is a valid criterium for being considered biased. Ever so slightly. ;-)
Oh, the whole discussion wasn't about bias? My bad. Let's move on then, shall we?
I personally profess firm belief in the following rationality principle: "If it can be explained or reproduced by humans, it shouldn't be considered as supernatural". Works for miracles, werewolf murders, David Copperfield (a native Terran until proven otherwise) and even crop circles. Now, if you want to make a hobby of studying them, it's no more silly than postage stamps, postcards or old comic books. :-)
BTW, I don't believe old Dave has magical powers, but I admire without hesitation his talent to "create magic" and amaze us. In fact, knowing that they ARE tricks, I appreciate them even better. I've read articles explaining the basic prestidigitation tricks and techniques. Well, when I see somebody do them, and I KNOW how he does it, and STILL can't begin to spot him doing it, I know the guy is good, and my respect goes to him. For instance, that paramedic at the last hospital I interned in. He was an amateur magician, did some tricks right in front of me, and left me in admiration for totally bluffing me at point blank range.
"Also, crop circles HAVE been discovered in pristine fields"
AH! That's the least I'd expect, even though I've never seen any examples myself.
But I'll remind you how the special effects were made in the very first Invisible Man B&W movie (a classic!): the actor walked normally in the snow, leaving prints, up to making the fallen body mark. Then he was removed from the otherwise pristine snow with the help of an off-screen crane. Finally, the scene was shot backwards, with a technician wielding a rake lowered on the crane's hook during each pause to erase the prints in reverse order. (Or maybe he walked in, erased one footprint of the actor and all of his own, and then the process was repeated.) I read how it was done years before seeing the movie, and had to admit it worked great on screen.
Just to remind you that 50 years ago, people already knew how to make visually convincing marks in pristine areas. So "it can be explained". It's no counter-proof of course, just a rational counter-argument to supernatural speculations. Ockham's razor.
Have I told you about the "haunted concrete slab" affair in France a few years ago? It was an ordinary-looking area of concrete in front of a private house's garage in the suburbs, and one day it started cracking. And heating up something surprising, with no visible reason. When the owners wanted to remove it and install a brand new one, the worker with the jack-hammer received a powerful electric shock.
I'll let you ponder for a little while what was going on, knowing that it was no human hoax or plot. Hypotheses welcome.
Tune in later for the shocking truth revealed! :-)
Speaking of simple-but-amazing geometries, check out this awesome, yet very fast-loading page:
http://www.tigercolor.com/color-lab/color-fantasy/color-fanatasy.htm
"a statistical correlation between crop circle locations and UFO sightings"
As their name says, we don't know what UFOs initially are, hence the name. Many are later identified. Optical effects, laser shows, various man-made crafts, light-up frisbees, fireworks...
Around the Eighties, there was a huge wave of UFO sightings over Belgium, all amazingly matching in description: three blinding lights in a triangle pattern. It was later revealed that at that same time the USA tested their new stealthy F-117 planes over Belgium... because that country had the appreciated quality of lighting its highways at night, so the radar-invisible crafts didn't need to use active detection instruments to know their whereabouts on the map. The lights were the landing spotlights. As for why did the radars pick nothing at these moments... :-)
Mysteries are always possible, of course. But in the Middle-Ages, people kept seeing devils at just about every forest path twist and curve. In the 20th century, they keep seeing UFOs and aliens. Except in the regions of Earth where they still believe in magical creatures!
[Our Srilanki cleaning lady never heard of any space creatures, but boy is she an expert on "guaranteed genuinely existing" spirits, like the yakking Yakça, the lewd Loo-Loo, the tag-along Tagalog, the two-headed serpent (maybe with a third head at the tip of its tail, I forget)...]
I once read a captivating report explaining how the infra-sound waves caused by wind resonance in the vast corridors of ancient castles could cause weird visual phenomenons by directly affecting the human eyeballs. Same thing may happen from electromagnetic waves created by an earthquake which sometimes artificially induce a mild hallucinatory temporal epileptic seizure. Such witnesses will be of perfect good faith... but will have witnessed no lovecraftian evil manifestations!
So my own belief is to doubt anything that hasn't been established as hard facts... and then some!
I loved how, in X-Files, they scenarised that this whole aliens thing was just a government cover-up to distract nosy people like Mulder from looking into the REAL dark secrets. And then next season they ruined the brilliance of the thing by making it that the aliens actually existed and WERE being concealed by the Govt.
That series got on my nerves because it was almost never about mysteries, mostly about paranoid conspiracies, and a truth "out there", maybe, but impossible to ever know. Bah.
I like this example of X-Files, because it sums up the bottom line: who can you believe? Or believe to be tricking you? The openly-admitted hoaxers? Or the people whom we know lied to us about forced sterilization, letting "niggers" die from Syphilis, Saddam's Anthrax, and pretty much everything they thought of? Or those who believe a fornus-eating fornit inhabits their typewriter?
Answer: hear everybody, trust no-one. Find your own answers, and even these you need to always keep doubting a little, out of caution.
That being said, I'm a big fan of crop circles. They're very cool. And, as I said, it's nice that their interest among the public makes it up for the farmer whose crop has been partly ruined. Now, MOO-ve over, I wanna see then too!
Still, I seriously doubt they're made by the landing of space crafts. Otherwise, many would be identical in shape, unless it's a shape-shifting, shell-like apparatus of a nature we can barely comprehend... ;-)
Hey, Paul! The logo on your site is IDENTICAL to the image Eolake put on this post! Coincidence? I think not.
Do tell us who's been visiting your dreams, Eolake. Maybe the Andalites are trying to warn us that it's almost too late to stop the Yeerks from Controllerizing us all.
Okay, I've read that Arecibo article now. Since I like playing the Devil's Advocate, here's my fierce shattering of your pretty crystal bubble/globe. Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride! ;-)
"Please refrain from smoking and keep your seats in the upright position. Thank you for flying Air Ratic."
- There are problems with the original message. I read a reasoned critic of it "back in the days", and some of the things it tries to convey are far from perfectly rendered. Sometimes it comes close to a riddle, like a puzzle which you can olny put together because you already know what the final image will look like.
- Right to left, left to right... does it matter? Do we even know how aliens would draw two-dimensional grids by default, anyway? And why not a grid of 73x23? What would become of our brilliant picture THEN? What if they "expand" it from bottom to top? Many questions, many hazards...
Also, using three prime numbers would've allowed for transmitting a volume image. A much more detailed, clear and efficient message could've been transmitted even back then. And by using bigger numbers, our representative image would at least have had a head. But enough capillotomy.
- Since this is all based on publicly known data (and heavily publicized, at that), what's to prove it couldn't just have been the doing of plain old Earthlings hungry for some fun? Anything "we know that they know", we too know, quod erat demonstrandum.
- Why such a complicated means of response? Why not a similar medium: a radio transmission, which would've had the great added merit of telling us both: that the "others" exist for sure, and in what direction of space to look for them? So far, to our knowledge, no crop-flattening space craft travels through space any faster (OR cheaper!!!!!) than a nice, three-minute radiowave transmission. Wouldn't YOU reply to a contact by a channel as similar as possible? Like using sign language to chat with native Americans?
"Why make things simple when it is so simple to make them complicated?" - Shadok proverb
- This message of ours was emitted in 1974, that's 34 years ago. Since it's going at the speed of light, how in Hades could it have already been received at a target distance of 25,000 light-years from us??? Taking in account that the reply needed time to reach us back, and supposing some unknown miraculous sci-fi technology was involved, we need to czech in that direction if there is anything located between 17 and 34 light years from us. But I doubt it: to optimize the signal's transmission, that targeted galactic cluster was probably in a direction straight out of our galaxy, with the least possible number of interfering Milky Way stellar systems on the way...
- Assuming the "Greys" are already here on our planet... Both their survival and amazing stealth raise an incredible number of questions. Starting with "Why the fuck do they leave us to destroy ourselves (and perhaps them) through war and planetary messing?" If they're so goddamned superiorly intelligent, by now they should know that their going public would literally start a new irresistible worldwide religion (already going strong without any solid proofs), and that they would promptly be listened to. Instead, they play binary Tetris in corn fields? Must be some very alien thought processes they have...
- Not to mention the logistical difficulties of supporting and concealing 21.3 billion weird midgets on our pocket-sized world willage.
- But that Silicon-based triple DNA helix tops it all, really. If their bio-chemistry is so radically different from ours, they just cannot feed from our planet's biomass. Already -to quote but one random example- an avocado is highly toxic to dogs, cats, cattle, goats, rabbits, fish, birds, and plain lethal to horses. Same for many foods between species that share the same genetic code and origin of life. You intend to serve them Big Macs? Furthermore, there's absolutely no reason why their genetic code would take the form of helicoidal DNA, a structure stemming directly from the molecular composition and structure of Adenin, Guanin, Thymin, Cytosin and Uracil, linking through hydrogen bonds along a deoxyribose "rotating ladder". With the added element Silicon, the odds of that same form being their genetic molecules are lower than those of peace in the Middle-East.
For instance, proteins with their aminoacid sequences carry a very similar type of information (basically, the genetic code once translated), but they have lots of other possible structures besides the SINGLE alpha helix. Assuming that the super-simplified shape of DNA would be obvious to extra-terrestrials was quite hasty from the Arecibo coders.
- "Some point in our own future - perhaps when the sun has become smaller": actually, the older our sun gets, the more it'll inflate, because its mass and therefore gravity field both keep decreasing (by emission of solar wind particles, and by the mass loss of all that emitted nuclear fusion energy). Ending, for our sun, in a sudden "red giant" burst that'll reach our orbit and sear the Earth entirely like a bunsen burner blowing on a moth. In about 4 billion years. Or 50 million, I forget. Need... recharge... batteries... need... RED BULL! (Aah, that's better! Up, up and away!)
- Oh, and please forgive me, but I can't resist another nasty slash: how can you know the SIZE of these beings? Ours was indicated by a unit witnin the message, the length of the carrier wave. (I'll assume that they will unserstand so much.) So, what's telling us theirs is not the size of a "pixel" in that field? That would imply some pretty gigantic "little greyish green men"...
- I read an article about a "CD-Rom crop circle", maybe you've got it on your site. It was a nifty piece of work, but so complex to do "by hand" that several mistakes slipped through, according to computer experts.
- "You cannot dispute the fact that people the world-over are communicating more because of their crop circle experiences". By constitutional right, sure I can! I'm positive there will be so few people connected to the internet reading MY here communication, that I'll be very fortunate if I get a single lukewarm flame. Yoo-hoo? Royal Air Force, are you up there in the Skies? Your momma makes crop circles when she sits at picnics! Come on, insult me, communicate. Whatever you do, don't just IGNORE me! (Pretty please?)
- "To create either within the constraints of a few hours of darkness is extremely impressive": well, if you gather 12 people, each would have to flatten 2x73 "pixels" to do his share once the grid is set. Far from impossible for a club of dedicated enthusiasts. Or a college prank. How far is this field from Princeton, again?
Okay, so I've had my fun. Sorry, didn't mean to suggest anybody's stupid, or anything. In reality, since these field art works feel like entertaining yet quite un-serious "mysterious messages", I just dealt with them in the same perceived tone: tongue-in-cheek comedy. Now, anybody implying I might be a Yeerk Controller bent on covering up the invasion-infestation, I'll animorph into an Antares Ogre and munch on your puny carcasses! Raaaarrrrr!
[Calming down.] Harrumph! If there's one thing I can't stomach, is people not taking humour seriously.
To conclude more seriously: guys, that's some nice deductive work on a quality enigma, but beware of the tree hiding the forest. When you focus too much on solving the puzzle, you might forget to think about the whys (the whies?) of the puzzle itself.
I'd rather demonstrate against racism and inflation and unemployment, than brandish banners in fron of the Pentagon demanding "the truth about the flying saucers that are being concealed from the public".
If one is to base upon the duration of those UFO phenomenons, any half-decently intelligent species wanting to make contact with us would have done so by now, with dozens of less convoluted means at their disposal. They would know the English language (at least that one) like their own, receive our innumerable radiowave transmissions from radio and TV, and know exactly how to send us a transmission of their own with complete safety, since we can't even fire at them on a lunar orbit without weeks or years of planning. That is, if they understandably want to be cautious when making wirst contact. So why draw in the crops?
Like Kabel Yaache said.
BTW... a giant alien Spirograph? (Hopping with frantic excitement.) D-d-do you p-p-people REALIZE what this means? It means they have perforated spinning gears! It means... it means they too have invented the wheel!!!
Such a fascinating revelation and scientific discovery, I think I'll... (swoon)
Ploof!
[Coming around] Oh, and, for the record? A simpler way to give those Reds the fingers would be to travel to West Berlin, go in clear sight of the Wall, and moon those stinkin' commies! Viva la libertad, amigos! Arriba Guevara! (Oopsie! My mom tells me the Che was a far-left activist. Ah, whatever. Mojo, baby, let's shag!)
BTW, Bert, I've read that many medieval church statues and stained glass windows bore details that only became accessible thanks to modern technology; in their days no worshipers would've ever noticed them. The likely conclusion was that the artists went the extra mile "just for the eyes of God".
Talented graffiti is art, and it's cool. We even have some here in Beirut, lucky me! :-)
I too would love to see a crop circle for real. They're cool regardless.
Other cool stuff: Nature's art, ice castles, felines of all sorts, beautiful nude women...
Link correction:
Les Shadoks
Damn, I remember the Shadoks from a single appearance on Danish TV when I was a small child!
Same for me, except in France.
Classics are eternal.
Here's my theory.
If... if crop circles are man made, they are made using a laser beam.
The challenge with the circles, of course, is the scale. Such mathematical precision necessarily calls for some advanced tool to greatly simplify the process.
Furthermore, as the artist derives no benefit whatsoever from these projects, I can't imagine anyone continuing to do them, year after year, unless an easy and automated method has been discovered.
A laser would solve the mystery. It's the only way where one could program the shape at the comfort of one's home and then only visit the scene to "print" it out.
Using this method, even a low azimuth of the beaming location (say a hilltop) or the tilt of the ground would pose no difficulty as you could parameterize the algorithm and recalculate the shape as needed.
Or alternatively, one could execute the "burn" from the center of the figure. Say from the top of a tall, self-standing ladder, or something.
If this is not the solution, then it's the aliens.
As I've told you, some hoaxers proved they were the authors of several crop circles by making new ones in front of many witnesses. And the press.
All it took them was a lawn roller, some stakes and rope, and careful measuring and teamwork. The rest is basic (more or less) geometry.
It's in no way different than drawing such figures on a paper sheet with a pen, ruler and compass. Only the larger scale represents something of a challenge and requires some beforehand training.
Not everybody can juggle or ride a skateboard, either, but it's in no way supernatural!
(Although... I once saw these chinese acrobats do their amazing act, and their costumes looked very much extra-terrestrial. I think the one with the extra pair of purple antennas was their group leader.)
The Nazca geoglyphs were also thought to have been made by aliens, lasers, and basically only possible for somebody capable of flight milleniae before the hot air balloon was invented.
Turns out the Nazca natives were perfectly capable of doing by themselves these images destined to "their gods in the Skies" (christians could've used the same words, and yet nobody's bringing aliens to explain it). In fact, aerial photography has revealed that while the nazcans were very talented for their time, a few mistakes slipped by their attention. Quite excusable, since their geoglyphs dwarfed the most ambitious of modern crop circles.
Basically, there's nothing to prove that our modern-day field images are anything more than improvised artistic gardening sessions. Some have even been made for advertising purposes, now that anybody can view them with Google Earth. They paid the field owners, and made them without the help of any aliens OR lasers. Ockham's razor...
The Wikipedia article even has links to sites that will give you a complete crash course on circling your own crops.
[Benny-Hill-speed escape from angry farmers not included, proced at your own risks.]
"All it took them was a lawn roller, some stakes and rope, and careful measuring and teamwork."
That's the thing, when you look closer, that's not at all everything to it. Like I said, sometimes there are complex weaved patterns at the bottom. And normally the stalks are not just flattened, they are somehow bent in a way that doesn't kill them, they keep growing.
Several remarks:
- Many plants can survive being stomped and will keep growing, under favorable conditions. Lawns are originally a selection of the more robust wild herbs, after all.
Remember the pressure principle of the nail bed? One single stalk could probably never resist the plank treatment. Hundreds of closely planted stalks can. The force each of them receives is very decreased.
I've seen once a cabaret act where a woman got herself suspended solely by her hair. Human hair IS that strong... if properly prepared, so that all the hairs equally share and bear the weight. She did have a very high hairline though, because such "games" aren't harmless to the roots on the long term. Already, a customary tight ponytail is very unadvised.
- Zen sand artists also routinely create some very complex patterns, purely by hand or with simple tools. Got any close-up photos of these braided stalks to show us? Anything palpable in the likeness of your arbosculpture post?
I love to be convinced, but only with solid stuff, not mere wild rumors from unknown alien buffs. Some of whom might even be wearing foil hats.
- I'm going to be mean and return you your own Ben Hecht quote of the day: you can't trust every sensationalist bit of detail some "crop researcher" mentioned. You need to czech your sources carefully, tovaritch.
You, I'd trust, if you tell me you inquired yourself on a crop circle and present your findings. Same for TTL. Paul I'll trust as well a priori, simply because he's part of the select few on this planet to think and talk rationally. (I care far less about someone's opinions than about how they express them. :-)
I noticed how Paul was very careful about jumping to any conclusions in his Arecibo Response article. That's a rare trait which I admire.
But so far, it seems none of you have been firsthand witnesses. You're more than welcome to counter-disprove my wronginess.
I won't just run on the heels of any unknown writer on a sensationalist conspiracyonnist site. In this I'm a hopeless cause. There are too many would-be Mulder Agents who will see just what they expect to see: definite proof that "ooh, spooky! something inexplicable" is going on, no matter if all their "clues" allow only wild speculations, and if the conclusion that "it cannot be explained" applies only to their self-attributed detective skills. Someone once said: "People who say something is impossible mean in fact that THEY cannot do it".
I've spent enough of my life listening to "deep believers" as the exclusive source for proof of the existence of God... and ergo the iron-clad veracity of the Bible and how they interpret it! Some even claiming that the Bible/Koran allowed them to know more about the Universe than any science reading. (Which makes me wonder how they ever could fail to invent the nuclear-powered laser computer in Y1K...)
Taking the conclusion as the basis of a theorem guarantees the results. It doesn't, however, guarantee their reliability. Beware of the "scientific methods of already-believer" jibber-jabberers. And shun the frumious bandersnatch, for maybe there are no snarks.
The thing is, knowledge can be proven, but a proof of ignorance, in the vein of "I'm establishing that there is no explanation", is never a serious valid reasoning. At best, a temporary result in an ongoing search. A search for facts, not merely hoping that some remote day the Grey graffityist will finally show up on CNN and sign his vegetal fresco.
Don't declare that the "magnetic fields are going wild"before you check your compass. Maybe that's no alethiometer you've got in your hand.
I think that since life is a dream, anything can happen.
And also because of that, nothing is very important.
I think the circles are made by the Big Mind, with energy. No aliens required.
You got that one wrong, buddy. Everybody knows that "Life is a circle". Therefore, I don't see any relevance with this whole matter of crop.. um... ah... er... circles?
(Aw, DANG!)
[Goes to skulk in a remote corner.]
Mind you, I am not of the belief that extra-terrestrial life, and one evolved at the level of superior intelligence (well, at least at our level of "unintelligence") can't exist. I'm pretty sure it does, actually.
I'm just disillusioned by the great lack of serious witnessed every time there's the tiniest hint of an Unidentified Flying Object sighting. The masses are way too fond of catchy beliefs, too collectively irrational. Same as the story of these "miracles" which happened in my former village a few years ago. Just a short-lived collective hysteria fad.
Crop circles are a fact. Their origin? At worst, a human hoax. At best, a pure hypothesis. Or the other way round. :-)
And I'd really love to grasp the logic behind the presumed contacts of extra-terrestrials with humans, by the thousands, yet none confirmed decently enough with clear hard elements. Do they want to go public, or to play über-mysterious riddles? What? Does not compute.
Look at nearly ALL fiction about existing aliens. When they go and make contact, it's in a frank, soon worldwide official way. Or they keep it secret because of some ongoing enemy planetary conquest/destruction plot. But honestly, the intelligence of an ANT would be enough to realize that this planet is no prize. Not if we predictably ruin it in the short term. Even a humble insect flees any perceivable pollution.
My main argument against riding the "aliens are among us" bandwagon, is not that it's outlandish (that would rather appeal to me), but that it's unconvincing. They very probably exist. They're very probably not right here among us.
Otherwise, they would probably compliment us on the nice artistic quality of our field circles, Nazca figures, Great Wall of China, Stonehenge and Carnac megaliths, and other cool human accomplishments.
(If the megaliths were of alien hi-tech making, the very least they would've done is make them of regular shape, no? Prehistoric tiny carved stones still have a regular shape after all this time, while menhirs are usually VERY crude. Even ancient Egyptians were very good at sculpting huge blocks of stone, without any lasers or force fields.)
P.S.: Big Mind... is that similar to Gannalech the Grand Intellect? Et tu, Mortimer?
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." -- Douglas Adams
Was your Quote of the Day trying to cleverly conclude the debate?
:-)
Mathematicians noticed that when they divided the circle into ten equal sections, the lines represented the digits in pi.
The first line moves along three sections, followed by a dot for the decimal point.
The lines then move outwards, firstly by one section, then by four sections, followed by one section and so on until the final line measures four sections, completing the first ten digits of pi.
----------
ritu
Wide Circles
The main problem I see in this fine reasoning, is that pi has an infinite number of digits.
And only Chuck Norris knows them all.
Say, I once saw the photo of a very special car in the italian city of Pisa. Its license number was:
PI 314 159
True story!
Well, we can't very well have an infinitely big crop circle, can we now? Imagine how upset the farmers would be.
I too know the last digit of Pi. It's seven.
See the extras on Benders Big Score for real number geekiness.
It's seven? Then I guess the last digit of pi isn't the Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Only 1/6th of it... (Not bad, Eo and Chuck!)
As for the infinity "problem", it's not one. An infinite addition of numbers may very well have a finite result, it's one of the basic things you learn in number sequences. For instance, the infinite sum of [1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +... + 1/2^n], for n=0 to infinity, equals 2. More aptly, the limit of this series is 2 when n approaches infinity. Same for pi, in the end it's just some number between 3 and 4.
You just have to make your crop circle with very very tiny planks when you get close to the end. (You'll know when you get there: like Eolake mentioned you'll notice a 7, and after it there's only Planck's limit. That's where it got its name from, because your crop-flattening plank can go no further.)
Spooky coincidence: last time I bought DVD movies, a few days ago, Bender's Big Score was among them! But I won't be viewing any extras, apparently it was a bare-bones bootleg version.
But it's still great value for money, at $2 a disc. Cheaper than a cinema ticket.
Considering there are people making a living out of it, I can only conclude that at up to $35 or more for a single-disc edition DVD, the movie majors are being far too greedy. $20 for a two-disc edition of something I really want is my limit. Yesterday, I was at the mall with my mother, to pick some music CDs for a gift (an all-official store). Well, I couldn't even find a bargain bin, because they don't have one any more. They used to, and I bought from it.
Morons. Greedy morons, who'd rather make a large benefit on an ever-shrinking sales volume, as the economic gap widens like the Great Rift African Valley.
P.S.: The two digits before the seven are twos. There was a hint about that in this very simple and cool approximation:
22/7 = pi
You can check it out with your calculator. :-)
This is why pi = 3.1415926535........227
The Universe is whispering something to us, right there. Ssssh, listen! I can hear it.
I'd come to a geek-out between you and Alex. Gawd, what a slug fest.
How deep a bleep would a slick bleepgeek geek if a bleepgeek could geek bleep in his meek sleep amidst cheap sheep? A whole holy Gawd slug fest, Batman!
And no, this time it's NOT some Danish tongue-twister! (Well, at least it's not Danish...)
Sounds kinky. What does it mean, Pascal?
Haven't got the faintest idea.
But it does sound kinky, doesn't it? Perhaps it's a Freudian® oil slick slip?
For you.
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