From: Randy 

Phil Payne wrote:
>> You know, it may well be that from our POV we really are alone in the
>> universe, not that nobody else exists but that the distances are so great
>> that it would take longer than the life span of civilizations to ever
>> communicate.
>
>
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/189280302X/103-0108512-0179003?v=glance&n=28
3155
>
> Another spectacular read.
>
> Sagan made the point that the Earth is warmer than the Sun at several points
> in the spectrum, specifically around 1200kHz (middle America's medium wave
> transmitters) and at the methane resonance.
>
> It's a sobering thought, according to Sagan, that the main clues of life on
> Earth from the point of view of an approaching alien spacecraft are country
> music and cow farts.
>
> (And he has the math to back that up.)
>

Hard to believe it's been 11 years:

#: 361796 S6/The OS Wars
     03-Apr-95  02:38:46
Sb: #361490-NEC abandons OS/2?
Fm: Phil Payne 100012,1660
To: Randy Holcomb 76507,156

  > CO2 or methane? Newsweek said methane.

What's a termite?

I've heard of US-centric, but this is ridiculous.  True, the insect order
outweighs the mammalian order on this planet by an order of magnitude or
two.
  But termites make up such a miniscule fraction of the total - and don't
produce that much methane anyway.

Carl Sagan has observed that ungulates produce a lot of methane, and that the
Mid West of America is populated with very large medium wave transmitters.
Both result in very strong lines in the Earth's spectrum - in fact, at
1.4MHz
or so, the Earth is considerably hotter than the sun.

But, as Sagan says, it's a sobering thought that cow farts and country
& western music will be the first sign an approaching alien gets of
life on Earth.

  phil{at}sievers.com
  Vice Chair, UKCMG
  +44 385302803

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