David Kipping

That's the blink of an eye.

And so it's not surprising at all that we would happen not to coexist with anyone else.

But that doesn't mean nobody else was ever here.

And if other civilizations come to that same conclusion and realization, maybe they scour the galaxy around them, don't find any evidence for intelligence, then they have two options.

They can either give up on communication and just say, well, it's never going to happen.

We may as well just worry about what's happening here on our own planet.

Or they could attempt communication, but communication through time.

And that's almost the most selfless act of communication because there's no hope of getting anything back.

It's a philanthropic gift almost to that other civilization that maybe might just be nothing more than a monument, which the pyramids essentially are, a monument of their existence, that these are the things they achieved, the things they believed in.

their language, their culture, or it could be maybe something more than that.

It could be sort of lessons from what they learned in their own history.

And so I've been thinking a lot recently about how would we send a message to other civilizations in the future?

Because that act of thinking seriously about the engineering of how you design it would inform us about what we should be looking for.

And also perhaps be our best chance, quite frankly, of ever making contact.

It might not be the contact we dream of, but it's still contact.

There would still be a record of our existence, as pitiful as it might be compared to a two-way communication.

Yeah.

It was almost like a humility of acceptance as well, of knowing that you have a terminal disease,

But your impact on the earth doesn't have to end with your death.

It could go on beyond with what you leave behind for others to discover with maybe the books you write or what you leave in the literature.