On 30Jun1908 an explosion occurred in Tunguska, Siberia; the cause has been a mystery to this day, with the most common culprit being assumed to be a meteor. Because of the strength of the blast, antimatter or a mini black hole have been speculated as being involved.
But now something even stranger is being reported; an Alien device has supposedly been discovered, along with a 50 kilogram meteor remnant. The discovery was made based on leads given from orbital photographs, and some surprisingly respected news sources (including The Economist and the Register) have been reporting it. There is a lack of follow-up details, however; either it is not true, or perhaps someone slapped a lid on it.
If anyone has more hard facts, please send them my way, or the links to them. While waiting for that data, here are the links I have so far… from the Turkish Press, Space Daily, Yahoo, and Interfax RU.
If it is true, I don’t find it very comforting. I was hoping for the first non-human contact to be in the form of a research probe entering our solar system, or a trading consortium stopping by to see what trinkets they could swap us in return for buying Jupiter as a refueling station on their way to more profitable markets. I don’t believe in the “Aliens will Save Us” outlook. I also don’t believe in the cold-war inspired attitude of “What isn’t Us is the Enemy” portrayed in so many Hollywood productions. I do believe that any intelligence we meet will have been shaped by basic evolutionary needs to survive first, communicate second, and work with us only when it is to their own advantage.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that if first contact was made by blasting a few hundred square kilometers of our planet into twisted wreckage, we may have a problem. Maybe that problem was a malfunctioning probe, or something that has drifted between the stars for millennium before chance caused it to impact with Earth. But it could have also been a ranging shot, or a small Berserker device doing what it could to destroy as much life as possible with it’s limited resources.
Bottom line is, I need more info than this sparse report gives us.