factfinder

If we are sitting here on this planet fighting among ourselves for lack of any better distraction, then perhaps,there are lots of planets all over the universe where intelligent beings are either boring themselves as we are, or are trying to establisgh contact with other intelligent beings on other planets … If we eliminate the frozen planets and planets sterilized by heat (this is not to imply that no life would be found outside the so-called habitable zone as there may be living things existing under the hardest physical conditions) , there are about ten thousand million planets in the galaxy for life … so let´s assume that the intelligent life is abundant and occurs on every planet. In this case the average distance from one intelligent community to the next is 10 light yrs, for comparison , the nearest star is about one light year away … However 10 light yrs is a very long distance - a radio signal would take 10 yrs to cover it , so communicating with someone as far as 10 light yrs away would not be like a telephone conversation …
The basis of speculations about intelligent life in space has always included the possibility that contact with life on our planet has already been made by some more highly evolved society from elsewhere in the universe … Let´s suppose that a technical civilization greatly in advance of the present one on Earth visits us every hundred thousand yrs or so to see if anything of interest is happening lately …
Now in earnest : The question to be posed is : Has the Earth in the past been visited by intelligent beings from the region of the star Sirius /the Dog Star ??? (see the book the Sirius Star )
The entire question is framed in terms of an African tribe named the Dogon who live in Mali (the former French Sudan ).The Dogon are in possession of the information concerning the Sirius Star System …(the information was possessed by the ancient Egyptians as well, the Dogons could have preserved ancien Egyptian mysteries in their culture ) ….
The Dogons preserve a tradition of what seems to have been an extraterrestrial contact. The intelligent beings of outer space landed in Africa,told specific informatuion to a West African tribe, then returned to space and left the rest of the world alone …
The French anthropologists in the middle of 19th cent. described the cosmological theories of the Dogons :“ The Dogons regard the star which revolves round Sirius and is actually named Digitaria, as the smallest and heaviest of all the stars … The star which goes round Sirius is the white dwarf Sirius B …
It was the smallest and the heaviest type of star then known as neutron stars and black holes were not much discussed and pulsars had not yet been discovered . So it is a most curious allusion from a supposedly primitive tribe !!! ( In Mali there are also large fields of very strange stones not coming from the Earth and in such quantities that the people are building houses of them … le Monde published photographs of them last year )
How men with no instruments at their disposal could know the movements and certain characteristics sof the star which is not scarcely visible but it is totally invisible ??? and was only discovered with the use of telescope …
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky , the reason of its brightness being that it is large (bigger than our sun) and close … Once an astronomer was looking hard at Sirius over a period of time and got furious because it wasn´t sitting still but it was wobbling … he had a difficult time understanding why but he finally concluded that an extremely heavy and massive star going around S. could make it wobble that way – the only trouble was that there wasn´t any large star going around S. Instead, there turned out to be a tiny little thing going around it every 50 yrs (the Dogons also knew this „50 yrs“ ) So S. came to be called S. A and the little thing S. B …