Where were you in 1991? In retrospect, it could have been a watershed year, a turning point in history and for a cosmic reason that few appreciate.
Although SETI continues to search for signals from advanced life elsewhere in the Universe, it is looking like there is almost zero chance it will be productive, so long as communication is dependent on radio waves and inverse square ... takes too much power, and gives away too much info. Then there is 1991 VG, hidden in plain view. There are better ways to snoop around the cosmos than radio. The "Bracewell probe" is an example of a technology that we could expect to be capable of one day. This concept was visually depicted by the "monolith" of 2001 A Space Odyssey. It is a self-powered compact AI . in the form of an autonomous probe built to last tens of thousands of years - for the express purpose of looking for remote civilizations but not giving away much else... powered by LENR no doubt. Unlike the film version, the real probe would prefer to stay in orbit near a subject planet, instead of landing square in ape-man territory. Surprisingly, there is a slight chance that one of these probes was witnessed nearby in 1991, and even earlier in 1975. Perhaps it said 'adios' in 1977, instead of "wow". if you catch my drift, and then disappeared as it corrected its orbit. This mysterious object could be something far more mundane than a probe, of course, but it will be returning in a few months, so maybe "ground control" will connect with it this time around. BTW - the apparent heliocentric orbit is impossibly close to earth's for it to be an asteroid. And its real name is "1991 VG" but we can call it. err. "Major Tom" (a "space oddity") in honor of several seventies memes. The various arguments about Major Tom's actual identity are found at the usual-suspects UFO sites. NASA is pretty sure it is the remnant of a failed Russian mission of some kind, in which case we should call it Major Tomsk... but no one doubts that it is an anomaly. http://holographicgalaxy.blogspot.com/2015/02/famous-alien-spaceship-1991-vg -returns.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_VG If Major Tom is an AI from "elsewhere" then the rationalization which can explain its delay in contacting us for all these years is basically that it is a spy, and spies are paranoid without something to trade. It is vulnerable, since probes of this type would be designed to last for eons but cannot carry much fuel. Plus they do not wish to be nuked by locals for appearing to "take sides" (namely referring to the aspirations of rivals: US, Russia and China). If it takes decades from Major Tom to use its EM-drive, in order to get into the proper position safely before attempting contact - no problem. It has a thousands of years of life left. A safe spot could be a geostationary or geosynchronous orbit - the 'high castle' meme, or an earth-trailing orbit. yes. think about it. an orbit very much like the Kepler mission. You remember the lame Kepler boondoggle? In fact, Major Tom may be choosing proximity to Kepler for safety concerns as well as practicality --if not as a source of spare parts :-) . Kepler's orbit could be a key to understanding its identity and maybe NASA is in cahoots already. If Major Tom should change course and line up with Kepler on this particular orbit in June of 2017, then we will know the reason (and you heard it first on vortex). BTW, there is evidence that the object has changed orbit on its own accord, possible several times, including recently (making it less likely to be space debris). Perhaps Major Tom has realized that Kepler is a salvageable mission, the US is the best choice for partnership or maybe NASA is already part of the ruse. Something to think about next summer. Thanks to Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick for making it all enjoyable and dramatic if not understandable. Hard to believe that back in 1968 we had no problem believing that the year 2001 was plenty of time to build and AI like Hal and go to Jupiter looking for Bracewell probes. That alt-history was believable in a perfect world back then, but ours was far from perfect. Instead, thanks to Nam and half a dozen other needless wars, what we have today in the AI department is limited to google, wiki and deep blue . with Hal not yet on the horizon. Better late than never. if we can avoid the next round of needless wars. Imagine what half the defense budget for forty years could do to a Space program..
