Today in the news we saw amazing pictures of a tribe that had been completely cut off from the rest of the world and locked out of time until an airplane finally came to their enclave of huts in a clearing in a remote part of the Amazon jungle. It’s amazing that this can still happen in “our” day and age. The tribesmen in the picture were covered in red body paint, as was typical of many indigenous peoples in the ancient Americas, and they were aiming their bows and arrows at the flying machine above them. I wonder if they thought the flying machine was an alien invader. They no doubt had never seen anything like it before.  They must have been scared out of their wits. It must have been a life-changing experience in which their fundamental view of the universe was changed. It was the day of their First Contact. I wonder if they could comprehend that that there were other human beings on the planet who possessed a technology light years beyond their own. Hopefully this isn’t all just a stunt made to prove a point. Like the man in the Bigfoot suit.

At the same time, NASA has another funky space probe on Mars. Seeing the bleak pictures of the barren Martian landscape taken by the Phoenix lander, I couldn’t help thinking that the most interesting things on Mars now are our own Earth probes. We will probably find nothing on Mars. No life, no microbes, nothing. But in the year 2008 (by one civilization’s reckoning) “We” have discovered Life on Earth, in the remote Amazon. Who are “We” anyway?  And what is “discovery” anyway? Maybe someday, sooner than we think, we will have another First Contact when the Vulcans finally come down to Earth and tell us to live long and prosper.