CERN Watch: India, Rising

The Indian Government presented the

CERN with this state of Lord Shiva

India may well turn out to be the major technological superpower of the coming century. Their schools are turning out engineers at a rate that dwarfs US and Europe combined. They've launched their own space program and recently landed a probe on the Moon. 

And if this recent editorial in The Economic Times newspaper is any indication, their religious and cultural traditions may be more receptive to the idea of extraterrestrial life than those in the West. They're certainly better off technologically, as America's brightest minds are more interested in trying to create money out of thin air for hedge funds and pyramid schemes. 

There's an impolitic, almost gloating tone to this piece, as if the writer feels that polytheistic Indians are much better equipped to deal with a disclosure scenario than those who hold monotheistic beliefs. From a piece entitled "Will Religion End on Mars?":

"...some people are already writing off most major religions which are based essentially on an Earth-centric model, as never being able to recover from such a crippling body blow. (The Bible makes no mention of other planets or life on other planets.) 

But life, unfortunately, is not so simple. Firstly, although evolution is easily the most elegant, encompassing and predictive theory providing a unifying explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, it may not be the last word on the subject nor even the central principle of extraterrestrial biology. 

The crunch that scriptural faiths will face, on the other hand, can loosely be termed decentralisation where the uniqueness of humanity along with Earth’s biosphere will no longer occupy centre stage as almost all belief systems have tried to sell us. 

These religions would, therefore, have no choice but to modify their dogma to bring extra-terrestrial life into their creation beliefs.

Interesting. Do the Indians know something that we don't? 

UPDATE: Here's an interesting sidebar to this discussion:

Attempts to contact aliens date back 150 years

The desire to contact intelligent life on other planets is much older than the UFO craze and the SETI movement. Several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate with possible Martians and Venusians.

These early proposals - which predate by 150 years the first extraterrestrial message that was sent in 1974 - were based on visual signals, as the invention of radio was still decades away.