What Is The Message?

Explanation: I can't help but wonder what some extraterrestrial, alien culture might think, as they peer through the clouds and view some of the patterns of how we inhabit this planet.

What are these unusual symbols covering the surface of this globe? All those connections, curves, linkages, dots? Is this a strange, two-dimensional hieroglyph language intended to communicate with us? Our best minds, our best algorithms, cannot seem to decipher the meaning.

Or is this a metastasized growth form that seems to have spread across much of the terrestrial portion of this little world?

In places, it appears to have sharp boundaries that are not defined by rivers or cliffs or oceans. Perhaps we caught this growth in a temporary dormant state before it will continue to spread again.

And, look! at those strange metallic-appearing bodies following each other in long lines across the landscapes! They must be the exoskeletons of a dominant life form here, but obviously not the species that created these other expansive patterns, as they bear no obvious limbs. Have they all but consumed the race that made the patterns, and now are expanding their own range, themselves?

Quick, let us leave this most peculiar and dangerous world, and alert our forces to mark this tiny rock as off-limits. On to the next ...

Information:
    Horn, W. M. 1990. Why are there so many of us? Description and diagnosis of a planetary ecopathological process. Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 12(1):9-39.

EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week